GRICE E SPERANZA

 

Luigi Speranza -- Grice e Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana – By Luigi Speranza, pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, The Swimming-Pool Library (Albalonga). Filosofo. Speranza, Ugo -- Speranza, Alessandro -- Speranza, Ettore -- Speranza, Gianni -- Speranza, Paola -- Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza-Ghersi –Ghersi-Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza lui speranza: luigi della --. Italian philosopher, attracted, for some reason, to H. P. Grice. Speranza knows St. John’s very well. He is the author of “Dorothea Oxoniensis.” He is a member of a number of cultivated Anglo-Italian societies, like H. P. Grice’s Playgroup. He is the custodian of Villa Grice, not far from Villa Speranza. He works at the Swimming-Pool Library. Cuisine is one of his hobbiesgrisottoa alla ligure, his specialty. He can be reached via H. P. Grice. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vita ed opinion di Luigi Speranza,” par Luigi Speranza. A. M. Ghersi Speranza -- vide Ghersi-Speranza. Ghersi is a collaborator of Speranza. Grice: “It’s easy enough to list Speranza’s publications.” Speranza, like Mill, was fortunate to belong to a literary familyand he would read Descartes’s Meditations, which drew him to philosophy. His studies in logic drew him to semanticsHis first love was Oxonian analysis as summarised in Hartnack’s essay on ‘contemporary’ philosophy. One of Speranza’s earliest essays is on Plato’s Cratylus, relying mainly on Cassierer, but also drawing from Austin’s Philosophical Papesr. Spearnza’s idea is that “ … mean …” is a dyadic relation and what’s behind Plato’s theory of forms. This was Speranza’s contribution to a seminar in ancient philosophy. For his contribution on medieaval philosophy, Speranza drew on the modistae, and the Patrologia Latina for the use of ‘intentio’ in various writers, up to AquinoSperanza finds it fascinating that the earliest modistae do find a conceptual link between the ‘intentio’ and the ‘significatio.’ For a seminar on scepticism, Speranza contributed with a paper on Gricedrawing on Sextus Empiricus and Bar-Hillel. It relates to Grice’s problem with the conversational category of fortitude. Speranza concludes that a phenomenalist account is possible, but there are two other options: ‘silence’ (“not to participate in the conversational game”) or the utterance of non-alethic utterances, such as questions and commands. For a seminar on political philosophy, Speranza contributed with an essay on ‘Contractualism’ from Rousseau onwards --. For a seminar on phenomenology and the social sciences, Speranza contributed with an essay on ‘The conversational unit,’ the idea that the emic approach is preferable to the etic approach. For a seminar on argumentation theory on Habermas, Speranza contributed with a “German Grice,” the idea of a ‘strategy’ is a momer. Grice is into co-operative proceduresand those who provide taxonomies of rationality should be made aware of this. For “The Carrollian,” Speranza contributed with “Humpty Dumpty’s Impenetrability.” The idea that Davidson is right and Alice does not mean that there is a knock-down argument, or that she should change the topiche draws on Grice’s collaborator at Oxford, D. F. Pears, for his insights on “Intention and belief.” At the request of the editor of a bibliographical bulletin, M. Costa, Speranza contributed with reviews of oeuvre by R. M. Hare (“Sub-atomic particles of logic”), J. F. Thomson (“if and If”) and work on the English philosopher H. P. Grice (J. Baker, etc.). His review on Way of Words spramg from the same project, and it is an ‘invitation.’ For a congress of philosophy, Speranza presented “On the way of conversation,” playing on Grice’s “way of words”“Surely there’s more than words to conversation.” Speranza focuses on what Grice amusingly calls a ‘minro problem,’ that of expression meaningSperanza’s example: “How do you find Bologna?” “I haven’t been mugged yet” was inspired by a remark of an attendant to the conference. For a congress on conversational reasoning, Speranza contributed with “First time at Bologna?” providing twenty five possible answers“first time in the region, actually.” Etc. Speranza, following Grice, refers to this sort of reasoning as a sort of ‘brooding’to ‘brood’ is to ‘reason’ in a calculated fashion. As an invitation project, Speranza collaborated with “Rational face to rational face: a study in conversational pragmatics from a Griceian perspective.” In his essay “Post-modernist Grice,” he deals with the unary and dyadic connectors. For a congress on “Current Issues,” Speranza presented his “The feast of reason,” three steps in the critique of conversational reason. The first step is empirical, the second is quasi-contractualist, and the third is rational, undersood weakly and strongly. For an essay on relativism, Speranza presented an essay on ‘The cunning of conversational reason.’ Speranza maintains Grice’s jocular references to Kant -- the Conversational Immanuel. For an essay on desirability, Speranza explored the issues connected with mise-en-abyme and self-reflectionsome of these were published. There is published correspondence with members of what Speranza calls the Grice Club. Refs.: The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley. Speranza, villaThe Swimming-Pool Library, H. P. Grice’s Play Group, Liguria, Italia. Grice’s Oxonian Implicature   J. L. Speranza   Abstract  In all his appeal to universality and universability, Grice remained an Oxonian at heart. For all his publicity of Kant, it is Fichte that saves him. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analuysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophising which originated in Oxford  WoW 376 It’s interesting that in that Retrospective Epilogue he zooms out from Oxonian to Athenian dialectic. In Prejudices and Predilections, he zooms out just to Cambridge – avoiding the redbrick.  There is a ‘cunning’ of conversational reason – meant as universal, it remains, Oxonian. A portrait of Grice hangs ithe Philosophy room (so called) at Merton – but do Mertonians, and human beings at large – know the whole story?  When it comes to the Fichte-Hegel-Kant debate, the best is to quote from Warnock. It is often said that Grice is an Oxford philosopher – and it’s true! It’s also said, as I would expand, that he is an ENGLISH Oxford philosopher – and that is a truer truth – because, to echo Gilbert and Sullivan, it was greatly to his credit. My third truth is that his oeuvre is addressed to other Oxford English philosophers – which has not always been the case. So that’s what I shall endeavour to shed some light on these notes.  Yes, yes, yes.  What’s English about Grice. Well, he was born in Harborne. How more English can you get? What’s Oxonian about Grice Well, straight from Clifton, he was mostly closeted in the cloisters of Corpus, to then turn into a Hammondworth Scholar at Oxford and end as a Tutorial Fellow and University Lecture at his beloved St. John’s.  This is a work in progress – and the idea is to be so. It is meant to engage other scholars, and mosdt of it will be a catalougue raisonee of the rather poorly ited chcecklist of his things.  Had Mabbott been able to manage P. F. Strawson, things would have gone different. But he wasn’t. So he decided to share his Strawson with the OTHER philosophy tutor at St. John’s – and the rest is history. Grice would NEVER have shown an interest in the topics that he did only because he came to be in contact with Strawson. The reference to logic is Strawsonian, and of course their long-standing debate on ‘if.’ Contacts with Strawson could fill a book, as those with Austin did fill a philosophical dissertation or two – ‘the reconciliation of Austin and Grice’. It may be best to start with Grice’s making fun of Strawon in ‘Prolegomena’, with a full quote from Introduction to Logical theory – all wrong! – and Urmson knew that (Philosophical analysis) in spite of Warnock’s good criticism of it (English philosophy). And Strawson was not alone – other Oxonian philosophers were playing with logic then, like that fellow of Lincoln, and Lemmon, and Bostock, and a few others. Cf. O. P. Wood review in Mind on logic on ‘or’  Contacts with previous generation: Bradley, Stout, Prichard.  More importantly Cook Wilson – not just the butt of a joke, what we know we know – but his genitorial programme in Statement and Inference. Bradley, and made fun of Wollaston and Bosanquet as ‘very minor.’ Discussion of Collingwood’s idea of presupposition in ‘Metaphysics,’ co-authored with Strawson and Pears, in Pears, The nature of metaphysics.  Grice’s view of different groups on ordinary-language – the older one carried out by Ryle. Grice’s interaction with O. P. Wood, of the Ryle group. Why else would he care to quote from Robinson on ‘You name it’ in ‘Actions and Events.’ Specifically on Ryle, Grice makes fun of him  in ‘Prolegomena’: I involuntarily sat on a chair. He becomes more serious when approach Ryle as a behaviourist in ‘Method in philosophical psychology,’ ending with another joke on Ryle’s agitations. Citation of Kneale, of the Grice Club, on the sophistication of induction.  Saturday mornings were never the same after he joined Austin’s Play Group. He will continue with the meetings after Austin’s demise.  Members of the Play Group were all Englishmen: alphabetically: Austin (the senior or master), Hare, Hampshire, Hart (Anglo-Jewish), Pears, Strawson.  Affectionate recollections of Nowell-Smith: Grice being one of the reasons Nowell-Smith left Oxford for good, even though that was where he died. Hare, whom Griced manages NOT to quote in WoW – ‘those authors who would appeal to a notion of a neustic above the phrastic’ --. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminar with J. L. Austin on Categories and De Interpretatione. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminar with Strawson on meaning. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf, Ashworth – joint seminar with G. J. Warnock on the philosophy of perception. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashowrth – joint seminar with D. F. Pears on the philosophy of action. Good quote: Pears on ‘if’ conversationally implicating ‘iff.’  For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminars with J. F. Thomson on the philosophy of action. “And others” – with Quinton.  See: Register seminars delivered by University lecturers in philosophy at Oxford, 1945-1967. Then there’s the contacts with the zillions of philosophers – English-born, I mean – who had a sojourn at Oxford (with Grice) but surely Oxford cannot accommodate all of them, and had to spread Griceianism to the redbricks. The first, Flew. But there’s Parkinson. And Warner, who ended up at Warwick. And Cox, who ended up at Liverpool – having researched on aesthetics and perception with Sibley and Grice. And Duncan-Jones and Barnes! Or Grant with his pragmatic implication in Philosophy – no mention of Grice! To name a few! But he would never give a joint seminar with Dummett – even when Dummett quotes from Grice profusely on implicature in Truth and other enigmas. Para-philosophical yet VERY OXONIAN peripatetic: founder of The Demi-Johns. V. ‘Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer’, obituary of Grice in THE TIMES.  Piano was the other. Indeed predating philosophy. Having started at Halborne as he joined his father on the violin an his brother on the cello. Derek Grice went to to become a professional cellist at Hastings. See brochure for end-of-year concert, ‘H. P. Grice, rendition of Ravel Pavane pour une.  Not to mention chess and cricket – at high levels of proficiency (Wiggins and Strawson, British Academy).  ‘Personal identity’, published in Mind, which means *submitted* to Mind. One might argue that it wasn’t after Perry unearthed this piece in “Personal identity,” it had not received proper notice, although Grice had continued to research on what he called ‘personal identity’ as a ‘logical construction’. When it comes to the relation with Oxford and English philosophy, while Parfitt made some light use of this, it all goes back to Locke. It is fun to think that when librarians were playing with this, they had to go by ‘alphabetical order’. The keywords would be then ‘personal identity’ and ‘logical construction.’ ‘Meaning’ was his contribution to The Oxford Philosophical Society. He had been lecturing o Peirce. But perhaps he profit most from philosophers of his generation: Urmson, Strawson, and even younger ones: Bostock, Peacocke, Blackburn – full chapter on Grice in Spreading the word – Sainsbury, Oxford educated, Over, Oxford educated, Potts of Leeds, Oxford educated, Davies, Oxford educated – full chapter in his book on meaning. Wiggins – who wrote the joint article on Grice for The British Academy.  ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ was his contribution to the symposium at The Aristotelian Society, chaired by Braithwaite and with A. R. White as co-symosiast. His public reference to the ‘idea’ if not yet the word for ‘implicature. It influenced a younger generation, notably Snowdon – and Platts who cannot quote from anything else on implicature in his full chapter on implicature in Ways of Meaning.  ‘Conversation’ ‘Intention and uncertainty’ was his Annual Philosophical lecture for the British Academy. He defines himself as a neo-Prichardian, having previously considered himself more of a Stoutian.  But ‘Intention and uncertainty’ allowed Grice to go back to topics of his own generation: Hart and Hamphsire on ‘intention’ and ‘certainty’ and ‘decision.’ He would have none of that! Hampshire Thought and action on cooperation and trust. Grice knew of Jewishness. At his Clifon, the Anglo-Jewish had a special House, and of course did not have to attend chapel. Oxford was different. And Honore, an old Cliftonian, would find affinity with Hart. I would think when delivering the James Lectures at Harvard, a few Oxonians may have been surprised that, for all of Hart’s achievements – of laws as rules, and so forth – Grice would care to cite him only as per a private conversation (the horrour!) where Hart assumed that if Mrs. Smith wrote the cheque inadvertently, the ENTAILMENT is that she did not take the required steps towards such a decision! And had it not been for Urmson who was editing Pritchard’s essays on motivation and interest and willing, Grice would not have quoted them – Prichard’s ideas on ethics pervade Grice’s own views on ethics since for Grice ultimately morality cashes on desire (interest).  Aspects of Reason and Reasoning.  Grice e Speranza: una conversazione h J. L. Speranza       His name was Hope, and he named his villa “Villa Speranza,” not realising that ‘speranza’ is hardly a cognate of the English surname ‘Hope,’ which is a misspelling of ‘hop’! inplicatura: entanglement. Sid. Ep. Lewis and Short, A Latin dictionary Aristoteles brachio exerto Xenocrates crure collecto, Heraclitus fletu oculis clausis Democritus risu labris apertis, Chrysippus digitis propter numerorum indicia constrictis, Euclides propter mensurarum spatia laxatis, Cleanthes propter utrumque corrosis quin potius experietur, quisque conflixerit, Stoicos Cynicos Peripateticos haeresiarchas propriis armis, propriis quoque concuti machinamentis. nam sectatores eorum, Christiano dogmati ac sensui si repugnaverint, mox te magistro ligati vernaculis implicaturis in retia sua precipites implagabuntur […]. Sidonius, Epistulae.   Abstract. Some of us have been engaged in the philosophy of H. P. Grice for some time. There’s something about implicatue, you know! In these notes, the avowed intention – never likely to be fulfilled, as Grice well knew -- is to place Grice, his implicature, and his significance – in both ways the expression ca be used -- within the broader philosophical context, with special emphasis in the philosophy of language. In short: a move from St. John’s!  Keywords: implicature, meaning, signification.  A note about the title. Some time ago, I started a series of notes systematically titled ‘Grice e …’ where the dots were filled by this or that Italian philosopher. It was my attempt at following Grice’s respect for the longitudinal unity of philosophy! But the phrase stuck. I wouldn’t be vernacular enough to explore ‘Grice e Austin,’ where that should surely read ‘Grice AND Austin’, but when it comes to Benedetto Croce, ‘e’ sounded, er, so much, er, euphonic! When H. P. Grice, the Englishman from Harborne – in what was originally Staffordshire, but Warwickshire by the time he had been born there -- started his serious study of philosophy, as he put it – Speranza never did! – Grice mentions his good fortune in having that Scot tutor, Hardie -- to teach him how to argue. Speranza didn’t!  It was however early in his studies in philosophy that Speranza came across Grice.  It was early in my philosophical studies that I came across Grice – or rather, I should say, Austin. Unexpectedly so. For someone outside the British Isles, and raised in the continental philosophical tradition, British – never mind English! – philosophers are observed with suspicion. In fact, the Continental traditionalists would go as far as to DENY philosophical status – except empiricism and pragmatism – to anything coming from those Isles. If Westward the empire strikes its way, as far as continental philosophy goes, one has to remain a Galllic – the true descendants of Graeco-Roman wisdom, or become a Teuton. Any other philosophies are looked down. So to dedicate one’s philosophical energy to a Briton is beyond the pale! It’s totally different if you ARE a Briton, as Grice was!  The proof of the pudding is in the eating. By mere statistical methods, one can show that continental philosophy NEEDS to be included in the philosophical curriculum of any varsity in the British Isles MORE SO than British philosophy IS included in the curriculum of a Continental university! As a result of this, any continental philosopher who decides to dedicate his efforts to a Briton – a British philosopher – is considered to be engaged in a sort of a joke, and he himself tends to take his own take humoristically! Austin, I was saying. In the standard histories of philosophy – and such is a requirement in any philosophical curriculum for any philosopher worth his name – it is -isms that fascinate the historian of philosophy. So Hartnack, for example, goes on to subdivide ‘ordinary-language philosophy’ – as a method rather than a body of doctrine -- as comprising Ryle’s senior group, and the junior group led by Austin. So I knew what I was going for! In the syllabus of most ‘philosophy of language’ – when it comes to the body of doctrines, rather than the method -- courses there will be a unit or two on ‘meaning and intention’ – I came to regard this as ‘significatio,’ rather – followed perhaps by one on ‘implication versus implicature.’  But the systematic treatment of Grice is hardly necessary in any philosophy curriculum outside Oxford – or even especially WITHIN Oxford, since it was anathema, in Grice’s generation, to quote OTHER Oxford philosophers! What they NEEDED to quote was ‘ordinary language’! Grice went from Scholar at Corpus – four years – under Hardie – having gotten the scholarship from Clifton. Grice had the greatest respect for those who preceded in philosophy at Oxford. Years later he would enjoin any serious student of philosophy to pay due respect to the ancestral greats. No Englishman is cited. Except two, actually. “Never mind paying respects to one who is NOT one of these ‘greats’ and I’m speaking of Bosanquet!” Grice is slightly more respectful towards Bradley – since, well, he had acquired an international reputation since that American, T. S. Eliot, had cared to write a doctoral dissertation about him. So Bradley gets a mention in the ‘Prolegomena’ to Logic and Conversation, regarding a joke on ‘not,’ and again in The Conception of Value, where Grice is treading very Bradleian, Hegelian, and Schellingian waters, with the non-relativised Absolute! To become Senior Scholar at Merton – no tutor required! – and to accept, finally, a lectureship at St. John’s – before becoming a fellow. The lectureship went well, and Grice went on to be offered a fellowship soon after. This was, of course, “Tutorial Fellow.” No such title would apply, say, to Grice’s later collaboration, D. F. Pears, since they only have fellows at Christ Church – only Students! While the association to St. John’s is adamant – it is perhaps a little source of stress for Grice that what came with the bargain a few years later is that he became ‘University Lecturer.’ This relates to Austin. Soon after the war, Austin instituted his New Play Group for games on Saturday morning, ‘by invitation only’ – “Sat. mrng.” the little card Austin would handle read – only for full-time, or whole-time (as Warnock rather more archaically put it) tutorial fellows in philosophy – and a few students, since Pears was there, if not Wood (who remained a faithful Ryleian). And the point is for these full-time (or whole-time as Warnock’s old fashioned prose has it) tutorial fellows (and students) to be able to get away from the labours of having to see their scholars – their pupils, that is – in Grice’s case, at St. John’s, and having to, well, TUTOR them! Grice’s bread and butter.  The best way to approach the Play Group is via the alphabet. There was Paul (that Grice cared to mention both in his “Prejudices and predilections” and in “Retrospective Epilogue – his obsession with sense data. G. A. Paul he went by – and his career had prospered had he not decided to go sailing on the North Sea – on a Sunday! There was Nowell-Smith, whom Grice describes as the straight man to Austin’s mockeries. In fact, Austin and Grice were the main reason why Nowell-Smith LEFT Oxford. It was too much for him. As Grice notes, the “Nowell” was decorative – Smith’s father. So the full name here would be P. H. N. Smith.  There was Dick – whose daughter became a famous lesbian. He didn’t go by “M.” – as Ryle didn’t go by “G.” – but by Marcus, which made him more of a charming character. There was Hamsphire, whom Grice loved. This should go as S. N. Hampshire. He had known Austin before the war and attended what Hampshire calls the ‘old’ Play Group, which met at All Souls, in the middle of the week – Thursday nights!  There was an Anglo-Jewish by the name of H. L. A. Hart, that Grice adored – Hart reviewed ‘Dark clouds mean a storm but there won’t be one’ for The Philosophical Quarterly, BEFORE Strawson had cared to type the draft on ‘Meaning’ --.  There were Grice’s collaborators Warnock, Pears, Thomson, Hare.  Or I should say.  There was Warnock. Anglo-Irish. He goes by “G. J. Warnock.” He became especially associated with Austin – after Austin’s death – when, along with Urmson, they edited his Philosophical Papers, and distributed the other stuff – with Urmson taking care of Austin’s How to do things with words notes, and Warnock with the Sense and Sensibilia. If Grice would meet with Warnock, it would be to discuss sense data – especially red pillar boxes – and their visa! If there was Warnock, there was Urmson. Grice recalled many a memorable anecdote with Urmson. Grice took Urmson as THE representative of the paradigm-case argument. Perhaps more crucially, the ONLY English author Grice cared to mention in his “Utterer’s meaning and intentions” is Urmson and his thumbscrews. The alleged counterexample is particularly interesting since it revolves about the recognition of the role of REASON in the account of ‘significatio’ – non-natural if you wish. The dark clouds that mean rain behave CAUSALLY – in the realm of nature – but if an utterer utters that ‘I can’t get by without my trouble and strife’ (meaning he found his wife indispensable), there must be a REASON, even if mechanistically-substitutable in the air – and if the Utterer IS a person, that reason is even NOT mechanistically substitutable! There was Pears. The perpetual Student. Grice loved him, and Pears loved Grice. When years later Grice refers to Witters as a minor philosopher, he was possibly aware that by that time Pears had become THE man to talk about Witters. Not in Grice’s time. If they met, it was to talk about INTENTIO. When Clarendon published a tribute to Grice, whose acronym goes G. R. I. C. E. – the I is for Intention (the G for Ground, the R for Ratio, the C for Category, and the E for End – as in Howard’s End – “That’s rude!” Rita exclaims in “Educating Rita.” There was Thomson. Whereas Grice titles the subject of his research with Pears as being on the philophy of action, it was more on philosophical psychology – since ACTION ACTION Grice would discuss with Thomson. Until Thomson left Christ Church for a post in an institute of technology! There was Hare. In his Retrospective Epilogue, Grice refers to those philosophers who go for the neustic and the phrastic, and we know who he means. R. M. Hare, the man is – from Somerset. He would give seminars on the ethics of Aristotle with both Austin and Grice. And Hare was one of the few members of Austin’s Play Group who cared to attend to GRICE’s Play Group – same place, same date – upon Austin’s death. But he would hardly talk. Not the communicative type, -- his shyness. But he had a great respect for the idea of conversational implicature, especially since it was a way to stick with ordinary language and linguistic botany and avoid the sorry story of deontic logic! And more.  There’s Strawson. P. F. Strawson, like Flew, and a few others, was among the first pupils assigned by Grice at St. John’s before the war. Strawson was taught for the Logic paper by Grice – while the rest went to the other St. John’s tutor, Mabb – as Grice called him. Strawson got a second in his P. P. E. examination, but he would later acknowledge that he never ‘ceased to learn logic’ from Grice – The implicature perhaps that he never started learning it! In any case, the association was very close, and they gave joint seminars on “Categories” – but which also dealt with ‘meaning and logical form.’ One who attended a session was surprised he could understand NO WORD of what Grice had proferred. Upon request, he emitted: “I don’t know the rules of the game, mate, but Grice seems to be winning!” Quinton liked that. Wood did not!  There was Woozley. So now for the alphabetical order then: Austin, Dick, Grice, Hampshire, Hare, Hart, Paul, Pears, Smith, Strawson, Thomson, Urmson, Warnock, Woozley.  If that’s not an -ism, I don’t know what is! By comparison, Ryle’s group was a MESS! On the other hand, Grice confides that of at least these three groups engaged at Oxford with the philosophy of language –as both method and doctrine – it was the third group of Wittgensteinians – by which he means Anscombe, but not by name – ‘who were the most disciplined of the lot’! Being a University Lecturer meant – non-naturally, of course -- that Grice’s lectures (the title is rather ironic at Oxford, since ‘to lecture’ is a term of abuse) could be attended by ANY member of the university, including a physicist, or perhaps a maid! It would be interesting to review his career in terms of what he genially called his ‘unpublications’ – ‘with a few publications thrown in for good measure.’ There is an early draft on “Negation and privation” which is an interesting choice. His affiliation with St. John’s was pretty minimal at that point, and the draft features his home address at Harborne!  Grice’s idea however is to produce a logical construction of ‘not’ – i. e. an analysis (‘philosophical analysis’ was in anyone’s lips, Grice says – of an utterance (or sentence – Grice wasn’t that fastidious then) involving ‘not’. He has two. One involving sensorial experiences, which he deems secondary, since they are what Broad called psycho-somatic – a purely introspective one. The one Grice choses is “Someone is NOT hearing a noise.” In Grice’s construction, the sentence becomes equivalent to the REJECTION of a related sentence, without the ‘not’: “Someone is hearing a noise.” It is to THIS sentence that Grice’s ‘person’ projects an attitude of rejection – not just ANY rejection, but the rejection that he KNOWS it! “Negation and privation” was followed by “Personal identity.” It is listed in Edwards’s Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, but Perry would no know that! When the now defunct University of California Press – an Americanism – accepted Perry’s proposal, Grice’s “Personal identity” was reprinted some decades since its first appearance in the pages of “Mind.” And if Grice chose “Mind” as the journal to which he submitted “Personal identity” the reason is out there to see. It may count as one of those ‘Critical Studies’ thing, since the first reference is to Ian Gallie’s previous, and recent, essay on selves and substances in the annals of analytic philosophy. “Mind” was still subtitled “a journal of PSYCHOLOGY and philosophy,” and under Moore’s editorship. Grice will go back to the topic at various stages. It was clear that, like “Negation and privation,” we have Grice the constructivist here, since, again, he is proposing a ‘logical construction’—the phrase is Broad’s – of sentences (or utterances, but he wasn’t so fastidious then) involving three types of “I” – or ‘someone’, as Grice prefers – “I’m not an ego-ist!” – somatic: “I was hit by a cricket bat”; psycho-somatic: “I am thinking of Hitler” and purely psychic: “Someone IS hearing a noise.” The interesting bit is that he spends a few paragraphs on Locke, on the identity of HUMAN and PERSON, which will become the topic of his speculation decades later – the transubstantiation, indeed, of a human into a person! Drafted to the Navy, Grice did his best, and came out alive – and kicking – and with a title of ‘Captain, Royal Navy.” And then it was back to Oxford.  Having married, he was not allowed to sleep at St. John’s, but St. John’s was generous enough to offer him a flat on Woodcock Road. So it was pupils, pupils, and more pupils. Instead, he had a lot of respect for them, and came to be known as “Godot” – as pupils would pile up up the stairs. There was another tutor in philosophy at St. John’s, which helped, with things like Strawson – who ‘had’ both! The other tutor, like Grice’s own tutor, was a Scot – good old Mabb, as Grice called it – or Mabbot for long! Like Hardie, he was more of a Ryleian, if anything at all! One thing that may fascinate the scholar at Oxford is that in those days attending a seminar may well mean attending a JOINT seminar. This is a trick. Isn’t it difficult enough to have to deal with ONE lecturer? However, Grice was happy to list all the other English philosophers with whom he shared a ‘seminar,’ as those things were called. It is mandatory for a scholar to attend at least three a week! So let us see if we can be more ‘official’ about the seminars – solo and joint, sometimes menage a trois – with which Grice engaged! The first collaborator Grice will mention is Strawson – “my former pupil” – so that’s fine and dany. Quine attended one of these, and was surprised at how little room they allotted to open session. “That IS an interesting point, about which I suppose I shall have an answer in two weeks – since next week’s is Strawson’s week!” Grice makes a point about the COMPOSITION here – He always said that monologue is implicature-free. Not so concerted interaction. COMPOSING a piece of writing with Strawson meant that they had to SHARE belief and validation of EACH sentence. ‘This surely led to the demise of our collaboration’! Come Grice and Thomson, we realise the best way to classify these joint seminars would be by surname of collaborator – but hey! So he also gave a joint seminar or two with THOMSON. Grice here cares to specify the topic: philosophy of action. THOMSON was the epitome of the hot-bed of Ordinary Language Philosophy until he married Judith Jarvis and left for a technological institute overseas! Grice and Warnock shared a visum. Then there was the joint seminars with G. J. Warnock – on which Grice kept all the notes. Warnock was a sort of a genius in an Anglo-Irish sort of way. Their seminars, of course, were on ‘The philosophy of perception’. Sayers attended one. “Grice mumbled and did his best to drive his audience away. For the most part, he succeeded, including myself.” “The philosophy of perception” is such an Oxonian sub-discipline. They don’t have it at Cambridge! At Oxford it is meant to implicate: we still revere the English empiricists – as they do not in France – witness Merleau-Ponty! Pears, Grice, and Apples. Then there were the joint seminars, on “The philosophy of action”, again, with D. F. Pears. But Pears and Grice, unlike Thomson, were more into what Grice will later call ‘philosophical psychology,’ so expect those seminars to be full of references to Grice’s description of Pears’s introspective accounts of Grice’s intendings and willings – not in that order! Pears made it to Grice’s ‘publication’ if an annual lecture at the British Academy counts as one. In the final paragraph, he acknowledges that this is all very fragmentary but truly in the spirit of what Pears has been saying AGAINST prediction! There were seminars with Austin. One on ‘De Interpretatione,’ that Ackrill attended. “Greek to me,” he would later say. The result was that Clarendon accepted Ackrill’s proposal to translate Peri Hermeneias into Anglo-Saxon murdering Plato’s and Aristotle’s parlance into talk of ‘making a statement’ or failing to make one! If you think about it, it was extraordinary that a man with whom you are giving a joint seminar you may still want to see on a Saturday morning! But that was Grice. What weakens the claim, though, is that of ALL the venues for the Play Group meetings, the one that Austin liked best was Grice’s St. John’s – not his rooms, rather backward – but a lovely lecture room ‘which made Austin felt like the C. E. O. of the Linguistic Botany Co. Ltd.’! With Austin Grice had a menage a trois, as we call them, since the two joined R. M. Hare to give a seminar on Aristotle’s Ethics. The fact is usually mentioned to prove that Linguistic Botany was NOT they did! Those seminars were meant for PUPILS who frankly needed instruction on the Greek mannerisms of Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps this or that archaic English philosopher – the Lit. Hum. programme did not include the name of any LIVING philosopher until they did! Austin, Grice, and Hare shared this classical education that Strawson lacked, having earned a mere P. P. E. rather – and Strawson could just NOT read, never mind, ‘read’ or ‘lecture’ on anything written in a lingo other than his own. Witness his own seminars on Abbott, er, Kant! Strawson’s idea was that Greek – and Latin – and German – got on the way of his lingo. But for Grice, an old Cliftonian, Greek (if not Latin) were second nature! You don’t feel Greek is a ‘foreign’ language, even if Thales of Miletus a foreigner was! There was a joint seminar with Woozley of the old school, if ever there was one – a member of Austin’s OLD play group. Woozley gave joint seminars with Grice on ‘scepticism.’ And so on. When it came to publishing – it was all Strawson’s fault. The least thing Grice wanted to do with his draft on ‘Meaning’ – a mere exercise in dialectic meant to impress the Philosophical Society (Oxford philosophical society, that is) into Grice’s taking care of the recent title published by Yale University Press – of all University Presses – by Stevenson on Ethics and language. A cursory examination of the 1948 draft shows Grice’s style, as it then was. He starts his three essays so far in the same manner. Grice starts the three essays – “Negation and privation,” “Personal identity,” and “Meaning” – in the same fashion. By considering ‘sentences’ – he wasn’t then fastidious enough to care about utterance. In the case of “Meaning” it is not clear what the sentences grouped under what he calls a ‘natural’ significatio – harking to Plato’s Cratylus – phusei – have in common. And he is not too careful about the sentences under this OTHER type of ‘significatio’ with respect to their syntactic format. But in the ends he has found a DEFINIENDUM: “By uttering x, U utters that p” iff – It’s the DEFINENS that matter, and Grice of course does not wish nor care to settle in a mere talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society. Remember: anyone else MAY, but an Oxonian philosopher does NOT want to be lectured! But 9 years later, Strawson asked Grice for the draft, had his wife typed it, and submitted it to an AMERICAN journal: the Philosophical Review! Grice’s Philosophical Review experiment collected a lot of criticism. But he never cared. Why should he? He learned from Austin: once you publish, forget about bringing the issue to your Saturday morning – you don’t need to discuss ‘no more’! Some of the criticism he did care to publish in his revision of the analysis in The Philosophical Review – a sort of critical notice, sort of thing. If one checks the list of names he gives, one notices only one Englishman: J. O. Urmson. Grice loved Urmson, and Urmson loved Grice. There are various cross-references among them. Grice would keep using Urmson as a defendant of paradigm-case arguments – and Urmson would play with the principle of appositeness, and the rules of evidence, and so forth. But by this time, he had encountered Implicature. Grice was proud of having presented Miss Implicature at Cambridge, of all places, in “The causal theory of perception.” However, American publishing being what it is – stingy! – he had to elapsed that long excursus on implicature – “So what the reader gets is the idea of IMPLICATURE as applied to ‘it seems to me as if that pillar box is red” – in the Harvard University Press reprint of the Aristotelian Society contribution. Warnock was a bit more careful, when reprinting the WHOLE symposium in his The Philosophy of Perception – only that A. R. White never quite knew what to do with Miss Implicature! It was Butler, fresh from Oxford, who thought of having a collection by Blackwell on Analytic Philosophy, and Grice contributed with “Some remarks about the senses.” However, this remained pretty local, since nobody other than an Oxonian would read a Blackwell title! Hot-bed of ordinary language philosophy Grice calls it – due to not just Austin, but Pears. Pears, an aristocrat, wanted to reach the masses, and had Grice and Strawson record a lecture on “Metaphysics” and publish it with Macmillan. The “Radio Days” notice has two typos: it states that it is a discussion BETWEEN Grice, Strawson, and Pears – only that ‘among’ is Austin’s choice! Pears, Fellow of Corpus, the “Radio Days” note goes on. If the revision of “Meaning” – “Utterer’s meaning” was published in The Philosophical Review, another continuation of that research he published for “Foundation of Language”: “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning” – “an essay whose title I almost always get it wrong in recollection,” he would say. By that time, while Oxford made him – Oxford left him – and the rest is history. Of course, not every Englishman who was a philosopher and a junior to Austin would fit in Grice’s social circle. Michael Wrigley recollects that upon introducing himself to Grice, and confessing he hailed from Trinity, just across the wall, was perhaps sillily going for advice to Grice in matters Dummettian. “Have you read Frege: Philosophy of language”. “I have not – and I hope I won’t!” – Grice liked Wrigley because he was from Leeds and no body who is perverse can come from Leeds – but Dummett was a Catholic, and a perversely convert one at that! While still part of the scene, Grice found out – upon the death of Austin – that a whole generation lacked a leader, so he offered himself. They would meet at Corpus. But of course, we can distinguish a few features between Austin’s new play group and Grice’s own. They games were not restricted to full-time or whole-time tutorial fellows. Grice’s own ‘scholars’ if we can use that name to mean someone from ANYWHERE who is at Oxford to pursue a degree ABOVE that of the B. A. – and more! When he came back to Oxford to deliver the John Locke lectures, the format was un-Oxonian. The lectures are open to members of non-the university, or non-members of the university. Grice was an exception in that he was a honorary fellow – but he cared to mention in the Proemium, that he always had a thing AGAINST Locke, having Grice been refused the really valuable John Locke Scholarship – TWICE! It is not easy to summarise Grice’s advancements to what we my call the critique of conversational reason. In his lectures on ‘conversation’, he would speak of ‘the conversational game,’ its ‘conversational rules,’ its ‘conversational moves,’ and so on. The Kantian references are mainly taken in jest. Notably with Grice’s introduction of the phrase, ‘conversational category.’ He was never sure how many categories there were, nor did he care. But the the idea of a ‘conversational category’ allowed him to have this or that ‘conversational maxim’ as hanging from a ‘principle of conversational helpfulness’, which was his bet at ‘conversation’ as ‘rational cooperation. He was well aware that the cooperation thesis was independent from the more general, and indeed, pretty dull idea, that conversation is a ‘rational activity.’ As it sometimes isn’t – but don’t go to Grice for having underestimated the aesthetics, or the moral, or this or other point of conversational activity – not his field! His identified a ‘fundamental question’ when it comes to this principle of conversational helpfulness. To wit: its basis. And he proceeds by offering a transcendental argument that had felt slightly circular to Graham and others. The idea is that given this or that ‘conversational goal’, which is now shared, the principle of conversational helpfulness and the set of this or that conversational maxim will follow. Grice was aware that the universality or alleged universality of his programme – strictly, the universalisability of the principle of conversational helpfulness from this or that conversational maxim – was bound to be trick, as it was for Kant. Hegel would speak of the ‘cunning of reason.’ Similarly, Grice had a response for anyone who’d care to attack the cunning of conversational reason. The idea is of the universal in the concrete. Rather than go to Malasia, the idea is to check the universalisability among Oxford pupils who ARE BOUND by this or that conversational maxim. It may safely be said that upon Austin’s demise – and after a short period of grieving – Grice was ready to take on Austin. So the key concept of conversational implicature springs from Grice’s attempts to make it very obvious that Austin – but also Strawson, and people who SHOULD know – kept ignoring or confusing different category shifts. The idea is that of an utterer who conveys that p. Centrally convey that p. Grice hastens to add ‘centrally’ since ‘He has beautiful handwriting’ hardly centrally conveys that ‘He is hopeless at philosophy’ as uttered by a philosophy don at Collections. What Grice conveys by uttering ‘He has beautiful handwring’ is that he has beautiful handwriting. So there follows a Platonic dichotomy here: what the utterer conveyed – never mind naturally, as by blushing, etc – gets subdivided into centrally and non-centrally. Within the non-centrally (implicitly conveyed) Grice’s focus, qua philosopher, is on what is CONVERSATIONALLY implicated, because it connects nicely with his idea of an overall Conversational Imperative and this or that conversational maxim. What Austin would be ignoring – if not Strawson – would be the category shift, from ascribing this ‘conveying’ not to the uttererer, but to his utterance – or even worse, to a TYPE of this utterance or that! But ouside Oxford, few really cared. Philosophers kept ignoring those fine distinctions. And they still do – especially those pupils who get accepted at St. John’s! Or shall I say, beyond St. John’s: ANY philosophy scholar is bound to find H. P. Grice’s portrait in the Philosophy Room at Merton – where he belonged! Philosophy, Grice said, like virtue, is entire. Yet he found that philosophical divergence was his fare of the day. It may do to review his polemic with his peers – and then perhaps with whom he called ‘the greats’ – anyone on which he cared to trust his attention. The list of polemics does not follow a particular order. Just this one. Consider Strawson. Grice would mock Quine and Chomsky – ‘two such intelligent people – never able to share ONE thought!” – the case with Strawson was similar. Although less dramatic. Their main inconsistency is on the status of the conversational implicature. With Grice infamously claiming that when HE uttered ‘if p, q’ HE conversationally implicates that there is non-truth-functional evidence for it. By reverse, Strawson mocked Grice’s use of the ‘conventional’ implicature – Frege’s Farbung --. Strawson was especially irritated that when it came to ‘so’ – or ‘therefore’ – Grice would have no qualm about saying that anything other than p and q is IMPLICATED, but conventionally, by an utterance of ‘p, so q’ or ‘p; therefore, q.’ Strawson felt like if there w room for conventional implicature in ASSERTED p’s and q’s and you do mind your p’s and q’s, then why not adopt a CONVENTIONAL, rather than ‘conversational’ implicature approach to ‘if p, q’. The matter would have rest as minimal had it not been Strawson’s idea, in his piece with Wiggins, to deal on this and deal on this in his tribute to Grice for the British Academy! With Austin, the differences are subtle, since Austin died too soon! Some have however attempted ‘a reconciliation of Austin and Grice.’ And it is true that, when still grieving the early demise of Austin, Grice felt like the ‘successor,’ rather than the critique of botany and philosophy of language. But soon afterwards he was extracting passages from the essays collected by Urmson and Warnock in Philosophical Papers, and making fun of them, in a charming way. Notably the use of ‘adverbs.’ Grice would also criticize Austin for almost always ignoring the ‘significatio’ as applied to an utterer, versus as applied to the ‘expression. One infamous case by Austin: When I see a goldfinch, and I say it – That’s a goldfinch – I don’t imply that I BELIEVE that that is a goldfinch. I imply that I KNOW it!”  With Smith, o Nowell-Smith, Grice would get irritated if one pointed to the similarities between Smith’s treatment of a rule of relevance, a rule of sincerity, and so on in his Ethics. “Mine are NOT rules!” With Urmson, Grice would possibly object to the rather free use by Urmson of a rule of ‘scalar’ implication, based on some rule of maximal informativeness. And perhaps on Urmson’s appeal to the principle of appositeness.  Many of Grice’s ideas were in the air – they were NOT Grice’s conceptions – and other ordinary-language philosophers were BOUND to find them! It was only rarely that they HAD to credit Grice.  As when Hart does credit Grice in The Philosophical Quarterly (in a footnote, typically).  It is very telling that when writing his Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation, Grice seems to be more interested than any to criticize his fellow Oxonians. Only one senior to Austin, and that’s Ryle. Grice spends quite some time on Ryle on adverbs. Then there’s Grice’s criticism of Austin – modification and aberration. It is interesting that the only Englishmen who were philosophers that Grice cites in his Conception of Value are Austin and Hare. Austin for his ‘artless sexism’ in the label, ‘trouser word’ and Hare for destroying universal value! The criticism to Hare in The Conception of Value is an interesting one – it echoes the spirit Grice knew well at Oxford. He does not care to quote Hare directly, but only via a popularization of his views by Mackie in a Penguin! There is this intriguing criticism of Hart – on ‘trying’. The view, as ascribed to Hart, is pretty ridiculous, and although Grice knew that his audience WAS familiar with Hart’s ramblings on this and that – he cares to mention that this view on ‘trying’ held by Hart was ‘shared’ with Grice ‘in conversation.’ So now you know! Then there’s the extended criticism in those ‘Prolegomena’ to his own pupil! Grice spends some time on what he surely found Strawson’s ridiculous – metaphysical excrescent – views on ‘if’. While in the Prolegomena he provides a direct quote on the topic from Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice has the dignity NOT to quote Strawson when he resumes the topic in a lecture which went untitled at the time but which by 1987 Grice had decided to title ‘Indicative conditionals.’ There is an interim reference to Strawson in the two previous lectures. One implicit, when Grice adds ‘if’ and the horseshoe as having a bit of an alleged divergence, and more infamously in the next lecture, where he even cares to quote from Strawson’s published views on ‘Truth’ from the infamous Bristol symposium, only to refute him. The performative view of ‘true’ – and indeed Hare’s performative view of ‘good’ are referred to in passing in the Prolegomena, too – but no proper name identified! And talking of credits, Grice was notoriously hurt when browsing through Strawson’s Individuals and not finding ONE single mention to Grice – although it is SO EVIDENT that ‘a reflection or two’ from their joint endeavours in ‘Categories’ is visible to the sharper eye. Why does Strawson care to quote in the acknowledgment Ryle but not Grice. It must be because he had paid enough respects to Grice in the Acknowledgment to Introduction to Logical Theory! And to what avail! (Robbing Peter to pay Paul – indeed!). Perhaps the greatest affrent from Strawson when in an essay in Theoria he cares to call Grice’s principle of relevance and the principle of the presumption of ignorance and the principle of presumption of knowledge – mere ‘platitudes.’ Surely a transcendental justification alla Kant for this or that ‘platitude’ is more than an Oxonian ear could bear! Warnock Grice would not criticize in print. But he always regarded a gem of botany Warmock’s amazement at Austin’s pretty clear question: “What would you say is the difference between ‘He played golf properly’ and ‘He played golf correctly.’ Grice seems to be amused by Warnock’s lack of a response. Grice’s response: “Playing cricket properly” means “playing cricket” – whereas “playing cricket correctly” – “is only something that someone like my aunt Matilda would say!”  Or Pears in “Ifs and cans” – ‘This relates to what H. P. Grice calls a conversational implicature – in a bracket, typically. Or Hare on Practical Inferences. “Surely ‘Post the letter’ entails ‘Or burn it’ – but this is more of a case of what H. P. Grice has called a conversational implicature. In none of these cases, the idea is to DEVELOP a full theory of language as a rational activity, that would make Kantian room for the idea of conversation as rational cooperation. It seems curious than early enough, in his "Causal Theory of Perception," Grice never seemed to have been interested in providing a systematic theory of conversation as rational co-operation.  Rather, he lists a couple of 'philosophical theses, or dicta' -- with an eye to improv them! No names of English Oxonian philosophers dropped.  When he gave the 'Prolegomena' to 'Logic and Conversation', Englishmen who were Oxonian philosophers -- and their names -- started to drop. The oldest of course Ryle. Followed by Austin. And then by other members of the Play Group, notably Strawson and Hart.  In these 'Prolegomena', Grice is conscious that he cannot provide a good case with an eye to correct their fellow philosophers -- well, he includes his own 'Causal Theory of Perception' as a suspect example, too! -- unless he totters into a theory of conversation as rational cooperation. Let's see if we can reformulate the former in the term of the latter.  For each case, Grice would say that the philosopher has to failed to focus on what a CONVERSATIONALIST 'signifies'. And when we rephrase the thesis in THOSE terms, the philosopher may still have misidentified the 'shade' of meaning -- the 'nuance' as Grice calls it in "Causal Theory of Perception." Notably, between what the conversationalist 'signifies' by EXPLICITLY conveying -- centrally 'signifying' -- or 'dicta,' proper -- AND what the conversationalist 'signifies' by some other, weaker, defeasible, implicit, uncentral kind of way.  Let's consider the cases in terms of the Oxonian philosophers Grice mentions.  RYLE -- Grice makes fun of him when Ryle in his book, no less, on "The Concept of Mind", which had philosophers at Oxford, such as O. P. Wood REVERING him -- goes on to lecture other philosophers on some 'unwittingly extension' of the 'sense' of 'VOLUNTARY" by this or that philosopher.  Grice's reply: Surely it is perfectly find to use 'voluntary' even if the agent was NOT at fault!  Second case: Austin. Grice loved Austin because he could mock him twice. Not so much for the specifics, but for the generalities -- no aberration without modification, or vice versa. The adverb is the same 'voluntarily' now. Austin claims that the 'significance' is no significance!  Grice's reply:  It is perfectly fine to add 'voluntarily' to any verb you please -- the monkey was voluntarily tossing off. Austin's mistake is to distinguish between what a conversationalist signifies centrally -- by using an utterance of an expression that features 'voluntarily' -- and what he implicates -- 'signifies implicitly' in a conversational cancellable way. Austin is focusing on THIS nuance of conversational meaning when he shouldn't!  At this point Grice needs the theory of conversation as rational cooperation. Because his idea is not just that the conversationalist's significance is BASIC, but that the 'significance' of an EXPRESSION is to be analysed ultimately in terms of the 'conversationalist's significance' -- Not a cup of tea that Austin would be willing to swallo -- he revering His Mother Tongue to the point of exhaustion!  As for Hart, it's all a joke -- since Hart only SAID in conversation that one has to be 'carefully' about 'carefully.' By the same token, Grice might have reported a conversation he had with the green-grocer's. 'The greengrocer keeps misuing the plural form and the scare quotes!"  The third member of the Play Group would be Grice himself -- he WAS happy with the result in "Causal Theory of Perception." So the fact that he gives the reference to the supplementary volume of the Aristotelian Society is just for the show -- or easy reference, if you wish! There is some seriousness to this! Since it hides Grice’s reverence for Price. Another example which occurred to Grice in “Causal Theory of Perception," Aristotle Society Supplementary Volume (as to others before him) is that the old idea that perceiving a thing involves having (sensing) a sense-datum (or sense-data) might be made viable by our rejecting the supposition that a sense-datum statement reports the properties of entities of a special class, whose existence needs to be demonstrated by some form of the Argument from Illusion, or the identification of which requires a special set of instructions to be provided by a philosopher;   and by supposing, instead, that "sense-datum statement" is a class-name for statements of some such form as "* looks (feels, etc.) $ to A" or "it looks (feels, etc.) to A as if."s   Grice hopes by this means to rehabilitate a form of the view that the notion of perceiving a thing is to be analyzed in causal terms.   But Grice had to try to meet an objection, which Grice found to be frequently raised by those sympathetic to Wittgenstein, to the effect that for many cases of perceiving the required sense-datum statements are not available;   for when, for example, I see a plainly red object in ordinary daylight, to say "it looks red to me," far from being, as my theory required, the expression of a truth, would rather be an incorrect use of words.  According to such an objection, a feature of the meaning, signification, or significance of  of   "x looks é to A"   is that such a form of words is correctly used only if either it is false that x is , or there is some doubt (or it has been thought or it might be thought that there is some doubt) whether x is .   So we come to the FOURTH member: not a colleague, like Austin, but his own PUPIL: Strawson. And not a member of the Establishment pre-Austin, like Ryle.  Grice manages to find his pupil at FAULT twice. The first is about 'if' -- which Grice correlates to 'and' and 'or' -- Interestingly, 'She is in the kitchen or in the bedroom' is one of the four examples in that interlude on implication in 'Causal Theory.' But at this point he manages to quote verbatim from Introduction to Logical Theory.  The other fault is Strawson's Analysis essay on 'Truth', where he says some ridiculous things 'which obviously pertain to the realm of what a conversationalist implicitly signifies!  Grice is again setting the record, by relying on published sources -- except Hart (in conversation), "The Concept of Mind," the reprint of Austin's essay in Philosophical Papers, ed. by Urmson and Warnock, Strawson's book Introduction, and Strawson's essay in Analysis. Note incidentally, that by stating, ‘ed. Urmson and Warnock,’ Grice is implicating: how do THESE two – members of the play group – feel about this? Urmson and Warnock remained at Oxford forever associated with Austin, due mainly to their curatorial nuances with How to do things with words (Urmson) and Sense and Sensibilia (Warnock). But the volume to which Grice refers is the set of “Philosophical Papers” – never essays, pompous! – by both four hands! Neither Urmson nor Warnock would care to provide an answer to the criticism by Grice on Austin’s piece on the lack of theoretical recognition for the idea of a conversationalist’s significance! Little wonder Grice stopped lecturing at Oxford for a while until he came back as a foreigner to give the Locke Lectures! But if Grice felt that way, it was his moral duty! As a University Lecturer, and examiner at Oxford, he had to deal with the whole population of philosophy pupils at Oxford – never mind those who had other alma mater! In other words, Oxford being what it was, although there was independence of mind as to on what a university lecturer could lecture – even if his lectures were mainly joint – Grice was possibly tired of having to hear the recitation of the Oxonian canon: ‘meaning is use’ ‘this is inappropriate’ – and having let the OTHER examiners – Strawson, Urmson, Warnock – ALLOWING the pupil to stick to such a dogma or mistake, when the PUPIL should be made pretty well aware that there is AN ALTERNATIVE account – which relies on conversation as rational cooperation!  It has been said that Strawson typed Grice's essay on 'signification' -- originally a talk to The Oxford Philosophical Society -- because there was a need, Strawson felt, to have more of that type of Oxonian philosophy in print!  A few years later, in his own essay, Strawson goes on to CRITICISE Grice's allegedly sufficient -- Strawson never bothered with necessary -- conditions for 'signification.'  However, when Grice lists those who helped him see the poit, Strawson comes second, not first! Earlier, another pupil of Grice's had pointed out that, when playing bridge, but not poker, the type of simmulation that is NOT to be expected in a case of 'significatio' qua communicatio -- is usually the way to success!  People -- some people! -- have often wondered why Grice never brought the problem of 'significatio' to the Saturday mornings. And the canonical answer is that Austin forbade the discussion of stuff that had already undergone printing!  Well, Grice's essay on 'signification' never undergone printing during Austin's days. What's more to the point is that 'A plea for excuses' had -- but Grice would not dare bring such dull topic as Austin's mistake in dealing with 'adverbs' -- no modification without aberration. Austin is not even mentioned in "Causal Theory of Perception," since, as many saw, Grice was still grieving Austin's demise. But in "Prolegomena," it looks as if Grice is PLAYING and having FUN in dealing with Austin's mistake in a way and in a manner that he would never have displayed in the presence of the Master of the 'kindergarten'!   In "The Causal Theory of Perception," Grice notes that it would be brusque to criticise his defence of traditionalist Price's causal theory of perception on the grounds that 'That pillar box seems red to me" sounds to the Oxonian ear, 'a bit brusque itself.'   Grice goes on to quote a few philosophical theses, or dicta -- sophismata which have become philosophismata -- like 'What is necessary is not also possible.'  And the rest is history!  H. P. Grice knew what he was talking about. Or rather, about which he was talking! And no, the implicature is not: why shouldn't he? Most people at Oxford did not!  Amazingly, he managed to write an essay on 'signifying' calling it 'meaning' -- true, one would NOT say that a word is a SIGN, but, as he points out, things that 'signify,' notably utterers NEED not, cannot, be SIGNS, either! And the analysans goes straight to define it -- Grice uses Forti's symbol, =def -- in terms of intending. Many remarks on intending point to the fact that you cannot intend to climb Mt. Everest on hands and knees --. This restricts what you can 'signify'. You cannot 'signify' 'Let's change the subject' by uttering 'Impenetrablity,' because as Dodgson notes: "I cannot expect that -- and it's very wise of you, Alice, to keep asking. 'Of course you don't until I tell you. But the definition of 'intending' itself had to wait for Grice's method from the banal to the bizarre -- which featured a transform from Stout to Prichard. In his analysis of what he saw Stout's too clever approach to 'certainty' Grice was having in mind Hampshire's and Hart's failed account of 'intending' in terms of 'deciding' with 'certainty.' In endorsing a Prichardian account he is thinking PEARS, who has it right. No certainty need be involved -- and Grice KNEW since he had spent some time on 'x is certain' versus 'it is certain' vis-a-vis Descartes's clear and distinct perception -- the topic of certainty in WoW as related to his Causal Theory of Perception in general. But the Sceptic features large. In WoW Grice has his own pupil, Strawson, challenging:  "You mean that I bring you a newspaper, surely"  For: "What is your ground for saying that what you mean is that I bring you an essay, instead?"  Similar questions are raised in the British Academy lecture, but not in terms of a pupil, but anyone who may challenge any INTENDER that he intends what he uttters he intends.  Grice finds in retrospecct that his Stoutian analysis was a very easy prey for the sceptic. And while he interludes with ACCEPTANCE for a while, he runs to Prichard for help. A very clever chap, Prichard was, who realised that 'will that...' is the key. Pears was listening. And although the days of their joint seminars in the philosophy of action -- along with J. F. Thomson, too -- were over -- Grice's philosophical wonder never left him! Historians of philosophy have struggled to find a way to describe the right tag to describe what Grice was doing: The Oxford school of ordinary language philosophy, etc. Grice put it best in what some regard as an early attempt to explicate Oxford philosophy to non-Oxonians. The title is telling: “Postwar Oxford philosophy” – and don’t expect to find a reference to Ryle, or Austin – it’s all about himself! Part of the reason by which we can be more or less sure that Grice did THINK of belonging himself to th Play Group is ex post facto – post Austin’s death that is. None other of the play group would have DREAMED of keep those Saturday morning meetings – Only Grice did! True, it was a different environment. The attendance was not restricted to whole-time tutorial fellows or students (Christ Church) in philosophy – but still!  Nobody was such a constructivist at Oxford at that time, expect our Grice!  References Ackrill, J. L. Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione. Austin, J. L. (1960). Philosophical papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Austin, J. L. (1962). Sense and sensibilia, reconstructed from the notes by G. J. Warnock. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Austin, J. L. (1960). How to do things with words, edited by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Ayer, A. J. Language, truth, and logic. London: Gollancz Bayes, Statistics Blackburn, S. W. Spreading the word. Blackburn, S. W. Review of Grice.  Blake, William. Poems. Bosanquet, Bernard.  Bostock, D. J.  Broad, C. D.  Bunyan, John.The Pilgrim’s Progress. Butler, Ethics. Collingwood, Metaphysics. Descartes Duncan-Jones, A. E. (1958). Fugitive propositions, Analysis.  Eddington,  Ewing, C. (1938). Meaninglessness. Mind.  Golding, William. The Inheritors. Grice, H. P. (1938). Negation and privation. Grice, H. P. (1941). Personal identity. Mind: a journal of philosophy and psychology.  Grice, H. P. (1948). Meaning. Grice, H. P. (1950). Intentions and dispositions. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. The Philosophical Review.  Grice, H. P. (1959). Post-war Oxford philosophy Grice, H. P. (1961). The causal theory of perception. Symposium with A. R. White, chaired by Braithwaite – held at Cambridge. Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume.  Grice, H. P. (1962). Some remarks about the senses, in R. J. Butler, Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell.  Grice, H. P. (1962). Negation. Grice, H. P. (1965). Logic and conversation. Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and conversation Grice, H. P. (1967). Prolegomena. Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and conversation. Grice, H. P. (1967). Further notes on logic and conversation. Grice, H. P. (1967). Indicative conditionals. Grice, H. P. (1967). Utterer’s meaning and intentions. Grice, H. P. (1967). Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning. Grice, H. P. (1967). Some models of implicature.  Grice, H. P. (1967). Ill-will Grice, H. P. (1967). Other Grice, H. P. (1967). Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of H. P. Grice Grice, H. P. (1968). Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning. Foundations of Language.  Grice, H. P. (1969). Utterer’s meaning and intentions. The Philosophical Review.  Grice, H. P. (1969). Vacuous names, in Donald Davidson and Jaako Hintikka, eds. Words and objections: essays on the work of W. V. Quine. Dordrecht: Reidel.  Grice, H. P. (1971). Intention and uncertainty. Proceedings of the British Academy. Annual Philosophical Lecture. Sold separately. Grice, H. P. (1975). Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.  Grice, H. P. (1977). Aspects of reason and reasoning. Grice, H. P. (1977). Reasons and reasons. Grice, H. P. (1977). Alethic reasons. Grice, H. P. (1977). Some remarks about ends and happiness. Grice, H. P. (1977). Presupposition and conversational implicature. Grice, H. P. (1982). Meaning revisited. Grice, H. P. (1983). The conception of value. Grice, H. P. (1983). Objective value. Grice, H. P. (1983). Objective and relative value. Grice, H. P. (1983). Absolute value.  Grice, H. P. (1986). Actions and events. The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Grice, H. P. (1987). Retrospective epilogue.  Grice, H. P. (1987). Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy. Grice, H. P. (1987). Philosophical eschatology and Plato’s Republic. Grice, H. P. (1988). Aristotle on the multiplicity of being. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Grice, H. P. Descartes on clear and distinct perception Grice, H. P. (1991). The conception of value. Oxford: Clarendon. Grice, H. P. (2001). Aspects of reason. Oxford: Clarendon.  Grice, H. P. and Judith Baker. Akrasia. Grice, H. P. and P. F. Strawson (1956). In defence of a dogma. Grice, H. P., P. F. Strawson, and D. F. Pears, ‘Metaphysics.’ Hardie, F. Plato. Hardie, F. Aristotle’s ethical theory.  Harrison, B. J. Introduction to the philosophy of language. London: Macmillan.  Hegel Kant, Immanuel. Translated by Abbott. Keynes, Probability. Kneale, W. C. Probability Mill, J. S. A system of logic Moore, G. E. Philosophical Papers. Leibniz Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary. Locke, John (1690). An essay concerning humane [sic] understanding.  Ogden, C. K. and I. A. Richards (1923). The meaning of meaning: a study of symbolism. London: Allen and Unwin Pears, D. F. Philosophy of mind. London: Duckworth.  Philonius of Megara – Fragments.  Platts, M. Ways of meaning. Platts, M. Review of G. R. I. C. E. Mind.  Potts, T. C. Grice, Leeds.  Price, Knowledge.  Prichard, Willing, edited by J. O. Urmson. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. Ramsey, F. P. The foundations of mathematics Robinson, W. Definition Ryle, Gilbert (1946). The concept of mind. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.  Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Shakespeare, William. Sonnets Sidonius, Letters. The Loeb Classical Library. Speranza, J. L. Grice’s Cratylus Speranza, J. L. Grice’s Sextus Empiricus. Speranza, J. L. The feast of conversational reason. Speranza, J. L. Conversational impenetrability. Speranza, J. L. The critique of conversational reason. Speranza, J. L. The Conversational Immanuel. Speranza, J. L. Robbing Peter to pay Paul: H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson. Speranza, J. L. Way of Things, Way of Ideas, Way of Words, Way of Conversations! Speranza, J. L. Grice italo! Speranza, J. L. Grice italo!; ossia, H. P. Grice e la filosofia italiana, Pel grupo di gioco di H. P. Grice, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Speranza. Speranza, J. L. This and That – Join H. P. Grice’s Play-Group! Spinoza Strawson, P. F. (1952). Introduction to logical theory. London: Methuen. Strawson, P. F. (1986). If and >. In G. R. I. C. E. Grounds Ratio Intentio Categoria End. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  Stout, G. F. Voluntary action. Mind.  Urmson, J. O. Philosophical analysis between the two wars. Warner, M. M. Church of England. Warnock, G. J. Language and morality. Oxford: Blackwell.  Whitehead, A. N. and B. A. W. Russell, Principia mathematica. Cambridge Wilson, J. C. Statement and inference, posthumously published from the lectures by Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon.  Winch, Peter. Grice’s Point.  Winkworth, Peccavi. PUNCH.  Wisdom, John. Metaphysics. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Wollaston Name index Ackrill, J. L.  Austin, J. L.  Bradley, F.  Cooper, D. E.  Flew, A. G. N.  Grice, H. P.  Hampshire, S. N. Hart, H. L. A.  Holdcroft, D Keynes, N. Theory of Probability Kneale, W. Theory of Probability Nowell-Smith, P. H. – see under Smith Over, D. E.  Peacocke, C. A. B.  Pears, D. F.  Potts, T. C.  Quinton, A. M.  Sainsbury, R. M.  Smith, P. H. Nowell Speranza, J. L.  Strawson, P. F.  Thomson, J. F.  Urmson, J. O.  Warner, M. M. Warnock, G. J.  Wiggins, D. G. P.  Wilson, J. C. Winch, Peter Wood, O. P.  Woozley, D.  Subject index Subject – used by H. P. Grice as a better rendition of ‘substance’ – “I am a subject, and I engage in inter-subjective activity with Strawson – but I’m not really a substance: coffee is!h Appendix -- Luigi Speranza -- Grice e Speranza – implicatura ed implicatura -- filosofia italiana – By Luigi Speranza, pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice, The Swimming-Pool Library (Albalonga). Filosofo. Speranza, Ugo -- Speranza, Alessandro -- Speranza, Ettore -- Speranza, Gianni -- Speranza, Paola -- Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza-Ghersi –Ghersi-Speranza, Anna-Maria -- Speranza lui speranza: luigi della --. Italian philosopher, attracted, for some reason, to H. P. Grice. Speranza knows St. John’s very well. He is the author of “Dorothea Oxoniensis.” He is a member of a number of cultivated Anglo-Italian societies, like H. P. Grice’s Playgroup. He is the custodian of Villa Grice, not far from Villa Speranza. He works at the Swimming-Pool Library. Cuisine is one of his hobbiesgrisottoa alla ligure, his specialty. He can be reached via H. P. Grice. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vita ed opinion di Luigi Speranza,” par Luigi Speranza. A. M. Ghersi Speranza -- vide Ghersi-Speranza. Ghersi is a collaborator of Speranza. Grice: “It’s easy enough to list Speranza’s publications.” Speranza, like Mill, was fortunate to belong to a literary familyand he would read Descartes’s Meditations, which drew him to philosophy. His studies in logic drew him to semanticsHis first love was Oxonian analysis as summarised in Hartnack’s essay on ‘contemporary’ philosophy. One of Speranza’s earliest essays is on Plato’s Cratylus, relying mainly on Cassierer, but also drawing from Austin’s Philosophical Papesr. Spearnza’s idea is that “ … mean …” is a dyadic relation and what’s behind Plato’s theory of forms. This was Speranza’s contribution to a seminar in ancient philosophy. For his contribution on medieaval philosophy, Speranza drew on the modistae, and the Patrologia Latina for the use of ‘intentio’ in various writers, up to AquinoSperanza finds it fascinating that the earliest modistae do find a conceptual link between the ‘intentio’ and the ‘significatio.’ For a seminar on scepticism, Speranza contributed with a paper on Gricedrawing on Sextus Empiricus and Bar-Hillel. It relates to Grice’s problem with the conversational category of fortitude. Speranza concludes that a phenomenalist account is possible, but there are two other options: ‘silence’ (“not to participate in the conversational game”) or the utterance of non-alethic utterances, such as questions and commands. For a seminar on political philosophy, Speranza contributed with an essay on ‘Contractualism’ from Rousseau onwards --. For a seminar on phenomenology and the social sciences, Speranza contributed with an essay on ‘The conversational unit,’ the idea that the emic approach is preferable to the etic approach. For a seminar on argumentation theory on Habermas, Speranza contributed with a “German Grice,” the idea of a ‘strategy’ is a momer. Grice is into co-operative proceduresand those who provide taxonomies of rationality should be made aware of this. For “The Carrollian,” Speranza contributed with “Humpty Dumpty’s Impenetrability.” The idea that Davidson is right and Alice does not mean that there is a knock-down argument, or that she should change the topiche draws on Grice’s collaborator at Oxford, D. F. Pears, for his insights on “Intention and belief.” At the request of the editor of a bibliographical bulletin, M. Costa, Speranza contributed with reviews of oeuvre by R. M. Hare (“Sub-atomic particles of logic”), J. F. Thomson (“if and If”) and work on the English philosopher H. P. Grice (J. Baker, etc.). His review on Way of Words spramg from the same project, and it is an ‘invitation.’ For a congress of philosophy, Speranza presented “On the way of conversation,” playing on Grice’s “way of words”“Surely there’s more than words to conversation.” Speranza focuses on what Grice amusingly calls a ‘minro problem,’ that of expression meaningSperanza’s example: “How do you find Bologna?” “I haven’t been mugged yet” was inspired by a remark of an attendant to the conference. For a congress on conversational reasoning, Speranza contributed with “First time at Bologna?” providing twenty five possible answers“first time in the region, actually.” Etc. Speranza, following Grice, refers to this sort of reasoning as a sort of ‘brooding’to ‘brood’ is to ‘reason’ in a calculated fashion. As an invitation project, Speranza collaborated with “Rational face to rational face: a study in conversational pragmatics from a Griceian perspective.” In his essay “Post-modernist Grice,” he deals with the unary and dyadic connectors. For a congress on “Current Issues,” Speranza presented his “The feast of reason,” three steps in the critique of conversational reason. The first step is empirical, the second is quasi-contractualist, and the third is rational, undersood weakly and strongly. For an essay on relativism, Speranza presented an essay on ‘The cunning of conversational reason.’ Speranza maintains Grice’s jocular references to Kant -- the Conversational Immanuel. For an essay on desirability, Speranza explored the issues connected with mise-en-abyme and self-reflectionsome of these were published. There is published correspondence with members of what Speranza calls the Grice Club. Refs.: The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley. Speranza, villaThe Swimming-Pool Library, H. P. Grice’s Play Group, Liguria, Italia. Grice’s Oxonian Implicature   J. L. Speranza   Abstract  In all his appeal to universality and universability, Grice remained an Oxonian at heart. For all his publicity of Kant, it is Fichte that saves him. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analuysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophising which originated in Oxford  WoW 376 It’s interesting that in that Retrospective Epilogue he zooms out from Oxonian to Athenian dialectic. In Prejudices and Predilections, he zooms out just to Cambridge – avoiding the redbrick.  There is a ‘cunning’ of conversational reason – meant as universal, it remains, Oxonian. A portrait of Grice hangs ithe Philosophy room (so called) at Merton – but do Mertonians, and human beings at large – know the whole story?  When it comes to the Fichte-Hegel-Kant debate, the best is to quote from Warnock. It is often said that Grice is an Oxford philosopher – and it’s true! It’s also said, as I would expand, that he is an ENGLISH Oxford philosopher – and that is a truer truth – because, to echo Gilbert and Sullivan, it was greatly to his credit. My third truth is that his oeuvre is addressed to other Oxford English philosophers – which has not always been the case. So that’s what I shall endeavour to shed some light on these notes.  Yes, yes, yes.  What’s English about Grice. Well, he was born in Harborne. How more English can you get? What’s Oxonian about Grice Well, straight from Clifton, he was mostly closeted in the cloisters of Corpus, to then turn into a Hammondworth Scholar at Oxford and end as a Tutorial Fellow and University Lecture at his beloved St. John’s.  This is a work in progress – and the idea is to be so. It is meant to engage other scholars, and mosdt of it will be a catalougue raisonee of the rather poorly ited chcecklist of his things.  Had Mabbott been able to manage P. F. Strawson, things would have gone different. But he wasn’t. So he decided to share his Strawson with the OTHER philosophy tutor at St. John’s – and the rest is history. Grice would NEVER have shown an interest in the topics that he did only because he came to be in contact with Strawson. The reference to logic is Strawsonian, and of course their long-standing debate on ‘if.’ Contacts with Strawson could fill a book, as those with Austin did fill a philosophical dissertation or two – ‘the reconciliation of Austin and Grice’. It may be best to start with Grice’s making fun of Strawon in ‘Prolegomena’, with a full quote from Introduction to Logical theory – all wrong! – and Urmson knew that (Philosophical analysis) in spite of Warnock’s good criticism of it (English philosophy). And Strawson was not alone – other Oxonian philosophers were playing with logic then, like that fellow of Lincoln, and Lemmon, and Bostock, and a few others. Cf. O. P. Wood review in Mind on logic on ‘or’  Contacts with previous generation: Bradley, Stout, Prichard.  More importantly Cook Wilson – not just the butt of a joke, what we know we know – but his genitorial programme in Statement and Inference. Bradley, and made fun of Wollaston and Bosanquet as ‘very minor.’ Discussion of Collingwood’s idea of presupposition in ‘Metaphysics,’ co-authored with Strawson and Pears, in Pears, The nature of metaphysics.  Grice’s view of different groups on ordinary-language – the older one carried out by Ryle. Grice’s interaction with O. P. Wood, of the Ryle group. Why else would he care to quote from Robinson on ‘You name it’ in ‘Actions and Events.’ Specifically on Ryle, Grice makes fun of him  in ‘Prolegomena’: I involuntarily sat on a chair. He becomes more serious when approach Ryle as a behaviourist in ‘Method in philosophical psychology,’ ending with another joke on Ryle’s agitations. Citation of Kneale, of the Grice Club, on the sophistication of induction.  Saturday mornings were never the same after he joined Austin’s Play Group. He will continue with the meetings after Austin’s demise.  Members of the Play Group were all Englishmen: alphabetically: Austin (the senior or master), Hare, Hampshire, Hart (Anglo-Jewish), Pears, Strawson.  Affectionate recollections of Nowell-Smith: Grice being one of the reasons Nowell-Smith left Oxford for good, even though that was where he died. Hare, whom Griced manages NOT to quote in WoW – ‘those authors who would appeal to a notion of a neustic above the phrastic’ --. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminar with J. L. Austin on Categories and De Interpretatione. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminar with Strawson on meaning. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf, Ashworth – joint seminar with G. J. Warnock on the philosophy of perception. For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashowrth – joint seminar with D. F. Pears on the philosophy of action. Good quote: Pears on ‘if’ conversationally implicating ‘iff.’  For the annals of the University of Oxford – cf. Ashworth – joint seminars with J. F. Thomson on the philosophy of action. “And others” – with Quinton.  See: Register seminars delivered by University lecturers in philosophy at Oxford, 1945-1967. Then there’s the contacts with the zillions of philosophers – English-born, I mean – who had a sojourn at Oxford (with Grice) but surely Oxford cannot accommodate all of them, and had to spread Griceianism to the redbricks. The first, Flew. But there’s Parkinson. And Warner, who ended up at Warwick. And Cox, who ended up at Liverpool – having researched on aesthetics and perception with Sibley and Grice. And Duncan-Jones and Barnes! Or Grant with his pragmatic implication in Philosophy – no mention of Grice! To name a few! But he would never give a joint seminar with Dummett – even when Dummett quotes from Grice profusely on implicature in Truth and other enigmas. Para-philosophical yet VERY OXONIAN peripatetic: founder of The Demi-Johns. V. ‘Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer’, obituary of Grice in THE TIMES.  Piano was the other. Indeed predating philosophy. Having started at Halborne as he joined his father on the violin an his brother on the cello. Derek Grice went to to become a professional cellist at Hastings. See brochure for end-of-year concert, ‘H. P. Grice, rendition of Ravel Pavane pour une.  Not to mention chess and cricket – at high levels of proficiency (Wiggins and Strawson, British Academy).  ‘Personal identity’, published in Mind, which means *submitted* to Mind. One might argue that it wasn’t after Perry unearthed this piece in “Personal identity,” it had not received proper notice, although Grice had continued to research on what he called ‘personal identity’ as a ‘logical construction’. When it comes to the relation with Oxford and English philosophy, while Parfitt made some light use of this, it all goes back to Locke. It is fun to think that when librarians were playing with this, they had to go by ‘alphabetical order’. The keywords would be then ‘personal identity’ and ‘logical construction.’ ‘Meaning’ was his contribution to The Oxford Philosophical Society. He had been lecturing o Peirce. But perhaps he profit most from philosophers of his generation: Urmson, Strawson, and even younger ones: Bostock, Peacocke, Blackburn – full chapter on Grice in Spreading the word – Sainsbury, Oxford educated, Over, Oxford educated, Potts of Leeds, Oxford educated, Davies, Oxford educated – full chapter in his book on meaning. Wiggins – who wrote the joint article on Grice for The British Academy.  ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ was his contribution to the symposium at The Aristotelian Society, chaired by Braithwaite and with A. R. White as co-symosiast. His public reference to the ‘idea’ if not yet the word for ‘implicature. It influenced a younger generation, notably Snowdon – and Platts who cannot quote from anything else on implicature in his full chapter on implicature in Ways of Meaning.  ‘Conversation’ ‘Intention and uncertainty’ was his Annual Philosophical lecture for the British Academy. He defines himself as a neo-Prichardian, having previously considered himself more of a Stoutian.  But ‘Intention and uncertainty’ allowed Grice to go back to topics of his own generation: Hart and Hamphsire on ‘intention’ and ‘certainty’ and ‘decision.’ He would have none of that! Hampshire Thought and action on cooperation and trust. Grice knew of Jewishness. At his Clifon, the Anglo-Jewish had a special House, and of course did not have to attend chapel. Oxford was different. And Honore, an old Cliftonian, would find affinity with Hart. I would think when delivering the James Lectures at Harvard, a few Oxonians may have been surprised that, for all of Hart’s achievements – of laws as rules, and so forth – Grice would care to cite him only as per a private conversation (the horrour!) where Hart assumed that if Mrs. Smith wrote the cheque inadvertently, the ENTAILMENT is that she did not take the required steps towards such a decision! And had it not been for Urmson who was editing Pritchard’s essays on motivation and interest and willing, Grice would not have quoted them – Prichard’s ideas on ethics pervade Grice’s own views on ethics since for Grice ultimately morality cashes on desire (interest).  Aspects of Reason and Reasoning.  Online Archive of California   Finding Aid to the H. Paul Grice Papers, 1947-1989, bulk 1960-1989 Finding Aid written by Bancroft Library staff The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Finding Aid to the H. Paul Grice Papers, 1947-1989, bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 The Bancroft Library    University of California, Berkeley  Berkeley, California Finding Aid Written By: Bancroft Library staff The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Collection Summary  Collection Title: H. Paul Grice papers Date (inclusive): 1947-1989, Date (bulk): bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 Creator : Grice, H. P. (H. Paul) Extent: Number of containers: 10 cartons Linear feet: 12.5 Repository: The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California, 94720-6000 Phone: (510) 642-6481 Fax: (510) 642-7589 Email: bancref@library.berkeley.edu URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ Abstract: The H. Paul. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consist of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice, during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and the University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research Grice conducted on theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English Physical Location: Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog. Information for Researchers  Access  Collection is open for research. Publication Rights  Materials in these collections may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley See:. Preferred Citation  [Identification of item], H. Paul Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Alternate Forms Available  There are no alternate forms of this collection.  Indexing Terms  The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog. Grice, H. P. (H. Paul)--Archives Language and languages--Philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Faculty papers. Manuscripts for publication. Administrative Information  Acquisition Information  The H. Paul Grice papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Kathleen Grice on March 9, 1990 Accruals  No additions are expected. System of Arrangement  Arranged to the folder level. Processing Information  Processed by Bancroft Library staff in 2009-2010. Biographical Information  Herbert Paul Grice, born in 1913 in Birmingham, England, obtained his degree at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he returned to teach until 1967 after providing teaching services at a public school in Rossall. In 1967, H.P. Grice moved to California, becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained until his death in 1988. His long list of contributions during his teaching career include the William James Lectures from 1967-1968, his publication of "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning," from 1968-1969, his Urbana lectures presented in 1970, "Logic and Conversation," published in 1975, Kant lectures delivered in 1978-1977, John Locke lectures presented in 1978-1979, and Carus lectures presented in 1983. Grice's publications and lectures are compilations of his extensive research performed in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, Aristotelian philosophy, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Grice is also attributed with coining the word "implicature" in 1968 to describe speakers, and for defining his own paradox known as "Grice's paradox," introduced in Grice's "Studies in the Way of Words," (1989) a volume of all his publications and writings. Scope and Content of Collection  The H.P. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consists of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research, some in the form of audio files, Grice conducted on his theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Also included in the H.P. Grice collection is Grice's research on Aristotelian philosophy with Judith Baker and metaphysics with George Myro, his other research focusing on the philosophy of the mind with such subjects as perception. Also included is documentation of Grice's involvement with the American Psychological Association (APA) during his professorship at UC Berkeley.   Series 1 Correspondence 1947-1988  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 1-15) Arrangement  Arranged alphabetically according to last name; followed by general correspondence Scope and Content Note  Series includes correspondence with Grice's student and colleague Judith Baker, and colleagues Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Carton 1, Folder 1 Bennett, Jonathan Circa 1984  Carton 1, Folder 2 Baker, Judith Undated  Carton 1, Folder 3 Bealer, George 1987  Carton 1, Folder 4 Code, Alan 1980  Carton 1, Folders 5-6 Suppes, Patrick 1977-1982  Carton 1, Folders 7-8 Warner, Richard 1971-1975  Carton 1, Folder 9 Wyatt, Richard 1981  Carton 1, Folders 10-12 General to H.P. Grice 1947-1986  Carton 1, Folders 13-14 General 1972-1988  Carton 1, Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice 1968    Series 2 Publications 1957-1989  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates Scope and Content Note  Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" 1957  Carton 1, Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" 1957, 1976-1980  Carton 1, Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing 1958  Carton 1, Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" 1966  Carton 1, Folders 21-23 "Logic and Conversation" 1966-1975  Carton 1, Folders 24-26 William James Lectures 1967  Carton 1, Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning" 1968  Carton 1, Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" 1969  Carton 1, Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture IX 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Circa 1971  Carton 2, Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" 1971-1973  Carton 2, Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures I-III 1973  Carton 2, Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures 1986  Carton 2, Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 22-23 "Two Chapters on Incontinence" with Judith Baker Circa 1976  Carton 2, Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Circa 1977  Carton 2, Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" 1977-1981  Carton 2, Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" 1978  Carton 2, Folders 29-30 John Locke Lectures "Aspects of Reason" 1979  Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Circa 1985  Carton 3, Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy 1986  Carton 3, Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" 1986-1989  Carton 3, Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" 1987  Carton 3, Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" 1987  Carton 4, Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" 1988  Carton 4, Folder 5 Grice Reprints 1953-1986  Carton 4, Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 10 "Negation I" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 11 "Negation II" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Undated  Carton 4, Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Undated  Carton 4, Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 4, Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Undated  Carton 4, Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Undated    Series 3 Teaching Materials 1964-1983  Physical Description: Carton 5, Carton 6 (folders 1-3) Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; alphabetical for those teaching materials without dates. Scope and Content Note  Includes seminars and lectures given during Grice's years as a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Carton 5, Folder 1 Student Notes on Grice's Seminar at Cornell 1964  Carton 5, Folder 2 Grice Seminar 1969  Carton 5, Folder 3 Philosophy 290-2 with Judith Baker 1992  Carton 5, Folder 4 Philosophy 290-2 1993  Carton 5, Folders 5-6 Seminar on Kant's Ethical Theory 1974-1977  Carton 5, Folder 7 Seminar on "Aristotle Ethics" 1975-1996  Carton 5, Folder 8 Philosophy 290, Kant Seminar with Judith Baker 1976-1977  Carton 5, Folder 9 "Kant's Ethics," Volume II 1977  Carton 5, Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures 1977  Carton 5, Folders 14-15 Philosophy 290 1977-1978  Carton 5, Folders 16-17 "Kant's Ethics," Volume III 1978  Carton 5, Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Seminar 1979-1980  Carton 5, Folders 19-21 Seminar on Kant's Ethics, Volume V 1980-1982  Carton 5, Folder 22 Philosophy 200. Grice and Myro 1982  Carton 5, Folder 23 Notes on Kant 1982  Carton 5, Folder 24 Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy 1983  Carton 5, Folder 25 Seminar on Freedom Undated  Carton 5, Folder 26 Grice Lectures Undated  Carton 5, Folders 27-28 Seminar on Kant's Ethics Undated  Carton 5, Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Lectures II-IV Undated  Carton 5, Folder 30 UC Berkeley, Modest Mentalism Undated  Carton 5, Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Grice/Staal Seminar, Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 3 Grice/Staal, "That" Clause Undated    Series 4 Professional Associations 1971-1987  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 4-12), Carton 10 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically. Scope and Content Note  Includes Kant's Stanford Lectures, various notes and audio tapes of Beanfest, Grice's fall 1987 group research on universals, and conferences and discussions concerning the American Psychological Association (APA). Also includes a carton of cassettes, magnetic recorder tapes, and cassette sets of four on professional talks with colleague George Myro on identities, metaphysics, and relatives and Grice's various seminars given at different institutions such as Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and Seattle on his philosophical theories. Carton 6, Folder 4 APA Symposium - "Entailment" 1971  Carton 6, Folders 5-6 Stanford - "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant 1977  Carton 6, Folder 7 Conferences - Causality Colloquium At Stanford University Circa 1978  Carton 6, Folder 8 Conferences - APA Discussion - Randall Parker's Transcription of Tapes 1983-1989  Carton 6, Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest 1985  Carton 6, Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes 1985  Carton 6, Folder 11 Group Universals 1987  Carton 6, Folder 12 Group Universals - Partial Working Copy 1987  Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences 1970-1986    Series 5 Subject Files 1951-1988  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 13-38), Cartons 7-9 Arrangement  Alphabetically Scope and Content Note  Includes Reed Seminar notes, notes on ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes and their own philosophical theories, research and accompanying notes on other prominent philosophers such as Kant and Davidson, notes with colleagues Judith Baker, Alan Code, Michael Friedman, George Myro, Patrick Suppes, and Richard Warner, on various theories of reason, trust, language semantics, universals, and values. Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" 1983  Carton 6, Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship Undated  Carton 6, Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Undated  Carton 6, Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Undated  Carton 6, Folder 20 Bealer Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 21 Berkeley Group Team Notes 1983  Carton 6, Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Undated  Carton 6, Folder 23 Categories with Strawson Undated  Carton 6, Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives 1981  Carton 6, Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 26 Davidson's "On Saying That" Undated  Carton 6, Folders 27-28 Descartes Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 29 "Grice on Denials of Indicative Conditionals" by Michael Sinton Circa 1971  Carton 6, Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Undated  Carton 6, Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Undated  Carton 6, Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 34-35 Notes on Ethics with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 6, Folder 36 North Carolina Ethics Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 37 Festschrift and Warner Notes Circa 1981-1982  Carton 6, Folder 38 "Finality" Notes with Alan Code Undated  Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" by Grice Undated  Carton 7, Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 3 "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" by Kant Undated  Carton 7, Folder 4 "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics with Richard Warner Undated  Carton 7, Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated  Carton 7, Folder 7 Notes on Hume 1975  Carton 7, Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 10 Identity Notes with George Myro 1973  Carton 7, Folders 11-12 "Ifs and Cans" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Undated  Carton 7, Folders 14-16 Notes on Kant 1981-1982  Carton 7, Folder 17 Kant's Ethics 1982  Carton 7, Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Undated  Carton 7, Folder 19 Language and Reference Circa 1966  Carton 7, Folder 20 Language Semantics Undated  Carton 7, Folders 21-22 John Locke Lecture Notes 1979  Carton 7, Folder 23 Logical Form and Action Sentences Undated  Carton 7, Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Undated  Carton 7, Folders 26-27 Notes on Metaphysics 1988  Carton 7, Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Undated  Carton 7, Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Undated  Carton 7, Folder 30 Method and Myth Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 31 Mills Induction Undated  Carton 7, Folder 32 Miscellaneous on Actions and Events Undated  Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous - Judith Baker Undated  Carton 8, Folder 2 Miscellaneous - Metaph Notes 1987-1988  Carton 8, Folder 3 Miscellaneous - Oxford Philosophy Undated  Carton 8, Folders 4-8 Miscellaneous Philosophy Notes 1981-1985  Carton 8, Folders 9-13 Miscellaneous Philosophy Topics Undated  Carton 8, Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Undated  Carton 8, Folders 16-17 Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics 1975-1976  Carton 8, Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Undated  Carton 8, Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Circa 1978  Carton 8, Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Undated  Carton 8, Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Papers Undated  Carton 8, Folder 23 Papers on Perception Undated  Carton 8, Folder 24 Perception Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 25 Notes on Perception with Richard Warner 1988  Carton 8, Folder 26 "Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 27 "A Pint of Philosophy" by Alfred Brook Gordon, includes notes by Grice Circa 1951  Carton 8, Folder 28 "A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 29 "Lectures on Pierce" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 30 Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Circa 1970  Carton 8, Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Undated  Carton 8, Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Undated  Carton 9, Folder 2 "Preliminary Valediction" 1985  Carton 9, Folder 3 Presupposition and Implicative Circa 1979  Carton 9, Folder 4 Probability and Life Undated  Carton 9, Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 6 Reasons 1966  Carton 9, Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Circa 1980  Carton 9, Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Undated  Carton 9, Folder 9 Schiffer Undated  Carton 9, Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Undated  Carton 9, Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 13 "Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics" by Alan Code Undated  Carton 9, Folder 14 Social Justice Undated  Carton 9, Folder 15 "Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Undated  Carton 9, Folder 16 Super-Relatives Undated  Carton 9, Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Notes 1986-1987  Carton 9, Folder 20 Various work on Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc/ with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 9, Folder 21 Universals 1987  Carton 9, Folder 22 Universals with Michael Friedman 1987  Carton 9, Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Undated  Carton 9, Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Undated  Carton 9, Folders 25-27 Miscellaneous - Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Undated  Carton 9, Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated  Carton 9, Folder 29 "Virtues and Vices" by Philippa Foot Undated  Carton 9, Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs 1974-1975 References  ACKRILL, J. L. cited by Grice, on ‘Happiness.’ ACKRILL, J. L. citing Grice AUSTIN, Philosophical papers. AUSTIN, How to do things with words. AUSTIN, Sense and sensibilia. BOSTOCK – cited by Walker. DUMMETT – cited by Grice. EWING FLEW, citing Grice. Grice, H. P. Prejudices and predilections; which become, The Life and Opinions of H. P. Grice’ HAMPSHIRE – cited by Grice. HARE, Practical inferences HART, citing Grice, Philosophical Review.  KNEALE, Induction, cited by Grice. OVER, D. E. citing Grice PEACOCKE, C. A. B. citing Grice in Evans/Mcdowell PEARS, citing Grice PEARS cited by Grice Prichard, ed. By Urmson – cited by Prichard. SAINSBURY citing Grice SMITH, P. H. Nowell. Cited by Grice. Speranza, J. L. The sceptic and language. Speranza Speranza STOUT – cited by Grice STRAWSON, P. F. citing Grice Introduction to logical theory URMSON, cited by Grice WoW URMSON citing Grice WARNOCK – cited by Grice –  citing Grice in ‘Saturday mornings.’ WIGGINS citing Grice, Dictionary WIGGINS and STRAWSON, see Strawson WILSON, John Cook – Statement and Inference  APPENDIX – Conversational Reason.  J. L. Speranza  Luigi Speranza, “Grice e la storia della filosofia italiana.” Speranza has done crucial research on Griceianism, unearthing some documents by O.Wood, J. O. Urmson, P. H. Nowell-Smith, and many many others – not just H. P. Grice.  University of California, Berkeley  Berkeley, California Finding Aid Written By: Bancroft Library staff The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Collection Summary  Collection Title: H. Paul Grice papers Date (inclusive): 1947-1989, Date (bulk): bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 Creator : Grice, H. P. (H. Paul) Extent: Number of containers: 10 cartons Linear feet: 12.5 Repository: The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California, 94720-6000 Phone: (510) 642-6481 Fax: (510) 642-7589 Email: bancref@library.berkeley.edu URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ Abstract: The H. Paul. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consist of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice, during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and the University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research Grice conducted on theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English Physical Location: Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog. Information for Researchers  Access  Collection is open for research. Publication Rights  Materials in these collections may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley See:. Preferred Citation  [Identification of item], H. Paul Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Alternate Forms Available  There are no alternate forms of this collection.  Indexing Terms  The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog. Grice, H. P. (H. Paul)--Archives Language and languages--Philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Faculty papers. Manuscripts for publication. Administrative Information  Acquisition Information  The H. Paul Grice papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Kathleen Grice on March 9, 1990 Accruals  No additions are expected. System of Arrangement  Arranged to the folder level. Processing Information  Processed by Bancroft Library staff in 2009-2010. Biographical Information  Herbert Paul Grice, born in 1913 in Birmingham, England, obtained his degree at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he returned to teach until 1967 after providing teaching services at a public school in Rossall. In 1967, H.P. Grice moved to California, becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained until his death in 1988. His long list of contributions during his teaching career include the William James Lectures from 1967-1968, his publication of "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning," from 1968-1969, his Urbana lectures presented in 1970, "Logic and Conversation," published in 1975, Kant lectures delivered in 1978-1977, John Locke lectures presented in 1978-1979, and Carus lectures presented in 1983. Grice's publications and lectures are compilations of his extensive research performed in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, Aristotelian philosophy, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Grice is also attributed with coining the word "implicature" in 1968 to describe speakers, and for defining his own paradox known as "Grice's paradox," introduced in Grice's "Studies in the Way of Words," (1989) a volume of all his publications and writings. Scope and Content of Collection  The H.P. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consists of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research, some in the form of audio files, Grice conducted on his theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Also included in the H.P. Grice collection is Grice's research on Aristotelian philosophy with Judith Baker and metaphysics with George Myro, his other research focusing on the philosophy of the mind with such subjects as perception. Also included is documentation of Grice's involvement with the American Psychological Association (APA) during his professorship at UC Berkeley.   Series 1 Correspondence 1947-1988  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 1-15) Arrangement  Arranged alphabetically according to last name; followed by general correspondence Scope and Content Note  Series includes correspondence with Grice's student and colleague Judith Baker, and colleagues Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Carton 1, Folder 1 Bennett, Jonathan Circa 1984  Carton 1, Folder 2 Baker, Judith Undated  Carton 1, Folder 3 Bealer, George 1987  Carton 1, Folder 4 Code, Alan 1980  Carton 1, Folders 5-6 Suppes, Patrick 1977-1982  Carton 1, Folders 7-8 Warner, Richard 1971-1975  Carton 1, Folder 9 Wyatt, Richard 1981  Carton 1, Folders 10-12 General to H.P. Grice 1947-1986  Carton 1, Folders 13-14 General 1972-1988  Carton 1, Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice 1968    Series 2 Publications 1957-1989  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates Scope and Content Note  Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" 1957  Carton 1, Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" 1957, 1976-1980  Carton 1, Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing 1958  Carton 1, Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" 1966  Carton 1, Folders 21-23 "Logic and Conversation" 1966-1975  Carton 1, Folders 24-26 William James Lectures 1967  Carton 1, Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning" 1968  Carton 1, Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" 1969  Carton 1, Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture IX 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Circa 1971  Carton 2, Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" 1971-1973  Carton 2, Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures I-III 1973  Carton 2, Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures 1986  Carton 2, Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 22-23 "Two Chapters on Incontinence" with Judith Baker Circa 1976  Carton 2, Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Circa 1977  Carton 2, Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" 1977-1981  Carton 2, Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" 1978  Carton 2, Folders 29-30 John Locke Lectures "Aspects of Reason" 1979  Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Circa 1985  Carton 3, Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy 1986  Carton 3, Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" 1986-1989  Carton 3, Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" 1987  Carton 3, Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" 1987  Carton 4, Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" 1988  Carton 4, Folder 5 Grice Reprints 1953-1986  Carton 4, Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 10 "Negation I" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 11 "Negation II" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Undated  Carton 4, Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Undated  Carton 4, Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 4, Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Undated  Carton 4, Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Undated    Series 3 Teaching Materials 1964-1983  Physical Description: Carton 5, Carton 6 (folders 1-3) Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; alphabetical for those teaching materials without dates. Scope and Content Note  Includes seminars and lectures given during Grice's years as a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Carton 5, Folder 1 Student Notes on Grice's Seminar at Cornell 1964  Carton 5, Folder 2 Grice Seminar 1969  Carton 5, Folder 3 Philosophy 290-2 with Judith Baker 1992  Carton 5, Folder 4 Philosophy 290-2 1993  Carton 5, Folders 5-6 Seminar on Kant's Ethical Theory 1974-1977  Carton 5, Folder 7 Seminar on "Aristotle Ethics" 1975-1996  Carton 5, Folder 8 Philosophy 290, Kant Seminar with Judith Baker 1976-1977  Carton 5, Folder 9 "Kant's Ethics," Volume II 1977  Carton 5, Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures 1977  Carton 5, Folders 14-15 Philosophy 290 1977-1978  Carton 5, Folders 16-17 "Kant's Ethics," Volume III 1978  Carton 5, Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Seminar 1979-1980  Carton 5, Folders 19-21 Seminar on Kant's Ethics, Volume V 1980-1982  Carton 5, Folder 22 Philosophy 200. Grice and Myro 1982  Carton 5, Folder 23 Notes on Kant 1982  Carton 5, Folder 24 Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy 1983  Carton 5, Folder 25 Seminar on Freedom Undated  Carton 5, Folder 26 Grice Lectures Undated  Carton 5, Folders 27-28 Seminar on Kant's Ethics Undated  Carton 5, Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Lectures II-IV Undated  Carton 5, Folder 30 UC Berkeley, Modest Mentalism Undated  Carton 5, Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Grice/Staal Seminar, Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 3 Grice/Staal, "That" Clause Undated    Series 4 Professional Associations 1971-1987  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 4-12), Carton 10 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically. Scope and Content Note  Includes Kant's Stanford Lectures, various notes and audio tapes of Beanfest, Grice's fall 1987 group research on universals, and conferences and discussions concerning the American Psychological Association (APA). Also includes a carton of cassettes, magnetic recorder tapes, and cassette sets of four on professional talks with colleague George Myro on identities, metaphysics, and relatives and Grice's various seminars given at different institutions such as Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and Seattle on his philosophical theories. Carton 6, Folder 4 APA Symposium - "Entailment" 1971  Carton 6, Folders 5-6 Stanford - "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant 1977  Carton 6, Folder 7 Conferences - Causality Colloquium At Stanford University Circa 1978  Carton 6, Folder 8 Conferences - APA Discussion - Randall Parker's Transcription of Tapes 1983-1989  Carton 6, Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest 1985  Carton 6, Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes 1985  Carton 6, Folder 11 Group Universals 1987  Carton 6, Folder 12 Group Universals - Partial Working Copy 1987  Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences 1970-1986    Series 5 Subject Files 1951-1988  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 13-38), Cartons 7-9 Arrangement  Alphabetically Scope and Content Note  Includes Reed Seminar notes, notes on ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes and their own philosophical theories, research and accompanying notes on other prominent philosophers such as Kant and Davidson, notes with colleagues Judith Baker, Alan Code, Michael Friedman, George Myro, Patrick Suppes, and Richard Warner, on various theories of reason, trust, language semantics, universals, and values. Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" 1983  Carton 6, Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship Undated  Carton 6, Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Undated  Carton 6, Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Undated  Carton 6, Folder 20 Bealer Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 21 Berkeley Group Team Notes 1983  Carton 6, Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Undated  Carton 6, Folder 23 Categories with Strawson Undated  Carton 6, Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives 1981  Carton 6, Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 26 Davidson's "On Saying That" Undated  Carton 6, Folders 27-28 Descartes Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 29 "Grice on Denials of Indicative Conditionals" by Michael Sinton Circa 1971  Carton 6, Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Undated  Carton 6, Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Undated  Carton 6, Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 34-35 Notes on Ethics with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 6, Folder 36 North Carolina Ethics Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 37 Festschrift and Warner Notes Circa 1981-1982  Carton 6, Folder 38 "Finality" Notes with Alan Code Undated  Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" by Grice Undated  Carton 7, Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 3 "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" by Kant Undated  Carton 7, Folder 4 "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics with Richard Warner Undated  Carton 7, Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated  Carton 7, Folder 7 Notes on Hume 1975  Carton 7, Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 10 Identity Notes with George Myro 1973  Carton 7, Folders 11-12 "Ifs and Cans" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Undated  Carton 7, Folders 14-16 Notes on Kant 1981-1982  Carton 7, Folder 17 Kant's Ethics 1982  Carton 7, Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Undated  Carton 7, Folder 19 Language and Reference Circa 1966  Carton 7, Folder 20 Language Semantics Undated  Carton 7, Folders 21-22 John Locke Lecture Notes 1979  Carton 7, Folder 23 Logical Form and Action Sentences Undated  Carton 7, Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Undated  Carton 7, Folders 26-27 Notes on Metaphysics 1988  Carton 7, Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Undated  Carton 7, Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Undated  Carton 7, Folder 30 Method and Myth Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 31 Mills Induction Undated  Carton 7, Folder 32 Miscellaneous on Actions and Events Undated  Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous - Judith Baker Undated  Carton 8, Folder 2 Miscellaneous - Metaph Notes 1987-1988  Carton 8, Folder 3 Miscellaneous - Oxford Philosophy Undated  Carton 8, Folders 4-8 Miscellaneous Philosophy Notes 1981-1985  Carton 8, Folders 9-13 Miscellaneous Philosophy Topics Undated  Carton 8, Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Undated  Carton 8, Folders 16-17 Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics 1975-1976  Carton 8, Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Undated  Carton 8, Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Circa 1978  Carton 8, Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Undated  Carton 8, Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Papers Undated  Carton 8, Folder 23 Papers on Perception Undated  Carton 8, Folder 24 Perception Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 25 Notes on Perception with Richard Warner 1988  Carton 8, Folder 26 "Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 27 "A Pint of Philosophy" by Alfred Brook Gordon, includes notes by Grice Circa 1951  Carton 8, Folder 28 "A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 29 "Lectures on Pierce" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 30 Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Circa 1970  Carton 8, Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Undated  Carton 8, Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Undated  Carton 9, Folder 2 "Preliminary Valediction" 1985  Carton 9, Folder 3 Presupposition and Implicative Circa 1979  Carton 9, Folder 4 Probability and Life Undated  Carton 9, Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 6 Reasons 1966  Carton 9, Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Circa 1980  Carton 9, Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Undated  Carton 9, Folder 9 Schiffer Undated  Carton 9, Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Undated  Carton 9, Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 13 "Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics" by Alan Code Undated  Carton 9, Folder 14 Social Justice Undated  Carton 9, Folder 15 "Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Undated  Carton 9, Folder 16 Super-Relatives Undated  Carton 9, Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Notes 1986-1987  Carton 9, Folder 20 Various work on Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc/ with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 9, Folder 21 Universals 1987  Carton 9, Folder 22 Universals with Michael Friedman 1987  Carton 9, Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Undated  Carton 9, Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Undated  Carton 9, Folders 25-27 Miscellaneous - Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Undated  Carton 9, Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated  Carton 9, Folder 29 "Virtues and Vices" by Philippa Foot Undated  Carton 9, Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs 1974-1975 References  ACKRILL, J. L. cited by Grice, on ‘Happiness.’ ACKRILL, J. L. citing Grice AUSTIN, Philosophical papers. AUSTIN, How to do things with words. AUSTIN, Sense and sensibilia. BOSTOCK – cited by Walker. DUMMETT – cited by Grice. EWING FLEW, citing Grice. Grice, H. P. Prejudices and predilections; which become, The Life and Opinions of H. P. Grice’ HAMPSHIRE – cited by Grice. HARE, Practical inferences HART, citing Grice, Philosophical Review.  KNEALE, Induction, cited by Grice. OVER, D. E. citing Grice PEACOCKE, C. A. B. citing Grice in Evans/Mcdowell PEARS, citing Grice PEARS cited by Grice Prichard, ed. By Urmson – cited by Prichard. SAINSBURY citing Grice SMITH, P. H. Nowell. Cited by Grice. Speranza, J. L. The sceptic and language. Speranza Speranza STOUT – cited by Grice STRAWSON, P. F. citing Grice Introduction to logical theory URMSON, cited by Grice WoW URMSON citing Grice WARNOCK – cited by Grice –  citing Grice in ‘Saturday mornings.’ WIGGINS citing Grice, Dictionary WIGGINS and STRAWSON, see Strawson WILSON, John Cook – Statement and Inference  APPENDIX – Conversational Reason.  J. L. Speranza  Luigi Speranza, “Grice e la storia della filosofia italiana.” Speranza has done crucial research on Griceianism, unearthing some documents by O.Wood, J. O. Urmson, P. H. Nowell-Smith, and many many others – not just H. P. Grice.  A number of people have made this book possible by giving generously of their time to talk about Paul Grice, his life and his work, whether by letter, by e-mail or in person. I would therefore like to thank the fol-lowing, in an order that is simply alphabetical, and in the hope that I have not omitted anyone who should be thanked: Professor Judith Baker; the staff at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, in particular David Farrell; Tom Gover of the Old Cliftonian Society; Kathleen Grice; Adam Hodgkin; Professor Robin Lakoff; The Rossallian Club; Michael Stansfield, college archivist at Corpus Christi and Merton colleges;  Professor Sir Peter Strawson; Professor Richard Warner. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Grice for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and to quote from manuscript material; and to the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which gave permission to quote from their manuscript holdings.There is an inherent tension in writing about Paul Grice because two separate academic disciplines lay claim to his work, and do so with jus-tification. Those who know him as a philosopher may not be aware of the full significance of his role in the development of present day linguistics, while those whose interest in him originates from within linguistics may be unfamiliar with the philosophical questions that are integral to his work. Grice would not have considered himself to be anything other than a philosopher, so the title of this book might seem odd or even provocative. But I chose it in order to reflect the profound influence he has had on a discipline other than his own. Grice's work is of interest to philosophers and to linguists alike.  I myself belong to the second group. My first encounter with Grice's work was when I was introduced to his theory of conversation as a student, and was struck by the ambition and elegance of his proposed solution to a range of linguistic problems, as well as by the questions and difficulties it raised. I have since been pleased to recognise just these reactions to the theory in many of my own students. As I read more of Grice's work, I became intrigued by the question as to whether there was a unity to be found in his thought that would incorporate the familiar work on conversation into a larger and more significant philosophical picture. This book is my attempt to answer that question. I certainly hope that it will be of interest to readers from both philosophical and linguistic backgrounds, with the following words of caution to the former.  Grice's work draws on a range of previous writings that often go unac- knowledged, presumably because he assumed that his audience would be aware of its philosophical pedigree. The questions he is addressing can be less familiar to linguists, so on a number of occasions I have offered an overview of the history of an idea or an exegesis of a work.  I run the risk that these sections may appear to be superficial, or alternatively to be labouring the obvious, to readers well versed in philoso-phy, but I have offered the degree of detail necessary to enable those unfamiliar with the relevant background to follow Grice's arguments and appreciate the nature of his contribution. Further, my intention inthese sections is to sketch the relevant history of a philosophical debate, rather that to offer either a critique of or my own contribution to that debate. I can only ask for tolerance of these aspects of my book from readers already familiar with the relevant areas of philosophy.In 1986 Oxford University Press published a volume of essays drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, who was then 73. It was not formally described as a Festschrift, but Grice's name was concealed as an acronym of the title, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, and many of those who contributed to the volume took the opportunity of paying tribute to his work and influence. Among these, Gordon Baker revealed that what he admired most was Grice's  'skilful advocacy of heresies'.' In a similar vein, Grice's colleague Richard Grandy once introduced him to an audience with the comment that he could always be relied on to rally to 'the defence of the underdogma'.?  Given Grice's conventional academic career together with his current status in philosophy and, particularly, in linguistics, these accolades may seem surprising. His entire working life was spent in the prestigious universities of Oxford and Berkeley, making him very much an establishment figure. Much of his philosophy of language , particularly his theory of conversational implicature, has for a number of decades played a central role in debates about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, or meaning as a formal linguistic property and meaning as a process taking place in contexts and involving speakers and hearers. But the canonical status of Grice's ideas masks their unconventional and even controversial beginnings. As Baker himself ob-serves, Grice's heresies have tended to be transformed by success into orthodoxies.  In fact, Grice's work was often characterised by the challenges it posed to accepted wisdom, and by the novel approaches it proposed to established philosophical issues. The theory of conversational implicature is a good example. It is often summarised as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the fact, familiar to common sense, thatwhat people literally say and what they actually mean can often be quite different matters. In particular, the theory is concerned with some apparent discrepancies between classical logic and natural language.  More generally, it addresses the question of whether the meaning of everyday language is best explained in terms of formal linguistic rules, or in terms of the vagaries and variables of human communication.  Grice's theory developed against the background of a sharp distinction of approaches to these issues. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who saw logic as the appropriate apparatus for explaining meaning, dismissed the differences displayed by natural language as examples of its inherent imperfection. Everyday language was just too messy and imprecise to form an appropriate topic for philosophical inquiry.  The opposing view is perhaps best summed up by the slogan from Wittgenstein's later work that 'meaning is use'? Philosophers from this school of thought argued that if natural language diverges from logical meaning, this is simply because logic is not the appropriate philosophical tool for explaining language. Meaning in language is an important area of study in its own right, but can be considered only in connection with the variety of ways in which language is used by speakers.  Grice's approach to this debate was to argue that both views were wrong-headed. He proposed to think outside the standard disjunction of positions. Logic cannot give an adequate account of natural language, but nor is language simply a multifarious collection of uses, unamenable to logical analysis. Rather, logic can explain much, but not all, of the meaning of certain natural language expressions. More generally, formal semantic rules play a vital part in explaining meaning in everyday lan-guage, but they do not do the whole job. Other factors of a different but no less important type are also necessary for a full account of meaning. Most significantly, Grice argued that these other, non-semantic factors are not a random collection entirely dependent on individual speakers and contexts, but can be systematised and explained in terms of general principles and rules. The principles that explain how natural language differs from logic can also explain a wide range of other features of human communication.  In this novel attitude, Grice was certainly rejecting formal approaches, with their claim that the only meaning amenable to philosophical discussion was that which could be described in terms of truth-conditions, and could enter into truth-functional relationships. But also, and perhaps more surprisingly, he was rejecting a belief in everyday use as the chief, or indeed the only, location of meaning. This was a central tenet of philosophy at Oxford while Grice was developing his theory ofconversation, or at least of that subsection of Oxford philosophy known as the philosophy of ordinary language. Grice himself was an active member of this subsection and is often referred to as a leading figure in the movement. However, his use of formal logic in explaining conversational meaning demonstrates that his heretical impulse extended even to ordinary language philosophy itself. Indeed, the success of his theory of conversational implicature has been credited with the eventual demise of this movement as a viable philosophical approach.* Grice's readiness to question conventions, even those of his own subdiscipline, makes him hard to categorise in terms of the usual philosophical distinctions. He does not sit easily on either side of the familar dichotomies; he is neither exactly empiricist nor exactly rationalist, neither behaviourist nor mentalist. This makes synoptic discussions of his work difficult, as is perhaps entirely appropriate for a philosopher who readily expressed his dislike of attempts to divide philosophy up into a series of '-ologies' and '-isms'.  The theory of conversation is undoubtedly the best known of Grice's work. The particular, and often exclusive, emphasis on it can be explained perhaps in part by its intrinsic potential as a tool for linguistic analysis, and perhaps also, more accidentally, by the historical inaccessibility of much of his other writing. A notorious perfectionist, Grice was seldom happy that his work had reached a finished, or acceptable, state, and was therefore always reluctant to publish. Those who knew him have related this reluctance to the penetration of his own philosophical vision, turned as relentlessly on his own work as on that of others. His Oxford colleague Peter Strawson has suggested that this resulted in an uncomfortable degree of self-doubt:  I suspect, sometimes, that it was the strength of his own critical powers, his sense of the vulnerability of philosophical argument in general, that partially accounted, at the time, for his privately expressed doubts about the ability of his own work to survive criti-cism. After all, if there were always some detectable flaws in others' reasoning, why should there not be detectable, even though by him undetected, flaws in his own?  Certainly, Grice's account of conversation as an essentially cooperative enterprise is generally discussed, and frequently criticised, in isolation from the rest of this work, seen as a free-standing account of linguistic interaction. It is paraphrased, often in just a few pages, in most introductory text books on pragmatics and discourse analysis.' It hasbeen used or referred to in analyses of gendered language, children's language, code switching, courtroom cross-examination, the language of jokes, oral narrative and the language of liturgy, along with many other topics? However, it is only one aspect of a large and diverse body of work from a career of over four decades. In the context of this work, it can be seen as an intrinsic part of the gradual development of Grice's thinking on a range of philosophical topics. It also offers an analytic tool that Grice himself applied in his later work to a variety of philosophical problems, although never to the data of actual conversation.  To some extent, then, Grice's later use of the theory of conversation offers its own explanation of the significance, and the theoretical purpose, of that work. More than that, however, Grice's less-known work merits attention in its own right. It ranges over a wide range of topics: not just the philosophy of language but epistemology, per-ception, logic, rationality, ethics and metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of running threads, and some striking continuities of theme and approach, throughout this diverse oeuvre. Grice himself argued that the disparate themes and ideas of his career displayed a fundamental unity.® In general, however, as Richard Grandy and Richard Warner observe in their introduction to Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, 'the systematic nature of his work is little recognised'!'  Throughout his work Grice focused on aspects of human behaviour, linguistic or otherwise, and the mental processes underlying them.  Increasingly central in his work was the idea that an analysis of these processes revealed people to be rational creatures, and that this rationality was fundamental to human nature. In an overview of his own work, Grice himself suggested, with typical tentativeness, that: 'It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves. '° He also displayed a sophisticated respect for common sense as a starting point in philosophical inquiry. It is sophisticated in that he did not espouse the straightforward adoption of common sense attitudes and terminology into philosophy. Rather, he urged that the philosopher remain aware of how the themes of philosophical inquiry are usually understood by non-philosophers. In a large part, this meant paying serious attention to the language in which particular issues were ordinarily dis-cussed, or to what Grice once described as 'our carefree chatter'." In this focus at least he retained an approach recognisable from his background in ordinary language philosophy. However, he proved himself ready to go beyond the dictates of common sense where the complexity of the subject matter demanded. Philosophy, he argued, is a difficult subjectthat deals with difficult issues, and it is often necessary to posit entities not current in everyday thought: to construct theoretical, empirically unverifiable entities if they are explanatorily useful. Within these para-meters, as he once suggested, 'whatever does the job is respectable'. 12 He was certainly not a simple egalitarian in philosophy. In the early 1980s he noted down, apparently for his own edification, the following complaint:  It repeatedly astonishes me that people who would themselves readily admit to being devoid of training, experience, or knowledge in philosophy, and who have plainly been endowed by nature with no special gifts of philosophical intelligence should be so ready to instruct professional philosophers about the contents of the body of philosophical truths. 13  Despite his readiness to add entities to philosophical explanations when this seemed appropriate, Grice was concerned that such explanations should remain as simple as possible, in the philosophical sense of simplicity as drawing on as few entities as possible. In the lectures on conversation he endorsed 'Modified Occam's Razor', which he defined as 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'.I This philosophical parsimony was carried over into other areas of his work; he sought general explanations that would account for as wide a range of subject matter, for as few theoretical constructions, as possible. If he prized philosophical simplicity, Grice's ideas were often far from reductive in more general terms. In particular, he did not shrink from explanations that saw people as separate and different: different from animals, in terms of communicative behaviour, or from automata, in terms of rational thought.  More generally, Grice sustained an enthusiasm for the business of philosophy itself, accompanied by a conviction, unfashionable at the start of his career, that the works of philosophers from other schools of thought and different ages deserve thoughtful and continual re-analysis. His work reveals a belief that philosophical investigation and analysis are worthwhile ventures in their own right and a willingness to employ them to offer suggested approaches, rather than completed solutions, to philosophical problems. Further, Grice was always ready to hunt out and consider as many possible counter-arguments and refutations of his own ideas as he could envisage, often advancing some particular idea by means of a detailed discussion of an actual or potential challenge to it. These factors together lend a 'discursive' and at times afrustratingly tentative air to Grice's work. But despite the earnestness of Grice's interest in philosophy, and the rigour with which he pursued it, his tone was often playfully irreverent. This was, to some extent, the result of a deliberate policy that philosophy could, indeed should, be fun. 'One should of course be serious about philosophy', he argued, 'but being serious does not require one to be solemn.'5 Grice was not a gifted public speaker, given to elaborate divergences in exegeses, and to stuttering and even mumbling in presentation. l Nevertheless, his presentations could be entertaining occasions; tape recordings of him speaking about philosophy, both informally and formally, are often punctuated by laughter.  Grice himself suggested that his search for the fun, even the funny in philosophy was prompted by 'the wanton disposition which nature gave me'." But it had been reinforced 'by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect'. He had no time for those whose method of conducting philosophical debate was that of 'nailing to the wall everything in sight'. In his view, philosophy was best when it was a collaborative, supportive activity. This idea was, to some extent, inherent in his philosophical background; ordinary language philosophy was frequently undertaken as a group activity. However, it is an idea that was peculiarly suited to his person-ality. Grice could be extremely convivial; he was often surrounded by people, and preferred to develop his ideas by discussion rather than by solitary composition. He was no ascetic; he ate, drank and smoked copi-ously. But conviviality is not the same as affability. His delight in philosophical discussion often spilled over into an intense desire to 'win' the argument. He could be curt in response to points of view with which he was not in sympathy. On those occasions when he sought intuitive responses to his linguistic examples, he could be dismissive of those who got it 'wrong'. Moreover, those who know him have suggested that at times his tendency towards self-doubt could manifest itself in gloomi-ness, even moroseness. 18  Grice's tendency was to become entirely absorbed with whatever he was engaged in, if it interested him intellectually. Often this was some philosophical issue of substance or of composition. His wife Kathleen recalls that he frequently stayed up late into the night, often pacing up and down as he battled with some problem.l' Sometimes other people were caught up in this absorption. During his time at Oxford, he conducted a long collaboration with Peter Strawson. In later life, Gricehimself would recount how he was once phoned up by Strawson's wife who told him to stop bothering her husband with late night phone calls.20 This obsessiveness was characteristic of all the activities to which he devoted his considerable energies. Kathleen remembers that he was always engaged on some project; if it was not philosophy then it was playing the piano, or chess, bridge or cricket. These last two were more absorbing than mere hobbies. He played both bridge and cricket competitively at county level. Cricket, in particular, was an obsession that almost rivalled philosophy; he played for a number of different clubs and 'became an inelegant but extremely effective and prolific opening batsman'.2 During his Oxford career, he spent the large part of each summer on cricket tours.  Grice's immense energy in these different directions was undoubtedly aided by the amount of time he had at his disposal, in part the consequence of not having to concern himself too much with everyday prac-ticalities; according to Kathleen, from childhood onwards he always had, or found, people to look after him. He certainly pursued his interests to the exclusion of the mundane, often neglecting food and sleep if a particular problem, or game, had his attention. In those areas where he did have practical responsibility, Grice was legendarily untidy. He took little concern over his clothes, or his personal appearance gener-ally. His desk was constantly covered by huge and apparently unsorted piles of paper. However, he would not allow anyone else to touch these, claiming that he knew exactly where everything was. After he died, these papers were deposited in the Bancroft library at the University of California, Berkeley, as the H. P. Grice Papers. This archive, which amounts to 14 large cartons, contains whatever Grice had about himself at the end of his life, mainly heaped on his desk or crammed under his bed. It consists largely of papers from after his move to Berkeley in 1967.  But it also includes those papers from his Oxford days, dating right back to the 1940s, that had seemed important enough to him to take and keep with him.  The cartons contain a mixture of finished manuscripts, draft versions, lecture notes and odd jottings. These are often crammed with writing, but never with anything extraneous to the matter in hand; it seems that Grice never doodled. They offer some clue to at least one reason for Grice's reluctance to publish. Grice seems to have been more struck than most by the essentially inconclusive nature of his own work; no project was, for him, ever really completed, or ever separate from the work that preceded and followed it. So notes and manuscripts were stored along with those from decades earlier if they were perceived to be on a relatedtheme. Papers covered in Grice's cramped hand in faint pencil, characteristic of his work from Oxford, were annotated and added to by notes in ball-point made years later in Berkeley. Ideas generally associated exclusively with his late work, such as those relating to rationality and to finality, are explored in notes dating back to the 1960s. Work often remained in manuscript form for so long that it needed to be updated as the years went by. In the original version of 'Indicative conditionals', part of the William James lectures of 1967, Grice uses the example:  'Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M.'. At a later date 'MacMillan' has been crossed out and 'Heath' written over the top in a different coloured ink. This was the example used when the lecture was eventually published. 22  Above all, the H. P. Grice papers confirm that for Grice there was no real distinction between life and work. He was not in the habit of keeping regular hours of work, or of distinguishing between philosophical and private concerns. In the same way, his current philosophical preoccupation would spill over into his everyday life. Any piece of paper that came to hand would be covered in logical notation, example sentences, trial lists of words, invented dialogues, or whatever else was preoccupying him at that moment, all written in what Grice himself described as 'a hand which few have seen and none have found legible'.2 So the cartons contain not just the orthodox pages of ruled note paper, but also a miscellany of correspondence (often unopened), financial statements, menus, paper napkins, playing card boxes, cigarette packets and even airline sick bags that came to hand as ideas occurred to him during a flight. Some of these suggest that Grice's writing style was not as spontaneous as it may sometimes appear. Certainly the manuscripts of articles and the lecture notes, always written out in full, were produced in longhand with little significant revision.  But Grice was not averse to jotting down what he once described as  'useful verbiage' in preparation for these. In conjunction with some work on the place of value in human nature drawing on, but diverging from a number of previous philosophers including John Stuart Mill, he noted down the phrase: 'so as not to be just Grice to your Mill..!.24 While working on an account of value and freedom drawing on both Aristotle and Kant, he tried out possible hybrids: 'Ariskant? Kantotle?'. 25 This book considers Grice's work within a broadly chronological framework, following the course of his philosophical life. However, because Grice did not work on discreet topics in neat succession, it is sometimes necessary to group together strands of work on related topics even where they in fact extend over years or decades. Nevertheless, thechronological arrangement makes possible an understanding of the development, as well as the remarkable unity, of Grice's thinking. It also allows some scope for considering the impact on it of the work of other philosophers, and of the various personal associations he formed throughout his life. The final chapter is concerned with the impact of Grice's ideas on linguistics. It is concerned with the development of what has become known as 'Gricean pragmatics' and therefore concentrates on responses to the theory of conversation.In a conversation recorded in 1983, Grice commented that fairly early in his career he stopped reading current philosophy.' In the light of his constant engagement with the work of his contemporaries, this characteristically mischievous claim need not be taken at face value. Indeed, his own immediate elaboration somewhat modifies it. Instead of spending his time trying to keep up with all the philosophical journals, he concentrated increasingly on the history of philosophy, choosing his reading matter by strength of ideas rather than by date of composition.  To this it might be added that he also devoted a great deal of time to face-to-face discussion with those he chose as his philosophical col-leagues. Grice's exaggerated claim therefore draws attention to two constant influences on his own philosophy: debate and collaboration with others engaged in similar fields of enquiry, coupled with what in the same conversation he calls 'respect for the old boys'.  It is tempting to identify the emergence of this tension between old and new ideas, or perhaps more accurately this dialogue between orthodox and challenging ways of thinking, throughout Grice's early life.  Born on 15 March 1913, he was the first son of a wealthy middle-class couple, Herbert and Mabel (née Felton) Grice, and grew up in Harborne, an affluent suburb of Birmingham. He was named after his father, but preferred his middle name, and was from an early age known generally as Paul. His early publications were credited to 'H. P. Grice', and are sometimes still cited as such, but in later years he published as simply  'Paul Grice'  '. Herbert Grice is described in his son's college register as  'business, retd'. In fact he had owned a manufacturing business making small metal components that prospered during the First World War.  When the business subsequently began to fail, Mabel stepped in to save the family finances by taking in pupils. She included Paul and hisbrother Derek in this miniature school, meaning that the first few years of their education were conducted at home. This reversal of roles explains Herbert's early 'retirement'. After the failure of the manufacturing business, he did not attempt another venture, preferring instead to concentrate on his skills as a concert cellist. His musical talent was inherited by both his sons; Herbert, Paul and Derek would often perform domestically as a trio.  Family life at Harborne was punctuated not just by musical recitals, and by innumerable games of chess, but also by controversy and debate, although the topic was generally theological rather than philosophical.  Herbert had been brought up in a nonconformist tradition, while Mabel was a devout Anglo-Catholic. The third adult member of the household, an unmarried aunt, had converted to Catholicism. Grice recalled fondly the many doctrinal clashes he witnessed as a result of this mix, particularly those between his aunt and his father. He suggested that his father's self-defence in these circumstances awakened, or at least rein-forced, his own tendency towards 'dissenting rationalism'; this tendency stayed with him throughout life? It would seem from this that he lent more towards his father's way of thinking, but certainly by the time he reached adulthood he had abandoned any religious faith he may initially have held. He did not retain the Christianity with which he had been surrounded as a child, but he kept the enthusiasm for debate in general, and for the habits of questioning received wisdom and challenging orthodoxy on the basis of personal reasoning in particular.  When Grice was 13 his education was put on to a more formal footing when he went as a boarder to Clifton College in Bristol. This public school, exclusively male at the time, provided excellent preparation for Oxford or Cambridge for the sons of those wealthy enough to afford it, or for those who, like Grice, passed the scholarship examination. Boys belonged to one of a number of 'houses',  ', rather in the style of Oxbridge  colleges, and received the education in classics that would equip them for entry to university. It seems that Grice excelled at this; at the end of his Clifton career, in July 1931, he won a classical scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He had not concentrated exclusively on academic matters, however. He had been 'Head of School' during his final year, and had also kept up his musical interests. He performed a piano solo in the school's 1930 Christmas concert. Joseph Cooper, Grice's contemporary at Clifton who went on to become a concert pianist and then chairman of the BBC television programme 'Face the Music', played a piece by Rachmaninoff at the same concert. 'Weenjoyed Grice's playing of Ravel's "Pavane"', runs the school's report on the concert, 'its stateliness provided an effective contrast to the exuberance of the Rachmininoff.'3  Corpus Christi had a strong academic tradition, but was not as socially fashionable as some of the larger colleges. It therefore tended to attract students from more modest backgrounds than colleges such as Christ Church or Magdalen, where social success often depended on demonstrable affluence. However, despite such distinctions between individual colleges, Oxford in general was a place of privilege. Students were nearly all male, were predominantly from public schools, and were generally preparing to take their places as members of the establish-ment. Fashionable political opinions were left wing, and students of Grice's generation tended to see themselves as rebelling against nineteenth-century notions of responsibility and propriety. Such rebel-liousness, however, was of a very passive nature; it lacked the zeal and the active protest that was to characterise student rebellion in the 1960s.  It did little to affect the day to day life in Oxford, where the university was legally in loco parentis, and where all undergraduates lived and dined in college. Some 50 years later, Grice recalled the atmosphere of the time with amused but affectionate detachment:  We are in reaction against our Victorian forebears; we are independent and we are tolerant of the independence of others, unless they go too far. We don't like discipline, rules (except for rules of games and rules designed to secure peace and quiet in Colleges), self-conscious authority, and lectures or reproaches about conduct....  We don't care much to talk about 'values' (pompous) or 'duties' (stuffy, unless one means the duties of servants or the military, or money extorted by the customs people). Our watchwords (if we could be moved to utter them) would be 'Live and let live, though not necessarily with me around' or 'If you don't like how I carry on, you don't have to spend time with me.  Grice was at Corpus Christi for four years. Classics was an unusual subject in this respect; most Oxford degree programmes were a year shorter. At that time, philosophy was taught only as part of the Classics curriculum, and it was in this guise that Grice received his first formal training in the subject. The style was conservative, based largely on close reading of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. This seems to have suited Grice's meticulous and analytical style of thought well, as the tutorial teaching method suited his dissenting and combativenature. Although there were lectures, open to all members of the uni-versity, teaching was based principally at tutorial, therefore college, level. Students would meet individually with their tutors to read, and then defend, an essay. In reflecting on his early philosophical educa-tion, Grice always emphasised what he saw as his own good fortune in being allocated as tutee to W. F. R. (Frank) Hardie. A rigorous classical scholar and an exacting tutor, Hardie might not have been everyone's first choice, but Grice credited him with revealing the difficulty, but also the rewards of philosophical study. Grice also, it seems, relished the formalism that Hardie imposed on his already established appreciation of rational debate. Under Hardie's guidance, this appreciation developed into a belief that philosophical questions are best settled by reason, or argument:  I learnt also form him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).  Grice even recounts with approval, but reluctant disbelief, the story that a long silence in another student's tutorial was eventually broken by Hardie asking 'And what did you mean by "of"?' No doubt the contemporary detractors of ordinary language philosophy would have seen Grice's enthusiasm for this anecdote of the 1930s as a sign that he was perfectly suited to the style of philosophy that would flourish at Oxford in the following two decades. This was crucially concerned with minute attention to meaning and to the language in which philosophical issues were traditionally discussed.  Grice's admiration for Hardie was later to develop into friendship; they were both members of a group from Oxford that went on walking holidays in the summers leading up to the Second World War, and Hardie taught Grice to play golf. The friendship was based in part on a number of characteristics the two had in common. There was their shared rationalism; Grice found welcome echoes of his own approach in Hardie's 'reluctance to accept anything not properly documented'?  Moreover, Hardie never admitted defeat. Discussions with him, Grice later observed, never actually ended; they would simply come to a stop.  In response, Grice learnt to adopt a similar stance in philosophical argument, clinging tendentiously to whatever position he had set out to defend. Once, when Grice was taught by a different philosophy tutor for one term, the new tutor reported back to Hardie that his studentwas 'obstinate to the point of perversity'. To Grice's enduring delight, Hardie received this report with thorough approval.  However some may have judged his style of argument, Grice's undergraduate career was an indisputable success. Students took 'Modera-tions' exams five terms into their degree, before proceeding to what was popularly known as 'Greats',  , the stage in the degree at which philoso-  phy was introduced. Grice achieved First Class in his Moderations in  1933. In the summer of 1935 he took his finals, and was awarded First Class Honours in Literae Humaniores, as 'Greats' was officially called. His studies did not take up all of his time during these years, however, and he mixed academic success with extracurricular activities, particularly sporting ones. He played cricket, and in the summer of 1934 captained the college team. In the winter he followed up this success by becoming captain of the college football team. During this same period, he was president of the Pelican Philosophical Society and editor of the Pelican Record. Both took their name from the bird forming part of the Corpus Christi crest that had become the informal symbol of the college.  After Grice completed his undergraduate studies, there was a brief hiatus in his academic career. There were at that time few openings at Oxford for those graduates who had not yet gained a University Lectureship or been elected to a College Fellowship. For the academic year 1935-6 Grice left Oxford, but not the elite education system of which he had been part for the past decade, when he went as Assistant Master to Rossall in Lancashire. At a time when there were very few Universities in the country, an Honours degree, especially from Oxford or Cambridge, was regarded as more than adequate a qualification to teach at a public school such as Rossall. It was not at all uncommon for Assistant Masters to stay in post for just a year or two before moving on to a more permanent position or embarking on a career in some other field. Indeed, of the 11 other Assistant Masters appointed between 1933 and 1937 by the same headmaster as Grice, only four stayed for more than a year; none of the other seven went on to careers as school masters.® In Grice's case, his appointment at Rossall filled the time between his undergraduate studies and his return to Oxford in 1936. It was also in 1936, unusually a year after the completion of his studies, that Grice was willing, or perhaps able, to pay the fee necessary for con-ferment of his BA degree.  He was enabled to return to Oxford by two scholarships, both of which would have required him to sit examinations. First was an Oxford University Senior Scholarship, an award for postgraduate study at anycollege and in any subject. In the same year, Grice was awarded a Harmsworth Senior Scholarship, a 'closed' scholarship to Merton college. The Harmsworth Scholarships, funded by an endowment from former college member Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, were a relatively new venture, aimed specifically at raising the profile of postgraduate achievement at the college. A history of Merton notes that the scheme  'brought to the college a succession of intelligent graduates from all col-leges. In that way a window was opened on to the world of graduate research at a time when there were few opportunities at that level in the university as a whole." The scholarships had been available only since 1931, and only three were awarded each year, across the range of academic subjects. Grice's contemporaries were Richard Alexander Hamilton, also from Clifton College, in sciences, and Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn in modern languages. Grice was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton between 1936 and 1938, but no award or higher degree resulted from his time there. He was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1939 but this was a formality, available seven years after initial matriculation to students who had received a BA, upon payment of a fee. Nevertheless, the time spent at Merton was an important period in Grice's philosophical development not least because it was during this time that he became aware of subjects and methodologies then current in philosophy, and indeed taking shape in Oxford itself. He added knowledge of contemporary and dissenting philosophy to his existing familiarity with established orthodoxy.  Grice's experiences of undergraduate study had been typical of the time. The philosophy taught and conducted at Oxford between the wars was extremely conventional, that is to say speculative and metaphysical in nature, with an almost institutionalised distrust of new ideas. The business of philosophy was centred on the exegesis of the philosophi-cal, and particularly the classical 'greats'. Indeed, until just before the Second World War, no living philosopher was represented on the Oxford philosophy syllabus. The picture was different at Cambridge.  From early in the century, Russell had been developing his analytic approach to issues of knowledge and the language in which it is expressed, arguing that suitable rigorous analysis can reveal the 'true' logical form beneath the 'apparent' grammatical surface of sentences.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus, first published in English in 1922, had taken these ideas further, arguing that such analysis could reveal many of the traditional concerns of philosophy to be merely 'pseudo-problems' However, such was the insularity of academic institutions at the time that Oxford had not officially, and barely in practice, been aware ofthese developments in Cambridge, let alone of those in other parts of Europe.  This isolation was fairly abruptly ended, at least for some of the younger philosophers at Oxford, during the period when Grice was at Merton. This change was due in a large part to A. J. Ayer, and to the publication of his controversial first book Language Truth and Logic in  1936. Ayer had himself been an undergraduate at Oxford between 1929 and 1932 but, unusually, had read many of Russell's works, as well as the Tractatus. He had been encouraged in this by his tutor, Gilbert Ryle, a socially conservative but intellectually progressive don, who had even taken Ayer on a trip to Cambridge where he had met Wittgenstein personally. Ayer was impressed by the methods of analytic philosophy in general, and in particular by Wittgenstein's ambitious claims that it could 'solve' age-old philosophical problems for good by analysing the language in which they were traditionally expressed. He was even more profoundly affected by the ideas with which he came into contact during a visit to Austria after finishing his studies. There he became acquainted with a number of members of the Vienna Circle, and attended several of their meetings. Then as now, this group of scientists and philosophers were referred to collectively as 'the logical positivists' They represented a number of separate interests and specialisms, but shared at least one common goal: the desire to refine and perfect language so as to make it an appropriately precise tool for scientific and logical discussion. They distinguished between meaningful statements, amenable to scientific study and discussion, and other statements, strictly meaningless but unfortunately occurring as sentences of imperfect everyday language. Their chief tool in this procedure was the principle of verification.  The logical positivists divided the category of meaningful statements into two basic types. First, there are those expressed by analytic, or necessarily true, sentences. 'All spaniels are dogs' is true because the meaning of the predicate is contained within the meaning of the subject, or because 'dog' is part of the definition of 'spaniel'. They added the statements of mathematics and of logic to the category of analytic sentences, on the grounds that a sentence such as 'two plus two equals four' is in effect a tautology because of the rules of mathematics. The second category of meaningful statements is those expressed by synthetic sentences, or sentences that might be either true or false, that are capable of being subjected to an identifiable process of verification. That is, there are empirically observable phenomena sufficient to determine the question of truth. All other statements, those neither expressed byanalytic sentences nor verifiable by empirical evidence, are meaning-less. This includes statements concerning moral evaluation, aesthetic judgement and religious belief. For the logical positivists, such statements were not false; they merely had no part in scientific discourse.  The doctrine of the Vienna Circle was radically empiricist and strictly anti-metaphysical.  When Ayer returned to Oxford in 1933 as a young lecturer, he set himself the task of introducing the ideas of logical positivism to an English-speaking audience. Language, Truth and Logic draws heavily on the ideas of the Vienna Circle, but also includes elements of the British analytic philosophy Ayer had found persuasive as an undergraduate. In the opening chapter, provocatively entitled 'The Elimination of Meta-physics', he outlines the views of logical positivism on meaning. He also offers his own formulation of the principle of verification:  We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. 10  In subsequent chapters, Ayer applies this criterion uncompromisingly to the analysis of statements such as those of ethics and theology, those of our perceptions of the material world, and those relating to our knowledge of other minds and of past events.  Language, Truth and Logic, which was widely read and discussed both within Oxford and beyond, tended to polarise opinions. Not surpris-ingly, many of the older, established Oxford philosophers reacted strongly against it and the explicit challenge it posed to philosophical authority. It dismissed many of the traditional concerns of philosophy on the grounds that they were based on the discussion of meaningless metaphysical statements; it proposed to solve many apparent philosophical problems simply by analysis of the language in which they were expressed and, of course, it rejected all religious tenets. However, to many of the younger philosophers it offered a welcome and exhilarating change for precisely these same reasons. Ayer became a central figure in a group of young philosophers who met to discuss various philosophical topics. The meetings took place in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College during term times for about two years from early 1937. Here Ayer first began to talk, and to disagree, with another young philosopher, J. L. Austin.In the decade immediately following the Second World War, Austin was to be instrumental in the development of ordinary language phi-losophy, which dominated Oxford, and was deeply influential on Grice personally. In the late 1930s, however, his philosophical position was yet to be fully articulated. Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, has suggested that Austin was initially very impressed by Ayer, who was the only member of the group to have published, but that 'during the course of the All Souls Meetings... Austin staked out, if not a set of doctrines, then an approach which was very much his own'." This approach brought him increasingly into conflict with Ayer. Initially their disagreements were amicable enough, but in later years their differences of opinion were to lead to an increasing and unresolved hostility.  Grice perhaps identifies what it was that Austin found increasingly unsatisfactory about Ayer's logical positivism when he observes in an unpublished retrospective that: 'between the wars, in the heyday of Philosophical Analysis, when these words were on every cultured and progressive lip, what was thought of as being subjected to analysis were not linguistic but non-linguistic entities: facts or (in a certain sense) propositions, not words or sentences'.12 Analytic philosophy, whether in terms of Russell's 'logical form', or of the verificationists' 'meaning-fulness'  ', was concerned with explaining problematic expressions by translating statements in which such expressions occur into more ele-mentary, logically equivalent statements in which they do not occur. It considered language as an important tool for the clarification of concepts and states of affairs, not as an appropriate target of analysis in its own right. Indeed language, as used in ordinary discourse, offered potential dangers that the philosopher needed to avoid; it could mislead the unwary into inappropriate metaphysical commitments.  The major advocates of philosophical analysis between the wars, Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, all shared the conviction that everyday language was 'imperfect' and needed to be purified and improved before it could be ready for philosophical use. This disdain for ordinary language is at least in part the source of Austin's growing discontent with analytic philosophy in general, and with its spokesman Ayer in particular. Austin became increasingly convinced that ordinary language was a legitimate focus of philosophical enquiry. Not only was it 'good enough' as a tool for philosophy, it was also possible that the way in which people generally talk about certain areas of experience might offer some important insights into philosophically problematic concepts. For instance, there is the problem of our knowledge of other minds. For Ayer, statements about the mental states of others weremeaningless and unacceptable as they stood. A statement such as 'he is angry' was not amenable to any process of verification, and committed its speaker to the existence of unempirical concepts such as minds and emotions. To avoid the unpleasant prospect of having to dismiss all such statements as simply meaningless, Ayer insisted in Language, Truth and Logic that they must be translatable into verifiable statements.  Statements about others' mental states are most appropriately translated into statements about their physical states: about their appearance and behaviour. Such statements, which concern phenomena that can be directly perceived, are amenable to verification. Assumptions about mental states are merely inferences from these. Austin's defence of statements about other minds would run as follows. People use statements such as 'he is angry' all the time, with no confusion or misun-derstanding. Therefore, it seems appropriate to take such statements seriously: to analyse them as they stand rather than to treat them as being in some way 'really' about perceptions and inferences. Further-more, the fact that people ordinarily talk in this way might be seen as good grounds for accepting emotions and mental states as valid concepts.  Grice had a lot in common with the group meeting in All Souls. He was much the same age; of the main members of the group, Austin was two years older than him, Ayer three and Berlin five, while Stuart Hampshire was a year younger. Moreover, like both Ayer and Austin he had studied Classics at Oxford, and been introduced to the study of philosophy in 'Greats'. But college life was so insular that he was not aware of this group or party to its discussions. Merton was in many ways a similar college to Corpus Christi: small and relatively low in the social hierarchy of colleges. Indeed, it had a growing reputation for offering places to students without traditional Oxford credentials: to those from the Midlands and the North of England, and to grammar school pupils.  In contrast, Christ Church and Magdalen, where Ayer and Austin were respectively, were both large and prestigious colleges. All Souls was exclusively a college of Fellows, offering no places to undergraduate or postgraduate students. Grice was later to account for his own absence from the meetings by explaining that he was 'brought up on the wrong side of the tracks'. 13 He did read Language Truth and Logic, and like many of his contemporaries was extremely interested in the methodology it suggested for tackling philosophical problems. However, he recalled in later life that from the beginning he had certain reservations about Ayer's claims that were never laid to rest; 'the crudities and dogmatism seemed too pervasive'. 14Grice may have been unimpressed by some of Ayer's more sweeping claims, but they opened up to him analytic possibilities that affected his own style of philosophy. An early typescript paper on negation has survived. This was a topic to which Grice returned in a series of lectures in the early 1960s, but on which he never published. The paper is not dated, but the use of his parents' address in Harborne suggests that it was written before he obtained a permanent position at Oxford, therefore presumably before the Second World War. He tackles the epistemological problem posed by negative statements such as 'this is not red' or 'I am not hearing a noise'.  '. Such statements raise the question of how  it is that we become acquainted with a negative fact. Grice argues that knowledge of negative facts is best seen as inferential. We are confident in our knowledge of a negative because we have evidence of some related positive fact. So our knowledge that a certain object is not red might be derived by inference from knowledge that it is green, together with an understanding that being green is incompatible with being red.  The second example sentence is more problematic. It expresses a 'priv-ative fact', an absence. If the inferential account of negative knowledge is to be maintained, it must be possible to suggest a type of fact incompatible with the positive counterpart of the negative, that is with the sentence 'I am hearing a noise', for which the speaker can have adequate evidence. Grice's suggestion is that the incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the speaker entertains the positive proposition in question, without having an attitude of certainly to that proposition. If you think of a particular proposition, and are aware that you do not know it to be true, then you may be said to be inferring knowledge of a negative. If you entertain the proposition that you are hearing a noise, but do not know this proposition to be true, then you are in a position to assert 'I do not hear a noise'. More generally, to state 'I do not know that A is B' is in effect to state 'Every present mental process of mine has some characteristic incompatible with knowledge that A is B'. 15  Although Grice does not acknowledge any such influences, his paper can be placed very much within the analytic tradition, and its main proposal draws on verificationist assumptions. The problem it tackles is the issue of how we are 'really' to understand negative statements: how we are to translate them so that they do not contain the problematic term  'not'. Grice's proposed analysis can be subjected to a process of verifi-cation, on the understanding that perception though the senses (it is green') and introspection (every present mental process of mine...) are empirical phenomena.On completion of his Harmsworth studentship in 1938, Grice was appointed to a lectureship in philosophy at the third college of his Oxford career, St John's. In the complex social hierarchy of Oxford col-leges, this was definitely a step up; St John's was larger, more affluent and more prestigious than either Merton or Corpus Christi. More impor-tantly, it was a sign that Grice's career was progressing well. Although it carried a relatively high teaching load, and brought with it no benefits of college membership, a lectureship was a good position from which to impress the existing Fellows of the college, who had control over the appointment of new members. In fact, Grice was elected to the position of full Fellow, tutor and lecturer in philosophy after just one year. He was to hold this post for almost 30 years, but initially he stayed at St John's for only one because his career, like that of many of his con-temporaries, was interrupted by war service. Grice was commissioned Lieutenant in the Navy in 1940. Initially, he was on active service in the North Atlantic. Then in March 1942 he joined Navy Intelligence at the Admiralty, where he stayed until the war ended.  The war years saw the publication of Grice's first article, 'Personal Identity', in Mind. Neither the topic nor the journal were particularly surprising choices for a young Oxford philosopher at that time. Mind, edited by G. E. Moore, was one of the leading, indeed one of the few, journals of contemporary philosophy, and had reflected the interest in logical positivism of the 1930s. After the war, under the editorship of Gilbert Ryle, it would become the acknowledged organ for much of the work from the new school of Oxford philosophy.l The topic of personal identity was one of long-standing philosophical interest, and had received renewed attention during the 1930s; indeed, it was one of the topics discussed in the meetings at All Soul's. It is ultimately concerned with a question that was to underlie Grice's work throughout his life: the question of what it is to be a human being. Discussing personal identity means considering the relative importance of, and relationship between, physical and mental properties. Describing identity exclusively in terms of physical bodies presents problems, but so does describing it entirely in terms of mental entities. The former position would suggest that a single body must always be the location of a single iden-tity, or person, regardless of personality change, memory loss or mental illness. Moreover, it would seem to entail that, since the composition of a physical body does not stay the same throughout a lifetime, someone must be regarded as having separate identities, or being different people as, say, a baby, an adult, and an old man. An account of personal identity based exclusively on mental sameness, however,would force us to accept that one mental state transferred into another body, perhaps by surgery or reincarnation, should result in no change of identity. Philosophers wrestled with hypothetical 'problem cases'. If it were possible to take the brains out of two bodies and swap them over, would this be best described as a brain transplant or a body trans-plant? Ayer, Austin and their companions had concerned themselves with the status of Gregor Samsa from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis': 'was he an insect with the mind of a man, or a man with the body of an insect?'. 17  In attempting to negotiate between these two opposing, equally prob-lematic, accounts, Grice looks to 'memory theories' of personal iden-tity. In this, he draws on work produced almost 250 years previously by John Locke, while acknowledging some of Locke's critics and attempting to suggest a way of addressing them. In other words, Grice's first published work shows the characteristic combination of old and new ways of thinking. He draws on work from philosophical 'old boys', such as Locke and his eighteenth-century critic Thomas Reid. At the same time, he looks for solutions to their problems in a much newer style of philosophy, one in general terms analytic, and in more particular terms concerned with the close analysis of individual linguistic examples.  Locke argues that, unlike in the case of inanimate masses, the identity of living creatures must depend on more than bodily unity. As evidence he suggests the examples of an oak growing from a seedling into a great tree and then cut back, or a colt growing into a horse, being sometimes fat and sometimes thin; throughout these changes they remain the same oak, and the same horse. In search of an appropriate substitute for bodily sameness, he discusses what might be seen as a hierarchy of living beings, and considers where a notion of identity can be located in each case. In general, at each stage of the hierarchy, what is required is an account of function. The parts of a tree form a single entity not because they remain physically constant, but because they are arranged in such a way as to fulfil certain functions: the processes of nutrition and growth that together ensure the continued existence of the tree. In much the same way, the identity of an animal can be described in terms of the fulfilment of the functions that ensure its sur-vival. Even 'man' is no different in this respect; human identity consists in the collection of parts functioning together over the course of a lifetime, to ensure the growth, maturation and survival of the individual human being. Various different particles of matter form a single human at different points in time precisely because they all participate in a single, continued, life.Locke points out that this account of a man or human being, although it does not rely on simple bodily identity, does make necessary reference to the physical body. The parts of the body may change over time, but, united by common functions, they together form part of the definition of 'a man'  '. If we relied only on mental identity, or 'the  identity of soul', we would not be able to resist the idea that physically and temporally separate bodies might all belong to the same man. Locke suggests that an account based just on the soul could not rule out the unacceptable claim that the ill-assorted list: 'Seth, Ismael, Socrates, Pilate, St Austin, and Caesar Borgia, ... may have been the same man.'18 Furthermore, the form of a man is a necessary part of our understanding of the concept of a man, and of the meaning of the word 'man'.  Even if we were to hear a creature that looked like a parrot hold intelligent conversation and discuss philosophy, functions normally associated exclusively with people, we would hardly be tempted to say that it must be a man, but rather we would say that it was 'a very intelligent rational parrot'. 19  Locke's next move is to suggest a categorial distinction between 'man' and 'person'.  , a distinction he admits is at odds with normal under-  standing and speech. He offers a very specific definition of a person as  'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places' 20 The point of this distinction is to explain the 'extra' properties persons are generally seen as possessing, beyond those of animals.  It might be said variously to account for consciousness, self-awareness or the soul. The identity of a person, then, consists not just in the unity of functioning parts, the criterion that accounts alike for the identity of a plant, or an animal, or a 'man'. The identity of a person depends on the continuation of the 'reason and reflection' across a range of different times and places. In Locke's words, 'as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person'? Locke offers his own solution to what has come to be known as the 'brain transplant' problem, which he explains in terms of the transfer of souls. In Locke's fanciful illustration, the soul of a prince is transferred into the body of a cobbler, the cobbler's soul having been removed. We would say that what was left was the same person as the prince, since he would have the thoughts of the princeand the consciousness of the prince's past life. However, we would at this point be forced to acknowledge the distinction Locke is drawing between 'man' and 'person', by saying that this was the same man as the cobbler, as demonstrated by the continuity of bodily functioning.There is one fairly obvious problem with an account of identity dependent on the extension back in time of a single consciousness.  Locke in effect dismisses this problem by arguing that it is an error arising from a particular way in which language is generally used. The problem is concerned with memory loss. If he were completely and irrevocably to lose his memory, Locke suggests, we would still want to say that he was the same person as the one who performed the actions he has now forgotten. Yet on Locke's own account, if his consciousness could no longer be extended back to these past actions, he could not be the same person as the one who performed them. Locke suggests that our reluctance to accept this conclusion, our inclination to insist that he is still the same person, can be traced to a lack of reflection about the use of the pronoun 'I'. In this case, the amnesiac Locke would in fact be using 'I' to refer not to the person, but to the man. Locke does not himself offer any examples, but the following illustrates his point.  If, having lost his memory and then been instructed about his own past life, he were to state 'I was exiled by James Il', he would be using the pronoun to refer only to the same man, or living creature, as he is now, not to the same person. Our tendency to maintain that 'I' must in these examples stand for the same person is because of our failure to distinguish properly between 'man' and 'person': our habit of conflating the two. Once this conflation is recognised for what it is, the problem can be resolved; it may be possible for a single man to be more than one person during his life. Indeed, although our use of the pronoun sometimes seems to miss this, elsewhere in the language it is apparently acknowledged:  when we say such a one is not himself, or is beside himself; in which phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least first used them, thought that self was changed; the selfsame person was no longer in that man.22  Grice's account of personal identity relies on Locke's theory, but draws more directly on two later philosophers. Thomas Reid, writing about a hundred years after Locke, produces a 'problem example'. Ian Gallie, just a few years before Grice, offers a more developed discussion of the use of the first person pronoun. Reid points out that the notion of consciousness extending back in time can only make sense if it is understood as memory; Locke's account can only be coherently understood as a memory theory of identity. Further, he cautions that although the expressions 'consciousness' and 'memory' are sometimes used inter-changeably in normal speech, it is important for philosophers not to confuse the two. 'The faculties of consciousness and memory are chiefly distinguished by this, that the first is an immediate knowledge of the present, the second an immediate knowledge of the past. 23 But if personal identity is dependent on knowledge of the past or on memory, the following case, which has become known as the 'brave officer' example, presents severe difficulties. A boy is whipped for stealing apples. When the boy grows up, he joins the army and, as a young officer, captures an enemy standard. In later life, the officer is made a general. It is perfectly possible that, when rescuing the standard, the officer was able to remember, even did actively remember, that he was whipped as a child. It is also possible that the elderly general can remember clearly the time when he captured the standard but, with memory fading, has forgotten all about being whipped as a boy. The memory is lost irrevocably; even if prompted about the incident, he cannot remember it. According to Locke's account, we would have to say that the young boy was the same person as the brave officer, and the brave officer was the same person as the old general, but that the old general was not the same person as the young boy. Not only does this offend against our intuitive notions of identity, it also runs counter to basic logic. If A is identical to B, and B is identical to C, then it follows that C must be identical to A.  In 'Personal identity', Grice acknowledges his considerable debt to Gallie's article 'Is the self a substance?', which was published in 1936, also in Mind. It is a revealing choice of inspiration, perhaps reflecting Grice's growing interest in the style of philosophy being practised by some of his Oxford contemporaries: the analysis of specific linguistic examples as a means of approaching more general philosophical prob-lems. Gallie does not directly discuss the memory theory of identity. He assesses the case for the existence of a 'self', a metaphysical entity or substance, remaining constant across a series of temporally different mental experiences. As an enduring ego it forms a mental unit of iden-tity, in addition to any purely physical phenomenon. From the outset, he proposes an account of 'self' in terms of 'a certain class of sentences in which the word "I" (or the word "me") occurs' 2 Such sentences can, he suggests, be grouped into two or perhaps three sets. The first of these is the set of sentences in which 'my mind' could be substituted for 'T'.  Gallie admits that in some cases the result may be 'unusual English', but maintains that it is enough that they would not be false. Examples include 'I feel depressed' and 'I see it is raining'. The second set of sentences is defined negatively; such substitution is impossible in examplessuch as 'I am under 6 feet in height' and 'I had dinner at 8 o'clock to-night'. Gallie acknowledges but dismisses from discussion a third but purely philosophical use of 'T'; expressions such as 'I hear a noise now' and 'I see a white expanse now' are concerned with facts of which the speaker has introspective knowledge, rather than with any claims about properties of longer duration. Gallie's starting point is the contention that examples from his first set offer evidence that the self must exist.  If we use T' in these cases, and use it legitimately, there must be something to which we are referring; there must be a mental property that endures across a range of temporarily distinct experiences.  Grice's article also starts with a discussion of 'I' sentences, but his analysis of them is rather more subtle than Gallie's, and his claims about their significance more ambitious. He divides Gallie's two basic categories into three, although he implicitly dismisses the idea that Gallie's  'philosophical' uses constitute a separate class. His starting point is not with minds but with bodies; the easiest sentences to define are those into which the phrase 'my body' can be substituted, sentences such as  'I was hit by a golf ball' and 'I fell down the cellar steps'.  . A second class,  one not distinguished by Gallie, seems to require something extra as well as a physical body to be involved. This includes sentences such as  'I played cricket yesterday' and 'I shall be fighting soon', in which substituting 'my body' for 'I' does not provide an exact or full paraphrase.  These sentences in turn are to be distinguished from a further class in which substitution of 'my body' is even less satisfactory, sentences such as 'I am hearing a noise' and 'I am thinking about the immortality of the soul'. Grice is not explicit about what would count as a suitable substitute for 'I' in these sentences. By implication, the 'I' of bodily identity is easier to paraphrase than the 'T' of mental identity, and Grice is not prepared as Gallie was to offer a paraphrase into 'unusual English' But he does suggest tentatively that, in the cricket and fighting sen-tences, reference to the physical body would need to be supplemented with 'something about the sort of thoughts and intentions and decisions I had.'25  Grice's ambitious claim is that the dispute about personal identity is really a disagreement about the status of certain 'I' sentences. Examples not concerned with bodily identity, sentences of the 'I am hearing a noise' category, are central to the type of identity philosophers have generally discussed. Philosophers over the centuries who have addressed the nature of personal identity have been concerned with the correct analysis of this type of 'I' sentence, whether they knew it or not. More-over, Grice argues, they have also been concerned with the correctanalysis of a class of sentences closely related to these but containing the word 'someone' instead of the word 'I'. An adequate account of personal identity must be able to offer an analysis both of 'I am hearing a noise' and of 'someone is hearing a noise'.  Grice's theory of personal identity is based on Locke's account, but attempts a modification to answer its critics. His analysis of the relevant  'I' and 'someone' sentences is in terms of a particular relationship between experiences divided by time and place. A series of such experiences can be said to belong to the same person. The relationship in question cannot be a simple one of memory, or possible memory, because this raises the 'brave officer' problem; a person having a particular experience may be quite incapable of remembering an earlier experience, but yet be the same person as the person who had that expe-rience. As a maneuver to avoid this problem, Grice introduces the phrase 'total temporary state' (t.t.s.), as a term of art to describe all the experiences to which an individual is subject at any one moment. These t.t.s.'s can occur in series, and describing a person means describing what it is that makes any particular series the t.t.s.'s of one and the same person. Grice's suggestion is that every t.t.s. in a 'person' series contains or could contain an element of memory relating it to some other t.t.s. earlier in the same series. In this way, the 'brave officer' problem is avoided. The t.t.s of the general contains a memory trace of the experience of the brave officer, and the t.t.s. of the brave officer contains a memory trace of the experience of the boy. The three t.t.s.'s are linked into a series and it does not matter that there is no direct link between that of the general and that of the boy.  Grice analyses 'someone hears a noise'  ', the example type he identi-  fied as central to personal identity, in terms of his notion of t.t.s.:  a (past) hearing of a noise is an element in a t.t.s. which is a member of a series of t.t.s.'s such that every member of the series either would, given certain conditions, contain as an element a memory of some experience which is an element in some previous member, or contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member; there being no subset of members which is independent from all the rest.26  Each t.t.s. contains at least one memory link, or potential memory link, either forward or backward in an appropriate series. Sentences containing the problematic 'I' and 'someone'  ', the 'I' and 'someone' that cannotbe paraphrased in terms of bodies, can be re-expressed in terms that remove the problem word and replace it with a suitably defined series of t.t.s.'s. Personal identity is shown to be a construction out of a series of experiences.  Grice considers various possible objections that might be raised to his analysis, including the objection that it is just too complicated as an account of a set of apparently simple sentences. He is himself unsure that this is a particularly damning objection, but argues that his analysis of 'self'-sentences is in any case:  probably far less complicated than would be the phenomenalist's analysis of any material object-sentence, if indeed a phenomenalist were ever to offer an analysis of such a sentence, and not merely tell us what sort of an analysis it would be if he did give it.?7  This is an interesting dig. Phenomenalism was most closely associated at this time with the logical positivists, and therefore at Oxford with Ayer. It was a form of scepticism, holding that we do not have direct evidence of material objects; we have evidence only of various 'sense data'  ', and infer the existence of material objects from these. In other words, phenomenalists claimed that statements about material objects need to be translatable into empirically verifiable statements about sense data. Grice's objection is that the appropriate translations were never actually offered, merely discussed; his complicated analysis of  'someone is hearing a noise', on the other hand, offered something def-inite. This is closely related to the type of objection Austin was raising to Ayer's method; his theories introduced technical terms such as 'sense data', but did not explain them in ordinary language.  In the light of Grice's sideswipe at sense data theories, it is perhaps surprising that John Perry, in his commentary, should find phenome-nalist tendencies in Grice's account of personal identity. His reason lies in the analytic approach Grice shares with phenomenalism. Both were concerned with analysing sentences that contain a problem expression (for the phenomenalists words referring to material objects, for Grice the relevant uses of 'I' and 'someone') in such a way that these expressions are removed and empirically observable phenomena are substi-tuted. Sense data and total temporary states are both available to introspection. For phenomenalists, material objects are logical constructions based on the evidence of sense data; they need to be recog-nised as such and the 'true' form of the sentences expressing them needs to be understood. For Grice, persons are logical constructions fromexperiences. Perry does, however, acknowledge an important difference between Grice's enterprise and that of other analytic philosophers, of whom he takes Russell to be a prime example:  In Russell's view, the logical construction was the philosopher's contribution to an improved conception of, say, a material object, free of the epistemological problems inherent in the ordinary conception.  So analysis, for Russell, does not preserve exact meaning. But Grice intends to be making explicit, through analysis, the concept we already have.28  In other words, Grice sees ordinary ways of talking as adequate and valu-able, if in need of clarification. For analytic philosophers such as Russell, ordinary language is simply not good enough; it needs to be purged of inappropriate existential commitments and vague terms before it can be a fit tool for philosophy or science.  Grice's account of personal identity has been generally well received in its field. Despite his reservations, Perry describes it as 'the most subtle and successful' attempt to rescue Locke's memory theory? Similarly, Timothy Williamson cites Grice's paper as the first in a succession of responses to the 'brave officer' problem in terms of a transitive relation between a set of spatio-temporal locations.3º In many ways it seems far removed from the work for which Grice is now best known. And indeed when he returned to philosophy after the war he was concerned with rather different topics. But this early article shows some of the traits that were to become characteristic of his work across a range of subjects, in particular a close attention to the nuances of language use. One theme in particular, the notion of what it is to be a person, and Locke's idea of an ontological distinction between 'man' and 'person' was to prove central to much of Grice's later philosophy.  The publication of 'Personal identity' meant that Grice's professional life was not entirely put on hold during the war years, and neither was his personal life. In 1943 he married Kathleen Watson. Kathleen was from London, but they had met through an Oxford connection. Her brother J. S. Watson had held a Harmsworth senior scholarship shortly after Grice and the two had become friends. James married during the war and, when his best man was killed on active service shortly before the ceremony, called on Paul at short notice to perform the duty. Paul and Kathleen met at the wedding. At the time of his own wedding, Paul still had two years of war service ahead of him, but it meant that when he returned permanently to Oxford he would not be living in St John's,as he had done briefly as a bachelor. There were no rooms for married Fellows in college; indeed, women were not permitted on the premises, even at formal dinners. Paul and Kathleen settled in a flat on the Woodstock Road rented from his college. His Fellowship at St John's was, of course, still open to him, as was the prospect of a closer involvement with the new style of philosophy taking shape in Oxford.The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford philosophy during the decade or so from 1945 was very different from that which Grice had known before the Second World War. As students and dons alike returned from war service, the process of change that had begun with a few young philosophers during the 1930s picked up momentum. Old orthodoxies and methods were overthrown as a host of new thinkers and new ideas took their place. The style of study was questioning, exploratory and cooperative. Many of the philosophers who were active in this period, such as Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson, have since testified to the spirit of optimism, enthusiasm and sheer excitement that predom-inated.' The reasons for these emotions were similar to those that had drawn A. J. Ayer to the work of the Vienna Circle just over a decade earlier. A new style of philosophy was going to 'solve' many of the old problems. Once again, this was to be achieved by close attention to and analysis of language. For logical positivists this involved 'translating' problematic statements of everyday language into logically rigorous, empirically verifiable sentences. For the new Oxford philosophers, however, no such translations would be necessary. A suitably rigorous attention to the facts of language was going to be a sufficient, indeed the only suitable, philosophical tool.  In retrospect, Grice suggested the following causes of the differences after the war:  the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene.?Gilbert Ryle, the tutor who had introduced Ayer to Wittgenstein and encouraged him to travel to Vienna, was a decade or more older than Grice and his contemporaries, having been born in 1900. However, his influence on Oxford philosophy during the 1940s and 1950s was con-siderable. His philosophy of mind, in particular, was widely known through his teaching, and was eventually published as The Concept of Mind in 1949. In this book, Ryle argues against the received idea of the mind as a mental entity separate from, but in some way inhabiting, the physical body: Descartes's 'ghost in the machine'. All that can legitimately be discussed are dispositions to act in a certain way in certain situations. The error of dualism can be attributed to the tendency to analyse minds as 'things' just as bodies are things. Taken together with a strict distinction between mental and physical, this gives rise to the error of defining minds as 'non-physical things'. This error stems from a basic category mistake involving the type of vocabulary used in discussions of minds. Differences between the physical and the mental have been 'represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of "thing", "stuff", "attribute", "state", "process"  "change"  ', "cause" and "effect"' 3 Only close attention to language  reveals this tendency among philosophers to extend erroneously terms applicable to physical phenomena, and thus to enter into unproductive metaphysical commitments. Ryle was keen to see this philosophical approach adopted more widely, and after he took over as editor of Mind in 1947, began what Jonathan Rée has described as a 'systematic cam-paign' to take control of English philosophy. He drew together some of the more promising young Oxford philosophers and 'by galvanising them into writing, especially about each other, in the pages of Mind, he gave English academic philosophy in the fifties an energy and sense of purpose such as it has never seen before or since."  The style of philosophy Ryle was deliberately promoting found resonances in the work of J. L. Austin, who was continuing to develop the notions about ordinary language with which he had confronted Ayer before the war. Ayer himself had returned to Oxford only briefly, before taking up a chair at University College London in 1946. The ideas of logical positivism were, in any case, losing their earlier glamour and appeal for younger philosophers, and Austin became the natural leader of the next wave of Oxford philosophy, both before and after his appointment as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. This promotion may seem surprising today; Austin had published just three papers by 1952, none of which were strictly about moral philosophy. It seems that credit was given to the importance of his ideas, and his rep-utation as an inspiring and charismatic teacher, a reputation achieved despite his rather austere personality. Few if any of his colleagues felt that they really got to know him personally. This was perhaps in part because, as Geoffrey Warnock has suggested, he was 'a shy man, wary of self-revelation and more than uninviting of self-revelation by others'. It may also have been in part because, unusually among his peers, he eschewed college social life, preferring to spend his time quietly at home with his family in the Oxfordshire countryside. Never-theless, most people who knew him had their favourite story to sum up what could be a formidable and confrontational, but also a humourous and humane personality. George Pitcher relates how Austin once attended a meeting at his college concerned with plans for the college buildings. The meeting got embroiled in a long and seemingly unrec-oncilable discussion about the President's Lodgings. When finally asked for his opinion, Austin's response was 'Mr President, raze it to the ground. Grice recalls how a colleague once challenged Austin with Donne's lines 'From the round earth's imagined corners,/ Angels your trumpets blow' as an example of non-understandable English. 'It is perfectly clear what it means,' replied Austin, 'it means "Angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth" "  Such anecdotes illustrate Austin's ability to cut through protocol and rhetoric and reveal the plain facts underneath: often to reveal that things are just as simple as they seem, and a lot more simple than they are made out to be. This was the spirit in which he approached philosophy. He was undoubtedly lucky in this project in the number of dedicated and talented young philosophers who, as Grice puts it,  'appeared' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early post-war years, undergraduates and new tutors were generally older than had been the tradition, and eager to study, their university careers having been postponed or interrupted by the war. Austin played an active role in spotting and encouraging talent, building up what quickly came to be seen as his own 'school' of philosophy. This development seems rather at odds with his views on discipleship. Ben Rogers has suggested that, unlike Wittgenstein, Austin 'discouraged anything like a cult of personality: he wanted to put philosophy on a collective footing' However, there is some evidence that Austin was at least in part predisposed to encourage, and even to enjoy, his status as leader. Grice reports that Austin was once heard to remark to a colleague, 'if they don't want to follow me, whom do they want to follow?"The style of philosophy developed and practised by Austin and his followers has been variously labelled as 'Oxford philosophy', linguistic philosophy' and 'ordinary language philosophy'. It is in fact far from uncontroversial that a single, identifiable approach united the philosophers working in Oxford at this time, even those in Austin's immediate circle. Grice himself denies this assumption in a number of published commentaries, such as the uncompromising claim that: 'there was no  "School"; there were no dogmas which united us.' Perhaps the only common position of the Oxford philosophers, certainly the only one Grice acknowledges, was a belief in the value, indeed the necessity, of the rigorous analysis of the everyday use of words and expressions. They worked on a wide range of philosophical problems, and even when addressing the same issue they often disagreed on analysis or conclu-sion. But in approaching these problems they were in agreement that careful attention to the words in which they were conventionally expressed was the best path to understanding, tackling and perhaps eliminating the problems themselves. The origins of this approach are controversial. Commentators have looked beyond Ryle and Austin to suggest Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and even Gotlob Frege as candidates for the title 'father' of ordinary language phi-losophy. There is certainly something in all these claims; each thinker was  influential in the development of the analytic tradition from which ordinary language philosophy emerged. But under Ryle's and Austin's guidance it developed in directions not envisaged, and in some cases explicitly not approved, by its putative mentors.  In the late nineteenth century Frege proposed analysis of language as a method for tackling philosophical problems. He was chiefly a math-ematician, but in the course of his work addressed the language of logical expressions, and the potential problems inherent in it. Frege's most influential contribution to the philosophy of language is his distinction between 'sense' and 'reference'. Any name, whether a proper name or a description, that points to some individual in the world, does so by way of a particular means of identifying that individual. A name therefore has both a reference, the individual it denotes, and a sense, the means by which reference is indicated. In this way, Frege explains statements of identity. If we attend only to reference, an example such as 'Sophroniscus is the father of Socrates' would have to be dismissed as uninformative; it would simply offer a logical tautology, stating of an individual that he is identical with himself. If, however, we attend to sense as well as reference, we can analyse this example as making an informative statement to the effect that the two names may differ insense but share the same reference. The example is significant because, although there is no difference between the denotation of the two names, there is nevertheless 'a difference in the mode of presentation of the thing designated'."  Russell proposed the 'translation'  account that became characteristic  of analytic philosophy. Suitably rigorous attention could reveal the logical structure beneath a grammatical form that was often misleading and imperfect. His main difference from Frege was in his analysis of descriptions. Russell observes in his 1905 article 'On denoting' that 'a phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; for example,  "the present king of France" 1 For Frege such examples posed no problem. It was perfectly possible to say that such an expression had a sense but no reference. But the consequences of this position are unacceptable to Russell because of their impact on logic. If 'the king of France' simply has no reference, then any sentence of which it is subject, such as Russell's famous example 'the king of France is bald', must also fail to refer to the world; in other words it must fail to be either true or false. For Russell this result is intolerable because it dispenses with clas-sical, two-valued logic, in which every proposition must be capable of being judged either 'true' or 'false'  . Classical logic states that if a propo-  sition is true then its negation must be false, and vice versa. But under Frege's analysis 'the king of France is bald' and 'the king of France is not bald' are indistinguishable in terms of truth value; both fail to be either true or false. Not only is this unacceptable, argues Russell, it also goes against the facts of the matter; 'the king of France is bald' is a simple falsehood.  Russell uses the label 'definite descriptions' for phrases such as 'the king of France', and claims that they are a particular type of expression demanding a particular type of analysis. Despite appearances, they are not denoting expressions, and they do not function as subjects of sentences in which they superficially appear to be in subject position. The subject/predicate form of a sentence containing a definite description, a sentence such as 'the king of France is bald', is misleading. That is, the logical structure of the sentence is at odds with its purely grammatical form; it is actually a complex of propositions relating to the existence, the uniqueness, and then the characteristics, of the individual apparently identified. Russell's rendition of this example can be paraphrased as: 'there exists one entity which is the king of France, and that entity is unique, and that entity is bald! Re-analysed in this way, it is possible to demonstrate that, in the absence of a unique king of France, one of these propositions is simply false. If it is not true thatthere is a present king of France, the first part of the logical form is false, making the sentence as a whole also false.  Russell's theory of descriptions has been seen as the defining example of analytic philosophy. Ayer often repeated his admiration for it in these terms. His close attention to language as well as to logic further caused Russell to be credited with inspiring ordinary language philosophy. 13 However, he would certainly not have been pleased by this latter acco-lade; he was still active in philosophy when the new approach was in the ascendant and he publicly and vociferously opposed it.' His own motivation in 'On denoting', and elsewhere, was not to describe natural language for its own sake, but to explain away the apparent obstacles it offered to classical logic. If every statement containing a denoting phrase could be explained as a complex proposition not involving a denoting phrase as a constituent, bivalent logic could be maintained.  Like Frege, Russell's first and primary philosophical interest was in mathematical logic. His interest in the analysis of language and therefore in meaning grew out of a concern for analysing the language in which the ideas of logic are expressed, and ultimately for refining that language.  Russell's Cambridge colleague and almost exact contemporary G. E.  Moore would perhaps have been less uncomfortable with being credited as genitor of ordinary language philosophy. Like many of the Oxford philosophers a generation later, he came to philosophy from a background in classics, and remained sensitive to details of meaning.  This was coupled with a rather leisured approach to philosophical enquiry; a private fortune enabled him to spend seven years at the start of his career away from all professional responsibilities, pursuing his own philosophical interests. Certainly, the result was a thorough and meticulous attention to the language in which philosophical discussion is couched. Another common feature between Moore and many ordinary language philosophers, one identified by Grice, was an anti-metaphysical, determinedly 'common-sense' approach to philosophical issues. 15  An illustration of both the rigorous analysis and the confidence in intuitive understanding can be found in Moore's article 'A defence of common sense', published in 1925. This was a forerunner of the infamous British Academy lecture of 1939 in which he held up his own hand as incontrovertible and sufficient 'proof' of the existence of material objects. In the published article, too, Moore addresses the question of the status of our knowledge of external objects, as well as our belief in the existence of other human beings, and indeed the viability of anyphysical reality independent of mental fact. In asserting such viability Moore is, as he explains, arguing against the sceptical view that all that we have access to are 'ideas' of objects, offered to us by means of our sense impressions, never the objects themselves. Such philosophical views were dominant in English philosophy when Moore himself was a young man, and were in part what he was reacting against in defending common sense. Moore's 'defence' rests almost entirely on his assertion of what he knows to be the case, by introspection based on the dictates of common sense. He knows with certainty of the existence and continuity of his own body, as well as its distinction from other, equally real physical objects. Not only that, but all other human beings have a similar, but distinct set of knowledge relating to their own bodies.  Further, to describe these as common-sense beliefs is actually to admit that they must be true, since the very expression 'common sense' implies that there is a set of other minds holding this belief and therefore that other minds, and other people, exist. Common sense should extend to analysis of the language of philosophy as well. In assessing the truth of a sentence such as 'The earth has existed for many years past', it is necessary to consider only 'the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions'  '. Moore comments dryly that the existence of such  a unique, ordinary meaning 'is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing'. This capacity, he suggests, has led to the erroneous argument that a statement such as this is questionable, and perhaps even false.  This insistence that philosophers attend to the ordinary use of the expressions with which they are dealing, together with the expression of bafflement that they should declare themselves unsure of the nature of such ordinary use, was to become as characteristic of Austin's work as it was of Moore's. Austin was widely known to be impressed by Moore's work, and inspired by his methodology, although he was less convinced that intuitive convictions and commonplace orthodoxies could be accepted at face value without further exploration. Grice recalls him declaring, with a characteristic combination of scholarly enthusiasm and school-boy jocularity: 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man.'" This pithy summary of his own philosophical influences introduces one of the most controversial issues concerning the origins of ordinary language philosophy: the impact of Wittgenstein. Some commentators have argued that Wittgenstein's later work was crucially important; Ernest Gellner, for instance, discusses 'linguistic philosophy' as if it were uncontroversially a product of Philosophical Investigations. 18 But in his biographical sketch of Austin, Geoffrey Warnock argues cat-egorically that Wittgenstein did not influence the philosophical method Austin promoted."' The issue is a difficult one to settle. Ben Rogers suggests that: 'Oxford philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s was more indebted to Wittgenstein than it liked to admit, 20 and it is certainly possible that his ideas informed discussion at the time, even if his intellectual presence was not directly acknowledged. Philosophical Investigations, presenting Wittgenstein's later work on language, was not published until 1953, but earlier versions of it were circulated and read in Oxford in the immediate post-war years. Other commentators, such as Williams and Montefiore, emphasise what they see as the striking differences between Wittgenstein and Austin. The two men's personalities, they suggest, were reflected in their different styles of philoso-phy: Wittgenstein's intense and introspective, Austin's scholarly and meticulous.22  Wittgenstein's early work had been inspired by his former tutor Russell. Although highly original, it was very much within Russell's formal, analytic tradition. Language operates by expressing propositions that may differ from apparent surface form but map on to the world by means of the basic properties of truth and falsity. 'To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true,' Wittgenstein suggests in his Tractatus, prefiguring the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle23 However, the work Wittgenstein produced when he returned to philosophy after a self-imposed break was notoriously different from that of his youth. It shows some striking similarities to ordinary language philosophy. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that language is better defined in terms of the uses to which it is put than the situations in the world it describes. Words are tools for use and, just as a tool may not always be used for the same function, meaning is not necessarily constant. Coining one of the most enduring metaphors in the philosophy of language, he argues that a word is best described as having a loose association of meanings that are essentially independent but may display certain 'family resemblances'  '. He argues  that apparent philosophical problems are in fact issues of language use; correct investigation of the language in which problems are posed reveals them to be merely 'pseudo problems'  '. Also, and perhaps even  more strikingly, he comments that, in philosophical discussion as else-where, 'When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day.'24  Whatever positive influences may have acted on Austin, it is certain that he was at least in part reacting against some other philosophical styles. In particular, he was taking issue with logical positivism, and withthe work of his old sparring partner A. J. Ayer. Soon after the war, Austin developed his response to Ayer on sense data. This was presented as a series of lectures, first delivered in 1947, and was published only posthumously, when Geoffrey Warnock edited the lecture notes under the title Sense and Sensibilia. Austin deals in detail and critically with Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, the book published in 1940 that expanded on and developed the implications of the verificationist account presented in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued in the earlier book that the operation of the principle of verification for an individual is not directly dependent on the physical world, but relies on the data we receive through our senses. These 'sense data' are the only evidence we have available by which to subject sentences making statements about the world to appropriate processes of verification. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer addresses the question of whether our knowledge is determined by material objects themselves or by our personal sense data. He develops a phenomenalist approach to this question, arguing that beliefs and statements about material objects are only legitimate if they are translated into beliefs and statements about our sense data. In this way, he maintains that discussion of the status of material objects is primarily a dispute about language. It is a dispute about the best way to analyse statements of experience. Sentences concerned with material objects and those concerned with sense data are simply uses of two different types of language. They refer to the same things in two different ways, rather than describing ontologically different phenomena.  25  Austin disliked the idea that philosophers need to 'see through' ordinary language before they can say anything rigorous about material objects. In his lectures on perception he argues that belief in sense data is an error into which philosophers have been led by the words they coin. The term itself is introduced artificially; ordinary people in everyday life find no need of it. Even the word 'perception' has an unnecessarily technical ring for Austin. People rarely talk about perceiving material objects, and still less frequently of experiencing sense data.  They do talk about seeing things, and so philosophers should attend to the suggestions this offers as to how the world works. The 'plain man' can cope perfectly well with distinguishing appearance from reality, with describing rainbows, or with commenting that ships on the horizon may appear closer than they are. Philosophers need only look to the actual use of words such as 'reality', 'looks' and 'seems' to understand this. Ordinary language has its own, perfectly adequate way of dealing with the difference between appearance and reality. Near thebeginning of his lectures, Austin sums up his response to sense data theorists:  My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described... Ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realised.26  In other work, Austin objects to the assumption he finds in logical positivism and elsewhere that the most important or the only philosophically interesting function of language is to make statements about the world. Philosophers concerned with questions of truth and falsity, and with determining meaning in terms of verification, overlook the many different ways in which speakers actually use language, and fall into the fallacy of seeing it as merely a tool for description. 'The principle of Logic that "Every proposition must be true or false" has too long operated as the simplest, most persuasive and most pervasive form of the descriptive fallacy.2 Only a careful consideration of the way in which people actually use language enables philosophers to dispense with this fallacy. Even when people do make statements of fact, it is often necessary to consider 'degrees' of success, rather than simple truth.  It is only with such a concept that we can make sense of various loose ways of talking, such as 'the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg', or explain why a statement may be true, but somehow 'inept' , such as saying 'all  the signs of bread' when clearly in the presence of bread.  Austin's approach, then, was based on a distrust of philosophical constructions and technical terminology, especially terminology he suspected of being unnecessary or poorly defined, but it was not entirely negative. He wanted to replace these with a serious and rigorous attention to the way in which any matter of philosophical interest is discussed in everyday language. He sets out these ideas particularly clearly and characteristically stridently in 'A plea for excuses' , a paper delivered  to the Aristotelian Society in 1956, which came to be seen almost as a manifesto for ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers have for too long conducted their discussion in real or feigned ignorance of the way in which key words and phrases are used in ordinary, everyday lan-guage. It is not just that the language of everyday is a worthy subject and adequate vehicle for philosophical enquiry. Rather, it is the only tool with a claim to being sufficient for philosophical purposes, honedas it is by generations of use to describe the distinctions and connections human beings have found necessary. These can reasonably be claimed to be more sound and subtle 'than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon - the most favoured alternative method'28 Meanings, including the meanings of philosophical terms, can only coherently be discussed with reference to the ways in which words are used in ordinary discourse.  More specifically in 'A plea for excuses', Austin is concerned with a rigorous examination of the circumstances in which excuses are offered, and the different forms they may take. For instance, excuses are only offered for actions performed freely. A consideration of the ordinary use of 'freely' to describe an action reveals that it does not introduce any particular property, but serves to negate some opposite, such as  'under duress'. It would be used only when there is some suggestion that the opposite could or might apply. There would be something strange about applying the term 'freely' to a normal action performed in a normal manner. Austin sums up this claim in the slogan 'no modification without aberration'? For many ordinary uses of many verbs, there is simply no modifying expression, either positive or negative that can appropriately and informatively be applied. The  'natural economy of language' dictates that we can only add a modifying expression 'if we do the action named in some special way or cir-cumstance'.30  Austin promoted his approach to philosophy through personal contact, including his own teaching, at least as much as through published papers such as 'A plea for excuses'. Lynd Forguson has studied undergraduate Oxford philosophy examination papers and observed that questions reflecting ordinary language philosophy began to appear as early as 1947, and were increasingly frequent throughout the 1950s.  For instance, students were asked: 'Is it essential to begin by deciding the meaning of the word "good" before going on to decide what things are good?'31 Perhaps most significantly Austin's ideas were disseminated through active collaboration in philosophy with his colleagues. This did not take the form of any co-authored papers or books. Indeed, both Grice and Stuart Hampshire have suggested that Austin's independent character and idiosyncratic style would have made him an awkward writing companion.32 His approach to collaboration in philosophy was to draw together the responses and insights of as many different informed observers of language use as possible. In the late 1940s, he instituted a series of 'Saturday Mornings'  ', meetings that ran in term time  and brought together a number of like-minded Oxford philosophers.Grice was present from the start. Other members included R. M. Hare, Herbert Hart, David Pears, Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson. Grice recalls how Austin described these meetings, perhaps semi-seriously, as a weekend break from the regular work of 'philosophical hacks', enabling them to turn their attention to less narrowly philosophical topics. Perhaps with this explanation in mind, Grice labelled the meetings 'The Play Group'. He seems to have been inordinately pleased with this name, and employed it in both spoken and written accounts of Oxford philosophy throughout his life. He used it at the time with some of his colleagues but never, it seems, with Austin himself. Austin was not the sort of man with whom to share such a joke. 34  The American logician W. V. O. Quine spent the academic year 1953-4 at Oxford as visiting Eastman professor. In his memoir of this period he passes on the rumour that attendance at Saturday Mornings was controlled by rules devised by Austin to preclude particular individu-als.35 There does not seem to be any explicit first-hand support from members of the group for this allegation. However, there is some evidence from them that Austin imposed criteria for attendance that would, in effect, have ruled out anyone older than himself who might prove a challenge to his leadership. Geoffrey Warnock remarks simply that attendance was 'restricted to persons both junior to Austin and employed as whole-time tutorial Fellows' 3 Many years later, when Grice was thinking back to the days of the Play Group, he jotted down a list of Oxford philosophers of the time. Interestingly, he divides his list into three categories: 'yes' (Austin, Grice, Hampshire, Strawson, Warnock...), 'no' (Anscombe, Dummett, Murdoch...) and 'overage' (Ryle, Hardie ...).37  Initially, at least, Austin seems to have stuck to his self-imposed remit.  The Play Group engaged not so much in philosophical debate as in intellectual puzzles and exercises pursued for their own sake. A favourite occupation was to analyse and categorise the rules of games, or to invent games of their own. Kathleen Grice recalls that one term they seemed to spend most of their time drawing dots on pieces of paper. Another term they decided to 'learn Eskimo' 38 However, they gradually turned their attention to more obviously philosophical occupations. Austin liked to pick a text per term for the group to read and discuss. However, some of the group did not find this a particularly fruitful philosophical method, largely because of Austin's preferred pace, which was painstakingly slow. 'Austin's favoured unit of discussion in such cases was the sentence', Warnock recalls, 'not the paragraph or chapter, still less the book as a whole. 39 At other times, the Play Group put into practiceAustin's views about the correct business of philosophers by engaging in 'linguistic botanising'.  Austin admired the sciences, and regretted that his own education had given him little real knowledge or expertise in them. His idea was to apply the same techniques of rigorous observation and attention to detail as would be used in a discipline such as botany to the material of linguistic use. The language, and the way in which it was ordinarily used, were there as empirical facts to be observed by those with the sensitivity to do so. Only in this way could its categories and fine distinc-tions, honed over generations, become available to the philosopher.  Examples of this philosophical method are to be found in many of Austin's own writings. For instance, in 'A plea for excuses', where he advocates philosophical attention to 'what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it', he suggests some of the words and phrases related to excuses that may shed light on its use: abstract nouns such as 'misconception', 'accident', 'purpose' and verbs such as  'couldn't help', 'didn't mean to', 'didn't realise'. 4º He proposes a philosophical methodology of 'going through the dictionary'; only such a rigorous analysis of the language will give a thorough and objective overview of the subject matter, which can then be subjected to a process of introspective analysis.  At the Play Group, linguistic botanising was no less painstaking, but it took a discursive, collaborative form. The members would, in effect, pool their linguistic resources in order to draw up lists of words related to the particular subject under discussion. They would then analyse the uses and nuances of these words, deciding which were suitable, and which unsuitable, in various different contexts. As Grice later explained it, they would examine a wide range of the relevant vocabulary, to 'get a list of "okes and nokes"'* J. O. Urmson has described the processes involved more fully:  Having collected in terms and idioms, the group must then proceed to the second stage in which, by telling circumstantial stories and constructing dialogues, they give as clear and detailed examples as possible of circumstances under which this idiom is to be preferred to that, and that to this, and of where we should (do) use this term and where that.... At [the next] stage we attempt to give general accounts of the various expressions (words, sentences, grammatical forms) under consideration; they will be correct and adequate if they make it clear why what is said in our various stories is or is not felic-itous, is possible or impossible.  42Austin argued that this process was both empirical and objective.  Several philosophers conferring together would avoid the possible distortions and idiosyncrasies that might skew the findings of a single researcher, as well as bringing together a wide range of different experiences and specialisms. At a conference in 1958, he was challenged to say what set of criteria was adequate for judging a philosophical analysis of a concept. He is reported as replying, 'If you can make an analysis convince yourself, no matter how hard you try to overthrow it, and if you can get a lot of cantankerous colleagues to agree with it, that's a pretty good criterion that there is something in it. '43 Their task was not just to list and to categorise areas of vocabulary, but to analyse the conceptual distinctions these indicated. Only after selecting relevant terms and discussing their usage was it legitimate to compare the findings with what philosophers had traditionally said. Despite his frosty demeanour and austere habits, Austin displayed huge enthusiasm and optimism, attitudes that infected the members of the Play Group. Grice has commented that Austin clearly found philosophy tremendous fun, although he 'would not be vulgar enough to say anything like that'. 4  If Austin's method attracted devotees, however, it also attracted critics. The practitioners of ordinary language philosophy saw it as an exciting new approach capable of overthrowing past orthodoxies and offering solutions to age-old problems, but its critics saw it as sterile and complacent, valuing lexicographical pedantry over real philosophical argument.4 Some of its more high profile opponents, such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, targeted what they saw as the shallow insights, even the platitudes, to which the Oxford philosophers limited them-selves. Maintaining his position that ordinary language is simply not good enough for rigorous philosophical enquiry, Russell derided what he saw as the triviality of ordinary language philosophy; 'To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. Other critics targeted the practitioners more directly, characterising them as spoilt and snobbish, 'playing' at philosophy without feeling the need to justify their leisurely activities.  Ernest Gellner, a former student of Austin's, published a book in 1959 exclusively concerned with attacking the Oxford philosophers and their method. Gellner finds his own way of repeating Russell's mockery when he suggests that ordinary language philosophy suggests that 'the world is just what it seems (and as it seems to an unimaginative man at about mid-morning)' 4 This style of philosophy 'at long last, provided a philosophic form eminently suitable for gentlemen' because it demanded immense leisure and 'yet its message is that everything remains as itis'.48 C. W. K. Mundle argues that Austin's elitism mars his philosophy.  He detects prescriptivism beneath Austin's apparently descriptivist concern for 'what we should say'. 'In the name of ordinary language, he demands standards of purity and precision of speech which are extraordinarily rare except among men who got a First in Classical Greats.'49 There is undoubtedly some substance in the accusations of elitism.  The members of the Play Group shared an understanding that detailed analysis and meticulous enquiry were important ends in themselves, but also a certainty of leisure and means to pursue these ends. Their appointments did not carry the pressure to publish that to modern academics is a matter of course, a fact almost certainly crucial to the success of ordinary language philosophy. Linguistic botanising was often conducted self-consciously for its own sake, without expectations of spe-cific, publishable 'results'. Stuart Hampshire has admitted that Austin's method depended on a comparatively careless attitude to time and pub-lication: 'you're apt to get discouraged about publishing because you can't fit it all neatly into a journal article.  150  At the time, the Oxford philosophers were in general reluctant to argue their own case. Partly in response to this, Grice later took on the task of offering a first-hand account of ordinary language philosophy in defence against some of its critics. The subject clearly exercised him from the mid-1970s on; he talked, both formally and informally on the topic, and wrote copious notes about it. In a move that would have seemed to the critics to have confirmed their worst fears about snobbery and self-importance, he compares post-war Oxford to the Academy at Athens, with Austin by implication playing the role of Aristotle. In fact the comparison is not as pompous as it may first appear; Grice is not suggesting that mid-twentieth-century Oxford was as important to the history of philosophy as ancient Athens. Rather, he sees certain similarities between the two enterprises that gave ordinary language philosophy a philosophical pedigree its critics claimed it lacked. He sees reflections of Austin's method in what he describes as the 'Athenian dialectic': the interest in discourse ingeneral, and in the facts of speech in particular. The connection is summed up for Grice in the two aspects of the Athenian interest in ta Zeyoueva. The phrase can refer to 'what is spoken', both in the sense of ordinary ways of talking, and of generally received opinions. Both schools were concerned not just with the analysis of language, but with seeing the way people speak as a reflection of how they generally understand the world, a reflection of the  'common-sense' point of view. The difference is, Grice argues, that Austin and his school concentrated more closely on the first aspect;Aristotle and his on the second. Aristotle was concerned not so much with methodology as with picking out foundations of truth. Austin was interested in the 'potentialities of linguistic usage as an index of conceptual truth, without regard for any particular direction for the deployment of such truth.'51  Grice also addresses critics of ordinary language philosophy more directly, accusing them of simple misrepresentation. Gellner's book, in particular, he describes informally as 'a travesty'. In effect, he accuses the critics of inverted snobbery: of assuming that ordinary language philosophy must be trivial and elitist because it was practised by a socially privileged group of people in an ancient university. He admits that the style of philosophy came easiest to those who had received a classical, therefore a public school, education. Education in the classics had fitted the Oxford philosophers to the necessary close attention to linguistic distinctions: ordinary language philosophy involved 'the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage' 5 Grice's response is perhaps confused. At times he seems to accept the accusation of elitism but to argue against its derogatory implications. Why should high culture in philosophy be considered bad, he wonders, if it is prized in art, literature and opera? At other times, however, he seems simply to reject the accusation, arguing that anyone with suitably acute powers of observation could engage in this kind of analysis. This ambivalence is most apparent in some of his comments that did not make it into print. In a section of the handwritten draft of the 'Reply to Richards', but not of the published version, he comments on the accusation of elitism:  To this the obvious reply would seem to be that if it were correct that philosophy is worth fostering, and that proficiency demands a classical education, then that would provide additional strength to the case for the availability of a classical education. But I doubt if the facts are as stated; I doubt if 'linguistic sensitivity' is the prerogative of either the well-to-do or of the products of any particular style of education. 53  Grice's attitude to his social environment may have been, or have become, somewhat ambivalent, but during the 1940s and 1950s he was central to the ordinary language philosophy movement. He attended Austin's Saturday Mornings regularly and enthusiastically. Outside these meetings, he worked collaboratively with other members of the group.He even collaborated with Austin himself, although in teaching rather than writing. The two taught joint sessions on Aristotle. Grice later claimed that these were particularly easy teaching sessions for him because no preparation was necessary. They would simply arrive in class and Austin would start talking, freely and spontaneously. At some point Grice would find something with which he disagreed and say so, 'and the class would begin'* It seems that their style of teaching often rested on each holding fast to an opposing position. Speaking long after he had left Oxford, Grice recalled Austin's typical response when challenged on some point: 'Well, if you don't like that argument, here's another one.'55 Grice may have been amused by Austin's view of philosophy in terms of 'winning', but he himself was not likely to back down on a position once he had taken it up. However, this method had its successes. Their pupil J. L. Ackrill went on to become a Fellow of Brasenose College, and to publish his own translation of Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione in 1963. Among his acknowledgements to those who had helped him in understanding these works, he comments:  I am conscious of having benefited particularly from a class given at  Oxford in 1956-7 by the late J. L. Austin and Mr H. P. Grice.'56  For Grice himself, the most fruitful collaboration during this period was the joint work he undertook with Peter Strawson. Strawson had gone up to Oxford in 1939 and had been Grice's tutee. He later commented that: 'tutorials with [Grice] regularly extended long beyond the customary hour, and from him I learned more of the difficulty and possibilities of philosophical argument than from anyone else.'" Strawson's career also had been interrupted by the war, and he did not gain a permanent position until 1948, when he was appointed Fellow of University College. He was one of the younger members of the Play Group, but nevertheless a central figure in ordinary language philosophy, and unusually successful in completing work. In 1950 he published 'On referring', in which he offered a response to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, an account that had been widely praised, and practically unchallenged, since it first appeared in 1905. Russell had argued that natural language can be misleading as to the structure of our knowledge of the world; Austin and his followers that, on the contrary, it is the best guide we have to that structure. Strawson suggests that, preoccupied with mathematics and logic, Russell had overlooked the fact that language is first and foremost a tool in communication. Russell had ignored the role of the speaker: '"mentioning", or "referring", is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do. Once an appropriate distinction is drawn between'a sentence' and 'a use of a sentence', it is possible to consider how most people would actually react on hearing the 'king of France' example (in which, for some reason, Strawson changes 'bald' to 'wise'). When used in 1950, or indeed in 1905, the example is not false. Rather, the question of whether it is true or false simply does not arise, precisely because the subject expression fails to pick out an individual in the world, and therefore the expression as a whole fails to say anything.  For Strawson, then, 'the king of France is wise' does not entail the existence of a unique king of France. Rather, it implies this existence in a 'special' way. In later work he uses the label 'presupposition' to describe this special type of implication. This was a term originally used by Frege in his discussion of denoting phrases and, like Frege, Strawson notes that presupposition is distinct from entailment because it is shared by both a sentence and its negation. Both 'the king of France is wise' and 'the king of France is not wise' share the presupposition that there exists a unique king of France, although their entailments contradict each other. On Russell's analysis, the negative sentence is ambiguous. Both the existence and the wisdom of the king of France are logical entailments, so either could be denied by negating the sen-tence. Strawson argues that Russell has attempted, inappropriately, to apply classical logic to what are in fact specific types of natural language use. 'Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language'; he concludes, 'for ordinary language has no exact logic.'60  Stawson and Grice taught together, covering topics such as meaning, categories and logical form. W. V. O. Quine, who attended some of their weekly seminars in the spring of 1954, paints a picture of these sessions:  Peter and Paul alternated from week to week in the roles of speaker and commentator. The speaker would read his paper and then the commentator would read his prepared comments. 'Towards the foot of page 9, I believe you said. Considered judgement was of the essence; spontaneity was not. When in its final phase the meeting was opened to public discussion, Peter and Paul were not outgoing.  'I'm not sure what to make of that question.' 'It depends, I should have thought, on what one means by .. 'This is a point that I shall think further about before the next meeting. '61  This style of debate was obviously not to Quine's taste, and there is certainly something reminiscent of Grice's former tutor W. F. R. Hardie in what he describes. Grice worked and talked very much within theformal and mannered social milieu of Oxford at the time. His lecture notes from the period, generall y written out in full, contain many references to what 'Mr Stawson proposed last week' or 'Mr Warnock has suggested'. But there is evidence also that the apparently prevaricating answers Quine ridicules were genuine responses to the complexity of the matter in hand. Grice often begins his lectures with a return to 'a question raised last week to which I had no answer'. Indeed, he later argued explicitly that philosophy works best not as a series of rapid retorts to impromptu questions, but as a slow and considered debate:  The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpov ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightening chess.  62  This slow, thoughtful style was carried over to the deliberation and composition of Grice and Strawson's writing and was, Grice later sug-gested, the reason why the collaboration eventually ceased. Strawson, who seems to have been much more interested in finished products than Grice was, eventually could no longer cope with the laborious process, in which complete agreement had to be reached over a sentence before anything could be written down. But it lasted long enough for Grice to be impressed by the 'extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport' they developed, such that 'the potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me.'63 One of their writing projects developed from their teaching on categories. Their topic dated back to Aristotle, and had also been discussed by Kant. It is a type of descriptive metaphysics, in that it involves analysis and classification towards an account of the very general notion of 'what there is'. In metaphysics, this account is offered in terms of the nature and status of reality, rather than in terms of the types of description of individual aspects of that reality to be found in the sciences. In particular, it is concerned with reality as reflected in human thought. Kant had argued that the study of human thinking is important precisely because it is the only guide we have to reality. The facts of 'things in themselves', aside from our human perceptions of them, are unknowable. For Aristotle, these questions had been closely linked to his interest in the study of language.  Human language is the best model we have available of human thought.  We structure our language to reflect the structure of our thought. So, for instance, the division of sentences into subjects and predicatesreflects the way we cognitively divide the world into things and attrib-utes, or particulars and universals.  Grice and Strawson's long, slow collaboration on this topic was not very productive, by modern standards at least, in that it resulted in no published work. But Grice himself valued it very highly, and commented late in his life that he had always kept the manuscripts with him. Unfortunately, only a fragment of these appears to have survived.  However, this is accompanied by rough notes indicating something of their working method. They apply a distinctively 'Austinian' approach to Aristotle's use of language, experimenting together to see which English words can successfully combine with which others, trying out combinations of possible subjects and predicates. Notes in Grice's hand record that 'healthy' can be applied to, or predicated of, 'person', 'place'  'occupation', or 'institution', while 'medical' can be applied to 'lecture'  'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription', and 'advice'. 65 Grice notes that the neutral term 'employment' can cover the importantly different terms 'use', 'sense' and 'meaning', and that here it is perhaps most appropriate to say that the predicate has the particular range of 'uses'. This aspect of the work seems to take over Grice's attention at one point. The notions of 'sense', 'meaning' and 'use' need to be distinguished not just from each other, but between discussions of sentences and of speakers. 'Need to distinguish all these from cases where speaker might mean so-and-so or such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of the sentence' he notes, '"Jones is between Williams and Brown" either spatial order or order of merit, but doubtful this renders it an ambiguous sentence.'  The notes also explore the difference in grammatical distribution between substantial and non-substantial nouns. 'Mercy' can be both referred to and predicated, whereas 'Socrates' can only be referred to.  In other words, it seems that although both substantials and non-substantials can occupy subject position, substantials must be seen as the primary occupiers of this slot because they cannot occur as predi-cates. To demonstrate this point he distinguishes between establishing existence by referring to, and by predicating, expressions. The distinction is established by means of a comparison between two short dia-logues. The following is perfectly acceptable; evidence is successfully offered for the existence of a universal by predicating it of a particular:  Bunbury is really disinterested. Disinterested persons (real disinterestedness) does not exist. A: Yes they do (it does); Bunbury is really disinterested.In contrast descriptive statements do not guarentee the existence of their subjects, but rather stand in a 'special relation' to statements of existence. This special relation is, they note, elsewhere called 'presup-position'; it seems that at this stage at least, Grice was prepared to endorse Strawson's response to Russell. The following is 'not linguistically in order :  Bunbury is really disinterested. There is no such person as Bunbury. A: Yes there is, he is really disinterested.  Producing a sentence in which something is predicated of a substantial subject is not enough to guarentee the existence of that subject. They note that the situation would be quite different if 'in the next room' were substituted into A's response. Here A's choice of predicate does more than just offer a description of Bunbury; it points to a way of verifying his existence. Our use of language, then, very often presupposes the existence of substantial objects. Furthermore, substances are in a sense the basic, or primary objects of reference. Grice and Strawson admit that they have no conclusive proof of this latter claim, but they offer their own intuitions in support, presumably drawn from their experiments with substantial and non-substantial subjects. Further, substances are, in general, what we are most interested in talking about, asking about, issuing orders about; 'indeed the primacy of substance is deeply embedded in our language'  Grice later suggested that the closest echoes of this joint work in published writing were in Strawson's book Individuals, subtitled 'An essay in descriptive metaphysics', published in 1959. In this Strawson considers in much more detail the implications of various kinds of descriptive sentences for the theory of presupposition. But there were also resonances of the joint project in various aspects of Grice's own later work. Two points from the end of the manuscript fragment, one a non-linguistic parallel and one a consequence of their position, indicate these. The parallel comes from a consideration of the basic needs for survival and the attainment of satisfaction people experience as living creatures. Processes such as 'eating', 'drinking', 'being hurt by', 'using',  'finding', are entirely dependent on transactions with substances. Grice and Strawson suggest that it is not entirely fanciful to consider that the structure of language has developed to reflect the structure of these most basic interactions with the world.The relevant consequence of their position relates to a familiar target for ordinary language philosophers: the theory of sense data. Their argument is in essence a version of the argument from common sense, although they do not explicitly acknowledge this. If substances are a primary focus of interest, and if this fact is reflected in the language, then this offers good evidence that the world must indeed be substantial in character. If the proponents of sense data were correct, if all we can accurately discuss are the individual sensations we receive through our sense, then 'substantial terminology would have no application'. Of course, this argument is fundamentally dependent on faith in ordinary language. In effect it claims that, since people talk about, and indeed focus their talk on, material objects, we have adequate grounds for accepting that material objects exist.  The second major collaboration between Grice and Strawson, which produced their only jointly published paper, was composed uncharacteristically rapidly. It was written in the same year as Quine observed their joint seminars, and indeed was in direct response to his visit.  Quine introduced to Oxford an American style of philosophy. This had its roots in logical positivism, but had developed in rather different directions. In particular, Quine's empiricism took the form of an extreme scepticism towards meaning. He argued that it was legitimate to look at meaning in terms of how words are used to refer to objects in the world, but not to discuss meanings as if they had some existence independent of the set of such uses. In an essay published in 1953 he argues that the error of attributing independent existence to meaning explains the tenacity of the doctrine of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, even in empirical philosophies where it should have been abandoned.  Quine argues that, although it is a basic doctrine of many empirical theories, the analytic/synthetic distinction is inherently unempirical. It relies on the notion that words have meaning independent of individ-ual, observable instances of use. The sentence 'no bachelor is married' can be judged analytic and therefore necessarily true only on the assumption that 'bachelor' is synonymous with 'unmarried man'. Yet such an assumption depends on a commitment to abstract meaning. It is legitimate only to consider the range of phenomena to which the two terms are applied, a process that must inevitably be open-ended. In other words, we are committed to the truth of so-called analytic sentences for exactly the same reason that we are committed to the truth of certain synthetic sentences, such as 'Brutus killed Caesar'  Our past  experience of the world, including our experience of how the words ofour language are applied, has led us to accept them as true. However, our belief in any statement established on empirical grounds is subject to revision in the light of new experience. We may find it hard to imagine what experience could lead us to abandon belief in 'no bachelor is married', but that is simply because of the strength of our particular empirical commitment to it. The difference between analytic and synthetic statements, then, is not an absolute one, but simply a matter of degree. The distinction reflects 'the relative likelihood, in practice, of choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience'.66  One weekend during Quine's 1953-4 visit, Grice and Strawson put together their response to this argument, to be presented at a seminar on the Monday. In 1956 Strawson revised the paper on his own and sent it to The Philosophical Review, where it was published as 'In defence of a dogma'. Their defence is exactly of the type that Quine might have expected to encounter in Oxford in the 1950s; it rests on the way in which some of the key terms are actually used. The terms 'analytic' and  'synthetic' have a venerable pedigree. Generations of philosophers have found them useful in discussions of language and, moreover, are generally able to reach consensus over how they apply to novel, as well as to familiar examples. But the argument does not end with philosophical usage. Grice and Strawson argue that closely related distinctions can be found in everyday speech. The notion of analyticity rests, as Quine had noted, on the validity of synonymy. The expression 'synonymous' may not be very common in everyday speech, but the equivalent predicate 'means the same as' certainly is. Borrowing an example from Quine's essay, Grice and Strawson note that 'creature with a heart' is extensionally equivalent to 'creature with kidneys'; it picks out the same group of entities in the world precisely because all creatures with a heart also have kidneys. However, Grice and Stawson argue that the relationship between these two expressions is not the same as that between  'bachelor' and 'unmarried man'. Many people would be happy to accept that '"bachelor" means the same as "unmarried man"' but would reject  '"creature with a heart" means the same as "creature with kidneys"'.  In effect, Grice and Strawson are defending the existence of exactly the type of meaning Quine dismisses. The element distinguishing the second pair of terms, but not the first, cannot be anything to do with the objects in the world they are used to label, because in this they are exactly equivalent. Rather, there must be some further notion of  'meaning' that people are aware of when they deny that 'creature with heart' and 'creature with kidneys' mean the same. It is this notion ofmeaning, which forms part of the description of the language but does not directly relate to the world it describes, that Quine rules inadmissi-ble. This also allows for the existence of analytic sentences. 'A bachelor is an unmarried man' is analytic precisely because its subject means the same as its predicate. This can be confirmed by studying just the lan-guage, not the world. In much the same way, the meaning of some sentences makes them impossible in the face of any experience. That is, we just cannot conceive of any evidence that would lead us to acknowledge them as true. Grice and Strawson contrast 'My neighbour's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types' with 'My neighbour's three-year-old-child is an adult. The first may well strike us as impossible, but we can nevertheless imagine the sort of evidence that would force us, however reluctantly, to change our mind and accept it as true. But in the second case, unless we allow that the words are being used figuratively or metaphorically, there is just no evidence that could be produced to lead us to change our minds. The impossibility of the second example is entirely dependent on the meanings of the words it contains.  It is clear that the nature of analytic and synthetic sentences, and of our knowledge of them, exercised Grice a good deal both at this time and later. Kathleen Grice recalls that, during the 1950s, he delighted in questioning his children's playmates about 'whether something can be red and green all over'  ', and enjoyed their subsequent confusion, insist-  ing that spots and stripes were not allowed. As he observes in his own notes, 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is a supposed candidate for a statement that is both synthetic and a priori. Grice was presumably amusing himself by testing this claim out on some genuinely naive informants. In later years, he expressed himself still committed to the validity of the distinction between synthetic and analytic sentences, and indeed as seeing this as one of the most crucial of philosophical issues.  However, he had grown unhappy with his and Strawson's original defence of it. In particular, he no longer felt that it was enough to argue that the distinction is embedded in philosophical conscience. The argument indicates that the distinction is intelligible, in that it is possible to explain what philosophers mean by it, but not that it is theoretically necessary. In other words, 'the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny'? Certainly their case in defence of the distinction may seem rather weak as a piece of ordinary language philosophy. Austin had rejected other terms, such as 'sense data', precisely because theiruse seemed to be restricted to philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, philosophers as distinguished as Anthony Quinton found their argument against Quine compelling, paraphrasing them as saying that: 'An idea does not become technical simply by being dressed up in an ungainly polysyllable.' Grice never really returned to the task of mounting a new defence for the distinction, although he maintained that it was important and, crucially, 'doable'. 72  Grice's other major collaboration of the 1950s was with Geoffrey Warnock, a regular member of the Play Group, and later Principal of Hertford College. As with Strawson, Grice's collaboration with Warnock grew out of a joint teaching venture, and again this took the form of a series of evening lectures at which they alternated as speaker and com-mentator. The pace was leisurely and exploratory; a single topic might be developed over the course of a term, or even over successive years.  Their theme was perception, the subject of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia lectures. In these, Austin had applied his method of trying out examples to investigate shades of meaning for some of the relevant termi-nology. For instance, he argued that the terms 'looks', 'appears' and  'seems', which Ayer had assumed to be as good as synonymous, in fact displayed some striking differences in meaning when considered in a set such as 'the hill looks steep', 'the hill appears steep', 'the hill seems steep'73  Warnock has commented that, perhaps because of the intense treatment in these lectures, the vocabulary of perception was never discussed on Saturday mornings.* However, this was an omission that he and Grice made up for in private; their surviving notes are full of lists of words and usages by means of which they hoped to discover the understanding of perception embedded in the language. For instance, they draw up a list headed 'Syntax of Illusion', considering the various constructions in which the word 'illusion' can appear, and the shades of meaning associated with these. 'Be under the illusion (that)' and 'have the illusion (that)' are grouped together, presumably as predicates that can attach to people. 'Gives the illusion (that)' and 'creates the illusion (that)' are listed separately, with the note that these might 'apply exclusively to cases where anyone might be expected, in the circs, to handle the illusion'. The example 'it is an illusion' is accompanied by the unanswered question 'what is it?"7s  Grice and Warnock are concerned here with the so-called 'argument from illusion'. This had been put forward by a number of philosophers in support of the need to explain perception in terms of sense data. Austin spends a considerable proportion of Sense and Sensibiliaattacking Ayer over exactly this issue, although he acknowledges that Ayer's commitment to it is tentative. The argument draws on the fact that in a number of more or less mundane situations things appear to be other than they in fact are. For instance, a stick placed partially in water has the appearance of being bent, even though it is perfectly straight. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, your body appears to be located several feet behind the mirror when in fact it is located several feet in front of it. In these cases, the argument goes, there must be something that looks bent, or behind the mirror, that is distinct from the material object in question. The term 'sense data' is necessary in order to discuss this; the individual receives sense data that are distinct from the material object in question. From here, the argument is extended to cover all perception, even when no such illusions are involved. Seeing these types of illusion does not feel like a qualitatively different experience from seeing things as they actually are, hence it would be bizarre to maintain that the object of perception is of one kind in the cases of illusion and of another kind in other cases. It must be the case that all we ever do perceive are sense data, not material objects themselves.  Austin spends several lectures addressing these issues, arguing that it is an unnecessary imposition to claim that there must be one type of object of perception. Ayer and others have illegitimately assumed that optical illusions, such as the ones discussed, along with dreams, mirages, hallucinations and various other phenomena can all be explained in the same way. Rather, we see a whole host of different entities in different situations. These different types of experience are in fact generally fairly easy to distinguish, as any reflection on the language available to discuss them will reveal. People ordinarily are quite capable of saying that 'the stick looks bent but it is really straight'; it is philosophical sophistry to claim that there must be something, distinct from the stick itself, which has the 'look' in question. With typical bluntness, Austin dismisses the question of what you see when you see a bent stick as 'really, completely mad'. And with perhaps some sleight of hand he dismisses the mirror example by arguing that what actually is several feet behind the mirror is 'not a sense datum, but some region in the adjoining room'.76  In their lectures on perception, Grice and Warnock take up the question of whether or not it is legitimate to talk of any intermediary between material objects and our perceptions of them. They notice an asymmetry between the senses, or at least the vocabulary that describes them. The verbs 'hear', 'smell' and 'taste' can all take objects that donot describe material phenomena. It is possible to 'hear a car', but is equally possible to 'hear the sound of a car'  . In a similar way, it is pos-  sible to describe the 'smell of a cheese' or the 'taste of a cake'. This is not the case for the other two senses. The objects of touch are always material and not, or not primarily, the 'feeling' of material things.  Feeling, they note, perhaps entails having sensations, but it is not the case that these sensations are what we feel. Furthermore, there is no word at all to occupy this intermediary place in the case of sight. Certainly there is no general word analogous to 'sounds'. This conclusion was not reached lightly. Notes in Grice's hand on the back of an envelope try out a list of words in an attempt to find a suitable candidate for the role, but all are rejected. The following types of objects, he notes, fail to fit the bill because they are not universal objects of seeing;  'surface, colour, aspect, view, sight, gleam, appearance...' can all be used, but only in special circumstances. In most cases, we simply talk of seeing the object in question.  In response to this lack of a word analogous to 'sound', Grice and Warnock do something rather surprising for philosophers of ordinary language; they make one up. They introduce the word 'visa' to describe the non-material intermediaries between material objects and sight.  Commenting later on this enterprise, Grice was keen to point out that ordinary language philosophy did not in fact rule out the introduction of jargon, so long as it was what he rather enigmatically describes as  'properly introduced'." Their manoeuvre was rather different from that of introducing a technical term such as 'sense data',  ', and then basing a  philosophy around the existence of sense data. Instead, they were giving a name to what they had discovered to be a gap in the language in order to explore the language itself: to consider why no such word, and therefore presumably no such concept, was necessary. Their suggestion is that sight and touch are the two essential senses. That is, they are the senses on which we rely most closely to tell us about the material world. Touch is primary. Material objects are most essentially present to us through touch, and this is the sense we would be least ready to disbelieve.  However, because our capacity to touch material objects at any one time is limited, we rely to varying degrees on our other senses. Of these, sight correlates most closely with touch. It offers us the best indication of what an object would feel like. It is also more constant; an object capable of being heard may sometimes fail to produce its distinctive sound, but an object capable of being seen cannot fail to produce its  'visum'. For precisely this reason, the word 'visum', to describe something separate from the object producing it, does not exist.There are two possible accounts of the absence of a word such as  'visum'. The stronger account is that there is no space in the language for such a word; it could not exist. The weaker claim is that such a word could exist, but there is simply no need for it, because we never need to talk about the perceptions of sight without talking about material objects themselves. Warnock held to the stronger view and Grice to the weaker. This difference seems to have been rather a fraught one; Grice begins one lecture with the following extended metaphor.  I begin with an apology (or apologia). Last week it might well have appeared to some that W. was doing the digging while I was administering the digs. I should not like it to be thought that I am not in sympathy with his main ideas about 'visa'; the only question in my mind is precisely what form an answer on his general lines should take; and if I am busier with the awl than with the spade, the reason (aside from ineptitude with the latter instrument) is that I am pretty sure that he is digging in the right place.  78  It seems that the previous week Warnock had argued that if there were a word 'visum'  ', then, analogous to sound, it would have to be possible  to say that a material object could be 'visumless', but that this would not fit into our existing conceptual framework. Grice's argument is that if we want to use such a word, we can always make use of one of his suggestions, such as 'colour expanse'. It is probably correct to say that whenever we see a material object we see a colour expanse, but such an expression is reserved for those occasions when appearance and reality differ. It would not be strictly false to use them on other occasions, but:  'it would be unnatural or odd to employ this expression outside a limited range of situations, just because the empirical facts about perception mentioned by W. ensure that normally we are in a position to use stronger and more informative language! Grice's implication is that if a speaker is in a position to say something more informative, the less informative statement would not be used.  There was no joint publication for Grice and Warnock. On his own, Warnock did publish in this general field, although he did not make direct use of the notion of 'visa'. His 1955 paper to the Aristotelian Society, 'Seeing', is chiefly concerned with a close examination of 'the actual employment of the verb "to see"' 79 Warnock considers the implications of the various categories of object that the verb commonly takes.  In a footnote he acknowledges his general debt to 'Mr H. P. Grice'. Grice himself made even less direct use of their joint project in his own laterwork, although in the early 1960s he published two papers concerned with general questions about the status of perception. Later in that same decade he wrote a reflection on Descartes, although this was not published for more than 20 years.81 Descartes's scepticism leads Grice to reconsider the claims of phenomenalism, and to argue for a clearer distinction between 'truth-conditions', 'establishment-conditions' and  'reassurance-conditions' for statements about material objects.  It is evident that in drawing on the vocabulary of perception, Grice and Warnock were not just dutifully following Austin's lead; both were enthusiastic about the enterprise, and impressed by its results. Warnock recalls that at one point during this process Grice exclaimed, 'How clever language is!', and goes on himself to gloss this remark by explaining:  'We found that it made for us some remarkably ingenious distinctions and assimilations.'8 At this stage at least, Grice was committed to the close study of ordinary language as a productive philosophical enter-prise, and to Austin's notion of 'linguistic botanising' as a philosophical tool. He was very much a part of the social, as well as the philosophical, milieu of 1950s Oxford. He and Kathleen still lived on the Woodstock Road with their children Karen and Tim, born in 1944 and 1950. However, he took a full and active role in the life of St John's College which meant dining there frequently. Kathleen remembers the college as a distant, hierarchical institution. Women were permitted to enter college only once a year, when the porters and college servants arranged a Christmas party for the wives and children of Fellows.83 Quine's thumbnail sketch of his impressions of Grice in 1953, unflattering in the extreme, suggests that his concern for college proprieties was even stronger than his disregard for personal appearance:  Paul was shabby... His white hair was sparse and stringy, he was missing some teeth, and his clothes interested him little. He was vice-president of St John's college, and when I came as guest to a great annual feast there I was bewildered to encounter him impeccably decked out in white tie and tails, strictly fashion-plate.84  The vice-presidentship in question was a one-year appointment, and seems to have been largely social in nature, concerned with the organ-isation and running of college events. However, Grice's academic standing was also rising; in 1948 he was appointed to a University lectureship in addition to his college fellowship. This meant giving lectures open to all members of the university, in addition to the tutorial teaching duties at St. John's. Grice was also making a growing number of visitsaway from Oxford to give lectures and seminars. Most significantly, he began to make fairly frequent trips to America, where he was invited to speak at various universities. He was in fact one of the few to talk about ordinary language philosophy outside Oxford at that time, giving the lecture later published as 'Post-War Oxford Philosophy' at Wellesley College, Massachusetts in 1958.8 However, during this time he was gradually moving away from some of the strictures and dogmas of that approach. In many ways, Grice never fully abandoned ordinary language philosophy; his notes testify to the fact that he frequently returned to it as a method, in particular using 'linguistic botany' to get his thinking started on some topic. However, his philosophy began to diverge from it during this period in some highly significant ways that were to make themselves manifest in his best known work.G rice's growing unease with ordinary language philosophy brought him into conflict with J. L. Austin. Speaking long after leaving Oxford, he mentioned that he himself had always got on well with Austin, at least  'as far as you can get on with someone on the surface so uncosy'! But he clearly found that engaging with him in philosophical discussion could be a frustrating enterprise. Austin would adopt a stance on some particular aspect of language, often formed on the basis of a very small number of examples, and defend his position against a barrage of objections and counter-examples, however obvious. His tenacity in this would be impressive; Grice knew he himself had won an argument only on those occasions when Austin did not return to the topic the following week.  There is something in this reminiscent of the criticisms of obstinacy levelled against Grice himself as an undergraduate. However, it seems that there was more to Grice's frustration than simply encountering someone even less ready to back down in an argument than he was himself. He was becoming increasingly unhappy with the methodology supporting Austin's hasty hypothesis formation: the absolute reliance on particular linguistic examples. It is not that Grice lost faith in the importance of ordinary language or the value of close attention to differences in usage. However, along with some of Austin's harsher and more outspoken critics, Grice came to regard his approach as unfocused and even trivial. In his reminiscences of Oxford, he complained that Austin's ability to distinguish the philosophically interesting from the mundane was so poor that the Saturday morning Play Group sometimes ended up devoting an inordinate amount of time to irrelevant minu-tiae. They once spent five weeks trying to discern some philosophically interesting differences between 'very' and 'highly', considering why, forinstance, we say 'very unhappy' but not 'highly unhappy'. The result was 'total failure'. On another occasion, Austin proposed to launch a discussion of the philosophical concept of Pleasure with a consideration of such phrases as I have the pleasure to announce..!. Stuart Hampshire remarked to Grice that this was rather like meeting to discuss the nature of Faith, and proceeding to discuss the use of 'yours faithfully'.  In a similar vein, Grice was far from convinced that Austin's trusted method of 'going through the dictionary' had much to offer in the way of philosophical illumination. Speaking publicly in the 1970s, he commented that he once decided to put this method to the test by using it to investigate the vocabulary of emotions. He started at the beginning of a dictionary in search of words that could complement the verb 'to feel'. He gave up towards the end of the Bs, on discovering that the verb would tolerate 'Byzantine', and realising that 'the list would be enor-mous'? He never found any satisfactory way of narrowing such a list so as to include only philosophically interesting examples, and clearly believed that Austin had no such method either. Grice did not hesitate to explain his views to Austin, whose reply was typical of both his commitment to his methodology, and his intransigent response to opposi-tion. Grice reports himself as commenting that he, for one, 'didn't give a hoot what the dictionary says', to which Austin retorted, 'and that's where you make your big mistake. 3  The differences between Austin and Grice were not simply matters of personality or even of methodology. They reflected some important ways in which the two philosophers disagreed over what was appropriate in an account of language. Grice was increasingly convinced of the necessity for explanations that took the form of general theories, rather than the ad hoc descriptions that were Austin's trademark. He believed that Austin should be prepared to go further in drawing out the theoretical implications of his individual observations. Indeed, it has been suggested that Austin was suspicious of broad theories, generally supposing them to be over-ambitious and premature.* Grice also differed from Austin in his growing conviction that a distinction needed to be recognised between what words literally or conventionally mean, and what speakers may use them to mean on particular occasions. This conviction is not present in his earliest work. In 'Personal identity', for instance, he writes of 'words' and of 'the use of words' interchangeably.  However, the distinction is the subject of the long digression in his notes for the 'Categories' project with Strawson. It was to play an increasingly prominent part in his work, and to set him apart mostsharply from the orthodoxies of ordinary language philosophy. For Austin, as for Wittgenstein in his later work, use was the best, indeed the only, legitimate guide to meaning. The privilege afforded to use left no room for a distinction between this and literal meaning. Grice did not claim that actual use is unimportant. Indeed, in many of his writings he studied it with as much zeal as Austin. Rather, he saw it as a reliable guide just to what people often communicate, not necessarily to strict linguistic meaning.  Both the general interest in explanatory theories and the more particular focus on the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning are apparent in 'Meaning', a short but hugely influential article first published in 1957. It is tempting to trace the development of Grice's ideas through his work during the 1950s, but in fact this is ruled out by the article's history. Grice wrote the paper in practically its final form in 1948 for a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society but, as usual, he was hesitant to disseminate his ideas more widely. Almost a decade later, Peter Strawson was worried that the Oxford philosophers were not sufficiently represented in print. Unable to convince Grice to revise his paper and send it to a journal, he persuaded him to hand over the manuscript as it stood. Strawson and his wife Ann edited it and submitted it to the Philosophical Review. The paper therefore dates in fact from before Grice's collaborations with Warnock and with Strawson, from before Austin's development of speech act theory, and before even the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind.  'Meaning' offers a deceptively straightforward-looking account of meaning, apparently based on a common-sense belief about the use of language. In effect, Grice argues that what speakers mean depends on what they intend to communicate. However, his project is much more ambitious, and its implications more far-reaching, and also more prob-lematic, than this suggests. First, he introduces hearers, as well as speak-ers, into the account of meaning. The intention to communicate is not sufficient; this intention must be recognised by some audience for the communication to succeed. Hence the speaker must have an additional intention that the intention to communicate is recognised. More sig-nificantly, Grice proposes to broaden out his account to offer a theory of linguistic meaning itself. Linguistic meaning depends on speaker meaning, itself explained by the psychological phenomenon of inten-tion; conventional meaning is to be defined in terms of psychology.  In the opening paragraphs of 'Meaning', Grice does something Austin seems never to have attempted. He focuses the methodology of ordinary language philosophy on the concept of meaning itself, consider-ing and comparing some different ways in which the word 'mean' is used. His conclusion is that there are two different uses of 'mean' reflecting two different ways in which we generally conceive of meaning. The first use is exemplified by sentences such as 'those spots mean measles' and 'the recent budget means that we shall have a hard year'. The second includes examples such as 'those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full' and 'that remark, "Smith couldn't get on without his trouble and strife", meant that Smith found his wife indispensable'. Grice draws up a list of five defining differences between these sets of examples, differences themselves expressed in terms of linguistic relations. For instance, the first, but not the second set of examples entail the truth of what is meant. It is not possible to add 'but he hasn't got measles', but it is possible is to add 'but the bus isn't in fact full - the conductor has made a mistake'. Further, the examples in the first set do not convey the idea that anyone meant anything by the spots or by the budget. It is, however, possible to say that someone meant something by the rings on the bell (the conductor) and by the remark (the original speaker). And only in the second set of examples can the verb 'mean' be followed by a phrase in quotation marks. So 'those three rings on the bell mean "the bus is full"' is pos-sible, but not 'those spots mean "measles"'.  Grice characterises the difference between his two sets of uses for  'mean' as a difference between natural and non-natural meaning. The latter, which includes but is not exhausted by linguistic meaning, he abbreviates to 'meaningn'. In pursuing the question of what makes  'meaning' distinctive, he considers but rejects a 'causal' answer. He offers the following as a summary of this type of answer, paraphrasing and partly quoting C. L. Stevenson:  For x to meann something, x must have (roughly) a tendency to produce in an audience some attitude (cognitive or otherwise) and the tendency, in the case of a speaker, to be produced by that atti-tude, these tendencies being dependent on 'an elaborate process of conditioning attending the use of the sign in communication'.  This account makes the causal answer look very much like be-haviourism, with its notion of meaning as, in effect, the tendency for certain responses to be exhibited to certain stimuli. However, in the work from which Grice quotes, a book called Ethics and Language published in 1944, Stevenson is careful to distance himself from straightforwardly behaviouristic psychology. He argues that such an accountwould be too simplistic to explain a process as complex as linguistic meaning because it could refer only to overt, observable behaviour.  Rather, meaning is a psychologically complex phenomenon. The  'responses' produced will include cognitive responses, such as belief and emotion. Therefore, any account in terms of responsive action must be allowed 'to supplement an introspective analysis, not to discredit it'.  Stevenson, like Grice after him, draws attention to a distinction between two ways in which 'mean' is used, although he does so only in passing. He, too, defines one class of meaning as 'natural', a class he illustrates by suggesting that 'a reduced temperature may at times  "mean" convalescence'? He contrasts these uses of 'mean' with linguistic meaning which, he argues, is dependent on convention. The ways in which speakers use words on individual occasions may vary considerably, but conventional meaning must be seen as primary and relatively stable, underlying any of the more specific meanings in context. A word may be used in context to 'suggest' many things over and above what by convention it 'means'.  '. So, for instance, the sentence  'John is a remarkable athlete' may have a disposition to make people think that John is tall, 'but we should not ordinarily say that it "meant" anything about tallness, even though it "suggested" it'. The connection between 'athlete' and 'tall' is not one of linguistic rule, so tallness cannot be part of the meaning, however strongly it is suggested. What is suggested can sometimes be even more central, as in the cases of metaphors. Here, a sentence is 'not taken' in its literal meaning, but can be paraphrased using an 'interpretation' that 'descriptively means what the metaphorical sentence suggests'?  Grice's critique of the 'causal' theory of meaning includes a response to Stevenson's 'athlete' example. He argues that, in declaring 'tallness' to be suggested rather than meant, Stevenson is in effect pointing to the fact that it is possible to speak of 'nontall athletes': that there is no contradiction in terms here. This argument, Grice claims, is circular. He does not elaborate this point, but he presumably means that in establishing the acceptability of this way of speaking we need to refer to the conventions of linguistic behaviour, yet it is these very conventions we are seeking to establish. Grice adds that, on Stevenson's account, it would be difficult to exclude forms of behaviour we would not normally want to regard as communicative at all. It may well be the case that many people, seeing someone putting on a tailcoat, would form the belief that that person is about to go to a dance, and that the belief would arise because that is conventional behaviour in such circum-stances. But it could hardly be correct to conclude that putting on a tail-coat means n that one is about to go to a dance. To qualify by stating that the conventions invoked must be communicative simply introduces another circle: 'We might just as well say "X has meaning. if it is used in communication", which, though true, is not helpful.'o As a solution to the problems inherent in the notion of conventional behaviour, Grice introduces intention, doing so abruptly and without much elaboration. However, the concept would probably not have been much of a surprise to his original audience in 1948, having had a long pedigree in Oxford philosophy. Grice later commented that his interest in intention was inspired in part by G. F. Stout's 'Voluntary action' Stout was a previous editor of Mind, and his article was published there in 1896. In it he argues that if voluntary action is to be distinguished from involuntary action in terms of 'volition', it is necessary to offer a unique account of volition, distinguishing it from will or desire. He suggests that in the case of volition, but not of simple desire, there is necessarily 'a certain kind of judgement or belief', namely that 'so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the attainment of the desired end'." Indeed, if there is any doubt about the outcome of the volition, expressed in a conditional statement, this must refer to circumstances outside our control. This explains the difference between willing something and merely wishing for it. However, there is another crucial distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. In the case of the former, the action takes place precisely because of the relevant belief; a voluntary action happens because we judge that we will do it. An involuntary action may be one we judge is going to take place, but only because other factors have already determined this.  Further light is shed on Grice's interest in intention by a paper called  'Disposition and intention' he circulated among his colleagues just a few years after he had first written 'Meaning'. The paper was never pub-lished, and has survived only in manuscript, accompanied by a number of written responses in different hands. Reading these, it is not hard to imagine how a writer who tended towards perfectionism and self-doubt could be further dissuaded from publication by the results of canvassing opinion. Oxford criticism might be couched in genteel terms, but it could be harsh. One commentary begins: 'What it comes to, I think, is this; it seems to me that there is something wrong with the way Grice  goes to work....  ^ In 'Dispositions and intentions', Grice declares that  his purpose is to consider the best analysis of 'psychological concepts', concepts generally expressed in statements beginning with phrases such as 'I like.., 'I want..!, I expect... Such statements present analytical problems because they seem to refer to experience that is essen-tially private and unverifiable. Grice proposes to compare two common approaches to this problem. One he labels the 'dispositional' account, whereby the relevant concept is seen as a disposition to act in certain ways in certain hypothetical situations. Thus a statement of 'I like X' could be seen as specifying that the subject would act in certain ways in the interests of X, should the situation arise. The alternative is to consider such statements as describing 'special episodes', in other words to concede that they can be understood as descriptive only of private sensations, directed simply at the individual concept in question. These sensations take the form of special and highly specific psychological entities, such as liking-feelings'. Grice is dismissive of a third pos-sibility, an explanation from behaviourism describing psychological concepts purely in terms of observable responses. He rejects such approaches as 'silly'.  Grice argues that although the dispositional account runs into difficulty in certain cases, such as 'I want..!, 'I expect..' and, signifi-cantly, T intend.., it is not appropriate simply to switch to the 'special episode' account. The problems for the dispositional account are connected to their analysis in terms of hypotheticals. It would seem reasonable in the case of any genuine hypothetical to ask 'how do you know?' or 'what are your grounds for saying that?'. But in the case of the psychological concepts mentioned above, no such evidence can generally be offered, or reasonably expected. Speakers cannot be expected to be judging such concepts from observation, not even from a special vantage point; they can only be judging from personal ex-perience. In Grice's metaphor, 'I am not in the audience, not even in the front row of the stalls, I am on the stage.'3 The 'special episode' account does not fare much better. Every case of wanting, for instance, must create a separate psychological episode. The system of explanation quickly becomes unwieldy; wanting an apple, for instance, must be a discrete phenomenon, different from wanting an orange or a pear or a banana.  The third alternative, any version of a behaviourist account, is simply doomed to failure in cases such as 'want'. Grice singles Gilbert Ryle out for criticism. Ryle's account of psychological concepts is at best not clearly distinguished from behaviourism because of its ambiguity over whether the evidential counterparts of dispositions can be private or must always be observable by other people. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle describes certain statements concerned with psychological concepts as acts characteristic of certain moods. This is in keeping with his refusal to distinguish between physical and mental entities or activities. Whenwe feel bored, we are likely to utter 'I feel bored' in just the same way as we are likely to yawn. We do not observe our own mood and then offer an account of it; we simply act in accordance with it. Thus the statement is not produced as a result of assessing the evidence, but may itself form part of that relevant evidence, even to the speaker. 'So the bored man finds out he is bored, if he does find this out, by finding that among other things he glumly says to others and to himself "I feel bored" and "How bored I feel" '14 In response to such statements, we may want to ask 'sincere or shammed?', but not 'true or false?'. This is because statements such as 'I feel bored', ' I want..!' or 'I hope ..! act not as descriptive statements about ourselves but as 'avowals': unreflective utterances that may be treated as pieces of behaviour indicative of our frame of mind. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions, Ryle argues that the grammatical form of such sentences 'makes it tempting to misconstrue [them] as self-descriptions'. 15 In fact they are simply things said in the relevant frames of mind. However, unlike other forms of behaviour, speech is produced to be interpreted.  Grice argues that the difference between speech and other forms of behaviour is much greater than Ryle allows. In particular, while it is possible to 'sham' behaviour such as yawning without being false, a  'shammed' statement of 'I feel bored' will be simply false. A statement of boredom is not of the same order as a yawn when it comes to offering information precisely because, as Ryle acknowledges, it is uttered voluntarily and deliberately. Grice adds another possible indicator of boredom into the comparison. When listening to a political speech, we might give an indication that we feel bored by saying 'I feel bored', by yawning, or indeed by making a remark such as 'there is a good play coming on next week'. This last remark is also voluntary and deliber-ate, but it does not offer anything like the same strength of evidence of our state of boredom as the alleged 'avowal', precisely because it is not directly concerned with our state of mind. Only 'I am bored' is a way of telling someone that you are bored. Furthermore, although it might be possible to some extent to sustain a theory of avowals or other behav-iour as offering information about the state of mind of others, it will hardly do for one's own state of mind. A man does not need to wait to observe himself heading for the plate of fruit on the table before he is a position to know that he wants pineapple.  Grice's suggested solution to the apparent failure of the 'dispositional' and the 'special event' accounts, together with the unsustainability of a behaviourist approach, rests on intention. When analysing manyverbs of psychological attitude used to refer to someone else, we can produce a straightforward hypothetical, saying 'if so and so were the case he would behave in such and such a way'. However, the same does not seem to be the case when talking about oneself. 'If so and so were the case I would behave in such and such a way' cannot really be understood as a statement of hypothetical fact, but as a statement of hypothetical intention, just so long as the behaviour in question can be seen as voluntary. Further, it is simply not possible to say 'I am not sure whether I intend.', in the way it is possible to doubt other psychological states. It might be possible to utter such a sentence meaning-fully, but only to express indecision over the act in question, as when someone replies to the question 'Do you intend... ?' by saying 'I'm not sure'  '. It cannot mean that the speaker does not know whether he or she  is in a psychological state of intending or not.  Grice argues that a correct analysis of intention can form an important basis for the analysis of a number of the relevant psychological con-cepts. He offers a twofold definition of statements of intention, which relies on dispositional evidence without divorcing itself completely from the privileged status of introspective knowledge. The first crite-rion, familiar from Stout's original paper, is that the speaker's freedom from doubt that the intended action will take place is not dependent on any empirical evidence. Grice's second stipulation is that the speaker must be prepared to take the necessary steps to bring about the fulfil-ment of the intention. There would be something decidedly odd about stating seriously, 'X intends to go abroad next month, but wouldn't take any preliminary steps which are essential for this purpose'. Grice's analysis of statements of intention ends his unpublished paper rather abruptly, without returning to the other psychological verbs discussed at the outset. Having established that a doubt over one's own intention is something of an absurdity, he offers a characteristically tantalis-ing suggestion that 'we may hope that this may help to explain the absurdity of analogous expressions mentioning some other psychological concepts, though I wouldn't for a moment claim that it will help to explain all such absurdities.' Although his analysis of psychological concepts is here incomplete, he has established two significant com-mitments. First, he has justified the inclusion of psychological concepts in analyses; they do not need to be 'translated' away into behavioural tendencies or observable phenomena. Second, he has established the concept of intention as primary; it offers an illustration of how a psychological concept may be described, and is also in itself implicit in the analysis of other such concepts.Grice was not the only Oxford philosopher to revisit the topic of intention in the mid-twentieth century. In 1958, Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart published 'Decision, intention and certainty'. This echoes Grice's earlier, unpublished paper in arguing that there is a type of certainty about future actions, independent of any empirical evidence, that is characteristic of intention. They distinguish between a 'prediction' of future action and a 'decision' about it. A statement of the first is based on considering evidence, but a statement of the second on considering reason, even if this is not done consciously. People who say 'I intend to do X' may reasonably be taken to be committed to the belief that they will try to do X, and will succeed in doing X unless prevented by forces outside their control. Hampshire and Hart's claims are similar to those of Stout, but there are interesting differences in approach and style, revealing of the distance between the philosophical methods characteristic of their times. Stout is representative of an older style of Oxford philosophy, complete with sweeping generalisations and moralistic musings. In discussing the tendency of voluntary determination to endure over time and against obstacles, he comments that: 'If we are weak and vacillating, no one will depend on us; we shall be viewed with a kind of contempt. Mere vanity may go far to give fixity to the will.16 After logical positivism, and after Austin's insistence on close attention to the testimony of ordinary language, such unempirical excesses would not have been tolerated. Hampshire and Hart stick to more sober reflections on the language of intention and certainty. They come very close to one of Austin's observations in 'A plea for excuses' when they comment that: 'If I am telling you simply what someone did, e.g. took off his hat or sat down, it would normally be redundant, and hence mis-leading, though not false, to say that he sat down intentionally."' They describe the adverb 'intentionally' as usually used to rule out the suggestion that the action was in some way performed by accident or mistake. Also like Austin, they do not dwell on the possible consequences of the inclusion of the 'redundant' material.  An interest in the psychological concept of intention, and a reaction against the behviouristic tendencies he identified in work by Stevenson and by Ryle, were not the only sources of inspiration for Grice's  'Meaning'. In the following brief paragraph from that article, he comments on theories of signs:  The question about the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is, I think, what people are getting at when they display an interest in a distinction between 'natural' and 'conventional' signs.But I think my formulation is better. For some things which can mean. something are not signs (e.g. words are not), and some are not conventional in any ordinary sense (e.g. certain gestures); while some things which mean naturally are not signs of what they mean (cf. the recent budget example). 18  The mention of 'people' is not backed up by any specific references, but the unpublished papers Grice kept throughout his life include a series of lectures notes from Oxford in which he presents and discusses the  'theory of signs' put forward in the nineteenth century by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. These suggest that Grice's account of meaning developed in part from his reaction to Peirce, whose general approach would have appealed to him. Peirce was anti-sceptical, committed to describing a system of signs elaborate enough to account for the classification of the complex world around us, a world independent of our perceptions of it, and available for analysis by means of those perceptions. His theory of signs was therefore based on a notion of categories as the building blocks of knowledge; signs explain the ways we represent the world to ourselves and others in thought and in language.  In a paper from 1867, Peirce reminds his readers 'that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it'l' Conceptions, and the signs we use to identify them, comprise our understanding of the world. Signs act by representing objects to the understanding of receivers, but there are a number of different ways in which this may take place. There are some representations  'whose relation to their object is a mere community of some quality, and these representations may be termed likenesses', such as for example the relationship between a portrait and a person. The relations of other representations to their object 'consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed indices or signs'; a weathercock represents the direction of the wind in this way. In the third case, there are no such factual links, merely conventional ones. Here the relation of representation to object 'is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed symbols'; such is the relationship between word and object.2º Peirce later extended the general term 'sign' to cover all these cases, and used the specific terms icon, index and symbol for his three classes of representation.  In his lectures and notes on 'Peirce's general theory of signs', Grice analyses Peirce's use of the term 'sign', and proposes to equate it witha general understanding of 'means'. His chief argument in favour of this equation is that Peirce is not using 'sign' in anything recognisable as its everyday or ordinary sense. In a piece of textbook ordinary language philosophy, he argues that 'in general the use (unannounced) of technical or crypto-technical terms leads to nothing but trouble, obscuring proper questions and raising improper ones'.?' Restating Peirce's claims about 'signs' in terms of 'means' draws attention to shared features of a range of items commonly referred to as having 'meaning', as well as highlighting some important differences between Peirce's categories of  'index' and 'symbol'. Grice does not seem to have anything to say about Peirce's 'icons'.  , perhaps because this type of sign is least amenable to  being re-expressed in terms of meaning.  Using his translation of 'is a sign of' into 'means', Grice reconsiders Peirce's own example of an index. He observes that the sentence 'the position of the weathercock meant that the wind was NE' entails, first, that the wind was indeed NE; and second, that a causal connection holds between the wind and weathercock. This feature, he notes, seems to be restricted to the word 'means'. You can say 'the position of the weathercock was an indication that the wind was NE, but it was actually SE'; 'was an indication that' is not a satisfactory synonym of 'means' because it does not entail the truth of what follows. The causal connection also offers an interesting point of comparison to different ways in which 'mean' is used. Grice draws on an example that also appears in 'Meaning' when he suggests a conversation at a bus stop as the bus goes. The comment 'Those three rings of the bell meant that the bus was full' could legitimately be followed by a query of 'was it full?'.  At this early stage in the development of his account of meaning, Grice was obviously troubled by the relationship between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and that between the meaning words have by convention and the full import they may convey in particular contexts. There is no fully developed account of these issues in the lec-tures, but there are a few rough notes suggesting that he was aware of the need to identify some differences between 'timeless' meaning and speaker meaning. At one point he notes to himself that the following questions will need answers: 'what is the nature of the distinction between utterances with "conventional" meaningn and those with non-conventional?' and 'nature of distinction between language and use language? (sic)'. Elsewhere, he ponders the difference between 'what a sentence means (in general; timeless means; if you like the meaning of (type) sentence)' and 'what I commit myself to by the use of a sentence (if you like, connect this with token sentence)'. It is not clear fromthis whether he is seeing 'non-conventional' aspects of meaning as separate from, or coterminous with, those aspects of meaning arising from particular uses in context. However, the first two questions suggest that  'non-conventional' and 'use' are at least potentially separate issues.  When Grice collected his thoughts on meaning into the form in which they were eventually published, he produced a definition dependent on a complex of intentions. In the case of straightforwardly informative or descriptive statements, meaning is to be defined in terms of a speaker's intention to produce certain beliefs in a hearer. It is also necessary that the speaker further intends that the hearer recognise this informative intention and that this recognition is itself the cause of the hearer's belief. This definition excludes from meaningn a case where 'I show Mr X a photograph of Mr Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs X', but includes the related but crucially different case where 'I draw a picture of Mr Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr X'.22 In the former case, the effect would be produced in Mr X whether or not he paid any attention to the intention behind the behaviour. In the second example the recognition of this intention is crucial, and precisely this case would normally be seen as a piece of communication. A similar distinction can be made when the definition is extended to include communication intended to influence the action of others. A policeman who stops a car by standing in its way will produce his desired effect whether or not the motorist notices his intention. A policeman who stops a car by waving is relying on the motorist recognising the wave as intended to make him stop. The latter, but not the former, is an example of meaningnn. Avoiding the problem he identified in Stevenson's work, that of being unable to offer a full account of partic-ular, context-bound uses, Grice proposes to describe meaning in relation to a speaker and a particular occasion in the first place, and the meaningn of words and phrases as secondary, and derived from this.  He tentatively suggests that 'x means. that so-and-so' might be equated with some statement 'about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x'.23  In the concluding paragraphs of his article, Grice alludes briefly to two further aspects of meaning that draw on the questions he was posing himself in his notes and that were to prove central to his later work. First, although he is dealing primarily with specific instances of meanings on particular occasions, his account of meaning is not intended to cover the total significance potentially associated with the use of an expression. He draws a distinction between the 'primary' intention of an utterance, relevant to its meaning, and any furtherintentions: 'If (say) I intend to get a man to do something by giving him some information, it cannot be regarded as relevant to the mean-ingen of my utterance to describe what I intend him to do.2 Even though conventional meaning is to follow from intention, Grice hints that some types of intention, possibly highly relevant to how an utterance is received, cannot properly be described as part of the meaningN of that utterance. In his published paper, Grice is noncommittal about the precise number of distinctions between 'levels' of significance needed, and his rough notes suggest that this was an area in which he was unsure. Second, the hearer may sometimes look to specific context to determine the precise intention behind an utterance; he may con-sider, for instance, which of two possible interpretations would be the most relevant to what has gone before, or would most obviously fit the speaker's purpose. Grice notes that such criteria are not confined to linguistic examples:  Context is a criterion in settling the question of why a man who has just put a cigarette in his mouth has put his hand in his pocket; relevance to an obvious end is a criterion in settling why a man is running away from a bull. 25  Grice's suggestion that conventional meaning can be defined in terms of intentions has been widely praised. The philosopher Jonathan Bennett suggests that the idea of meaning as a kind of intending was commonplace, but that 'Grice's achievement was to discover a defensible version of it.26 Grice's postgraduate student and later colleague Stephen Schiffer went further, describing 'Meaning' as 'the only published attempt ever made by a philosopher or anyone else to say precisely and completely what it is for someone to mean something'27 However, commentators were not slow to point out the problems they saw as inherent in such an account. Responses to 'Meaning' have been numerous, and ranged over more than 40 years, but some raising the most fundamental objections were from Oxford in the years immediately following its publication. Austin did not produce a formal response, and Grice has suggested that they never even discussed it informally. This, he suggests, was not at all unusual. Austin rarely discussed with Grice, or with other colleagues, views that had become established through publication. He preferred his conversations to be about new directions and new channels of thought. 28  To those Oxford philosophers who did discuss 'Meaning' in print, a comparison with Austin's account of 'speech acts' was almost inevitable.Austin's version of speaker meaning was developed during the 1940s and 1950s. Various versions of it appeared in lectures and articles during this period, but the most complete account was presented when Austin was invited to deliver the prestigious William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. An edited and expanded version of his notes from these was published posthumously as How to do Things with Words. Austin's ideas changed and developed over the course of time, and even during the lectures themselves, but some basic fundamental principles can be iden-tified. These drew on his notion of the 'descriptive fallacy', the idea that linguistic study is ill served by the traditional philosopher's focus on language as a tool for making statements capable of being judged to be either true or false. Throughout the development of speech act theory, Austin's assumptions were very different from Grice's working hypothesis in 'Meaning' that language is primarily used to make informative, descriptive statements. For Austin, making statements of fact was only one, and not a particularly significant one, of the many different things people do with words. He proposed to analyse the range of functions language can be used to perform.  Initially, Austin concentrates on explicit 'performatives' , statements  that appear to describe but in fact bring about some state of affairs, usually a social fact or interpersonal relationship. He considers ritualised performatives, which require a very particular set of circumstances to be successful, such as 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' (during the appropriate ceremony), 'I do' (at the relevant point in a marriage service) or 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' (in a will). He then expands his field to include more every day examples, such as 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'  ', and 'I promise to...'. Charac-  teristically, Austin proposes 'going through the dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit' in search of performative verbs.2 Later, however, he realises that even this could not give an exhaustive list of what people do with words. People do things with all sorts of different types of utterances. Someone who utters, 'Can you pass the salt?' may well succeed in making a request by means of apparently asking a question.  In response to his observations about the possible differences between the apparent form of an utterance and its actual function, Austin proposes to divide the analysis of meaning into three levels, or three separate acts performed in the course of a single utterance. The 'locutionary act' is determined by the actual form of words uttered, established by their sense and reference: '"meaning" in the traditional sense' sense'.3° At the level of 'illocutionary act', the notion of force becomes relevant. It isdetermined by the matter of how the locution in question is being used, of what is being done in saying what is said. This can be seen as at least in part dependent on the individual intentions of the speaker, but these in turn depend on, and follow from, certain conventions of language use. So, in the example above, we can understand that the speaker intends to request that the hearer pass the salt, but only because there are conventions of use determining that questions of ability can be used with this force. The illocutionary act is not a simple consequence of the locutionary, but is concerned with conventions 'as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance'. 31 Finally, and separately, it is necessary to consider the effect of the utterance. Austin is here perhaps making a concession to the 'causal' theories of meaning Grice considered but dismissed. Austin refers to the effect achieved by the utterance, but unlike Stevenson he sees this as just one component of meaning, not a sufficient definition. The 'per-locutionary act' is defined by this effect, which may coincide with what the speaker intended to bring about, but need not. The perlocutionary act, then, is not a matter of convention, and cannot be determined simply with reference to the words uttered.  It is no surprise that Grice's 'Meaning' should have been discussed in the light of Austin's speech act theory. The two seem in many ways to cover similar ground, in that both oppose much of the traditional philosophical literature on meaning by insisting on the roles of context and of speaker intention. In fact, some commentators have been tempted to read Grice's paper as an implicit response, or challenge, to speech act theory. As Grice himself has pointed out, there is no such direct link.  'Meaning' existed in almost its finished state before the ideas in How to do Things with Words were made public, or even in some cases devel-oped. As he became aware of Austin's ideas, Grice did recognise some connections to his own themes and preoccupations, but continued to find his own treatment of them more compelling. In particular, he remained convinced that an account of meaning needed to give prominence to psychological notions, and was unhappy with what he saw as Austin's excessive dependence on conventions; Austin was 'using the obscure to explain the obscure' 32 From this, it would seem that his main objection to speech act theory was that it did not offer much explanation of meaning. For Grice, the observable facts of the conventions of use are in need of explanation, and this is best done with reference to individual instances of intention. Austin, on the other hand, was seeking to explain these conventions simply by drawing attention to another, more complex level of conventions.Peter Strawson picks up on exactly this difference between Grice and Austin when he reflects on 'Meaning' in his 1964 article 'Intention and convention in speech acts'.  '. His chief concern is the validity of Austin's  notion of illocutionary act, based as it is on conventions, both the conventions of the language that define the locutionary act, and the further conventions of use that mediate between this and illocutionary force.  However, Strawson argues, there are many cases where the difference between locutionary and illocutionary act cannot be explained simply with reference to conventions. In certain circumstances, to say 'the ice over there is very thin' may well have the force of a warning, but there is no particular convention of language use specifying this. Similarly, the difference between an order and an entreaty may depend not on any identifiable convention, but on a range of factors concerned with the speaker's state of mind and consequent presentation of the utter-ance. Strawson looks to Grice's notion of non-natural meaning to explain this additional, non-conventional set of factors. His paraphrase of Grice's account, expressed in terms of three separate intentions, was to prove instructive to future commentators:  § non-naturally means something by an utterance x if S intends (i) to produce by uttering x a certain response (r) in an audience A and intends (iz) that A shall recognise S's intention (i) and intends (i3) that this recognition on the part of A of S's intention (i) shall function as A's reason, or part of his reason, for his response (r).33  On Strawson's interpretation, one of the defining intentions is focused on Grice's indication that the speaker provides the hearer with a 'reason' to think or act in a certain way. He proposes to modify Grice's account before enlisting it to explain the notion of illocutionary force, because of certain counter-examples to which it is subject as it stands. It is possible to envisage contexts in which S utters x with exactly the three intentions described above, but in which it does not seem appropriate to say that S was trying to communicate with A. Strawson does not illustrate this problem with a specific example, but he suggests a schematic outline. S may intend to get A to believe something, fulfilling (i). S may arrange fake evidence, or grounds for this belief, such that A can see the evidence, and indeed such that A can see S fabricating it. S knows that A will be perfectly aware that the evidence is faked, but assumes that A will not realise that S has this awareness. The intention behind this is for A to have the relevant belief precisely because he recognises that S intends him to have this belief; this is S's (i2). Further, it is S's intentionthat the recognition of (i) will be the reason why A acquires the belief; indeed, A will have no other reason to form this belief, knowing that the evidence for it is faked. This fulfils (i3). In effect, an intentional account of meaning would have to include an extra layer of intention, because for S to be telling something to, or communicating with A, S must be taken to intend A to recognise the intention to make A recog-nise the intention to produce the relevant belief in A. In other words,  § must have a further intention (4) that A should recognise intention (i2). If S's intention (i), and hence intention (i2) is fulfilled, then A may be said to have understood the utterance, a definition Strawson links to Austin's notion of 'uptake' !, and hence to the successful accomplishment  of illocutionary force. Strawson argues that the complex intention (i4) is the necessary defining characteristic of saying something with a certain illocutionary force. He hints that his additional layer of intention may not in fact prove sufficient, and that 'the way seems open to a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognised' 34 Grice's definition of meaning as determined entirely by speaker intention is at odds with, or according to Strawson can be complementary to, Austin's reliance on convention. But it also opposes him to the notion, common in philosophy and later in linguistics, that meaning is determined by the rules of the language in question, defined independently of any particular occasion of utterance. Austin does allow some space to this type of meaning, specifying that the usual sense and reference of the words uttered constitute the locutionary act. He does not, however, develop this notion, or explain its relationship to his more central concern with speaker meaning. Strawson seems to downplay the importance of linguistic meaning for  Austin when he places him on the same general side as Grice in what he describes elsewhere as the 'Homeric struggle' between 'the theorists of communication-intention and the theorists of formal semantics' 35 Unlike Austin, Grice's more extreme arguments that meaning is to be explained entirely in terms of 'communication-intention' do not presuppose any notion of semantic meaning. This is an aspect of Grice's theory on which other commentators, such as John Searle, have focused.  Searle was a student at Oxford during the 1950s, where he was taught by both Austin and Strawson. He completed a doctoral dissertation on sense and reference in 1959 before returning to his native America. Well versed in both the traditional philosophy of meaning and Austin's concentration on communication, he worked on the theory of speech acts, publishing a book on the subject in 1969 in which he classifies possible illocutionary acts into a restricted number of general categories. Healso introduces the notion of indirect speech acts, in which one illocu-tionary act is performed by means of the apparent performance of a different illocutionary act. Austin's example 'Can you pass the salt?' succeeds as a request both because the apparent act, that of asking for information about the hearer's ability, is not appropriate in the context, and because rules of language use specify that this form of words can be used to make a request. For Searle, language is essentially a rule-governed form of behaviour. It is centred on the speech act, the basic unit of communication, but its rules include the specific semantic properties of its words and phrases.  This particular point gives rise to Searle's objections to Grice's total reliance on individual speaker intention in explaining meaning. Searle does allow for intentions in his account; indeed he is interested in basing it on just such psychological concepts and proposes to develop Grice's account in order to do so. In a later discussion he comments that his analysis in Speech Acts 'was inspired by Grice's work on meaning' 36 However, like Austin before him, he sees semantic rules as underlying the range of intentions with which a speaker can appropriately produce any particular utterance. Searle is much more explicit than Austin in specifying that linguistic rules come first and restrict intentional possi-bility. Unlike Grice, he therefore singles out linguistic acts as separate from general communication; in the case of language, meaning exists independent of intention, or of occasion of use. Searle illustrates this with his own counter-example to Grice. An American soldier is captured by Italian troops in the Second World War. Neither the soldier nor his captors speak German, and the soldier speaks no Italian. The soldier wishes to make the Italian troops believe that he is German. He utters the only German sentence he knows, which happens to be 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', a line of poetry remembered from childhood that translates as 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. He hopes that his captors will guess that he must be saying 'I am a German soldier'. The soldier intends to get his captors to believe he is a German soldier. He intends that they should recognise his intention to get them to believe this, and that this recognition should serve as their reason for entertaining that belief. All the circumstances are in place for a case of Grice's meaningwn. Yet, Searle argues, it would surely be unreasonable to maintain that when the soldier says 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', he actually non-naturally means 'I am a German soldier'. The rules of German do not allow this; the words mean 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. Searle concludes that Grice's account is inadequate as itstands because Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention. 37  Like Strawson, Searle proposes to amend Grice's intentional account in the light of his own counter-example. In effect, he argues that the notion of intention must be expanded to include convention. When speakers use words literally, part of their intention is that hearers recog-nise the communicative intention precisely because of the pre-existing rules for using the words chosen. Searle attempts to balance the twin effects of intention and convention in his account of meaning. The result is rather further removed from Grice than Searle acknowledges when he suggests that he is offering an 'amendment'. It returns to the traditional idea of conventional, or linguistic, meaning as the basic location of meaning on which intention-based speaker meaning is dependent.38 The magnitude of the consequences of Searle's attempt to introduce conventions into an intentional account is perhaps illustrative of the gulf between semantic and psychological approaches to meaning. It also highlights the scale of Grice's undertaking in producing an account of meaning relying entirely on the latter.  Stephen Schiffer was a graduate student in the 1960s when, as he has since described, he was 'much taken with Grice's program'39 He was impressed by what he saw as Grice's reduction of the semantic to the psychological, but also believed he had identified the inadequacies of this particular account of speaker meaning. In the 1972 book in which he attempted to develop and improve on Grice's account, he notes that it is not possible to claim priority for conventional meaning and at the same time define meaning in terms of intention. To maintain that speaker meaning, 'what S meant by x',  ', is primary, but also that speaker  meaning could be in any way dependent on the meaning of x would be simply circular. Schiffer does not see the exclusive concentration on intention as necessarily problematic, or at least not for this reason: 'To say this does not commit Grice to holding that one can say whatever one likes and mean thereby whatever one pleases to mean. One must utter x with the relevant intentions, and not any value of 'x' will be appropriate to this end: I could not in any ordinary circumstances request you to pass the salt by uttering "the flamingoes are flying south early this year".  '40 Schiffer's own response is that conventional meaning  does exist, but is secondary to intentional meaning, because it is built up in a speech community over time, resultant on the fulfilling of certain communicative intentions.  The problems Schiffer identifies for Grice are not problems with the notion that meaning is best given a psychological rather than a seman-tic definition, an assumption with which he agrees. Rather, Schiffer questions the adequacy of intention as the relevant psychological state.  He echoes Strawson's schematic counter-example to argue that it can be possible for all the intentions Grice defines to be in place, but for no act of communication to be achieved. Strawson's example indicated that another layer of intention (Strawson's i) must be added to the defini-tion. Schiffer argues explicitly for the consequence Strawson only sug-gested, namely that the need for regressive intentions will in fact prove to be infinite. He constructs a series of more and more elaborate counter-examples to show that the levels of intention necessary fully to define meaning can never be exhausted. In the first such example, § produces a cacophonous rendition of 'Moon Over Miami' with the intention of driving A out of the room. S's intention is that A will leave the room not just because A cannot stand the noise, but because A recognises that Sis trying to get rid of A. Further, S intends that A recognise the intention that A recognise the intention to get A to leave the room, because S wishes A to be aware of S's disdain. 'In other words'  ', Schiffer explains,  'while A is intended to think that S intends to get rid of A by means of the repulsive singing, A is really intended to have as his reason for leaving the fact that S wants him to leave.'41 In order to rule out the unacceptable suggestion that by singing 'Moon Over Miami' S meant that A was to leave the room, Schiffer proposes another level of intention. Further, more complex, examples call for further such layers. For Schiffer, the infinitely regressive series of intentions that intentions be recognised that this causes makes for an unacceptable definition of meaning.  For Schiffer the best hope for a psychological account of meaning lies in an appeal to a special type of knowledge. This type of knowledge occurs when two people are in the following relation to a piece of infor-mation, or to a proposition p. S and A both know that p; S knows that A knows that p; A knows that S knows that p; A knows that S knows that A knows that p; S knows that A knows that S knows that p; and so on without limit. Such a pattern also leads to an infinite regress but, Schiffer argues, a harmless one. It is just the sort of situation we do in fact find in everyday life, as when S and A are sitting facing each other with a candle in between. Schiffer coins the phrase 'mutual knowledge* for the recursive set of knowing he describes. S and A mutually know* that there is a candle on the table. Once Grice's account of meaning is adapted to refer to mutual knowledge*, the apparent counter-examples are all ruled inadmissible, and therefore no longer pose a problem. The intentions S has in producing an utterance must be 'mutual known* by S and A for a true instance of meaning to take place. Mutual knowl-edge* with its infinite regress, is missing in each of the counter-examples.  'Meaning' might appear to be offering a definition of the concept of meaning by proposing to substitute the concept of intention: in the vein of the logical positivists to be 'translating' problematic sentences into those that do not contain the problem term. This was certainly Schiffer's interpretation when he described Grice's account as 'reduc-tionist'. However, more recent commentators have been keen to defend Grice against this interpretation. For instance, Giovanna Cosenza has suggested that the analysis would be reductionist 'only if Grice had seriously considered speakers' intentions and psychological states as more fundamental, more basic, either epistemologically or metaphysically, than all the concepts related to linguistic meaning', and claimed that Grice did not hold this view.4 Anita Avramides has also argued that Grice's account of meaning need not be seen as reductionist. *3  Grice was certainly distancing himself from those accounts of what he would call 'non-natural meaning' in which the notion of convention was primary. However, he was somewhat tentative about the precise relation between the two central concepts; his belief that convention could be entirely subsumed within an intentional account is expressed more as a hope than as a conviction. He seems, further, to have been troubled by the exact relationships between the different messages potentially conveyed by a single utterance. Even if the definition of convention is to be dependent on intention, some messages are more closely or more obviously related to conventional meaning than others. He as yet had no formal account of how the 'full significance' of an utterance might be derived or calculated. Nor had he yet drawn a clear distinction between messages conveyed by the words uttered and messages conveyed by the very act of utterance. This is a distinction Schiffer describes by differentiating between 'S meant something by (or in) producing (or doing) x' and 'S meant something by x'.* A very similar point is made by Paul Ziff in his 1967 response to 'Meaning'.  Ziff is decidedly dismissive of Grice's 'ingenious intricate discussion' of meaning and the 'fog' to which it gives rise.* He argues that the meanings of words and phrases, and indeed the lack of meaning of nonsense  'words'  , are quite independent of any individual's intention. Like Schiffer, he argues that 'Grice seems to have conflated and confused "A meant something by uttering x" ... with the quite different "A meant  something by X"146  The responses and criticisms of his peers were to feed into Grice's own thinking about meaning over the following years. His published outputduring the 1950s was restricted to 'In defence of a dogma' and  'Meaning', hardly an impressive record even by the standards of the time. Peter Strawson was responsible for seeing both these papers into print, while those he left alone fell victim to Grice's perfectionism.  Some, like 'Intentions and dispositions' were never published, while others waited in manuscript for 30 or more years. Of these, 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes' and 'Common sense and scepticism' indicate a development in Grice's thinking on the need to distinguish between what our words literally mean and what we mean by using those words. They also suggest something of Grice's ambivalence towards the place of conventional meaning. Like much of his work, these papers developed from his teaching: the former from a lecture delivered in 1950 and the latter from joint classes with A. D. Woozley at the same time or even earlier.  Grice's project in these papers was a typically 'ordinary language' enterprise: the desire to tackle a familiar philosophical problem by means of a rigorous examination of the terms characteristically employed to discuss it. The problem in question was how to address scepticism. In response to G. E. Moore's 'defence from common sense' the American philosopher Norman Malcolm had suggested that Moore was in effect approaching the problem via an appeal to ordinary lan-guage, although apparently without knowing it. We use expressions to refer to and to describe material objects, and we do so in a 'standard' or 'ordinary' way. To claim, as some philosophers have done, that there are no material objects, is therefore to 'go against ordinary language'. 47 In effect, such philosophers are claiming that some uses of ordinary language are self-contradictory, or always incorrect, an inadmissible claim because 'ordinary language is correct language'. 48 Grice challenges Malcolm's interpretation of Moore. Malcolm draws an unwarranted polarity between 'ordinary' and 'self-contradictory' in language use, he suggests. The two properties need not be incompatible; people do routinely say things that are literally self-contradictory or absurd. Further-more, not every meaningful sentence would actually find a use in ordinary language. In 'Common sense and scepticism', he offers a striking example of what he means. 'It would no doubt be possible to fill in the gaps in "The — archbishop fell down the — stairs and bumped  —- like —," with such a combination of indecencies and blasphemies that no one would ever use such an expression', but we would not therefore want to treat the expression as self-contradictory. 4 In 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes', he suggests that it is often necessary to acknowledge a difference between 'what a given expression means (ingeneral)' and 'what a particular speaker means, or meant, by that expression on a particular occasion. Figurative or ironic utterances, for instance, involve 'special' uses of language.  As a general definition, 'what a particular speaker means by a particular utterance (of a statement-making character) on a particular occasion is to be identified with what he intends by means of the utterance to get his audience to believe!»' For this intention to be successful, the speaker must at least rely on the audience's familiarity with 'standard' or 'general' use, even if individual occasion meaning is to differ from this. In this way Grice is able to offer his own challenge to the sceptic.  Faced with everyday statements about material objects, the sceptic is forced to claim either that, on particular occasions, people use expressions to mean things they have no intention of getting their audience to believe, or that people frequently use language in a way quite unlike its proper ('general') meaning, leaving the success of everyday communication unexplained. Although in general agreement with Malcolm's aim in refuting scepticism, Grice is unhappy with the apparent simpli-fications, and some of the implications, of his argument. He replaces it with his own more sophisticated argument from ordinary language, an argument depending in particular on a detailed examination of the nature of 'meaning'.As Grice's enthusiasm for ordinary language philosophy became increasingly qualified during the 1950s, his interest was growing in the rather different styles of philosophy of language then current in America.  Recent improvements in communications had made possible an exchange of ideas across the Atlantic that would have been unthinkable before the war. W. V. O. Quine had made a considerable impression at Oxford during his time as Eastman Professor. Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from him over certain specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Quine, who was visiting England for a whole year, and who brought with him clothes, books and even provisions in the knowledge that rationing was still in force, travelled by ship.' However, during the same decade the rapid proliferation of passenger air travel enabled movement of academics between Britain and America for even short stays and lecture tours. Grice himself made a number of such visits, and was impressed by the formal and theory-driven philosophy he encountered. Most of all he was impressed by the work of Noam Chomsky.  It may seem surprising that the middle-aged British philosopher interested in the role of individual speakers in creating meaning should cite as an influence the young American linguist notorious for dismissing issues of use in his pursuit of a universal theory of language. But Grice was inspired by Chomsky's demonstration in his work on syntax of how  'a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control'. Less for-mally, he expressed admiration for an approach that did not offer  'piecemeal reflections on language' but rather where 'one got a pictureof the whole thing' Chomsky's first and highly influential book Syntactic Structures was well known among Grice's Oxford contemporaries.  The Play Group worked their slow and meticulous way through it during the autumn of 1959. Austin, in particular, was extremely impressed.  Grice characterised and perhaps parodied him as revering Chomsky for his sheer audacity in taking on a subject even more sacred than phi-losophy: the subject of grammar. Grice's own interest was focused on theory formation and its philosophical consequences. Chomsky was taking a new approach to the study of syntax by proposing a general theory where previously there had been only localised description and analysis. He claimed, for instance, that ideally 'a formalised theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed'. Grice's aim, it was becoming clear, was to do something similar for the study of language use.  Meanwhile, ordinary language philosophy itself was in decline. As for any school of thought, it is difficult to determine an exact endpoint, and some commentators have suggested a date as late as 1970. However, it is generally accepted that the heyday of ordinary language philosophy was during the years immediately following the Second World War.  The sense of excitement and adventure that characterised its beginning began to wane during the 1950s. Despite his professed dislike of disci-pleship, Austin seems to have become anxious about what he perceived as the lack of a next generation of like-minded young philosophers at Oxford. It became an open secret among his colleagues that he was seriously contemplating a move to the University of California, Berkeley?  No final decision was ever made. Austin died early in 1960 at the age of 48, having succumbed quickly to cancer over the previous months.  Reserved and private to the last, he hid his illness from even his closest colleagues until he was unable to continue work. His death was certainly a blow to ordinary language philosophy, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it was the immediate cause of its demise. Grice, who seems to have been regarded as Austin's natural deputy, stepped in as convenor of the Play Group, which met under his leadership for the next seven years. Individuals such as Strawson, Warnock, Urmson and Grice himself continued to produce work with recognisably 'ordinary language' leanings throughout the 1960s.  Grice's interests at this time were not driven entirely by philosophical trends in Oxford and America; he was also turning his attention to some very old logical problems. In particular, he was interested in questions concerning apparent counterparts to logical constants in natural language. For instance, in the early 1960s he revisited a theme he hadfirst considered before the war, when he gave a series of lectures on  'Negation'  . In these, he concerns himself with the analysis of sentences  containing 'not', and with the extent to which this should coincide with a logical analysis of negation. Consideration of a variety of example sentences leads him to reject the simple equation of 'not' with the logical operation of switching truth polarity, usually positive to negative. He argues that 'it might be said that in explaining the force of "not" in terms of "contradictory" we have oversimplified the ordinary use of  "not"! In another lecture from the series he suggests that the lack of correspondence between 'not' and contradiction 'might be explained in terms of pragmatic pressures which govern the use of language in general'® Grice was hoping to find not just an account of the uses of this particular expression, but a general theory of language use capable of extension to other problems in logic. He would have been familiar enough with such problems. The discussion of some of them dates back as far as Aristotle, in whose work he was well read even as an undergraduate.  In Categoriae, Aristotle describes not just categories of lexical meaning, but also the types of relationships holding between words. To the modern logician, the use of terms in the following passage may be obscure, but the relationship of logical entailment is easily recognisable.  One is prior to two because if there are two it follows at once that there is one whereas if there is one there are not necessarily two, so that the implication of the other's existence does not hold reciprocally from one.'  The relationship between 'two' and 'one', or indeed between any two cardinal numbers where one is greater than the other, is one of asymmetrical entailment. 'Two' entails 'one',  ', but 'one' does not entail 'two'  A similar relationship holds between a superordinate and any of its hyponyms, or between a general and a more specific term. To use Aristotle's example: 'if there is a fish there is an animal, but if there is an animal there is not necessarily a fish.'º The asymmetrical nature of this relationship means that use of the more general term tells us nothing at all about the applicability of the more specific. Aristotle also considers the relative acceptability of general and specific terms, and in doing this he goes beyond a narrowly logical focus.  For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more informative and apt to give the species than the genus. For example,it would be more informative to say of the individual man that he is a man than that he is an animal (since the one is more distinctive of the individual man while the other is more general)."  Applying the term 'animal' to an individual tells us nothing about whether that individual is a man or not. Therefore, if the more specific term 'man' applies it is more 'apt', because it gives more information.  This same point arises in a discussion of the applicability of certain descriptions later in Categoriae. Aristotle suggests that: 'it is not what has not teeth that we call toothless, or what has not sight blind, but what has not got them at the time when it is natural for it to have them.'2 A term such as 'toothless' is only applied, because it is only informative, in those situations when it might be expected not to apply. Here, again, the discussion of what 'we call' things goes beyond purely logical meaning to take account of how expressions are generally used. Logically speaking a stone could appropriately be described as toothless or blind; in actual practice it is very unlikely to be so described.  Grice's self-imposed task in considering the general 'pragmatic pressures' on language use was, at least in part, one of extending Aristotle's sensitivity to the standard uses of certain expressions, and examining how regularities of use can have distorting effects on intuitions about logical meaning. He was by no means the first philosopher to consider this. For instance, John Stuart Mill, in his response to the work of Sir William Hamilton, draws attention to the distinction between logic and  'the usage of language', 13 He reproaches Hamilton for not paying sufficient attention to this distinction, and suggests that this is enough to explain some of Hamilton's mistakes in logic. Mill glosses Hamilton as maintaining that 'the form "Some A is B" ... ought in logical propriety to be used and understood in the sense of "some and some only" ' 14 Hamilton is therefore committed to the claim that 'all' and 'some' are mutually incompatible: that an assertion involving 'some' has as part of its meaning 'not all'. This is at odds with the observations on quantity in Categoriae and indeed, as Mill suggests, with 'the practice of all writers on logic'. Mill explains this mistake as a confusion of logical meaning with a feature of 'common conversation in its most unprecise form'. In this, he is drawing on the extra, non-logical but generally understood 'meanings' associated with particular expressions. In a passage that would not be out of place in a modern discussion of lin-guistics, Mill suggests that:If I say to any one, 'I saw some of your children to-day,' he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so.  15  Mill draws a distinction between what 'words mean' and what we generally infer from hearing them used. In what can be seen as an extension of Aristotle's discussion of 'aptness', he argues that it is a mistake to confuse these two very different types of significance. A more specific word such as 'all' is more appropriate, if it is applicable, than a more general word such as 'some'. Therefore, the use of the more general leads to the inference, although it does not strictly mean, that the more specific does not apply. 'Some' suggests, but does not actually entail 'not all'.  Besides his interest in logical problems with a venerable pedigree, Grice was also concerned with issues familiar to him from the work of recent or contemporary philosophers. In both published work and informal notes he frequently lists these and arranges them in groups.  Part of his achievement in the theory he was developing lay in seeing connections between an apparently disparate collection of problems and countenancing a single solution for them all. For instance, in Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that, although the expressions 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' appear to be simple opposites, they both require a particular condition for applicability, namely that the action in question is in some way reprehensible. If they were simple opposites, it should always be the case that one or other would be correct in describing an action, yet in the absence of the crucial condition, to apply either would be to say something 'absurd'. Similarly, although if someone has performed some action, that person must in a sense have tried to perform it, it is often extremely odd to say so. In cases where there was no difficulty or doubt over the outcome, it is inappropriate to say that someone tried to do something: so much so that some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have claimed that it is simply wrong. Another related problem is familiar from Austin's work; it is the one summed up in his slogan 'no modification without aberration'. For the ordinary uses of many verbs, it does not seem appropriate to apply either a modifying word or phrase or its opposite. Austin was therefore offering a gen-eralisation that includes, but is not restricted to, Ryle's claims about  'voluntary' and 'involuntary'. For many everyday action verbs, the act described must have taken place in some non-standard way for anymodification appropriately to apply. Austin offers no theory based on this observation, and indeed Grice was unimpressed by it even as a gen-eralisation; he claimed in an unpublished paper that it was 'clearly fraudulent'. 'No "aberration" is needed for the appearance of the adverbial "in a taxi" within the phrase "he travelled to the airport in a taxi"; aberrations are needed only for modifications which are corrective qualifications. 16  Grice's general account of language, conceived with the twin ambitions of refining his philosophy of meaning and of explaining a diverse range of philosophical problems, gradually developed into his theory of conversation. Like his project in 'Meaning', this draws on a  'common-sense' understanding of language: in this case, that what people say and what they mean are often very different matters. This observation was far from original, but Grice's response to it was in some crucial ways entirely new in philosophy. Unlike formal philosophers such as Russell or the logical positivists, he argued that the differences between literal and speaker meaning are not random and diverse, and do not make the rigorous study of the latter a futile exercise. But he also differed from contemporary philosophers of ordinary language, in arguing that interest in formal or abstract meaning need not be abandoned in the face of the particularities of individual usage. Rather, the difference between the two types of meaning could be seen as systematic and explicable, following from one very general principle of human behaviour, and a number of specific ways in which this worked out in practice. In effect, the use of language, like many other aspects of human behaviour, is an end-driven endeavour. People engage in communication in the expectation of achieving certain outcomes, and in the pursuit of those outcomes they are prepared to maintain, and expect others to maintain, certain strategies. This mutual pursuit of goals results in cooperation between speakers. This manifests itself in terms of four distinct categories of behaviour, each of which can be sum-marised by one or more maxims that speakers observe. The categories and maxims are familiar to every student of pragmatics, although in later commentaries they are often all subsumed under the title  'maxims'  Category of Quantity  Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).  Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.  Category of Quality  Do not say what you believe to be false.  Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.  Category of Relation   Be relevant.  Category of Manner  Avoid ambiguity of expression.  Avoid ambiguity.  Be brief.  Be orderly.!7  Grice uses the simple notion of cooperation, together with the more elaborate structure of categories, to offer a systematic account of the many ways in which literal and implied meaning, or 'what is said' and what is implicated', differ from one another. In effect, the expectation of cooperation both licenses these differences and explains their usually successful resolution. Speakers rely on the fact that hearers will be able to reinterpret the literal content of their utterances, or fill in missing information, so as to achieve a successful contribution to the conversation in hand. The noun 'implicature' and verb 'implicate' (as used in relation to that noun) are now familiar in the discussion of pragmatic meaning, but they were coined by Grice, and coined fairly late on in the development of his theory. In early work on conversation he suggested that a 'special kind of implication' could be used to account for various differences between conventional meaning and speaker meaning. He ultimately found this formulation inadequate, together with a host of other words such as 'suggest', 'hint' and even 'mean', precisely because of their complex pre-existing usage both within and outside philosophy.    The difference between saying and meaning had an established philosophical pedigree, as well as a basis in common sense. A literature dating back to G. E. Moore, but largely concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s, offers a significant context to Grice's work. Little of this is now read and none of it attempts anything as ambitious as a generalising theory of communication. With typical laxness, Grice does not refer to this body of work in any of his writings on the topic, although he must have been aware of it; much of it originated from the tight circle of Oxford phi-losophy. Writing for his fellow philosophers, and in the conventions ofhis time, he was able to refer vaguely and generally to the debate in the expectation that the relevant context would be recognised  G. E. Moore had argued that when we use an indicative sentence we assert the content of the sentence, but we also imply personal commitment to the truthfulness of that content; 'If I say that I went to the pictures last Tuesday, I imply by saying so that I believe or know that I did, but I do not say that I believe or know this."8 This distinction was picked up by a number of philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel discussed the sense of 'imply' identified by Moore, proposing to describe it as 'pragmatical'. Bar-Hillel identifies himself as a supporter of 'logical empiricism' (he quotes approvingly a comment from Carnap to the effect that natural languages are too complex and messy to be the focus of rigorous scientific enquiry) and his article is aimed explicitly at rejecting philosophy of the 'analytic method' in general and of Moore in particular. However, he suggests that by using sentences that are 'meaningless' to logical empiricists, such as the sentences of metaphysics or aesthetics, 'one may nevertheless imply sentences which are perfectly meaningful, according to the same criteria, and are perhaps even true and highly important' 2º A full account of the pragmatic sense of 'implies' might, he predicts, prove highly important in discussing linguistic behaviour. A few years later D. J. O'Connor contrasted the familiar 'logical paradoxes' of philosophy with less well known 'pragmatic paradoxes'. O'Connor draws attention to certain example sentences (such as 'I believe there are tigers in Mexico but there aren't any there at all') which, although not logically contradictory or necessarily false, are pragmatically unsatisfactory. His purpose is to distinguish between logic and language and to urge philosophers to attempt to 'make a little clearer the ways in which ordinary language can limit and mislead us'. 21  The philosophical significance of implication was also discussed by those more sympathetic to ordinary language, in particular by members of the Play Group. Writing in Mind in 1952, J. O. Urmson acknowledged the 'implied claim to truth' in the use of indicative statements, but felt the need to clarify his terms: 'The word "implies" is being used in such a way that if there is a convention that X will only be done in circumstances Y, a man implies that situation Y holds if he does X.22 Urmson suggests the addition of an 'implied claim to reasonableness'; 'it is, I think, a presupposition of communication that people will not make statements, thereby implying their truth, unless they have some ground, however tenuous, for those statements. 23 Read with hindsight, Urmson's suggestion looks like a hint towards Grice's second maxim ofQuality. Another member of the Play Group, P. H. Nowell-Smith, appears to add something like a maxim of Relevance, a notion that Grice discusses as early as the original version of 'Meaning'. In his book Ethics, Nowell-Smith suggests that there are certain 'contextual implications' that generally accompany the use of words, but that are dependent on particular contexts. Without reference to Urmson, he phrases these as follows:  When a speaker uses a sentence to make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.... A speaker contextually implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his statement.... What a speaker says may be assumed to be relevant to the interests of his audience.24  For Nowell-Smith the contextual rules are primary, and do not operate with reference to logical meaning; in effect there is no 'what is said'. In fact, he specifies that logical meaning is a subclass of contextual impli-cation, because it is meaning we are entitled to infer in any context whatsoever. Other philosophers concerned with implication, however, did identify different levels of meaning. In The Logic of Moral Discourse, 1955, Paul Edwards distinguishes between the referent of a sentence (the fact that makes a sentence true or, in its absence, false: in effect the truth-conditions) and 'what the sentence expresses' (anything it is possible to infer about the speaker on the basis of the utterance).25  Some attempted syntheses of thinking about implication lacked much in the way of generalising or explanatory force. In his 1958 article 'Prag-matic implication', C. K. Grant's account of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena leads him to the claim that 'a statement pragmatically implies those propositions whose falsity would render the making of the statement absurd, that is, pointless.26 What is implied by a statement of p, he insists, is not just the speaker's belief in p, but some further proposition. Isobel Hungerland, writing in 1960, reviews the range of attempts to mediate between asserted and implied meaning and exclaims 'What a range of rules!'? Her suggestion of a generalisa-tion across these rules is that 'a speaker in making a statement contextually implies whatever one is entitled to infer on the basis of the presumption that his act of stating is normal. 28  Grice was working on his own generalisation, which was to link together the range of principles of language use into one coherent account, and to give this a place in a more ambitious theory of lan-guage. If the maxims of Quality and of Relation were familiar from con-temporary work in Ethics, those of Quantity and Manner drew on Grice's long-standing concern about stronger and weaker statements.  This was the idea that had interested him in his rough notes on 'visa' for his work on perception with Geoffrey Warnock. The earliest published indication appeared in 1952, in a footnote to Peter Strawson's Introduction to Logical Theory. In discussing the relationship between the statement 'there is not a book in his room which is not by an English author' and the assumption 'there are books in his room', Strawson draws attention to the need to distinguish between strictly logically relations and the rules of 'linguistic conduct' 29 He suggests as one such rule:  'one does not make the (logically) lesser when one could truthfully (and with equal or greater linguistic economy) make the greater, claim. It would be misleading, although not strictly false, to make the less informative claim about English authors if in a position to make the much more informative claim that there are no books at all. Strawson acknowledges that 'the operation of this "pragmatic rule" was first pointed out to me, in a different connection, by Mr H. P. Grice!  It was typical of Grice that he did not publish his own account of this pragmatic rule until almost ten years after Strawson's acknowledgement.  'The causal theory of perception' appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, after Grice delivered it as a symposium paper at the meeting of the Society in Cambridge in July 1961. His main focus is his long-standing interest in the status of our observations of material objects. Grice offers tentative support for a causal account of percep-tion. Theories of this type date back at least to John Locke. They maintain that we directly perceive through our faculties of sense a series of information, given the title 'sense data' by later philosophers, and infer that these are caused by material objects in the world. For Locke, the inference was justifiable, but his account of perception, and causal theories ever since, had been dogged by accusations of scepticism. If we have no direct access to material objects, but only to the sense data they putatively cause, the way is left open to doubt the independent existence of such objects.  Grice's defence is tentative, even by his own circumspect standards.  He proposes to advance a version of the causal theory 'which is, if not true, at least not obviously false'.3° Some of the defence itself is presented in quotation marks, as a fictional 'opponent' argues with a fictional 'objector' to the causal theory, implicitly distancing Grice from the arguments on either side. This tentativeness might in part be explained by the extreme heresy of Grice's enterprise for a philosopher of ordinary language. Some of Austin's most strident remarks about ordi-nary language had appeared in his attack in Sense and Sensibilia on philosophical theories of perception, and their reliance on the obscure and technical notion of 'sense data'. Austin's chief target here had been phe-nomenalism which, in claiming that sense data are the essence of what we think of as material objects, is often seen as a direct competitor to the causal theory of perception. Although defending one of phenome-nalism's rivals, Grice was suggesting reasons for retaining Austin's particular bugbear, 'sense data', as a term of art. Indeed, he even goes so far as to hint that his own, speculative version of the causal theory 'neither obviously entails nor obviously conflicts with Phenomenalism'.31  Grice defends sense data because, as he argues, the sceptic who wants to question the existence of the material world needs to make use of them and the sceptic's position at least deserves to be heard. He defends it also because of his own ideas about language use. Indeed, his essay on perception seems at times in danger of being hijacked by his interest in language. This is not entirely out of keeping with the subject; through Locke and Berkeley to Ayer and Austin, the philosophy of perception had focused on the correct interpretation of sentences in which judgements of perception are expressed. However, Grice makes no secret of his hope that his interpretation of such sentences will fit with views of language and use motivated by other considerations. Much of the essay is taken up with a discussion of general principles governing the use of language. This is inspired by a standard argument for retaining  'sense data' as a technical term; it would appear to underlie ordinary expressions such as 'so-and-so looks @ [e.g. blue] to me'. In effect, a suitably rigorous account of the meaning of such expressions would need to include reference to something such as a sense datum that corresponds to the subjective experience described. A potential objector might point out that such expressions are not appropriate to all instances of perception; they would only in fact be used in contexts where a condition of either doubt or denial (D-or-D) as to the applicability of @ holds. 'There would be something at least prima facie odd about my saying "That looks red to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted by a British pillar box in normal daylight at a range of a few feet.'32  Grice considers two possible ways of explaining this oddity. It could be seen as 'a feature of the use, perhaps of the meaning' of such expressions that they carry the implication that the D-or-D condition is ful-filled. Use of such expressions in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a misuse, and would fail to be either true or false.Alternatively, such statements could be seen as true whenever the property @ applies but, in the absence of the D-or-D condition, severely mis-leading. Use in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a more general error, because of 'a general feature or principle of the use of language' 33 Grice des cribes how until recently he had been undecided as to which of these two explanations to favour. He had, however, lent towards the second because it 'was more in line with the kind of thing I was inclined to say about other linguistic phenomena which are in some degree comparable.  934  Towards the end of his discussion, Grice hesitantly suggests a first attempt at formulating the general principle of language use: 'One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for so doing. 35 This is, of course, remarkably similar to the observation attributed to him by Strawson a decade earlier.  It seems that during the intervening years Grice had become increasingly impressed by how many different types of meaning this rule could explain, in other words by how general and simple an account of language use it suggested. In two interesting respects the formulation of the rule had changed. First, it had changed from a statement about what  'one does' in language use to what 'one should do'. This brought it nearer to the first maxim of Quantity it was eventually to become.  Second, the new formulation of the rule introduces possible exceptions, by alluding to 'good reasons' for breaking it. Again, Grice does not elaborate on this qualification, but the consideration of reasons for breaching the maxims, together with a discussion of the consequences of doing so, was to be vital to the subsequent development of his work.  It was what was to give it explanatory and generalising abilities beyond those of a simple list of 'rules' of linguistic behaviour.  Grice's claims about the use of language offer support to the defender of sense data. They allow the defender to describe statements of the  'so-and-so looks @ to me' type as strictly true regardless of whether the D-or-D condition holds. If such statements call for the use of sense data as a technical term to explain their meaning, then sense data are applicable to any description of perception. It is simply that in most non-con-troversial contexts such statements will be avoided because, although perfectly true, they will introduce misleading suggestions. Here, perhaps, was Grice's greatest heresy. Austin's rejection of sense data relied on an appeal to what people ordinarily say, together with an assumption that this is the best guide to meaning and truth. Grice's tentative support for it relies on a distinction between what people can truthfully say, and what they actually, realistically do say. Despite itsemphasis on linguistic use, 'The causal theory of perception' was well received as a contribution to the philosophy of perception. It was anthologised in 1965 in Robert Swartz's Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing.  In 1967, Grice's sometime collaborator Geoffrey Warnock included the essay in his volume on The Philosophy of Perception, singling it out for praise as an 'exceedingly ingenious and resourceful contribution'. 36  As was the case throughout his working life, Grice made no firm distinction between his teaching and the development of his own philosophical ideas. A series of lecture notes from the 1960s on topics relating to speaker meaning and context therefore provide an insight into the lines along which his thinking was developing, as do some rough notes from the same period. What his students gained from the fresh ideas in Grice's lectures, however, they paid for in his cavalier attitude to the topic and aims of the class. He begins one lecture, which is entitled simply 'Saying: Week 1':  Although the official title of this class is 'Saying', let me say at once that we are unlikely to reach any direct discussion of the notion of saying for several weeks, and in the likely event of our failing to make any substantial inroads on the title topic this term, my present intention is to continue the class into next term.37  Grice's interest in these lectures was in finding out what can be learnt about speaker meaning, specifically about what sets it apart from linguistic meaning, from close attention to its characteristics and circum-stances. The opening of another of the lectures, entitled 'The general theory of context', tells rather more of his purpose and method than is made explicit in much of the later, published work.  Philosophers often say that context is very important. Let us take this remark seriously. Surely, if we do, we shall want to consider this remark not merely in its relation to this or that problem, i.e. in context, but also in itself, i.e. out of context. If we are to take this seriously, we must be systematic, that is thorough and orderly. If we are to be orderly we must start with what is relatively simple. Here, though not of course everywhere, to be simple is to be as abstract as possible; by this I mean merely that we want, to begin with, to have as few cards on the table as we can. Orderliness will then consist in seeing first what we can do with the cards we have; and when we think that we have exhausted this investigation, we put another card on the table, and see what that enables us to do.It is not hard to discern Austin's influence here, in the insistence that a particular philosophical commonplace, if it is to be accepted as a useful explanation, must first be subject to a rigorous process of analy-sis. The call for system and order, however, is Grice's own. He had reacted against precisely the tendency towards unordered, open-ended lists in Austin's work. He argues in these lectures that thinking seriously about context means thinking about conversation; this is the setting for most examples of speaker meaning. He proposes, therefore, to compile an account of some of the basic properties common to conversations generally. His method of limiting his hand was to result in certain highly artificial simplifications, but he made these simplifications deliberately and knowingly. For instance, the relevant context was to be assumed to be limited to what he calls the 'linguistic environment': to the content of the conversation itself. Conversation was assumed to take place between two people who alternate as speaker and hearer, and to be concerned simply with the business of transferring information between them.  A number of the lectures include discussion of the types of behaviour people in general exhibit, and therefore the types of expectations they might bring to a venture such as a conversation. Grice suggests that people in general both exhibit and expect a certain degree of helpfulness from others, usually on the understanding that such helpfulness does not get in the way of particular goals, and does not involve undue effort. If two people, even complete strangers, are going through a gate, the expectation is that the first one through will hold the gate open, or at least leave it open, for the second. The expectation is such that to do otherwise without particular reason would be interpreted as deliberately rude.  The type of helpfulness exhibited and expected in conversation is more specific because of a particular, although not a unique, feature of con-versation; it is a collaborative venture between the participants. At least in the simplified version of conversation discussed in these lectures, there is a shared aim or purpose. However, an account of the particular type of helpfulness expected in conversation must be capable of extension to any collaborative activity. In his early notes on the subject, Grice considers  'cooperation' as a label for the features he was seeking to describe. Does  'helpfulness in something we are doing together'  ', he wonders in a note,  equate to 'cooperation'? He seems to have decided that it does; by the later lectures in the series 'the principle of conversational helpfulness' has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation'.  During the Oxford lectures Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regu-larities, or principles, detailing expected behaviour. The term 'maxim' to describe these regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.  Grice's initial choices of term are 'objectives', or 'desiderata'; he was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose of achieving the joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits two such desiderata: those relating to candour on the one hand, and clarity on the other. The desideratum of candour contains his general principle of making the strongest possible statement and, as a limiting factor on this, the suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead.  The desideratum of clarity concerns the manner of expression for any conversational contribution. It includes the importance of expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main import of an utterance be clear and explicit. These two factors are constantly to be weighed against two fundamental and sometimes competing demands. Contributions to a conversation are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the principle of Conversational Benevolence. The principle of Conversational Self-Love ensures the assumption on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble in framing their contribution.  Grice suggests that many philosophers are guilty of inexactness in their use of expressions such as 'saying', 'meaning' and 'use'  ', applying  them as if they were interchangeable, and in effect confusing different ways in which a single utterance can convey information. For instance, Grice refers back to the discussion at a previous class he had given jointly with David Pears, when the exact meaning of the verb 'to try' was discussed. This, of course, was one of the specific philosophical problems he was interested in accounting for by means of general principles of use. Stuart Hampshire had apparently claimed that if someone, X, did something, it is always possible to say that X tried to do it. This was challenged; in situations when there is no obvious difficulty or risk of failure involved it is inappropriate to talk of someone's trying to do something. Grice's answer had been that, while it is always true to say that X tried to do something, this may sometimes be a misleading way of speaking. If X succeeded in performing the act, it would be more informative and therefore more cooperative to say so. Therefore, an utterance of 'X tried to do it' will imply, but not actually say, that X did not succeed.  In his consideration of the desiderata of conversational participation, Grice initially compiles a loose assemblage of features. By the later lectures these appear in more or less their final form under the categories Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner (or, sometimes, Mode). Inarranging the desiderata in this way, Grice was presumably seeking to impose a formal arrangement on a diverse set of principles. But it seems that he had other motives: semi-seriously to echo the use of categories in such orthodox philosophies as those of Aristotle and Kant, and more importantly to draw on their ideas of natural, universal divisions of experience. The regularities of conversational behaviour were intended to include aspects of human behaviour and cognition beyond the purely linguistic. Grice's collaborative work with Strawson had been concerned with Aristotle's division of experience into 'categories' of substances.  Aristotle's original formulation of the list of such properties allows that they can take the form of 'either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected'.38 He concentrates mainly on the first four, and these received most attention in subsequent developments of his work. They were the starting-point for Kant's use of categories to describe types of human experience, and his argument that these form the basis of all possible human knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes to divide the pure concepts of understanding into four main divisions:  'Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distinct from it in execu-tion. '39 These are categories 'Of Quantity', 'Of Quality', 'Of Relation' and  'Of Modality', with various subdivisions ascribed to each. Kant's claims for both the fundamental and the exhaustive nature of these categories are explicit:  This division is systematically generated from a common principle, namely the faculty for judging (which is the same as the faculty for thinking), and has not arisen rhapsodically from a haphazard search for pure concepts, of the completeness of which one could never be certain.  40  Kant goes so far as to suggest that his table of categories, containing all the basic concepts of understanding, could provide the basis for any philosophical theory. These, therefore, offered Grice divisions of experience with a sound pedigree and an established claim to be universals of human cognition.  Early in 1967, Grice travelled to Harvard to deliver that year's William James lectures, the prestigious philosophical series in which Austin had put forward his theory of speech acts 12 years earlier. Grice's entitled his lectures 'Logic and conversation'. He was presenting his current thinking about meaning to an audience beyond that of his students andimmediate colleagues and was clearly aware of the different assumptions and prejudices he could expect in an American, as opposed to an Oxford, audience. 'Some of you may regard some of the examples of the manoeuvre which I am about to mention as being representative of an out-dated style of philosophy', he suggests in the introductory lecture, 'I do not think that one should be too quick to write off such a style.'41 Addressing philosophical concerns by means of an attention to everyday language was still a highly respectable, even an orthodox approach in Oxford. In America it was seen by at least some as belonging to an unsuccessful, and now rather passé, school of thought. In pleading its cause, Grice argues that it still has much to offer: in this case, the possibility of developing a theory to discriminate between utterances that are inappropriate because false, and those that are inappropriate for some other reason. Despite the difficulties inherent in such an ambitious scheme, and the well-known problems with the school of thought in question, he does not give up hope altogether of 'system-atizing the linguistic phenomena of natural discourse'.  Grice's ultimate aim in the lectures is ambitious and uncompromis-ing; his interest 'will lie in the generation of an outline of a philosophical theory of language' 4 He argues for a complex understanding of the significance of any utterance in a particular context; its meaning is not a unitary phenomenon. Conventional meanin g has a necessary, but by no means a sufficient role to play. Indeed conventional meaning is itself not a unitary phenomenon. Some aspects of it involve the speaker in a commitment to the truth of a certain proposition; this is  'what is said' on any particular occasion. Other aspects may be associated by convention with the words used, but not be part of what the speaker is understood literally to have said. The examples 'She was poor but honest' and 'He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave' convey more than just the truth of the two conjuncts, more than would be conveyed by 'She was poor and honest' or 'He is an Englishman and he is brave'.  '. An idea of contrast is introduced in the first example and one of consequence in the second. These ideas are attached to the use of the individual words 'but' and 'therefore', but do not contribute to the truth-conditions of the sentences. We would not want to say that the sentences were actually false if both conjuncts were true, but we did not agree with the idea of contrast or of consequence. We might, rather, want to say that the speaker was presenting true facts in a misleading way. These examples demonstrate implicated elements associated with the conventional meaning of the words used, elements Grice labels  'conventional implicatures'There is another level at which speaker meaning can differ from what is said, dependent on context or, for Grice, on conversation. In 'con-versational implicatures' meaning is conveyed not so much by what is said, but by the fact that it is said. This is where the categories of conversational cooperation, and their various maxims, play their part.  The onus on participants in a conversation to cooperate towards their common goal, and more particularly the expectation each participant has of cooperation from the other, ensures that the understanding of an utterance often goes beyond what is said. Faced with an apparently uncooperative utterance, or one apparently in breach of some maxim, a conversationalist will if possible 'rescue' that utterance by interpreting it as an appropriate contribution. In this way, Grice offers a more detailed account of the idea he explored in 'Meaning', and in his notes from that time: that there are three 'levels' of meaning, or three different degrees to which a speaker may be committed to a proposition. His model now includes, 'what is said', 'conventional meaning' (including conventional implicatures) and 'what is conversationally implicated'.  The presentation of the norms of conversational behaviour in the William James lectures is rather different from Grice's handling of them in his earlier work. The maxims, or the categories they fall into, are no longer presented as the primary forces at work. Instead, all are assumed under a general 'Principle of Cooperation'. The principle appeared late in the development of Grice's theory. It enjoins speakers to: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.'43 The name 'Cooperative Principle' was even later; it was added using an omission mark in a manuscript copy of the second William James lecture. Grice may well have been attempting to give a name, and an exact formulation, to his previously rather nebulous idea of cooperation or 'helpfulness'. However, the effect was to change what was presented as a series of 'desiderata', features of conversational behaviour participants might expect in their exchanges, to something looking like a powerful and general injunction to correct social behaviour.  In the development of his theory of conversation, Grice was much exercised by the status of the categories as psychological concepts. He questioned whether the maxims were the result of entering into a quasi-contract by engaging in conversation, simply inductive generalisations over what people do in fact do in conversation, or, as he suggested in one rough note, just 'special cases of what a decent chap should do'.  He remained undecided on this matter throughout the development ofthe theory, content to concentrate on the effects on meaning of the maxims, whatever their status. By the time of the William James lectures, however, he seems to be closer to an answer. He is 'enough of a rationalist' to want to find an explanation beyond mere empirical generalisation.  4 The following suggestion results from this impetus:  So I would like to be able to show that observation of the Cooperative Principle and maxims is reasonable (rational) along the following lines: that anyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation/communication (such as giving and receiving information, influencing and being influenced by others) must be expected to have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges that will be profitable only on the assumption that they are conducted in general accordance with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims.45  This is a wordy explanation, and also a troublesome one. It seems to create a loop linking the aim of explaining cooperation to an account of conversation as dependent on cooperation, a loop from which it does not successfully escape. The link between reasonableness and cooperation is far from explicit. Nevertheless, this passage offers Grice's account of his own preferences in seeking an answer to the question over the status, and hence the motivation, for the Cooperative Principle. His preference, particularly his reference to 'rational' behaviour, was to prove important in the subsequent development of his work.  However derived, the maxims operate to produce conversational implicatures in a number of different ways. In many cases, they simply  'fill in' the extra information needed to make a contribution fully coop-erative. A says 'Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days' and B replies, 'He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately'. B's remark does not, as it stands, appear relevant to the preceding remark.  But it is easy enough to supply the missing belief B must hold for the remark to be relevant. B conversationally implicates that Smith has, or may have a girlfriend in New York.46  In other cases the speaker seems to be far less cooperative, at least at the level of 'what is said'. In order to be rescued as cooperative contributions to the conversation, such examples need to be not so much filled out as re-analysed. Because of the strength of the conviction that the speaker will, other things being equal, provide cooperative contri-butions, the other participant will put in the work necessary to reach such an interpretation. In perhaps his most famous example of con-versational implicature, Grice suggests the case of a letter of reference for a candidate for a philosophy job that runs as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc! The information given is grossly inadequate; the writer appears to be seriously in breach of the first maxim of Quan-tity, enjoining the utterer to give as much information as is appropri-ate. However, the receiver of the letter is able to deduce that the writer, as the candidate's tutor, must know more than this about the candidate.  There must be some reason why the writer is reluctant to offer the extra information that would be helpful. The most obvious reason is that the writer does not want explicitly to comment on Mr X's philosophical ability, because it is not possible to do so without writing something socially unpleasant. The writer is therefore taken conversationally to implicate that Mr X is no good at philosophy; the letter is cooperative not at the level of what is literally said, but at the level of what is impli-cated. In examples such as this a maxim is deliberately and ostentatiously flouted in order to give rise to a conversational implicature; such examples involve exploitation.  These examples, and others Grice discusses in the second William James lecture, are all specific to, and entirely dependent on, the individual contexts in which they occur. Grice labels all such example  'particularised conversational implicatures'. There are other types of conversational implicature in which the context is less significant, or at least can operate only as a 'veto' to implicatures that arise by default unless prevented. These are implicatures associated with the use of particular words. Unlike conventional implicatures, they can be cancelled: that is explicitly denied without contradiction. These 'generalised conversational implicatures' account for many of the differences between the logical constants and the behaviour of their natural language counterparts. In effect, Grice claims that there simply is no difference between, say '', 'n', 'v' and 'not', 'and', 'or' at the level of what is said.  The well-known differences are generalised conversational implicatures often associated with the use of these expressions, implicatures determined by the categories and maxims he has established.  Part of Grice's motivation for this proposal was the desire for a simplification of semantics. The alternative to such an account was to posit a semantic ambiguity for a wide range of linguistic expressions. Grice argues against this, proposing a principle he labels 'Modified Occam's Razor', which would rule against it in decisions of a theoretical nature.  The principle states that 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond neces-sity' 47 Grice's reference was to William of Occam, or Ockham, thefourteenth-century philosopher credited with the dictum 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. This is known as 'Occam's razor' although it is not clearly attributable to any of his writings, and it is not at all uncommon for philosophers to discuss it in isolation from Occam's actual work. It is taken as a general injunction not to complicate philosophical theories; the best theory is the simplest theory, invoking the fewest explanatory categories. The preference for simple philosophical theories that do not add complex and potentially unnecessary categories was one with an obvious appeal to philosophers of ordinary language. Indeed, when Gilbert Ryle published his collected papers in 1971, he commented on the 'Occamising zeal' particularly apparent in the earlier articles. Another contemporary philosopher to draw on an Occam-type approach to discussions of meaning was B. S.  Benjamin, whose article 'Remembering' is referred to in the first William James lecture. He does not draw an explicit comparison to Occam's razor, but he does pose himself the question of whether the verb  'remember' should be analysed as multivocal or univocal. For Benjamin, a 'universal core of meaning is preserved in its use in different contexts'.49  Grice himself did not develop the connection between conversational implicature and the logical constants in any great depth, either in the William James lectures or elsewhere. This is perhaps surprising, given that he introduces his theory in terms of the question of the equiva-lence, or lack of equivalence, between certain logical devices and expressions of natural language. The implications of this question, together with the specific answers offered by conversational implicature, are treated in detail by others.5° A. P. Martinich has suggested that the initial concentration on, and subsequent abandonment of, the logical particles is a serious flaw in the construction of the second, and most widely read, of the William James lectures. In a book aimed at describing and promoting good philosophical writing, Martinich identifies this as 'one of the greatest articles of the twentieth century', but argues that the more general theory of 'linguistic communication' ought to have been made the focus from the outset. He comments that on first reading Grice's article he was unimpressed by what he saw as an unacceptably complex mechanism to solve a very particular logical problem: 'Once I realised that the solution was a minor consequence of his theory I was awed by its elegance and simplicity.'51  Grice's discussion of logic is mainly restricted to the fourth William James lecture, which he later labelled 'Indicative conditionals' after the chief, but not the only, logical constant it discusses. Indicative condi-tions had been a central theme of some lectures on logical form Grice delivered at Oxford while working on his theory of conversation. There he had commented extensively on Peter Strawson's treatment of this topic in his 1952 book Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice does not mention Strawson at all in this fourth William James lecture. He does, however, discuss the views of what he calls a '"strong" theorist', views that accord with Strawson's in the insistence that the logical implica-tion, 'po q' is different in meaning from various expressions in natural language, most notably 'if p then q'. Strong theorists, Grice suggests, have tended to stress the difference between what he calls natural or ordinary language conditionals and 'artificial' conditionals, defined by logic and determined by truth-conditional properties.  Strawson argues that, while logical conditionals can be given a full definition in terms of a truth table involving the two simple propositions involved ('p' and 'q'), such an account will not be sufficient for natural language expressions such as 'if p then q'. The logical account specifies that if p is true, q must also be true. If p is false, however, nothing can be predicted about the truth value of q; a false antecedent coupled with a false consequent is assigned the overall value 'true', but so is a false antecedent coupled with a true consequent. This truth-conditional account seems insufficient as a definition of natural language 'if ... then ...' in at least two ways. There is a suggestion in most actual instances that there is some causal connection between the antecedent and the consequent. One of Strawson's own examples is: 'If it rains, then the party will be a failure!' Such examples, he notes, are not about linguistic elements or logical relations: 'they suggest connections between different things in the world, discovered by experience of these things 52 Later, he comments that most examples of the 'if ... then .. construction would suggest either that the truth of the antecedent is in some doubt, or that it is already known to be false. It is only in such cases that we would be likely to label the resulting statement true, or perhaps 'reasonable'. Strawson's suggestion is that 'if p then q' entails its logical counterpart 'P > q'. However, 'a statement of the form "p > q" does not entail the corresponding statement of the form "if p then 9" 153 There are aspects of the meaning of 'if p then q' that go beyond, and are not included in, the meaning of the logical conditional.  In his Oxford lecture notes, Grice singles Strawson out as an example of a philosopher who has not paid sufficient attention to the different ways in which a natural language expression can convey significance when it occurs in context. For Grice, this oversight has serious consequences for an understanding of the meaning of various crucial exam-ples. Certainly, as well as discussing the 'meaning' of particular expres-sions, Strawson writes, apparently without distinction, of the 'use'  'employment', 'sense' and 'implication' of 'if ... then ...' statements.54 He describes the speaker's relation to the relevant meaning as one of  'suggesting', 'using', 'indicating', 'saying' and even 'making' 55  Grice's contention, although not explicitly expressed in 'Indicative conditionals', is that there is a great deal of difference between the members of the sets that Strawson uses interchangeably. In particular, sufficient attention to the difference between saying and implicating can explain away the apparent differences between 'p> q' and 'if p then q'. He begins the fourth William James lecture uncompromisingly enough by proposing to consider the supposed divergence between 'if' and 's' and to demonstrate that 'no such divergence exists'. He suggests that 'if p then q' is distinguished from 'p> q' by the 'indirectness condition' associated with it: the commitment to some causal or rational link between p and q. Grice's claim, in effect, is that the literal meaning of 'if p then q', 'what is said' on any particular occasion of utterance, is simply equivalent to the logical meaning of 'p > q'. The indirectness condition is a generalised conversational implicature. Like all generalised conversational implicatures, it can be cancelled without contradiction, either by circumstances in the context or by explicit denial. In a game of bridge: 'My system contains a bid of five no trumps, which is announced to one's opponents on inquiry as meaning "If I have a red king, I also have a black king" !5 Here, Grice suggests, the indirectness condition simply does not arise because it is blocked by the context. There is no suggestion that having a black king is causally linked to having a red king, and the meaning is the same as that of the logical condition. To say 'if Smith is in the library he is working' would normally suggest the indirectness condition. But it is perfectly possible to say I know just where Smith is and what he is doing, but all I will tell you is that if he is in the library he is working', in a situation where the speaker had just looked in the library and seen Smith there working. In such a case also, the indirectness condition is not attached to the use of the expression.  Grice suggests what he describes as two separate possibilities as to how the indirectness condition might be produced as an implicature, although it is not in fact clear that these are necessarily mutually exclu-sive. The first relies on his original 'general principle' about the tendency towards stronger rather than weaker statements, and the first maxim of Quantity that results from it. It is less informative to say 'if p then q' than it is to say 'p and q', because the former does not givedefinite information about the truth values of p and q. Therefore, any utterance of 'p> q' will, unless prevented by context, give rise to the implicature that the speaker does not have definite information about the truth values of p and q. The same explanation can be extended to utterances of the form 'p or q'. These too seem to differ systematically from the apparently equivalent logical disjunction, 'p v q'. The truth-conditional meaning of logical disjunction states simply that at least one of the simple propositions involved must be true. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, for both propositions to be true. Yet in natural language there is something distinctly odd about saying 'p or q' if you know for certain that both p and q are true. In Grice's terms, 'p or q' shares the logical meaning of 'p v q', but in addition carries a gener-alised implicature that they are not both true. If the speaker were in a position to offer the more informative form 'p and q', then it would be conversationally more helpful to do so.  Grice's second suggestion is that implicated meanings of such expressions may follow from their role in conversation, and in human interaction and thought more generally. The familiar logical constants enable people to work out the problems presented to them by everyday life. In particular, disjunction enables people to consider alternatives and eliminate the untenable. It enables people to give partial answers to 'Wh'-questions such as 'Who killed Cock Robin?'. The most helpful answer would be a single subject ('the sparrow', 'the wren'), but if the speaker is not in a position to offer one, a series of disjuncts is a way of setting out the possibilities. Conditionals, on the other hand, enable people to ponder the consequences of certain choices. They are, there-fore, necessary to the successful operation of reasoning beings. It would simply not be rational to use a conditional in certain contexts: contexts where there is no doubt about the truth of the antecedent, for instance.  For this reason, on the assumption that our interlocutors are rational beings, we tend to interpret a conditional as indicating that a simple coordination will not do. Similarly, it would not be rational to use a disjunction in a context where we know that one of the disjuncts is true; we would in effect be attempting to solve a problem that had already been solved. Grice suggests, with typical tentativeness, that:  It might be that either generally or at least in special contexts it is impossible for a rational speaker to employ the conditional form unless, at least in his view, not merely the truth-table requirements are satisfied but also some strong connection holds. In such a case a speaker will nonconventionally implicate, when he uses theconditional form in such a context, that a strong connection does hold.  59  Grice offers this account in terms of the behaviour of a 'rational' speaker in at least potential opposition to an account drawing on the first maxim of Quantity. Elsewhere, however, he discusses the maxims as describing individually rational forms of behaviour. It is therefore conceivable that it might be possible to integrate the two suggestions, seeing conditionals as used rationally to introduce the implication of strong connection, precisely because their 'tentative' state does not offer the information that would be cooperative if available.  In the later 'Logic and conversation' lectures, Grice continues his pro-gramme for a philosophical theory of language by returning to older preoccupations, particularly to the problems identified in, and raised in response to, 'Meaning'. In effect, the theory of conversation offers a much fuller account of the notion of speaker meaning than had been developed in 'Meaning', together with a principled system linking this to conventional meaning. When first introduced in the second lecture, conventional meaning itself receives rather cursory treatment. Grice suggests that 'what is said' can be roughly equated with conventional meaning, including assigning of reference to referring expressions and any necessary disambiguation. He almost immediately complicates this definition by stipulating that some aspects of conventional meaning can be implicated. Grice returns to the notion of 'what is said' in the fifth William James lecture, later published under the title 'Utterer's meaning and intentions'  Grice's contention is still that intentions on individual occasions must be the primary criteria in determining meaning. However, simply referring to what some individual meant by some action on some particular occasion is not sufficient to arrive at an account of 'what is said'. It does not rule out a host of examples that have nothing at all to do with saying, such as flashing your headlights to indicate that the other driver has right of way. Grice's solution is in effect to do something close to the manoeuvre suggested by Searle in Speech Acts. He proposes to import into the definition of 'meaning' a specification that the utterer's action must constitute a unit in some linguistic system that has, or contains, the meaning intended by the utterer. In other words, 'U did something x which is an occurrence of a type S part of the meaning of which is  "p" 16 Furthermore, he introduces a notion of what U 'centrally meant' in doing x, in order to distinguish a core meaning from other aspects of what may be conveyed by an utterance, in particular from its con-ventional implicatures. In effect, Grice is introducing the notion of conventional meaning into utterer meaning, making it serve as part of the definition of what a speaker can legitimately intend by an utterance, while still maintaining that individual speaker intention is the primary factor in meaning. Grice extends his discussion of the different 'levels' of meaning to allow for four separate levels, labelled 'timeless meaning',  'applied timeless meaning', 'occasion meaning of utterance type' and  'utterer's occasion meaning'.  In the same lecture, Grice responds to some of the criticisms of  'Meaning'  '. Most of these, such as Schiffer's identification of an unten-  able infinite regress, were not published at the time. Grice is replying to objections put to him 'in conversation'. His response to Schiffer is, in effect, that the mental exercises required in recognising the infinite regress in intentions quickly become 'baffling'. Whatever they may demonstrate in theory, they are impossibly complex for any real-life situation:  At some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of A by U will be impracticably difficult; and I suspect the limit was reached (if not exceeded) in the examples which prompted the addition of a fourth and fifth condition. So U could not have the intention required of him in order to force the addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations he would be requiring of A too difficult, but it would be impossible for U to find cues to indicate to A that the calculations should be made, even if they were within A's compass. So one is tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.  62  Searle's 'American soldier' counter-example was already published in article form, and Grice responds to it by arguing that Searle is unjustified in claiming that the soldier did not mean 'I am a German officer'.  Regardless of what the utterance conventionally meant in German (the question about lemon blossom), if the soldier used it with the intention of getting his captors to believe that he was a German officer, this was what he meant by the utterance. Grice offers a revised definition of his account of meaning. Intention is still the central notion, which Grice discusses in terms of 'M-intentions', emphasising the importance of the speaker's desire for some response from the audience.  The remaining two lectures in the 'Logic and conversation' series develop further this notion of M-intending. At the start of the penultimate lecture, published under the title 'Utterer's meaning, sentencemeaning and word-meaning', Grice displays a typical mixture of caution and ambition. He is concerned with the relationship between what a particular person meant on a particular occasion, and what a sentence or word means. What he has to say about this 'should be looked upon as an attempt to provide a sketch of what might, I hope, prove to be a viable theory, rather than as an attempt to provide any part of a finally acceptable theory' 63 Speakers may have one of two attitudes to an utterance, which will determine their M-intentions. They may wish to get hearers to believe something, or they may wish to get hearers to do something. These two attitudes, or moods, relate to indicative or assertive utterances and to imperative utterances. The two moods are represented by the symbols + and ! respectively. Grice proposes that the symbol * stand as a 'dummy operator' in the place of either of these.  Thus a general statement of the form 'Jones meant that *p' could be filled out using a specific mood operator and an indicative sentence to give either 'Jones meant that + Smith will go home' or 'Jones meant that ! Smith will go home'.  • A further expansion, substituting a clause in indi-  rect speech, yields 'Jones meant that Smith will go home' and 'Jones meant that Smith is to go home',  ', both instantiations of the original  formula.  M-intentions in relation to imperative types are now defined as the intention that hearers should intend to do something, rather than the earlier, simpler definition that they should do something. The M-intended effect of an indicative-type utterance is no longer necessarily that the hearer should believe something 'but that the hearer should think that the utterer believes something'6 The effect of these two changes, particularly the first, is that all possible M-intentions are defined in terms of some psychological notion. Grice explicitly defends his use of what he calls 'intensional' concepts: those defining meaning not just in relation to how language maps on to the world, but also to how it relates to individual minds. Psychological concepts should not be ruled out, he argues, if they have something explanatory to offer to a theory of language. In this lecture, Grice indicates an account of how timeless meaning in a single idiolect may develop to become timeless meaning for a group. In effect, he is arguing that individual speaker meaning can, over time, yield conventional meaning. The exact status of this conventional meaning is perhaps still uncertain. Meaning is best explained in terms of the practices of a group; drawing on this, conventional meaning comes from 'the idea of aiming at conformity'. 65 Grice recognises a tension, or an 'unsolved problem' in the relationship between these two types of meaning. Briefly, 'linguistic rules' can beidentified such that our linguistic practice is 'as if we accepted those rules and conscientiously followed them'. But the desire to see this as an explanation rather than just an interesting fact about our linguistic practice leads us to suppose that there is a sense in which 'we do accept these rules'. This then leaves the problem of distinguishing ontologically between acceptance of the rules and existence of the practice.  In the final William James lecture, Grice attempts a restatement of his position on meaning. To say that someone, U, means something, p, by some utterance of C, is to talk about 'U's disposition with regard to the employment of C'. This disposition 'could be (should be) thought of as consisting of a general intention (readiness) on the part of U; U has the general intention to use C on particular occasions to means that p' (Grice is here using 'mean,' for 'speaker meaning'). Although he still wants to claim that all meaning is ultimately dependent on intention, Grice is no longer claiming that all meaning is derived from speaker meaning, therefore specifically from M-intentions. His extensive modifications of his theory of meaning have themselves been the subject of criticism. In 1973 Max Black, responding to the lectures so far published, commented on Grice's 'almost unmanageable elaborations' of his own theory. He likens the tenacity with which Grice clings to the original idea to the latter fate of the Principle of Verifiability', with its numerous qualifications and reservations in the face of counter-examples.  Employing an accusation that had long haunted Grice, he suggests that this tenacity goes beyond 'an admirable stubbornness' , amounting to  'something that might be called a "philosophical fixation"'.  The exact nature of conventional meaning and its relation to the more central notion of speaker's meaning are perhaps the least well resolved aspects of the William James lectures. They are, however, crucial to Grice's central programme. A fully integrated philosophy of language relating abstract linguistic meaning to what individual speakers do in particular contexts needs at least a clear account of the status of linguistic meaning. Grice seemed uncomfortable with its pres-ence, but increasingly to be aware of his need to account for it. Towards the end of his life, he commented that the relationship between word meaning and speaker meaning was the topic 'that has given me most trouble'. However, some later commentators have been more optimistic on his behalf. Anita Avramides has argued that it is possible to reconcile a psychological account of meaning with a conventional account, urging that 'Grice's work on meaning is, I believe, of a hearty nature and can endure alteration and modification without becoming obsolete.' Brian Loar has dismissed possible criticisms that Grice's account of speaker meaning must always presuppose linguisticmeaning, claiming that 'the basic illumination shed by Grice's account of speaker's meaning does not depend on such precise conceptual explication.'1  The problems surrounding conventional meaning prompted some of the earliest published responses to the William James lectures, perhaps in part because the last two lectures in the series, both concerned with this general topic, were the first to appear in print: 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in 1969. In 'Meaning and truth', his discussion of the  'Homeric struggle' between formal semanticists and communication-theorists, Strawson suggests that the latter must always acknowledge that in most sentences 'there is a substantial central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of truth-conditions or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from that of a truth-condition.' Strawson singles out Grice's 1968 article as an example of a communication theorist implicitly making such as acknowledgement.  Another published response to these early articles came from Chomsky. It is clear from his 1976 book Reflections on Language that Grice's admiration for his work was not reciprocated. Chomsky detects a return to behaviourism in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning'. This is rather surprising, given Grice's own explicit rejection of behaviourism, and given his spirited defence of the need to allow psychological concepts into the theory of language. Chomsky picks up on Grice's reliance on having 'procedures' to produce certain effects as an account of timeless meaning for a particular individual.  Such an account, Chomsky argues, simply cannot explain the creativity of language use: the ability of speakers to produce and hearers to interpret an infinity of new sentences. He is uncomfortable with the loose ends and pointers to unresolved problems typical of Grice's work.  In particular, and not surprisingly, he picks up on Grice's discussion of the status of linguistic rules. This question, Chomsky insists, is 'the central problem, not a marginal one' 73 His own answer is, of course, that speakers really do follow linguistic rules in constructing utterances, and that these rules can tell us everything about the linguistic meaning of an utterance, and nothing about what an individual speaker meant in producing the utterance. In this book, as elsewhere, Chomsky is advocating a complete divorce between the discussion of linguistic meaning and the study of communication. Communication, he argues, is not the only, and by no means a necessary, function of language. Here is the source of the ultimately irresolvable difference between Chomsky and Grice. For Grice, communication is primary; the best chance for explaining language is by way of explaining communication.Grice returned to Oxford after the William James lectures, but only for one term. In the autumn of 1967 he took up an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley. The move was permanent; during the rest of his life he was to make only a handful of brief return visits to England. It was also in many ways incongruous. A thoroughgoing product of the British elite educational system, Grice delighted in the rituals and formalities of college life. And even Kathleen was amazed that he was ready to turn his back on cricket, concluding that it was only because at 54 he was too old to play for county or college that he was prepared to move at all. But there was no reluctance in Grice's acceptance of his new appointment. In fact, he engineered the move himself. While at Harvard, he had made his interest known generally in the American academic community. When the offer came from Berkeley he had accepted it enthusiastically and, somewhat naively, without negotiation.  Grice's only published comment on the reasons for his move to America is in the philosophical memoir in his Festschrift, part of his description of the development of the theory of conversation:  During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed, the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States.'  Certainly, the later William James lectures show an increasing formal-ism. For instance, in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning and word-meaning' Grice uses symbols to generalise over variables and producegeneric logical forms to be instantiated in particular utterances. He had found this way of working with language appealing on his earlier visits to America, and two of his major philosophical influences at this time, Chomsky and Quine, were American.  There were other, more personal reasons for the move. Grice had become a confirmed admirer of all things American. He appreciated the comparatively relaxed social mores; the informality of the 1960s, which had not yet fully penetrated the Oxford colleges, suited his own disregard for personal appearance. He loved the Californian sunshine. And he was enthusiastic about the ready availability of what he saw as the most important commercial commodities. Asked by one colleague what was attracting him away to America he replied, 'Alcohol is cheap, petrol is cheap, gramophone records are cheap. What more could you want?' Perhaps above all, he liked the openness and warmth of American society. One incident in particular, from a few years earlier, had strengthened him in this opinion. He had recently returned to Oxford after a stay of several months in Stanford. He ran into a relatively close colleague, who followed up a platitudinous declaration that they must meet up some time with the comment, 'I don't seem to have seen you around. Have you been away?' For Grice, this was indicative of a certain coldness and distance in British, or at least Oxford, society that contrasted poorly with his recent experiences in America. Certainly, he took to his new lifestyle with ease and enthusiasm. Soon after the move he bought  a house in the Berkeley Hills, with a balcony overlooking San Francisco Bay. Kathleen, who had stayed in England to oversee their two children's university entrances, moved to Berkeley only in 1969, by which time the matter of the house was all settled. She took a job teaching children with special needs, and would often return after a day's work to find every window sill covered with dirty glasses, some covered in paint smudges. Grice was in the habit of extending his hospitality to every visitor to the house, whether colleague, student or decorator, but not of tidying up afterwards.?  Berkeley in 1967 was a centre for the anti-Vietnam War movement, for the student protests and for the associated questioning of social and political orthodoxy. However, such challenges were not necessarily felt within the institution of the university itself. The philosophy department had maintained a sharp hierarchical distinction between faculty and students, even at graduate level. Grice, who specified that he would teach only graduate students, had an impact on this. For all its formality and traditionalism, the Oxford college tutorial system had the effect of promoting regular contact, and free exchange of ideas, between tutorsand students. Grice had greatly benefited from this, first as a student of  W. F. R. Hardie, and later as a tutor to younger philosophers such as Peter Strawson. At Berkeley he taught his students in small groups, and encouraged them to talk to him outside class times about philosophical ideas, including their own. At his instigation, the weekly philosophy research seminars were followed by an evening for both faculty and students in a local restaurant or at his house. In turn, he was a regular and enthusiastic attender of student parties. His motives were, of course, a mixture of the intellectual and the social, but the effect was to offer students an unprecedented access to the time and ideas of a member of faculty.  Just as he retained a distinctly 'Oxford' ethos in his teaching, despite his enthusiasm for his new post, so Grice remained unmistakably British, and more specifically old-school British establishment. Perhaps even more strikingly after 1967 than before, his supposedly 'everyday' linguistic examples were peopled by majors, bishops and maiden aunts, set at tea parties and college dinners. He continued to produce manuscripts in British English spelling, to be painstakingly changed to American spellings by the copy editors. And in tape recordings even from 20 years after the move, his conservative RP accent stands out in sharp contrast to those of his American colleagues. Nor did Grice entirely leave behind the methods and orthodoxies of Oxford philosophy when he moved to Berkeley to be in closer contact with American formalism. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy have drawn attention to the different ways in which analytic philosophy developed in America and in Britain. For instance, writing in 1956, Strawson describes the American tradition as turning away from everyday language in order to concentrate on formal logic, a tendency he sees represented in the work of Carnap and of Quine. This he contrasts with the British, or rather English, tradition, exemplified by Austin and Ryle, with its continued close attention to common speech. He sees the former approach as representing a desire to create something new, and the latter a desire to understand what already exists; he even goes so far as to suggest that these 'national preferences' are indicative of 'a characteristic difference between the New World and the Old'.3 Grice could be seen as making a strong statement of academic intent by moving to America, but even in the work he produced immediately after that move, perhaps the most formal work of his career, he retained a distinctively 'Old World' sensitivity to ordinary language.  Grice's first publication after the move, apart from the two William James lectures that appeared in print in the late 1960s, was 'Vacuousnames', published in 1969. This was firmly located in a formalist tra-dition, appearing in a volume of essays responding to the work of Quine and including contributions by linguists and logicians such as Chomsky, Davidson and Kaplan. It was concerned with issues of refer-ence, in particular the question of how best to analyse sentences containing names that fail to refer, sentences such as 'Pegasus flies'. Grice had in fact been working on reference for some time, both before and after his move. He was lecturing on the topic in Oxford in October 1966, and gave a paper closely related to 'Vacuous names' at Princeton in November 1967. He comments at the start of the published paper on his own inexperience in formal logic: 'I have done my best to protect myself by consulting those who are in a position to advise me; they have suggested ideas for me to work on and have corrected some of my mistakes.* It seems that he had undertaken, quite self-consciously, to educate himself in predicate logic, so as to be in a position to answer the question in which he had become interested. The quantity of notes that survive from this period, and the wide range of materials they cover, testify to the perseverance, and also the relentlessness, with which he pursued this end. Tiny, scrawled logical symbols cover headed note-paper from both St John's College and the Berkeley department, and envelopes addressed to Grice both at Woodstock Road and at various temporary addresses from his early months in Berkeley.  In some of the notes from early in his Berkeley career, Grice devotes a lot of attention to the way in which expressions such as 'reference' and 'referring' are used in everyday language. He considers expressions such as 'in saying p, S was making a reference' and 'in what S said p occurred referentially'. Such locutions, he notes to himself, are 'princi-pally philosophical in character; ordinary chaps don't often say this sort of thing'.' Instead, he investigates expressions that do occur in ordinary language, such as the phrase 'when he said... he was referring to .., for instance 'when he said "The Vice President has resigned" he meant/was referring to the secretary'. People do regularly use the expression 'refer' to describe not just what phrases literally denote, but what people intend to pick out, or point to. Grice tackles the apparent paradox introduced by such an example. If what the speaker meant was that the secretary (Jones) had resigned, and it is true that the secretary had resigned, what he said is true. However, what he said entails that there is (was) a vice-president. In a situation where it is not true that there is (was) a vice-president, what is said is not true. It seems at least possible that the speaker's remark must be both true (because the secretary has resigned) and not true (because there is no vice-president) atthe same time. Grice notes that the 'truth of what is said (in suitable cases) must turn not only on denotation but also on reference': on what the speaker intends to pick out as well as on what the words literally indicate.  In 'Vacuous names'  ', Grice declares himself keen to uphold if possible  a number of intuitively appealing dogmas. These should ideally inform the construction of a predicate calculus to explain the semantics of natural language. The dogmas include a classical view of logic, in which if Fa is true then ~Fa must be false, and vice versa. They also include the closely related claim that 'if Pegasus does not exist, then "Pegasus does not fly" (or "It is not the case that Pegasus flies") will be true, while  "Pegasus flies" will be false'." If these truth relations hold, 'Pegasus flies' logically entails that Pegasus exists. In this, Grice is proposing to sustain a Russellian view of logic. This may seem like an unexpected or contradictory proposal from a philosopher of ordinary language who had collaborated with Strawson and employed his 'presuppositional' account of such examples in their joint work on categories. However, Grice had been moving away from a straightforwardly presuppositional account for some time. As early as the notes for the lectures on Peirce from which 'Meaning' developed, he had pondered the idea that examples Strawson would describe as presuppositional might provide illustrations of the difference he was investigating between sentence meaning and speaker meaning? Grice does not argue that Strawson's account of presupposition does not work, or does not explain accurately how people understand utterances in context. But he suggests that it is not necessary to use Strawson's observation as an explanation of sentence logic as well as speaker meaning.  In the years since he made these notes, he had of course refined this notion in much more detail, developing in the William James lectures the idea that logical form may be quite different from context-bound interpretation, with general principles of language use mediating between the two. He adopts this approach in 'Vacuous names'  '. He con-  siders two different uses of the phrase 'Jones's butler' to refer to an indi-vidual. On one occasion, people might say 'Jones's butler will be seeking a new position' when they hear of Jones's death, even if they do not know who the butler is; they might equally well say 'Jones's butler, whoever he is, will be seeking a new position'. On a different occasion, someone says 'Jones's butler got the hats and coats mixed up', describing an actual event, but mistakenly applying the name 'Jones's butler' to a person who is actually Jones's gardener; Jones does not in fact have a butler. In effect Grice wields Modified Occam's Razor, although he doesnot name it, when he insists that there is no difference in the meaning of the descriptive phrase in these two instances, only in the use to which it is put. I am suggesting that descriptive phrases have no relevant systematic duplicity of meaning; their meaning is given by a Russellian account.' So in the second case, when 'Jones's butler' fails literally to refer, 'What, in such a case, a speaker has said may be false, what he meant may be true (for example, that a certain particular individual [who is in fact Jones's gardener] mixed up the hats and coats)." For Grice, our responses to speakers' everyday use of expressions may not be the best guide to logic.  Grice was genuine in his desire to find out more about both logic and linguistics. His notes from the years immediately following the move to Berkeley reveal that, as well as setting himself the task of learning predicate calculus, he was reading current linguistic theory. Along with his own extensive notes on the subject, he kept a copy of Chomsky's 'Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation', in a version circulated by the Indiana University Linguistics Club early in 1969.1º He also had a number of articles on general semantics, on model-theoretic semantics, and on the semantics of children's language. The notes show him at work on the interface between semantics and syntax. There are tree diagrams and jottings of transformational rules mapping one diagram on to the next. There are sketches of phrase structure rules, such as 'NP → Art + N' and 'N → Adj + N', accompanied by the list 'N: boy, girl, tree, hill, dog, cat'." He seems to have been interested for a while in reflexive pronouns, listing verbs with which they were optional, or verb phrases from which they could be deleted ('shave myself'/'shave', 'dress myself'/'dress') and those from which they could not ('cut myself'/'cut', 'warm myself'/'warm'). He also dabbled in pho-netics, making notes to remind himself of words representative of the various vowel sounds, and drawing up a table of the distinctive features of the consonants Ip, lt and kJ.  Given this flurry of interest in linguistics, and his stated intention of putting himself into closer connection with practising linguists, it is striking that Grice does not seem to have sought any contact with linguists working at Berkeley. This is all the more surprising given that the interests of some Berkeley linguists at the time might be seen as corresponding remarkably closely to his own. If Berkeley was a hub of student uprising in 1967, it was to become a centre for a different, quieter revolution in the early 1970s. The generative semanticists were in revolt against what were now the orthodoxies of Chomskyan linguistics.  Chomsky was maintaining his hard line on the difference betweenlinguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. He argued that generative grammar was concerned with syntactic structure, and with semantic meaning to the extent that it depended on deep structure. It had nothing whatsoever to say about how speakers use language in context.  The generative semanticists argued that, if grammar really was to offer an account of the human mind, it should be able to explain all aspects of meaning, including the obvious fact that meaning is often indirect, or non-literal. Robin Lakoff has described how, in making such claims, linguists such as Paul Postal, George Lakoff, James McCawley and John Ross were seen as directly opposing Chomsky. Their attempts to find ways of incorporating various aspects of utterance meaning into a formal theory of language led to more and more complicated linguistic rules, and eventually to the failure of generative semantics as an enter-prise. Along the way, however, they picked up on work from ordinary language philosophy as 'the magic link between syntax and pragmat-ics'." Speech act theory offered a way of incorporating utterance function into grammar. Generative semanticists attempted to account for implicit performatives, where no overt performative verb is present, in terms of a 'performative marker' in deep structure.13 Grice's theory of conversation suggested possibilities for incorporating context-sensitive rules into grammar, and thereby explaining a wide range of non-literal or indirect meaning.14  However, there was little personal contact between Grice and the linguists who were making such enthusiastic use of his work. Programmes of the Berkeley linguistics colloquium, sent to Grice in the philosophy department, provided him with paper for his incessant jottings and list-ings, but were left unopened. McCawley's work on the performative hypothesis gets a mention in a handout for Grice's students from 1971, but references in his more public lectures and in his published work are always to philosophers rather than linguists. Aware of what linguists were doing, but not in active dialogue with them, he worried privately in his notes over whether logicians and linguists actually mean the same by their apparently shared vocabulary such as 'syntax' and 'semantics'.  T have the feeling', he confesses, 'that when I use the word "semantic" outside logical discussion, I am using the word more in hope than in understanding.'5  There are, perhaps, two explanations for Grice's silence on the topic of generative semantics in particular, and of linguistics more generally, although there is no evidence that Grice himself endorsed either of these. One is to do with the specific differences between Grice's enterprise and that of his contemporaries in linguistics, the other with themore general differences between linguistics and philosophy as disci-plines. Although one of Grice's central interests at the time was that of linking semantics and syntax into a coherent theory of language, he saw semantics as primary and syntax as derived from it. As he suggested in one talk on the subject:  What I want to do is in aid of the general idea that one could work out for a relatively developed language a syntax such that all the way down any tree which would terminate in the [sic] sentence of the language would be a structure to which a semantical rule was attached.17  His theory of meaning was the driving force behind his theory of lan-guage. The generative semanticists, on the other hand, took syntax as primary. Syntax, with a much more precise definition than Grice was using, was the governing factor in language. Their aim was to use it to explain as many aspects of meaning as possible.  More generally, as Robin Lakoff has pointed out, the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics have different expectations of a 'theory' of language and make different assumptions about the role of examples. 18 Linguists, at least those within a broadly 'Chomskyan' framework, are generally committed to the scientific validity of their theories. Examples are used to demonstrate a point and, in the face of counter-examples, the theory must be modified or in the worst case abandoned.  Philosophers in Grice's style are concerned with producing philosophically revealing accounts of the relevant phenomena, and examples are used to illustrate these accounts. Some of the more recent reactions to the theory of conversation from within linguistics highlight these different expectations. For instance, Paul Simpson has complained that  'Grice's own illustrations are all carefully contrived to fit his analytic model; as a result there emerge from the theory too few explicit criteria to handle the complexity of naturally occurring language.'' For Grice's purposes, the close fit of illustration and model is no problem; to a linguist it is a major fault.  In 1970, Grice gave a series of lectures and seminars at the University of Urbana under the uncompromisingly ambitious title 'Lectures on language and reality'. He explains at the start of these that his overarching theme will be reference, a topic that has interested him for some time. His interest follows on his belief that a clear account of reference is essential to a full understanding of many other central topics in the philosophy of language. More specifically and recently, he has come tosee its significance to the connections between grammar and logic, between syntax and semantics. In the first lecture he launches into an elaborately coded account of language, based on a pseudo-sentence invented by Rudolf Carnap. In the introduction to The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap presents a typically logical positivist account of the philosopher's reason for taking language seriously. A suitably rigorous language will provide the necessary tools for logical and scientific exposition. This language is to be a formal system, concerned with types and orders of symbols but paying no attention to meaning. 'The unsystematic and logically imperfect structure of the natural word-languages' makes them unamenable to such formal analysis, but in a 'well-constructed language' it is possible to formulate and understand syntactic rules. 20  For instance, given an appropriate rule, it can be proved that the word-series 'Pirots karulize elatically' is a sentence, provided only that 'Pirots' is known to be a substantive (in the plural), 'karulize' a verb (in the third person plural), and 'elatically' an adverb... The meaning of the words is quite inessential to the purpose, and need not be known.  Carnap does no more with his invented example, proposing instead to stick to symbolic languages.  Grice's approach and purpose in 'Lectures on language and reality' are very different from Carnap's, although he does not refer directly to these differences, and indeed mentions Carnap only in passing. Still at heart a philosopher of ordinary language, Grice is convinced that natural language is a worthwhile focus of philosophical investigation in its own right, and that its apparent logical imperfections are not insurmount-able. Moreover, it is philosophically important because of the purposes to which it is put, not because of its potential for logical expression.  Perhaps with an eye to the subversiveness of his undertaking, he borrows from Austin's paper 'How to talk: some simple ways' in suggesting that his programme might be subtitled 'How pirots carulize elatically: some simpler ways'.21  Grice uses Carnap's nonsense words, and others like them, to build up a fragment of a fantasy world. So his audience is treated to pieces of information such as 'a pirot a can be said to potch of some obble & as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble e, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o1 as being fid to one another'. 22 Some way into the first lecture he offers the audience the key to thiscode. Pirots are much like ourselves, and inhabit a world of obbles very much like our own world. To potch is something like to perceive, and to cotch something like to think. Feng and fang are possible descrip-tions, much like our adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles.  Part of the reason for the elaborate story of obbles, he suggests, is because:  it seems to me very important that, when one is considering this sort of thing, one should take every precaution to see that one isn't taking things for granted and that the concepts which one is going to use have, as their basis, concepts which will only bring in what is required for them to do whatever job it is that one wants them to do.  Carnap wanted to use semantically opaque forms to hint at how an analysis of syntax might proceed without reference to meaning. Grice's intention in borrowing his example is to consider what concepts might be necessary to the discussion of meaning and reference, freed from the normal preconceptions of such a discussion.  It is when the behaviour of pirots is considered, when a group of pirots in a particular gaggle interact together, that the notion of reference becomes important. Situations in which pirots want to communicate about obbles are when language 'gets on to the world'. In effect, Grice is encouraging the dispassionate consideration of what rational beings are likely to do with a communication system. The regularities of syntax are based on language's function of referring to the world; the types of meanings the pirots need to express determine the structures of the language. A successful language is one able to offer true descriptions of the world. The business of language, its driving force, is com-munication. Grice may appear to have moved rather a long way from the ideals of ordinary language philosophy, in constructing an artificial code, or language fragment. However, he emphasises that he see this as a necessary simplification, as a way of modelling and defamiliarising natural language in order to study it more clearly. His interest remains with the issue of how language maps on to reality: how it exists principally as a system for communicating about the world shared by a community of speakers. He is interested in the workings of natural language rather than the regularities of the constructed, purified language of logic. The transcriptions of the Urbana seminars show one participant asking him whether it would not be better to stick to a logical lan-guage, with its simple, familiar structures: 'why bother with ordinarylanguage?' Grice's simple reply is 'I find ordinary language more interesting. 23  Grice returns to the debate between Russell and Strawson over denoting expressions that fail to refer in the fourth Urbana lecture, the only one to be published (some years later, as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature'). Here again, his inclination is in favour of Russell's theory of descriptions to account for examples such as 'the king of France is bald', and to find alternative explanations for the 'presuppo-sitional' effects associated with them. Characteristically tentative, Grice does not explicitly endorse the Russellian position, but proposes to investigate it and test the extent of its applicability. This time, he states explicitly that he will apply the 'dodge' of implicature.  On Russell's interpretation of 'the King of France is bald', both the unique existence and the baldness of the king of France are logical entailments of the sentence; 'the king of France is not bald' is ambigu-ous, with both entailments of the positive sentence equally possible candidates for denial. Strawson objected that a person who utters 'the king of France is not bald' will generally be taken to be committed to the existence of the king and to be denying his baldness. The supposed ambiguity is rarely if ever a feature of the use of such an expression.  Grice concurs with Strawson's suggestion that the commitment to existence seems to be shared by the assertion and its denial. However, he argues, it is not necessary to assume that the commitment is of the same order, or to the same degree, in both cases. If Russell's interpretation is retained, it follows that the denial must be semantically ambiguous between a negation with scope over the whole sentence, and negation with scope simply over the baldness. The latter does, whereas the former does not, retain semantic commitment to the existence of the king of France. On this interpretation the existence of the king of France is an entailment of the positive assertion, and of one (strong) reading of the denial. However, 'without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of "the king of France is not bald" as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of the king of France.'2 In response to this, it is possible to argue that on the weak reading of the denial the commitment to the existence of the king, although not a logical entail-ment, arises as a conversational implicature in use.  The implicature envisaged by Grice in this latter case is a generalised conversational implicature; it arises by default when the expression is used, unless cancelled explicitly or by features of the context. It is present because of the speaker's choice of the form of expression. For this reason Grice proposes to explain it in terms of the general categoryof Manner. In his original account of this category he suggested four maxims, and hinted that it might be necessary to add more. Here, he suggests one such addition, namely the maxim 'Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appro-priate', or 'Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply' 25 It is reasonable to expect that conversational contributions will be expressed in a manner conducive to the most likely possible reply or range of replies.  The facilitation of likely responses is also advanced to counter another of Strawson's objections to Russell. On Russell's account, an utterance of 'the king of France is bald' is simply false. Yet, Strawson observes, our most likely response on hearing it uttered would not be to say 'you're wrong' or 'that's false', but to be in some sense lost for an answer.  According to Grice, the speaker in such a situation has not framed the utterance in a way that makes a reply easy. One possible likely response to a statement is a denial. In a conversational contribution entailing several pieces of information it is possible that any one of these pieces may be denied, but some particular aspect is often a most likely candi-date. If all pieces of information are equally likely to be denied, the most cooperative way of phrasing the utterance would be as a simple conjunction of facts. The speaker would be expected to utter something close to the Russellian expansion, something such as 'there is one unique king of France, and this individual is bald'. In producing the contracted form 'the king of France is bald', however, the speaker is apparently assuming that possible responses do not include the denial of the unique existence of the king of France. Grice suggests that it is generally information with 'common-ground' status that is not considered a likely basis for denial. This may be because the information is commonly known, and known to be commonly known between speaker and hearer. But this explanation will not always serve:  For instance, it is quite natural to say to somebody, when we are discussing some concert, My aunt's cousin went to that concert, when we know perfectly well that the person we are talking to is very likely not even to know that we have an aunt, let alone know that our aunt has a cousin. So the supposition must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that we would expect the hearer to take from us (if he does not already know). That is to say, I do not expect, when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin went to a concert, to be questioned whether I have an aunt and, if so, whether my aunt has a cousin.This is the sort of thing that I would expect him to take from me, that is, to take my word for. 6  The king of France is bald' presents the baldness as available for discussion, as possibly controversial. The existence, however, is not treated as something likely to be challenged. This explains the difficulty encountered by anyone who does in fact want to challenge it. Similarly, the negative statement is interpreted as a challenge to some actual or potential statement in which the baldness, not the existence, of the king of France is at issue. This explains why it is generally taken to commit the speaker to the belief that the king of France exists, even if it does not in fact logically entail this.  Grice's treatment of presuppositional phenomena in 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' is sketchy and partial. He offers a fairly detailed account of examples containing definite descriptions, but his rapid survey of other types of presuppositional phenomena suggests that his account may not be easily extendable. The paper offers a further example of an attempt to apply the phenomenon of conversational implicature to a philosophical problem of long standing, and in particular to preserve a classical account of logic in the face of apparently intractable facts of language use. In considering the link between grammatical structure and the status of information, it draws on Grice's general interest in ways in which meaning may drive syntax. He does not generalise from the particular consideration of referring expressions in this paper. However, an unpublished paper from much later in his life does suggest the directions in which his thoughts may have devel-oped. In 1985, Grice was seeking to reconcile the Oxford school of philosophy with Aristotle's idea that philosophy is about the nature of things, rather than language. He proposes to adopt the hypothesis that opinion is generally reflected in language, with different 'levels' representing different degrees of commitment. Some aspects of knowledge receive the deepest level of embedding within syntax, residing in what Grice describes as the 'deep berths' of language. It is not possible for a speaker even to use the language without being committed to these.  The deepest levels are at a premium, so it is in the interests of speakers to reserve these for their deepest commitments. People might challenge these, Grice suggests, but it would be dangerous to do so. If we subscribe to this account, we might be tempted to argue that first principles of knowledge are to be found in the syntactic structure, rather than the vocabulary, of language: 'how we talk ought to reflect our most solid, cherished and generally accepted opinions 2 In this discussion of whatis presented as uncontroversial and what as available for denial, Grice might be described as interested in the ways in which different syntactic devices available for conveying information bring with them different existential and ontological commitments.  The fourth Urbana lecture, taken on its own, offers an account of how a possible addition to the category of Manner suggests a new approach to the problems posed by Russell's theory of descriptions. In the somewhat abridged form in which it was published as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' this is, of course, how it is generally read.  In the context of the Urbana lectures as a whole, however, it can also be seen as part of a much more ambitious project to describe how lan-guage, as a system to serve the communicative needs of rational beings,  'gets on to' the world, or functions to refer and describe. In this context, it is also apparent that Grice saw the question of the nature of reference as central to the philosophy of language, and particularly to his current interest in the division between syntax and semantics, or logic and grammar. Ultimately, it might be hoped that the structure of language could be shown to be revealing of the structure of human knowledge, precisely because language is dependent on knowledge.  The theory of reference was not the only topic in the philosophy of language to which Grice returned during the early 1970s. His new interest in the relationship between semantics and syntactic form, and hence in the expression of human thought, also prompted him to revisit the topic of intention. He had been elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, and in the summer of 1971 he made one of his rare return visits to England in order to give an Academy lecture. For his topic, he chose to return to the themes of his discussion paper 'Intentions and dispositions' some 20 years earlier. In the mean time, Hampshire and Hart had published their 'Decision, intention and certainty'. Gilbert Harman has repeated the rumour that this paper, containing a similar idea to that in 'Intentions and dispositions', 'prompted Grice to develop his alternative analysis'28 In his British Academy lecture, 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice refers rather vaguely to 'an unpublished paper written a number of years ago', and a thesis advanced in it that he now wants to criticise. He reformulates his original two-pronged account as a three-pronged one by making independence from empirical evidence into a separate criterion. 'X intends to do A' can truthfully be used only in cases where X is ready to take any preparatory steps necessary to do  A. Further, such a statement implies or suggests that X is not in any doubt that X will in fact do A. Finally, this certainty on the part of the speaker must be independent of any empirical evidence. Drawing onthe old ordinary language technique of devising a dialogue as context for a particular word, Grice offers the following illustration:  I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. You will enjoy that. I may not be there. I am afraid I don't understand. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Then you should have said to begin with, 'I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like, 'I should probably be going', or, 'I hope to go', or, 1 aim to go', or, 'I intend to go if I can'. Grice seems unconcerned by the highly artificial nature of this 'con-versation', compared to the structure and flow of naturally occurring talk. He comments that 'it seems to me that Y's remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained. 2 His point is that it seems legitimate to object to a use of 'I intend.' in cases where the speaker is not sure that it will be possible to fulfil the intention. The omission of such an addition as '... if I can' is possible only in cases where the doubt is perfectly obvious to both speaker and hearer, as when the speaker is making plans to keep ducks in extreme old age, or to climb Everest.  Grice's criticism of his own earlier analysis focuses on the implication that an intention is a type of belief, and the secondary notion that it is a belief independent of evidence. He argues that there are simply no parallels to be found for this type of belief; neither a hunch nor a memory will fit the bill. A belief such as an intention would have to be  - one that could not be true, false, right or mistaken - simply does not properly bear the title of belief at all. This means that intention lacks a clear definition, leaving it open to a sceptical attack challenging the coherency of ever saying 'I intend.. To use the statement 'I intend to do A' is to involve oneself in some degree of factual commitment and there must be something giving one the right to do this. Usually that something is evidence, but in the case of intention it has been established that there is nothing that would count as adequate evidence.  Grice responds to this possible sceptical position by rejecting the assumption that in stating an intention one is involved in a factual com-mitment. Characteristically, he develops this objection by means of a careful analysis of language. He suggests that there is a difference between two uses of the 'future tense' in English, a difference notmarked linguistically, or marked only in careful use in the distinction between 'I will..' and 'I shall ... In most normal uses, 'I will ..! can be used either with a future intentional or a future factual meaning.  Strictly speaking, if we intend to go to London tomorrow, we can only honestly use the expression 'I will go to London tomorrow' in its future intentional meaning; to do otherwise would be to suggest that it is somehow beyond our control. And for these future intentional statements it is simply not legitimate to ask for an evidential basis, any more than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!'. In each case to ask for evidence would be 'syntactically' inappropriate.  Having drawn attention to this distinction, Grice ponders the links it suggests between intending and believing with respect to a future action. He proposes the term 'acceptance' as one that can express 'a  generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief'.3° Using the notion of acceptance in the original three-pronged analysis might, he suggests, rescue it from the criticisms based on its reliance on belief as central to intention. In the case of intention but not of belief, X accepts that X will do A and also accepts that X doing A will result from that acceptance. No external justification is required.  In the case of belief, however, some external justification, or evidence, is needed for the acceptance.  At the start of 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice acknowledges a debt to Kenny's concept of 'voliting'. He does not refer directly to Kenny's work, but its influence appears in relation to the notion of 'acceptance'.  Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher who was President of the British Academy, had published a collection of essays entitled Action, Emotion and Will since Grice's first attempt at analysing intention.  Kenny argues that expressions of desire and of judgement both display a similar complexity; both take as object not a thing but a state of affairs, despite surface appearances to the contrary. 'Wanting' always specifies a relation to a proposition; so, for instance 'wanting X' is in fact  'wanting to get X'. For this reason, we might 'expect that an analysis of a report of a desire should display the same structure as the analysis of a report of a judgement' 3' Kenny introduces the artificial verb 'volit' to generalise over the range of attitudes a speaker can adopt to a proposition that express approval, whether this be approval of actual states, as in 'x is glad that p' or of possible states as in 'x wishes that p'. This positive attitude distinguishes 'voliting' verbs from simple judgement, which may be neutral or even disapproving. Kenny's 'volition' also covers intention. Later, Kenny proposes to borrow Wittgenstein's term  'sentence-radical' to describe the propositional form that can serve asthe object of any verb of 'voliting'. So 'You live here now' and 'Live here now!' share the same sentence-radical as a common element of meaning, and it is necessary to distinguish this from the 'modal com-ponent, which indicates what function the presentation of this state of affairs has in communication' 32 By means of this idea, Kenny is able to identify a connection between his verbs of volition a nd those of judgement.  There is some relation which holds between a man's Idea of God and his Idea of England no matter whether he judges that God punishes England or he wants God to punish England. Any theory of judgement or volition should make this common element clear.33  In 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice employs Kenny's notion of  'voliting' in drawing a connection between intention and willing, but he does not make much use of Kenny's analysis in terms of 'sentence-radicals'. This clearly influenced his thinking in this area, however, and its effects can be seen in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', a paper written and circulated in 1972, but never published. The connection between probability and desirability, or at least between probability statements and desirability statements, had been discussed by Donald Davidson in a paper Grice heard at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina in the autumn of  1967. Davidson was another of the highly formal American philosophers of logic and language influential on Grice's thinking and methodology at this time. In this paper, eventually published in 1970, Davidson uses pr and pf, qualitative operators with scope over pairs of propositions that express attitudes of the probable and the obligatory respec-tively. Thus, 'pr (Rx, Fx)' can be instantiated as 'That the barometer falls probabilizes that it will rain', or, more naturally 'If the barometer falls, it almost certainly will rain'. A moral judgements such as lying is wrong' is to be understood, again as a relation between two proposi-tions, as something such as 'That an act is a lie prima facie makes it wrong'. This can be symbolised as 'pf (Wx, Lx)'.34  Grice considers attitudes towards probability and desirability in terms of the functions they serve in human cognition. This is reminiscent of his work in 'Indicative conditionals' on the purpose of logical connectives such as 'v' and 's' in terms of their roles in reasoning processes.  Here, he argues that probabilistic argument functions in order to reach belief in a certain proposition. Moreover:The corresponding function of practical argument should be to reach an intention or decision; and what should correspond to saying 'P', as an expression of one's belief, is saying 'I shall do A', as an expres. sion of one's intention or decision. 35  Going further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability are not merely analogous; they can both be replaced by more complex structures containing a common element.  Grice proposes two types of operators, Op^ and Op". In combination, these replace Davidson's pf and pr. The operators grouped together as Op® represent moods close to ordinary indicatives and imperatives. They can be divided into two types: Op", and Op", corresponding to t and ! respectively. A-type operators, on the other hand, represent some degree or measure of acceptability or justification. They can take scope over either of the B-type operators, yielding 'Op^ + Op", + p', or 'Op^, +t + p' for an expression of 'it is probable that p' and 'Op", + Op" + a', or 'Op+! + p' for an expression of 'it is desirable that a'.  Moving on from operators to consider the psychological aspect of rea-soning, Grice proposes two basic propositional attitudes: J-acceptance and V-acceptance, to be considered as more or less closely related to believing and wanting. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol 'V', he proposes 'X y' [p]' for J-accepts and 'X y? [pl' for V-accepts. There are further, more complex attitudes y and y*. These are reflexive: attitudes that x can take to J-accepting or V-accepting. y is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either J-accepting [p] or J-accepting [-pl; x wants to decide whether to believe p or not. y* is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either x V-accepts [p] or x V-accepts I-pl; x wants to decide whether to will p or not. On the understanding that willing p gives an account of intending p, this offers a formalisa-tion of intending.  Grice notes that for each attitude there are two further subdivisions, depending on whether the attitude is focused on an attitude of x or of some other person. Therefore 'x y', Ipl' is true just in case 'x y? [x y'  [p] or x y' I-pll' is true; 'x y's Ipl' is true just in case 'x V-accepts (y}) ly V-accepts (y*) [x J-accept (y') [p] or x J-accept (v') [-p]ll' is true. Grice suggests an operator, Opa, corresponding to each particular propositional attitude y', where 'i' is a dummy taking the place of either 1, 2, 3, or 4, and where 'a' is a dummy taking the place of either 'A' or 'B'.  He now has four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets of propositional attitudes, which he describes as follows:Op'a Judicative  (A cases Indicative, B cases Informative)  Op a Volitive  (A cases Intentional, B cases Imperative)  Op a Judicative Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Imperative)  Op*a Volitive Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Inquisitive)  For all 'moods' except the second, the syntax of English does not reflect the distinction between the A and B cases. Grice notes that 'in any application of the scheme to ordinary discourse, this fact would have to be accommodated'. This suggests that he was thinking of his scheme as at least in principle applicable to an analysis of everyday language. For present purposes, he proposes to concentrate on the simple judicative and volitive operators. This is presumably because these express his basic psychological categories of J-accepting and V-accepting. He has, however, established that it is possible to discuss more complex opera-tors, and therefore more complex psychological attitudes, a topic to which he was to return. The attitudes expressed by t, and by the pair and !'s and ! ('I shall do A' and 'Do A') can be expressed by a general psychological verb of 'accepts'. So, for instance, 'x J-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts [-pl' and 'x V-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts l'ap!'.  Grice makes it clear that, in discussing meaning, he is still describing a way of speaking, a type of procedure for achieving a goal. The semantic characterisation of the operators consists in specifying the associated procedures.  This position has an obvious kinship with views of Searle; one place where we differ is that I am not prepared to treat as primitive the notion of rule (whether constitutive or otherwise), nor that of convention (indeed I am dubious about the relevance of the latter notion to the analysis of meaning and other semantic concepts). The notion of a rule seems to me extremely unclear, and its clarification would be one result which I hope might be obtained, ultimately, from the line of investigation which I am pursuing in this paper.  The written dialogue between Davidson and Grice continued. In 1978 Davidson published a paper entitled simply 'Intending', part of whichhe devoted to a response to Grice's 'Intention and uncertainty'. Like his earlier paper, 'Intending' was the result of various drafts and conference papers, including one presented at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy in October 1974. There, Davidson has commented,  'it  received a thorough going over by Paul Grice.36 In 'Intending', Davidson suggests, or rather presupposes, that it is reasonable to 'want to give an account of the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science' 37 He sees a problem here in accounting for 'pure intending', a type not accompanied by any observable be-haviour or consequence. He proposes instead a definition, or a path towards a definition, in terms of beliefs and attitudes that can be taken as rationalising an intention. Davidson acknowledges Grice's point that intentions are often conditional on certain issues, and that the conditions are often not expressed, or not articulated, for various reasons. He quotes Grice's dialogue about the fact that X might miss the concert by being in prison. His argument is that, however misleading X's original statement of intention may have been, it was not strictly incorrect. It is not inaccurate to say 'I intend to go to the concert' when you know that there may well be a reason why you cannot go, anymore than it is contradictory to say 'I intend to be there, but I may not be there'.  Indeed, stating every condition that might prevent the fulfilment of an intention is not practicable, even if it were desirable. 'We do not necessarily believe we will do what we intend to do, and ... we do not state our intentions more accurately by making them conditional on all the circumstances in whose presence we think we would act.'38 Davidson considers intention in terms of wanting, but not as a subclass of wanting. Indeed, he argues that it is possible for someone to say that he wants to go to London next week, but he does not intend to go because there are other things he wants to do more. Rather, both intending and wanting are separate sub-parts of a general psychological pro-attitude, and they are expressed by value judgements.  Grice's 'thorough going over' of Davidson's paper was never pub-lished, but it was tape recorded and subsequently transcribed. In it he outlines the position he took in Intention and uncertainty'. X intends to do A' entails that X believes X will do A; X's belief depends on evi-dence, but the relevant evidence derives from X's own psychological state. For Davidson the relationship between intention and belief is not one of entailment, but rather by saying 'I intend..' in certain circumstances you suggest that you believe you will do it. Grice wonders whether it might be possible to explain Davidson's position in terms ofa conversational implicature from 'I intend..' to 'I believe ... But he comments wryly that 'I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing alleged entailments by implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoeuvre is appropriate in this case.'39  Grice builds his case around a distinction between extensional and non-extensional intentions. In effect, a non-extensional intention is one that the subject in question would recognise. This is the one most commonly considered in discussions of intention, Grice argues. If 'The Dean intends to ruin the department (by appointing Snodgrass chair-man)' is true on a non-extensional reading, then the Dean would, if forced, be in a position to aver 'I intend to ruin the Department'. If the Dean says 'I shall ruin the Department' he is expressing, rather than stating his intention. It would, contra Davidson's claim, be inconsistent for the Dean to say 'I shall ruin the Department, but maybe I won't in fact ruin it'. The apparent counter-examples can be explained in terms of 'disimplicature'. In effect, context sometimes means that normal entailments are suspended. If we say that Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore, in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailment that Hamlet's father was in fact on the ramparts. In such a context, the speaker 'disimplicates' that Hamlet's father was on the ramparts. In the same way, when context makes it quite apparent that there may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are not committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it. A speaker who says 'Bill intends to climb Everest next week' disimplicates that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved.  The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation, but it does not seem to be one to which he returned. As it is presented in 'Logic and conversation', and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said': to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature, Grice appears to be conceding that the meaning conveyed by a speaker in a context may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used. In the cases under discussion, there is some particular element, some entailment,  that is 'dropped' in  context. However, he also hints that disimplicature can be 'total, as in  "You are the cream in my coffee"'. This remark appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting that, in a context which makes the whole of 'what is said' untenable, it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning. The mechanismsof disimplicature are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in terms of the assumption that the speaker is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality. If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimpli-cature is total, the hearer is forced to seek a different interpretation of the utterance.  There are undoubtedly problems inherent in the notion of disimpli-cature, which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea. In a 1971 article, Jonathan Cohen suggests a 'Seman-tical Hypothesis' as an alternative explanation of the phenomena of logical particles that Grice explains by means of his 'Conversationalist Hypothesis'. Cohen's suggestion is that some natural language expres-sions, such as 'either... or', differ from their apparent logical counter-parts. In this particular case, 'either... or' differs from 'V' by entailing, as part of its dictionary meaning, that there is indirect evidence for the disjunction. In examples such as 'The prize is either in the garden or in the attic, but I'm not going to tell you which', however, this meaning does not survive. This is because 'it is deleted or cancelled in certain con-texts, just as the prefixing of "plastic" to "flower" deletes the suggestion of forming part of a plant.'40 The idea of 'disimplicature' seems remarkably close to Cohen's looser notion of 'deletion', laying open the possibility that the very natural language expressions Grice was seeking to explain might after all differ semantically from their logical equivalents.  In his reply to Davidson, as in his earlier unpublished paper, Grice considers the role of intentions in actual everyday cognition. 'First we are creatures who do not, like the brutes, merely respond to the present; we are equipped to set up, in the present, responses in the more remote future to situations in the less remote future. Grice pictures our view of the future as an appointment book in which various entries are inscribed. We are aware of a distinction between entries we have no control over (inscribed in black) and those that are there by our control, or depend on us for their realisation (inscribed in red). These latter entries are intentions. If we can foresee an unpleasant consequent of such entries, we will try to avert it if we can by deleting a red entry. The Dean derives the conclusion from the existing entries that 'Early December Dean gets fired'. He is understandably unhappy about this, but is in a position to do something about it if he can find that one of the entries from which he drew the conclusion is in red. He is able to delete, for instance, 'Dean appoints Snodgrass' inscribed in red in mid-November.  The conclusion Grice draws from this is:that we need a concept which is related to that of being sure in the kind of way which I have suggested intending is related to being sure; and if we need such a concept we may presume that we have it.  This sentence contains a large leap in the argument, but the recording of his original presentation reveals that Grice got a big laugh from the audience at this point. He presents this conclusion gleefully, provocatively 'trying it on', suggesting that 'intend' seems to him a good candidate for the name of the concept in question. This was, however, to prove a serious manoeuvre in his methodology. In the field of philosophical psychology in particular, he was to argue that the need for a particular concept in rational creatures was good enough reason to assume its existence, or at least posit it for the purpose of theorising.  Grice challenges Davidson's views on wanting, describing his picture of a person's mental life as one of a series of wants competing to be assigned the status of intention. For Grice this is just too neat and organ-ised to be plausible. It does not even reflect how the matter is described in ordinary language. There is in fact a vast range of terms in the  'wanting-family' of verbs, and these demand careful attention. Contra Davidson's claim, we would be very unlikely to say 'I want to go to London next week but I don't intend to because there are other things I want more'. We are far more likely to use some phrase such as 'I would like to go to London but... In the following elaborately extended metaphor, Grice expresses his unease with the notion of a series of competing wants, arguing that rationality is necessary to impose some order or restraint on pre-rational emotions and impulses:  It seems to me that the picture of the soul suggested by D's treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one might almost say, com-puterised. It is a picture of an ideally decorous board meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the stand-point of their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action; normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another over-impressed with the presentations made by some particular member. My soul doesn't seem to me, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout, won't listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the chair-man, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since some-times the meeting breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.  In the final section of his reply, Grice returns to the discussion of methodology. He takes issue with Davidson's aim of avoiding the mysterious and the unexplained in accounting for intention. On the con-trary, in philosophy of mind, 'a certain kind of mysteriousness' is to be prized. A concept is useful to the extent that it can explain behaviour, and this consideration outweighs some degree of opaqueness in the concept itself, as in the case of Grice's J-accepting and V-accepting. A psychological theory will be more or less rich, depending on the complexity of the behaviour, and therefore of the necessary psychological states, of the creature under investigation.  In the seven years from the time of his move to America, Grice had developed his interest in the philosophy of language to include the relationship between semantics and syntax. This had involved him in considerations of how the structure of language may mirror the structure of thought, which had in turn led him back with new insights to some old interests, including the nature of intention, and the role of psychological concepts such as this in linguistic meaning. Interest in how language is used to express thought about the world prompted a consideration of psychological concepts and ultimately a return to a topic from much earlier in his career: the philosophical status of rationality.In 1975 Grice was made full professor at Berkeley, and in the same year he was elected president of the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association. Now in his sixties, there was no apparent diminution in his restless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He travelled frequently to speak at conferences, deliver lecture series and lead discussions, mainly within the United States. His reputation benefited from this exposure, and also from the wider dissemination of his work on implicature. He finally published the second and third William James lectures belatedly and apparently reluctantly during the 1970s, under the titles 'Logic and conversation' and 'Further notes on logic and conversation'!'  Meanwhile, Grice was cutting an increasingly striking figure around the Berkeley campus. He was always a large man and, apparently unmoved by California's growing interest in healthy eating, he had recently been putting on weight. In his youth he had been proud of his blond curls, but now his hair was thinning and whitish, and grew down over his collar. His clothes were chosen for comfort and familiarity rather than for style or fashion. He was most offended, however, when it was once suggested that his trousers were held up by a piece of string.  Wasn't it obvious, he demanded, that he was using two old cricket club ties? Grice did not, perhaps, deliberately cultivate his image as an eminent but eccentric Englishman abroad, but he does seem to have taken some pleasure in the effect he produced. Drinking one evening in Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, he was approached by a total stranger who wanted to know who he was: I don't recognise you, but I'm sure you must be someone distinguished.' Perhaps more telling than the anecdote itself is the fact that Grice was immensely pleased by the stranger's comment.Grice's chaotic untidiness extended from his person to his immediate surroundings. His desks at home and on campus were piled high with an apparent miscellany of notes, manuscripts and correspondence. He drove a series of old cars, all bought cheaply and constantly breaking down, a particular problem for Grice who had neither ability nor inclination to fix them. His disregard for appearances may have been the result of preoccupation or absent-mindedness, but it did not represent an embracing of the laissez-faire, or 'hippy' attitude of his students' gen-eration, as has sometimes been suggested. In fact, Grice seems to have been wary of the values this represented. Very early in the 1970s he jotted down an extensive list, apparently simply for his own benefit, of opposing 'good' and 'bad' values in this new ethos. The list headed  'Good Things' includes 'doing your own thing (self-expression)', 'inde-pendence (cf. authority)', 'new (unusual) experiences (self-expansion)' and 'equality'. The 'Bad (or at least not good) Things' include '(self) dis-cipline',  loyalty (except political)', tolerance (except towards what we favour)' and 'culture (except popular)'. Some items on the list are marked with as asterisk, which Grice annotates as 'some v. bad'. These include 'discrimination', 'getting unfair advantage' and 'authority'. 3  There is no mistaking Grice's disapproval for the new ethos, which may seem strange in the light of his own affectionate reminiscences of 'pinko Oxford', with its avowed dislike of discipline and authority. In fact, the rebelliousness of Grice's Oxford contemporaries was, as he himself half admits in those reminiscences, more a pose or a show of dissent than a real revolt. It drew on a lifestyle that depended on privilege maintained by the status quo. Grice was made uneasy by the more businesslike rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, with its challenge to authorities, political, social and intellectual.  If Grice was somewhat wary of his students' values, this did not diminish his enthusiasm and success in teaching them. He was exceptionally bad at the paper work and administration accompanying his teaching duties. Repeated requests from administrative staff for course reading lists went unanswered and sometimes unopened, course descriptions in student handbooks were often brief to the point of evasion, and lists of grades were submitted late or not at all. However, he seems to have taken the business of teaching itself much more seriously. Those who have heard him generally agree that he was not a talented lecturer.* Tapes of his lectures bear this out; they are full of hesitations, false starts and labyrinthine digressions. However, the few surviving tapes of Grice's seminars suggest that his approach lent itself more naturally to this form of teaching. A tape from 1978 of a seminaron theories of truth records him patiently drawing out responses from his students, encouraging even faltering attempts to form answers.  Above all, he was interested in nurturing sensitivity to philosophical method, and in reinforcing students in the habit of forming their own judgements. In the same seminar, as he helps along the discussion of truth, he draws out the significant steps in the argument: consider what criticisms might be made of our position, then think about how we might get out of them.' In teaching, he still emphasised linguistic intui-tion. Former student Nancy Cartwright has recalled a seminar on metaphysics in the mid-1970s in which Grice encouraged his students to consider the theoretical claims of physics by determining where they would incorporate 'as if'. A note from a graduate student from the late 1970s includes the comment, 'I'd say that you've already increased my belief in paying attention to our linguistic intuitions." As a supervisor he was encouraging and attentive. Judith Baker, one of Grice's doctoral students at this time, has commented that, 'When we discussed my thesis, Grice completely entered into my research and questions. He had a great gift for looking at what another philosopher wished to understand.8  It does seem that, despite his rather cavalier attitude to some of his professional duties, Grice was genuinely concerned about the welfare of his Berkeley students. Some of his notes for the Urbana lectures are written on the back of a draft letter in which he contributes to a faculty discussion of 'Graduate Programme Revision'. Recycling a favourite piece of terminology, he suggests a series of 'desiderata' for the graduate programme. These are concerned not so much with syllabus content as with the more general student experience. They include comments about increasing student access to faculty, as well as points such as  'reduce or eliminate 3rd year doldrums' and 'foster a sense of personal adequacy, together with the idea that philosophy can be an exciting and enjoyable activity'. He makes a final and particularly impassioned point about 'financial discrimination', interesting in the light of his rather wary attitude to new notions of equality. 'A pass at QE should not be nullified by poverty', he argues 'and the added anxiety would be bad in itself, and bad for student harmony and for the flow of applications for admission to the program."  As well as a growing academic reputation, and popularity among his students, Grice enjoyed at Berkeley productive intellectual friendships of the sort he had valued at Oxford. These were largely formed with younger philosophers such as George Myro, Richard Warner and Judith Baker. He collaborated with them in teaching and in writing, but aboveall he enjoyed long, informal discussions. He seemed to find it easier to put together and explore his own ideas in conversation with others than in solitude. These discussions often took place at the house in the Berkeley hills, with Kathleen on hand to cook whatever meal was appropriate to the time of day. Grice commented:  To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.lº  Perhaps the most significant collaboration of this period was that with Judith Baker. They produced copious notes on ethics, particularly  drawing on Kant and on Aristotle. They completed a book-length manuscript called 'Reflections on morals', credited to 'Paul Grice & Judy Baker or Judy Baker & Paul Grice' and planned and partly wrote another called 'The power structure of the soul'." These were intended for publication, but have not yet appeared. I The only published work to result from their long collaboration was one article, 'Davidson on  "Weakness of the will"', in which they return to some of the themes discussed by Grice in the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. 13  Grice's chief solo interest during the 1970s was not very far removed from the themes of his collaborative work with Judith Baker. Nor, typically, did it represent a completely new direction in his thinking.  Throughout his philosophical career, Grice's choices of topic tended to follow on from and build on each other, rather than forming discreet units. In this case, he returned to ideas that had interested him at least since his early work towards the William James lectures, namely the psychological property of rationality, its status as a defining feature of human cognition, and its consequences for human behaviour. Grice suggested that he drew out, and perhaps saw, the significance of rationality to his theory of conversation more clearly in later commentary on the work than in his original formulation of it.' He did mention rationality in the William James lectures, insisting that to follow the Cooperative Principle was to do no more than behave rationally in relation to the aims of a conversation. However, looking back over his work at the end of his life, he goes further, remarking on the essentially psychological nature of his theory of conversation. It was aimed not atdescribing the exact practices and regularities of everyday conversation, but at explaining the ways in which people attribute psychological states or attitudes to each other, in conversation or in any other type of interaction. Crucially, it saw conversation, an aspect of human behav-iour, as essentially a rational activity, and sought to explain this ratio-nality. Grice defends himself against criticisms that his theory overlooks argumentative, deceitful or idle conversations: 'it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess.'5 Properties of rationality, he argues, can legitimately be abstracted away from more specific conversational details.  Some of Grice's notes from the year or so immediately preceding the William James lectures suggest that even at that time he was concerned with the analysis of reason for its own sake. The back of a letter about the 1966 AGM of the North Oxford Cricket Club, for instance, is devoted to an imaginative weighing up of the respective pros and cons of spending July teaching philosophy at the University of Wigan, and of spending it on a cricket tour. Grice is looking for an analysis of  'reasons for doing', perhaps for the type of language in which people usually express such arguments. On the same paper he tries out different uses of the modal verb 'should'. I In other notes from the same year he starts considering the distinction between 'reasons for' and 'reasons why'! There seems then to have been a break in this line of thought;  Grice did little with the idea of reason during the time of his move to America, while he was concentrating on syntax and semantics.  However, he returned to the topic in the early 1970s, somehow finding the earlier notes in his idiosyncratic filing system and annotating and extending them. Returning to the distinction between 'reasons for..' and 'reasons why..!, he adopts a distinctively  'ordinary language  philosophy' approach as he tries out different uses and occurrences of the phrases. One note is actually headed 'botanizing' and lists, under the heading 'Reasons (practical)', such phrases as 'the reason why he d'd (action) was..!', 'there was (a) reason to @', 'there was (a) reason for him to q (action, attitude: fire x, distrust x)', 'he had reason to q',  'he had a reason for q-ing', 'his reasons for @-ing'. Grice makes notes on the distinction between the reason why x... was that p' and 'x's reason for ... was that/so that/to p'. He notes that for Aristotle:  Reasons for believing, if accepted, culminate in my believing something (where what I believe is the conclusion of the argument asso-ciated with these reason). Reasons for doing, if accepted, culminate in my doing something, where what I do is the conclusion of the  'practical' aspect associated with these reasons. i.e. the conclusion of a practical argument is an action. 18  Grice presented the results of these deliberations in a series of lectures called 'Aspects of reason', as the Immanuel Kant lectures at Stanford in  1977. In 1979 he used them again as the John Locke lectures in Oxford, this time adding an extra lecture to the series. The lectures were eventually edited by Richard Warner and published in 2001. The invitation to present the John Locke lectures was the occasion of one of Grice's rare trips to England. He made conscientious and surprisingly neat packing lists, including careful reminders to himself of the notes and books he would take with him to work on when not lecturing. His list of notes includes 'Kant notes - Aristotle notes - Incontinence - Ethics (Judy) - Presupposition'. The books he was packing represent some heavy, if predictable, reading: 'Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, Russell'. Perhaps less predictably, the list starts with the anomalous and unspecified  'Zoology'. Grice's interest in the study and classification of living beings was to show itself faintly in the lectures on reason, and more clearly in the work to follow.  At the start of the John Locke lectures, Grice comments on his pleasure at being back at Oxford:  I find it a moving experience to be, within these splendid and none too ancient walls, once more engaged in my old occupation of  rendering what is clear obscure. I am, at the same time, proud of my mid-Atlantic status, and am, therefore, delighted that the Old World should have called me in, or rather recalled me, to redress, for once, the balance of my having left her for the New.!9  He was no doubt highlighting the distinction between Old and New World for rhetorical effect. But there was something genuine in his claim to 'mid-Atlantic status'; just as he was always too prominently British fully to integrate into Californian life, he was no longer comfortably at home in Oxford. Notes sent and received at the time, inevitably covered with scribbled jottings to do with reason, indicate that he stayed in his old college, St Johns, and arranged to meet many of his former colleagues for drinks and dinners.  But he had to re-  accommodate to the formalities of Oxford. The back of a programme of a match between Oxford University Cricket Club and Hampshire showshim reminding himself to order 'dress shirt, black tie'. He also needs to remember 'shoe polish/brushes OR get cleaned' and 'button, needle, thread'. He poses himself a question that would not have troubled him for some years: 'gown or not gown?' There is no doubt that Grice knew the rituals of Oxford life well enough. However, the act of readapting to them seems to have involved him in some deliberate and rather strained effort after more than a decade in the very different social milieu of Berkeley. Some of his attitudes had changed as radically as his dress, although these changes were more carefully concealed from his former colleagues. Some years previously, soon after his move to America, he had confided in Kathleen that he had discovered that very few of the students at Berkeley knew any Greek; most read Aristotle in translation. Further, and rather to Kathleen's surprise, he expressed himself quite happy with this state of affairs; there were now some very good translations available. Kathleen was well aware that he would never have admitted to such an opinion in the presence of any of his former Oxford colleagues.21  The first of the John Locke lectures is titled 'Reasons and reasoning'.  Grice describes his desire to clarify the notion of reason, a notion deemed worthy of attention by both Aristotle and Kant. Typically cir-cumspect in his proposal, he suggests that such a clarification may make some interesting philosophical conclusions possible, but that the actual conclusions are beyond the scope of these lectures. He prefaces his con-sideration of the technicalities of reasoning with a fairly lengthy dis-cussion of a rather more abbreviated notion. This is the definition of reasoning with which most ordinary people are familiar. It is tempting here to see a parallel with Grice's theory of conversation. The study of the literal meanings of words is crucially important, and shows up the striking parallels between natural language and logic, but it does not tell us everything about how people actually use words. In the same way, the logical processes of reason are of supreme philosophical impor-tance, but nevertheless need to be seen as distinct from people's everyday experience of reasoning. Introspection is of limited use in establishing the processes of reasoning because people frequently take short cuts and make inferential leaps in their thinking. To do so is often beneficial in terms of the time and energy saved, and indeed might con-stitute a definition of 'intelligence'. 22 In his treatment of reason, Grice draws on and develops the line of argument from the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. The earlier paper was circulated in mimeograph, although far less widely than 'Logic and conversation' 23 It may have been at leastin part because much of it was subsumed into these lectures that it was not itself published. Grice's method of examining and clarifying the notion of reason is one Austin would have recognised and approved He presents the results of the dusting down of the methods of linguistic botanising apparent in his notes from the previous few years. He considers different ways in which the word 'reason' is used, classifies these uses into different categories, and illustrates these categories with examples. A sentence such as 'The reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane' exemplifies what he describes as 'explanatory reasons'.2 The same type of meaning is conveyed by variants such as 'the reason for the collapse of the bridge was that..! and 'the fact that the girders were made of cellophane was the reason why the bridge collapsed'. In all such examples the fact about the girders is offered as an explanation, or a causal account, of the collapse of the bridge. They are elaborate versions of Grice's original 'reason for' cate-gory. Such examples are 'factive' with respect to both events; the speaker implies the truth of both the fact about the bridge and the fact about the girders.  Second, there are 'justificatory reasons', exemplified by 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for thinking that the bridge had collapsed' and 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for postponing the conference. There are many possible variants on these patterns, including 'he had reason to think that ... (to postpone ...) but he seemed unaware of the fact' and 'the fact that they were so late was a reason for wanting to postpone the meeting'. These are all variations of Grice's original category of 'reason why'. They offer some support, although not inevitably necessary or sufficient justification, for a psychological state ('thinking', 'wanting') or an action ('postponing').  Such examples are factive with respect to the reason given, but do not guarantee the truth of the other event (the collapse of the bridge, the postponement of the conference).  Grice labels the third type of use of 'reason' 'Justificatory-Explanatory', because of their hybrid nature; they draw on aspects of both the preceding classes. 25 Examples include 'John's reason for thinking Samantha to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog' and 'John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself against recurrent metamorphosis'. These reasons are relative to a particular person. As the examples illustrate, they may be introduced by either 'that..!' or 'to.... In the first case, the resulting sentence is doubly factive unless 'X thought that' is inserted before the reason. In the second case, the sentence is only singly factive. In each case, if therelevant individual believes that the reason gives sufficient justification for the attitude ('thinking') or action ('denouncing') then the reason can be seen as an explanation for that attitude or action. Grice in fact suggests that this type of reason is a special case of explanatory reason;  'they explain, but what they explain are actions and certain psychological attitudes' .26  Having spent considerable time and gone into some complexity in distinguishing these classes of 'reason', both in the published lectures and in his preparatory notes, Grice appears to drop them rather abruptly. He turns to a consideration of practical and non-practical, or alethic reasons: in effect the reasons to do and reasons to believe that had concerned him in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'.  Grice does little to smooth the transition between these two topics, but does mention in passing that he will be concentrating exclusively on justificatory reasons. In seems that concentrating on 'reasons to' would enable him to look at the bases for intentional actions and for psychological attitudes. These two aspects of human psychology had provided an underlying thread in his work at least since 'Meaning'.  Grice refers to Kant's theory that there is one faculty of reason, a faculty that manifests itself in a practical and a non-practical aspect. For Grice, the nature and identity of a faculty is prohibitively difficult to investigate in itself. The language used to describe reason, however, is amenable to rigorous analysis. He therefore proposes to approachKant's theory by addressing the question of whether 'reason' has the same meaning or different meanings in 'practical reason' and 'non-practical reason'. He notes that a variety of ordinary language expressions used in reasoning can apparently describe both. The word 'reason' itself is one example, but so too are 'justification', modal verbs such as 'ought' and 'should', and phrases such as 'it is to be expected'. In effect, he is seeking to apply his Modified Occam's Razor to the vocabulary of reason by avoiding systematic ambiguities between separate meanings for such a range of natural language vocabulary. In doing so, he draws on his own earlier response to Davidson's suggestion of the operators 'pr' and 'pf'. He proposes that all reasoning statements have a common component of underlying structure, as well as an indication of the semantic subtype to which they belong. He posits as the common component a 'rationality' operator, which he labels 'Acc', and for which he suggests the interpretation 'it is reasonable that'. This is then followed by one of two mood-operators, symbolised by 'I' for alethic statements and '!' for practical statements. These two operators precede, and have scope over, the 'radical' ('I'). So the structure for 'John shouldbe recovering his health now' is 'Acc + t + I', while the structure for 'John should join AA' is 'Acc +! + I'.?? Grice suggests that the mood-operators be interpreted as two different forms of acceptance, technically labelled 'J-acceptance' and 'V-acceptance', but informally equated with judging and willing, or with 'thinking (that p)' and wanting (that p)'.  The mood-operators place conditions on when it is appropriate for a speaker to use a reasoning statement, in other words when speakers feel justified in expressing acceptance of a proposition. This raises the question of what is to count as relevant justification. Alethic statements are clearly justified by evidence. We have reason for making a statement about our knowledge or belief of a certain proposition just in case we have evidence for the proposition. Ideally, we are justified in using such statements if the proposition in question is true. But truth is not a possible means of validating statements of obligation, command, or inten-tion. To use some concrete examples (which Grice does not do), 'That must be the new secretary', interpreted alethically, would be optimally legitimate in a context where its radical', namely that is the new secretary', is true. The legitimacy of 'You must not kill', interpreted practically, however, cannot be assessed in terms of the truth of 'you don't kill'. There must be some other grounds on which such statements can be judged.  Grice's suggests that, in reasoning generally, we are interested in deriving statements we perceive as having some sort of 'value'. Truth, cer-tainly, is one type of value, and alethic reasoning is aimed at deriving true statements.  But in practical reasoning we are concerned with  another type of value, which might be described as 'goodness'. Grice's own summary of this difference, in which he implicitly links the two types of reasoning to his two broad psychological categories of mood operator, runs as follows:  We have judicative sentences ('t'-sentences) which are assigned truth (or falsity) just in case their radicals qualify for radical truth (or radical falsity); and we have volitive sentences ('!'-sentences) which are assigned practical value (or disvalue) just in case their radicals qualify for radical goodness (or badness). Since the sentential forms will indicate which kind of value is involved, we can use the generic term 'satisfactory' 28  In his discussion of practical value, Grice is drawing on themes he presumably expects to be familiar to his audience from Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, although he does not make any explicit reference. Grice himself was well versed in this work, which was a particular focus for his old tutor W. F. R. Hardie, and on which he himself worked collaboratively with Austin. Aristotle identifies rationality as a defining characteristic of human beings, distinguishing them from all other life forms. The rational nature of human beings ensures that all their actions are aimed at some particular end or set of ends. Although these ends differ depending on the specific field of activity, 'if there is any one thing that is the end of all actions, this will be the practical good'. Similarly, Grice considers practical value (he says very little more about 'goodness' here) as an end for which people strive in what they wish to happen, and therefore in what they choose to do. Here, again, he returns to the type of rationality he discussed in the William James lectures. Rational beings have an expectation that actions will have certain consequences, and are therefore prepared to pursue a line of present behaviour in the expectation of certain future outcomes. They are prepared to conform to regularities of communicative behaviour in the expectation of being able to give and receive information. This, however, is just one type of a much more general pattern of human behaviour. All actions are ultimately geared towards particular ends.  The extra lecture Grice added to the series at Oxford is 'Some reflections about ends and happiness', originally delivered as a paper at the Chapel Hill colloquium in 1976. Here too he draws on Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, this time more explicitly. Aristotle suggested that the philosopher contemplating the range of different ends for different actions is confronted with the question of the nature of the ultimate end, or the 'supreme good' to which all actions aim. The answer is not hard to find, but the significance of that answer is more complex. ' "It is happiness", say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.3 For ordinary people, however, living well involves something obvious such as wealth, health or pleasure. For the philosopher the nature of happiness is much more complex, and is linked to the proper function of a man. Individual men have different specific functions, and are judged according to those specific functions; a good flautist is one who plays the flute well and a good artist one who paints well. More generally, a good man is to be defined as one who performs the proper functions of a man well. Because rationality is the distinguishing feature of mankind, the function of a man is to live the rational life, and a good man is one who lives the rational life well. Therefore the good for man, or that which results in happi-ness, is 'an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are morekinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and more perfect kind. 31  For Grice, happiness is a complex end; that is, it is constituted by the set of ends conducive to happiness. The precise set of ends in question may vary from individual to individual, but they can be seen a conducive to happiness if they offer a relatively stable system for the guidance of life. Grice finishes on a leading but inconclusive note. It seems intuitively plausible that it should be possible to distinguish between different sets of ends in respect of some external notion. Otherwise it would, uncomfortably, be impossible to choose between the routes to happiness selected 'by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentle-man' 32 Grice's cautious proposal of the basis for a notion of 'happiness-in-general', abstracted from individuals' idiosyncrasies, draws on the essential characteristics of a rational being. He concludes his lecture series with the following, highly suggestive outline:  The ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abundance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.  As Richard Warner indicates in a footnote, the original Chapel Hill lecture ends with the further comment: 'But I have now almost exactly reached the beginning of the paper which, till recently, you thought I was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of ethical princi-ples. It is a pity that I have used up my time.'  The rather enigmatic reference to a 'creature-constructor', and the link to ethics with which Grice tantalised his Chapel Hill audience, draw on ideas developed over a number of years but not discussed in these lec-tures. Grice was working on the notion of a 'creature-constructor' back in the mid-1960s. He in fact originally planned to include discussion of this topic in the William James lectures. Papers from Oxford from 1966 include a jotted note entitled 'Provisional Grand Plan for James Lectures and Seminars'. There are two bullet points:  1. Use 'God' as expository device. Imagine creature, to behaviour of which 'think', 'know', 'goal', 'want', 'purpose' can be applied. But nocommunication. Goals continuation of self (or of species). Imagine God wishing to improve on such creatures, by enabling them to enlarge their individual worlds and power over them, by equipping them for transmission of beliefs and wants (why such change  'advance'; because of decreased vulnerability to vicissitudes of nature).  2. Mechanisms for such development. Elements in behaviour must in some way 'represent' beliefs and wants (or their objects) or rather states of the world which are specially associated with them.33  Grice's private note in fact contains the germs of most of his complex  'creature-constructor'  programme, and of the topics to which he  attempted to link it throughout the rest of his life. It also explains his interest in zoology. He was studying life in terms of the structures into which it has been classified. His idea was that it might, theoretically at least, be possible to devise a ladder or hierarchy of creatures, such that each rung on the ladder represents a creature incorporating the capacities of the creature on the lower rung, and adding some extra capacity.  As a presentational convenience, Grice proposes an imaginary agent or designer of this process, the expository device 'God' of his early notes.  In later notes, and certainly in all published work, he prefers 'creature-constructor' or 'Genitor'. The Genitor's task is to decide what faculties to bestow on each successive creature so as better to equip it to fulfil its ends. The chief end of all life forms is to ensure their own continued survival, or the survival of the species to which they belong. Grice's hierarchy could be seen as an extension of Aristotle's division of living creatures in the Nicomachean Ethics into those that experience nutrition and growth (including plants), those that are sentient (including horses and cattle) and those that sustain 'practical life of the rational part' (only human beings).34 Grice does not mention this, or indeed Locke's discussion of personal identity, familiar to him from his work on the topic more than 30 years earlier. Locke posited a hierarchy of living beings, with the identity of beings at each stage depending on the fulfilment of functions necessary to the continued existence of that being. Grice would presumably have assumed that the philosophical pedigree of his ideas would be transparent to his audience. He goes much further than Locke by employing the hierarchy of beings in a mental exercise to assess the status and function of human rationality.  In order to describe, or to represent, the place of human beings on the ladder of existence, Grice recycles the 'pirots' that had appeared in the 'Lectures on language and reality'. There, pirots had branched outfrom carulising elatically in order to model the psychological processes of communication. Now, they stand in for human beings in the Genitor's deliberations. They appeared in this guise as early as 1973 when Grice was teaching a course at Berkeley called 'Problems in philosophical psychology'. One of his students took the following notes in an early seminar in this series: 'one of the goals of the pirot programme is to discover what parallels, if any, emerge between the laws governing pirots and human psychology' 35 Grice was returning to his earlier interest in psychological states. He had addressed these back in the early 1950s when he had considered the best way of describing intentions.  In 'Dispositions and intentions' he had criticised dispositional accounts that described intentions in terms of dispositions to act. In particular he saw Ryle's version of this as coming dangerously near to behav-iourism and the denial of any privileged access to our own mental states.  His attitude seems to have softened somewhat in the intervening twenty years. The student's notes describe the pirot programme as an 'offspring of dispositional analyses of metal states from Ryle C of M. But behav-iourists unable to provide conditions for someone being in particular mental state purely in terms of extensionally described behaviour.' The pirot programme was designed to offer the bridge behaviourism could not provide, by describing underlying mental states derived from, but ontologically distinct from, observable behaviour. It was a functional account, in that each posited mental state was related to a specific function it played in the creature's observable behaviour; 'in functional account, functional states specified in terms of their relation to inner states as well as to behaviour'. Further, the student noted, 'a functional theory is concerned not only with behavioral output and input of a system, but of [sic] the functional organization of inner states which result in such outputs!'  'Philosophical psychology', then, was Grice's label for the metaphysical enquiry into the mental properties and structures underlying observable human behaviour. In contrast to a purely materialist position such as that of behaviourism, Grice was arguing in favour of positing mental states in so far as they seemed essential to explaining observable behaviour. Such explanatory power was sufficient to earn a posited mental property a place in a philosophical psychology. This openness to the inclusion of mental phenomena in philosophical theories was apparent in his earlier work on intentions, and also in the William James lectures. He was later to describe such an approach as  'constructivist'. The philosopher constructs the framework of mental structure, as dictated by the behaviour in need of explanation. Thephilosopher is able to remain ambivalent as to the reality or otherwise of the posited mental state, so long as they are explanatorily successful.  In fact, the ability to play an active role in explaining behaviour is the only available measure of reality for mental states. In the pirot pro-gramme, the fiction of the Genitor provided a dramatised account of this process, with decisions about what mental faculties would promote beneficial behaviours playing directly into the endowment of those faculties.  Grice had presented some of his developing ideas along these lines in a lecture delivered and published before the John Locke lectures, but in which the place of rationality in 'creature-construction' is more fully developed. 'Method in philosophical psychology' was Grice's presidential address to the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association in March 1975. In general, the lecture is concerned with establishing a sound philosophical basis for analysing psychological states and processes. He sums up his attitude to the use of mental states in a metaphor: 'My taste is for keeping open house to all sorts of conditions and entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework' 3 In keeping with this policy of tolerance towards useful metaphysical entities, Grice proposes two psychological primitives, chosen for their potential explanatory value. These are the predicate-constants J and V which, as he was to do in the John Locke lectures, he relates loosely to the familiar notions of judging, or believing, and willing, or wanting. Concentrating on V, we can see ways in which positing such a mental state can help explain simple behaviour in a living creature. An individual may be said to belong to class T of creatures if that individual possesses certain capacities which are constitutive of membership in T, as well perhaps as other, incidental capacities.  These constitutive capacities are such that they require the supply of certain necessities N. Indeed the need for N in part defines the relevant capacity. Prolonged absence of some N will render the creature unable to fulfil some necessary capacity, and will ultimately threaten its ability to fulfil all its other necessary conditions. Such an absence will therefore threaten the creature's continued membership of T. In these cir-cumstances, we can say that the creature develops a mental attitude of V with respect to N. This mental attitude is directed at the fulfilment of a necessary capacity; its ultimate end is therefore the continued survival of the creature.  A concrete example of this process, a simplified version of the one offered by Grice, is to think of T as representing the class 'squirrel' and N as representing 'nuts'. One necessary condition for a creature to be asquirrel is, let us say, its capacity to eat nuts. This capacity is focused around its own fulfilment; it is manifested in the eating of nuts. If the creature experiences prolonged deprivation of nuts, its ability to fulfil this capacity, and indeed all other squirrel-capacities, will be threatened (it will be in danger of death by starvation). In such a situation, it is legitimate to say that the squirrel wants nuts. This posited mental state explains the squirrel's behaviour (it will eat nuts if it can find them) in relation to a certain end (survival).37  A metaphysical theory that offers a model of why a squirrel eats nuts may not seem particularly impressive, but it is a necessary first step in modelling behaviour in much more complex creatures: ultimately, in describing human psychology. In making this transition Grice draws on the notion of 'creature-construction'. The genitor is bound by one rule; every capacity, just like the squirrel's capacity to eat nuts, must be useful or beneficial to the creature, at least in terms of survival. This rule is sufficient to ensure that any mental properties introduced into the system are there for a reason, fulfilling Grice's criterion of the usefulness of metaphysical entities. It also, perhaps, allows Grice to imply that such mental capacities might be evolutionarily derived, without having to commit to this or any other biological theory. The final stage in the mental exercise is to consider what further, incidental features may arise as side-effects of these capacities for survival.  Grice argues that it is not unreasonable to suggest that, in designing some of the more complex creations, the genitor might decide to endow creatures with rationality. This capacity would qualify as having survival benefits. For creatures living in complex, changing environments, it is more beneficial to have the capacity to reason about their environment and choose a strategy for survival, than to be endowed with a series of separate, and necessarily finite, reflex responses. Just as with the more primitive capacity of eating, it is necessary for the complex creature to utilise the capacity of reason in order to retain continued use of it, and indeed of the set of all its capacities. But once the creature is reasoning, the subjects to which it applies this capacity will not be limited to basic survival. A creature with the capacity to hypothesise about the relationship between means and end will not stop at deciding whether to hide under or climb into a tree, for instance. A creature from the top of the scale of complexity will be able to consider the hypothetical processes of its own construction. That creature will assess how each capacity might be in place simply to promote survival, and might confront a bleak but inevitable question: what is the point of its own continued survival?The creature's capacity for reason is exactly the property to help it survive this question. Rather than persuading the creature to give up the struggle for survival, the capacity is utilised to produce a set of criteria for evaluating ends. These criteria will be used to attribute value to existing ends, which promote survival, and to further ends that the creature will establish. The creature will use the criteria to evaluate its own actions and, by extension, the actions of other rational creatures The justification the creature constructs for the pursuit of certain ends, dependent on the set of criteria, will provide it with justification for its continued existence. Thus the capacity of rationality both raises and answers the question 'Why go on surviving?'38 Grice hints at the possible beginnings, and status, of ethics, when he suggests that the pursuit of these ends might be prized by the collective rational creatures to such an extent that they are compiled into a 'manual' for living. The creatures' purposes in existing are no longer just survival, but following certain prescribed lines of conduct. Grice tantalisingly ends the section of his lecture on 'creature construction' with a nod at some possible further implications of this idea.  Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).39  Somewhat at odds with his more specific usage elsewhere, Grice has here been using the term 'pirot' to refer to any creature on the scale.  The 'very intelligent rational pirots' are the psychologically most complex of such creatures. In adopting this term, which is added in the margin of his preparatory notes, Grice would appear to be making a pun on Locke's 'very intelligent rational parrot', the imaginary case used to argue that bodily form must have some bearing on personal identity.40 Other than this knowing reference, Grice does not make any attempt to link his work on creature construction to Locke, or to his own earlier interest in personal identity. Richard Warner has criticised Grice for ignoring the connections between rationality, happiness and personal identity, arguing that a notion of self will determine what counts as an essential end for an individual. If, he suggests,  we are to pursue Grice's strategy - and it is a promising one - of replacing Aristotle's 'activity in conformity with virtue' with 'suit-ability for the direction of life', I would suggests that an appeal tothe notion of personal identity should play a role in the explication of suitability. 41  As Grice's reference to a list of 'rules for living' suggests, the next direction in which he explored these ideas was in the area of philosophical ethics. He did not, however, return to the implications of his pun on  'manual' and 'Immanuel'. It is possible that he was referring to Immanuel Kant, whose work on reason was central to his own thinking on this subject. But the pun may also contain a hint towards an explanation of religious morality, and perhaps even religious belief, as facts of human existence, necessary consequences of human nature. In his own notes on the subject this aspect of the 'Immanuel' figures more prominently. In general, the plausibility of explaining religion within philosophical psychology seems to loom larger in Grice's thinking than his published work of the time would suggest. For instance, on the back of an envelope from the bank, in faint, almost illegible hand he wonders: 'perhaps Moses brought other "objectives" from Sinai, besides 10 comms'. Here he may be thinking about other systems for living, suggesting that 'perhaps we might... "retune" them'. In the same notes he seems to be pondering the differences between 'God' and  'good', between 'conception' and 'reality'. Perhaps, he speculates, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be treated along these lines; 'real or pretend doesn't matter provided... does explanatory job'.42  Grice seems here to be experimenting with the idea of 'construc-tivism' as a general philosophical method, not just as an approach to philosophical psychology. An entity, state or principle is to be welcomed if it introduces an increase in explanatory power. Beyond that it is not suitable, and indeed not possible, to enquire into its 'reality'. A system of explanations is successful entirely to the extent that it is coherent, relatively simple, and explains the facts. It is not hard to discern the influence of Kant in this epistemology, and his notion that 'things in themselves' are inevitably unreachable, but that our systems of human knowledge can nevertheless seek to model reality.  In his final decade, Grice turned such a philosophical approach in the direction of his interest in metaphysics, in philosophical psychology and, derived from this, in ethics. Anthony Kenny suggests that since the Renaissance the main interest from philosophers in human conduct has been epistemological:  Moral philosophy has indeed been written in abundance: but it has not, for the most part, been based on any systematic examination ofthe concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. the concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. Grice retired from his post at Berkeley in 1980, at the age of 67. There was no question, however, that he would cease full-time philosophical activity. He continued to teach, both part-time at Berkeley and, for a few years in the early 1980s, as a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also continued to work on new ideas, to write and, increasingly, to publish. His reluctance ever to consider a piece of work finished or ready for scrutiny had meant that only 12 articles had been published during a career of over 40 years. And in almost all cases he had been either effectively obliged to include a paper in the volume of proceedings to which it belonged, or otherwise cajoled into publish-ing. It had, however, long been agreed that the William James lectures would be published in full by Harvard University Press and now finally Grice began to take an active interest in this process. He perhaps realised that it was not feasible to continue delaying the revisions and reformulations that he considered necessary. Perhaps, also, the enthusiasm with which his ideas were received in Berkeley, and the frank admiration of students and colleagues, had slowly worn away at his formidable self-doubt. Writing in Oxford, Strawson has suggested that Grice's inhibiting perfectionism was 'finally swept away by a warm tide of approbation such as is rarely experienced on these colder shores'.! Cer-tainly, he began to draw up numerous lists of papers on related themes that he would like to see published with the lectures. These included previously published articles such as 'The causal theory of perception', but also a number that still remained in manuscript form, such as  'Common sense and scepticism', and 'Postwar Oxford philosophy'.  This planned volume was focused on his philosophy of language, but Grice was also turning his attention to publishing in other areas. After a visit to Oxford in 1980, the year in which he was made an HonoraryFellow of St John's College, he received a letter from a representative of Oxford University Press. This followed up a meeting at which Grice had clearly been eager to discuss a number of different book projects. The letter refers to 'the commentary on Kant's Ethics which you have been working on with Professor Judy Baker', and suggests that this might be the project closest to being in publishable form. However, the publisher expresses the hope that work on this 'will not deflect you from also completing your John Locke lectures on Reason', and a further work on Ethics.? Grice's desire to see some of his major projects through publication coincided with his retirement, and so could not have been driven by the demands of his post. Rather, it reflected a wish for some of the strands of his life's work to reach a wider audience than the select number of students and colleagues who had attended his classes and heard his lectures.  Grice's interests in reason and in ethics increasingly absorbed him during the 1980s. They were prominent in his teaching at Seattle and at Berkeley. He himself summarised this change of emphasis as a move away from the formalism that had dominated his work for a decade or more. The main source of the retreat for formalism lay, he suggested,  'in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attention to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language'? Certainly, the discussion of reason and, particularly, of ethics in Grice's later work takes a more metaphysical and discursive tone than that of some of the linguistic work from his early years in America. However, the break with the philosophy of language was not absolute; both new topics draw on questions about the correct analysis of various sentence types. In Grice's treatment of reason, close attention to the use of certain key terms led him to posit a single faculty of rationality, yielding both practical and non-practical attitudes. From there, his discussion of expressions of practical reasoning led to the question of the appropriate type of value to serve as the end point of such reasoning, analogous to alethic value in non-practical reasoning. A simplistically defined notion of a system for the direction of life raised the awkward suggestion that it might be impossible to discriminate between a wide variety of modes of living.  People are generally in agreement that the actions of Grice's 'well-balanced, kindly country gentleman', for instance, are to be afforded greater value than those of his 'unwavering egotist', but an account of value based simply on reasoning from means to ends seems unable to account for this.  The study of ethics has long included analysis of statements of value.  Sentences such as 'stealing is wrong' appear to draw on moral concepts;it can therefore be argued that an accurate understanding of the meaning of such sentences is fundamental to any explanation of those moral concepts. Very broadly, there are two positions on this question: the objectivist and the subjectivist. One objectivist approach to ethics argues that moral values exist as ontologically distinct entities, external to any individual consciousness or opinion. Human beings by nature have access to these values, although perceptions of them may be more or less acute, observance of them more or less rigorous, and understanding of their implications more or less perceptive. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this moral objectivism was Kant, who described ethical statements as categorical imperatives; they are to be observed regardless of personal preference or individual circumstance. These he distinguishes from hypothetical imperatives, also often expressed in terms of what one 'should' do, but dependent on some desired goal or end.  A canonical subjectivist position is that there are no moral absolutes; expressions of value judgements are always particular to subject and to context. Perhaps the most extreme version of this position was that put forward by A. J. Ayer, who followed his verificationist programme through to its logical conclusion by arguing in Language, Truth and Logic that sentences such as 'stealing money is wrong' have no factual meaning. Although apparently of subject/predicate form, they do not express a proposition at all. They merely indicate a personal, emotional response on the part of the speaker, much the same as writing 'stealing money!!', where 'the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed'. A less reductionist, but equally subjectivist position, is to analyse such statements as in fact having the form of 'hypothetical imperatives'  '. That is, moral statements attempt to  impose restrictions on behaviour, but do so in relation to certain actual or potential outcomes. They stipulate means to reach certain ends.  These ends may be made explicit, as in sentences such as 'if you want to be universally popular, you should be nice to people'. Often, however, they are suppressed, but can be understood as stipulating a general condition of success or advancement. So 'stealing is wrong' is hypothetical in nature, but this is hidden by its surface form. It can be interpreted as something such as 'if you want to get on in life, you should not steal'.  In his work on this subject, Grice draws particularly on two subjectivist analyses of statements of value as hypothetical imperatives:  Philippa Foot's 1972 essay 'Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives' and J. L. Mackie's 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.These choices are not surprising; Grice knew both Foot and Mackie personally from Oxford. In discussing the view that morality consists of a system of hypothetical imperatives, not of absolute values, Foot considers its implications for freedom and responsibility. Dispensing with absolute value raises the fear that people might some day choose to abandon accepted codes of morality. Perhaps this fear would be less, she suggests, 'if people thought of themselves as volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression' rather than as being bound to conform to pre-existing moral imperatives."  Mackie concedes that objectivism seems to be reflected in ordinary language. When people use statements of moral judgements, they do so with a sense that they are referring to objective moral values. More-over, 'I do not think that it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional meanings of moral terms.' However, he argues that this in itself is not sufficient to establish the existence of objective value. The question is not linguistic but ontological. Mackie rehearses two fairly standard arguments to support the break with common sense he is proposing: the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity draws attention to the variety of moral codes and agreed values that have existed at different times in human history, and exist now in different cultures. This diversity, Mackie suggests, argues that moral values reflect ways of life within particular societies, rather than drawing on perceptions of moral absolutes external to those societies. However, he sees the argument from queerness as far more damaging to the notion of absolute value. It draws attention to both the type of entity, and the type of knowledge, this notion seems to demand. Objective values would be 'entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe', while knowledge of them 'would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'? The supporter of objective value is forced to advocate types of entity and types of knowledge of a 'queer' and highly specific kind.  Despite Mackie's concession that a commitment to objective value is apparent in ordinary language, it was far from necessary that a philosopher of ordinary language would take an objectivist stance on ethics.  Indeed, at least one of Grice's Oxford contemporaries who published on the topic presented a subjectivist argument. In 1954 P. H. Nowell-Smith published Ethics, the book in which he advanced rules of 'contextualimplication' that foreshadowed some of Grice's maxims. Grice does not refer to this book in his own writings either on conversation or on value.  Nowell-Smith defends a subjectivist account of moral value, enlisting the argument described by Mackie as 'the argument from queerness'. In the tradition of post-war Oxford philosophy, Nowell-Smith employs different uses of words, and even fragmentary conversational 'scripts' to support his arguments. The meanings of individual words, he argues, often depend on the context in which they occur. For Nowell-Smith, this observation strengthens his subjectivist position. Since words do not remain constant, but are always changing their meanings, there can be no sentences that are true simply because of the meanings of the words they contain; in effect there can be no analytic sentences. Hence statements of moral value cannot be necessarily, but only contingently  In 1983, Grice was working on another major lecture series, which he entitled 'The conception of value'. He notes in the introductory lecture that the title is ambiguous, and deliberately so. The lectures are concerned both with 'the item, whatever it may be, which one conceives, or conceives of, when one entertains the notion of value', and with  'the act, operation, or undertaking in which the entertainment of that notion consists'' In effect, they address the two areas in which Mackie argues objectivism introduces 'queerness'. Grice suggests that the nature and status of value are of fundamental philosophical importance, while the way in which people think about value, their mental relationship to it, is deeply and intrinsically linked to the very nature of personhood.  Value, as suggested in the John Locke lectures, is the ultimate end point and the measure of rationality. The value of any piece of alethic reasoning is dependent on the facts of the matter. The value of practical reasoning, however, is dependent on a notion of goodness. Grice does not state his plan for addressing this issue, or for linking it to an account of ethics. However, as the lectures progress it becomes clear that he is supporting a means-end account of practical reasons, and of assigning some motives and systems for living higher value than others. This, indeed, seems a necessary corollary of his account of reasoning in terms of goals, and of the theory of the derivability of ethical principles hinted at in the closing remark of 'Some reflections on ends and happiness'.  However, in one of his more flamboyant heresies, Grice proposes to retain the notion of absolute value. This notion, generally associated with Kant's idea that moral imperatives are categorical, is canonically seen as being in direct conflict with an account of value concerned with goals, or with reasoning from means to ends.'The conception of value' was written for the American Philosophical Association's Carus lecture series, which Grice was to deliver in the same year. Progress was slow, particularly on the third and final lecture, in which his account of objective value was to be presented and defended. Grice had always preferred interaction to solitary writing, and as he got older he relied increasingly on constructive discussion and even on dictation. Unlike in earlier years, he produced very few draft versions of his writings during the 1980s; the papers that survive from this period consist only of very rough notes and completed manuscripts.  Now, finding composition even more laborious than usual, Grice enlisted the help of Richard Warner. Warner, who was then working at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a vivid account of the process:  To work on the Carus lecture, I drove up from LA on Friday arriving at noon. We began work, drinking inexpensive white wine as the afternoon wore on; switched to sherry as we broke off to play chess before dinner; had a decent wine from Paul's wine cellar with dinner and went back to work after eating. We worked all day Saturday with copious coffee in the morning (bread fried in bacon grease for break-fast) and kept the same afternoon and evening regime as the previous day. Paul did not sleep at all on Saturday night while he kept turning the problems over in his head. After breakfast on Sunday, he dictated, without notes, an almost final draft of the entire lecture. 1º  The result of this process was the third Carus lecture, 'Metaphysics and value'. Grice addresses the properties common to the two types of value by which alethic and practical arguments are assessed, and the centrality of both types to the definition of a rational creature. In this extremely complex but also characteristically speculative discussion, he returns to the idea that every living creature possesses a set of capaci-ties, the fulfilment of each of which is a necessary condition for the continued possession of that capacity, and indeed of all others. Here, the results of Grice's interest in biology are apparent. On the plane on the way to Oxford in 1979 he had been reading books on this topic. In 1981 he made a note to himself to 'Read "Selfish Gene", "chimp" lit'."1 In other notes from this period he lists 'mandatory functions', including 'Reproduction, Ingestion, Digestion, Excretion, Repair, Breath (why?), Cognition'.12 In 'Metaphysics and value', these thoughts are given a more formal shape as Grice considers again the distinction between essential and accidental properties of creatures. Essential prop-erties establish membership of a certain class of creature: 'the essential properties of a thing are properties which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).13 He speculates that rationality is in fact an accidental, rather than an essential property for the class of human being. However, as he argued in  'Method in philosophical psychology', once endowed with rationality, the creature will use the capacity to consider questions not just about how ends are to be achieved, but about the desirability of those ends The creature in possession of rationality, the human being, is endowed with a concern that its attitudes and beliefs are well grounded, or validated. Grice speculates that, as a result of the possession of this property, the human being performs a process of 'Metaphysical Tran-substantiation' on itself. It endorses this concern for validation with the status of an end in itself, and it transforms itself into a creature for whom this is the purpose: into a person. The properties of the human being and the person are the same, but they are differently distributed.  Crucially, for this metaphysically constructed entity 'person', but not for the human being, rationality is an essential property.  There is an unacknowledged link back to the work of John Locke in this suggestion, particularly to the work Grice drew on in his early article  'Personal identity'. Locke proposed a distinction between 'man' and  'person' to take account of the fact that people, as essentially rational beings, are uniquely distinguished from other life forms by something like self-awareness or consciousness. For Locke, the identity of a person depends on the continuation of a single consciousness, while the identity of a man, like that of any living creature, depends on unity of function. Grice's suggestion is similar to Locke's in its metaphysical distinction between 'man' or 'human being' and 'person'. However, he goes beyond Locke in attributing the distinction to the operation of rational creatures themselves, and in the link he proceeds to make between the transformed creature and the nature of value.  For Grice, the rational creature is able to devise and evaluate answers to the questions about value it is raising. This will initially take the form of comparing different possible answers in terms of effectiveness and coherence. By means of raising questions about the justification of ends, and assessing possible answers to those questions, the person takes on the function of attributing value. A rational creature becomes a creature that, by metaphysical definition, has the capacity to attribute value.  Value, even the type of value known as 'goodness', can be discussed objectively, because a creature uniquely endowed with, and indeed defined by, the capacity to judge it, exists. The creature is 'a being whoseessence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value. 1 Values exist because valuers exist. By means of this status afforded to the nature of personhood, it is perhaps possible to reassess Grice's sketchy reference in 'Aspects of reason' to the devising of systems for living. People devise systems for living from the applica-tion of the capacity of reason and the resultant ability to ascribe value to certain courses of action and withhold it from others. The develop-ment and maintenance of basic moral principles can therefore be seen as a necessary product of rational human nature.  In this way, Grice constructs his account of value as being dependent on analyses from means to ends, yet at the same time having objective existence. The process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation operates pri-marily to turn human beings into people and therefore valuers, but it thereby makes value viable. The process, and therefore the existence of valuers and value, derives from the capacity, incidentally present in human beings, for rationality. Neither value itself nor the process of valuing depend on any novel or 'queer' properties or processes. The nature of value, and the apprehension of value, can both be explained in terms of rationality, a phenomenon with an acceptable philosophi-cal pedigree of its own, and one used in other areas of explanation. In Grice's terms, value is embedded in the concept of people as rational creatures; 'value does not somehow or another get in, it is there from  the start'. 15  In the years following the delivery of the Carus lectures, Grice began to justify his claim that the study of value could have illuminating and far-reaching consequences in different areas of philosophical investiga-tion. He had already considered the implications of value for his own account of meaning in the paper 'Meaning revisited'. As so often with Grice's work, the date of publication is misleading. It was published in 1982 in the proceedings of a colloquium on mutual knowledge held in England, but an earlier version of part of the paper had been delivered at a colloquium in Toronto in March 1976. Grice offers a tantalisingly brief suggestion of what might happen if the very intelligent rational creature began to speak: an outline of an account of meaning within the framework of creature-construction to which, it seems, he did not return. If the creature could talk it would be desirable, and judged so by the creature, that its utterances would correspond with its psychologi-cal states. This would enable such beneficial occurrences as being able to exchange information about the environment with other creatures;  it would be possible to transmit psychological states from one creatureto the next. Further, the creature will judge this a desirable property of the utterances of other creatures; it will assume, if possible, that the utterances of others correspond with their psychological states.  In a sentence that is at once complex, hedged and vague, Grice pro-poses to retain some version of an intentional account of meaning:  It seems to me that with regard to the possibility of using the notion of intention in a nested kind of way to explicate the notion of meaning, there are quite a variety of plausible, or at least not too implausible, analyses, which differ to a greater or lesser extent in detail, and at the moment I am not really concerned with trying to adjudicate between the various versions.16  In an addition to the 1976 paper for the later colloquium he suggests that intentional accounts of meaning, including his own, have left out an important concept. This is heralded at the start of the article as 'The Mystery Package', and later revealed to be the concept of value. Grice hints that he has firm theoretical reasons for wanting to introduce value as a philosophical concept. Many philosophers regard value with horror, yet it can answer some important philosophical problems. It makes possible a range of different expressions of value in different cases.  Grice suggests the word 'optimal' as a generalisation over these differ-ent usages. This offers solutions to some problem areas in the inten-tional account of meaning, most significantly to the supposed 'infinite regress' identified by critics such as Schiffer. Grice expresses some scep-ticism over whether any such problem can in fact be found, but allows that it could at least be argued that his account entailed that 'S want A to think "p, because S want A to think 'p, because S wants...!"'. In effect, this demands a mental state of S that is both logically impossi-ble, because it is infinite, and yet highly desirable. Grice argues that just because it cannot in practice be attained, this mental state need not be ruled out from philosophical explanation. Indeed, 'The whole idea of using expressions which are explained in terms of ideal limits would seem to me to operate in this way', a procedure Grice links to Plato's notion of universal Ideals and actual likenesses."7  The state in which a speaker has an infinite set of intentions is optimal in the case of meaning. This optimal state is unattainable; strictly speak-ing S can never in fact mean p. Nevertheless, actual mental states can approximate to it. Indeed, for communication to proceed successfully other people can and perhaps must deem the imperfect actual mentalstate to be the optimal state required for meaning. Grice uses the story of the provost's dog to illustrate the notion of 'deeming'. It is a story of which he was apparently fond; he used it again in his later paper  'Actions and events'. The incoming provost of an Oxford college owned a dog, yet college rules did not allow dogs in college. In response, the governing body of the college passed a resolution that deemed the provost's dog to be a cat. I suspect', suggests Grice, that crucially we do a lot of deeming, though perhaps not always in such an entertaining fashion.'18  In the second version of the paper the 'mystery package' seems to be the focus of Grice's interest, but commentators at the colloquium on mutual knowledge were more interested in the possible 'evolutionary' implications of his ideas: the suggestion that non-natural meaning might be a descendant of natural meaning. This is not an idea that Grice seems to have pursued further. However, Jonathan Bennett had already postulated a possible Gricean origin for language, although carefully not committing himself to it.2°  Grice revisited 'Meaning', but not 'Logic and conversation'. Others, however, have drawn connections between rationality, value and coop-eration. Judith Baker has suggested that, 'when we cooperate with other humans on the basis of trust, our activity is intelligible only if we conceive of ourselves and others as essentially rational. 2 Marina Sbisa has gone further, making a more explicit link between Grice's notions of  'person' and of 'cooperative participant' and arguing that 'we might even envisage Metaphysical Transubstantiation as an archetypal form of ascription of rationality on which all contingent ascriptions of coop-erativity are modelled. 22 Richard Grandy, tackling the question of why a hearer might conclude that a speaker is being cooperative, suggests tentatively that Grice 'would have argued that the Cooperative Principle ought to be a governing principle for rational agents' and that such agents would follow it 'on moral, not on practical or utilitarian grounds!23 However, writing long before the publication of Grice's work on rationality and value, Asa Kasher suggested that the Cooperative Principle should be replaced by a more general and basic rationality principle. He argues that the individual maxims do not display any clear connection with the Cooperative Principle, but that they follow from the principle that one should choose the action that most effectively and efficiently attains a desired end. In this way the maxims 'are based directly on conclusions of a general rationality principle, without mediation of a general principle of linguistic action'.2 Further, in interpreting an utterance, a hearer assumes that the speaker is a rational agent.It might be that the discussion of value in Grice's later work offers a new way of interpreting the rather problematic formulation of his earlier work. Rationality and mutual attribution of rationality may be better descriptions of the motivation for the maxims described in the William James lecturers than is 'cooperation'. Speakers follow the rules of conversation in pursuit of particular communicative ends. On the assumption that other speakers are also rational creatures, the maxims also offer a good basis for interpreting their utterances. As rational crea-tures, speakers attribute value to ends that are consistent and coherent.  An implicature may be accepted as the end point of interpretation if it accords with the twin views that the other speaker is a rational being, and that their utterances correspond to their psychological states.  On this view, the Cooperative Principle and maxims are not an autonomous account of conversational behaviour precisely because they follow from the essential nature of speakers as rational creatures.  Cooperation is, in effect, just one manifestation of the much more general cognitive capacity of rationality. Further, introducing the notion of 'value' into the theory of conversation offers a defence against the charge of prescriptivism. The maxims are not motivated by a duty to adhere to some imposed external ethical code concerned with 'helpful-ness' and 'considerateness'. Their imperative form belies the fact that they are a freely chosen but highly rational course of action. Like moral rules they are means towards certain ends: ends that are attributed value by creatures uniquely endowed to do so. Both the tendency to adhere to the maxims and the tendency to prize certain courses of action as  'good' follow as consequences of the same essential property of people as rational beings: the property, indeed the necessity, of attributing value. As such, the theory of conversation can be argued to be one component in Grice's overarching scheme: a description of what it is to be human.  The allocation of time and the completion of projects became a pressing concern for Grice as the 1980s wore on because his health was failing. He had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life, and tape recordings from the 1970s onwards demonstrate that his speech was frequently interrupted by paroxysms of coughing. In response he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to Kathleen that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house, but he never touched it. This drastic action was taken, as he himself was in the habit of commenting, too late. In December 1983 he gave a farewell lecture at the end of his time at the University of Washington, in which he referred to 'my recent disagreement withthe doctors'. Even before this had taken place, he explains, he had decided to offer this talk as a thank you on his and Judith Baker's behalf,  'for making the time spent by us here such fun'.? Whether or not the doctors in question were insisting that Grice finish his demanding shuttle between Berkeley and Seattle, they certainly seem to have been recommending that he slow down. It was around this time that he was first diagnosed with emphysema, the lung condition that was presenting him with breathing difficulties and was to cause increasing ill health over the following years.  If his doctors were urging him to burden himself with fewer com-mitments, they did not check his enthusiasm for work. Stephen Neale, then a graduate student at Stanford, spent a day with Grice in Berkeley in 1984. He found that Grice 'was already seriously weakened by illness, but he displayed that extraordinary intellectual energy, wit, and eye for detail for which he was so well known, and I left his house elated and exhausted' 2 Grice's response to his illness seems to have been if anything an increased impetus towards advancing the projects then in hand, and a renewed drive towards seeing his many unpublished works into print. Early in 1984 he began making lists of things to do. Some of these include private and financial business which, mixed in with academic matters, have survived with his work papers; there was, by this time at least, no real distinction between the personal and the philosophical. He planned to 'collect "best copies" of unpublished works and inform "executors" of their nature and location and of planned "editing"'?7 On the same list appears the resolution to 'go through old letters and dispose'.  In the mid-1980s, then, Grice was looking back over the work of more than four decades. This was prompted partly by his concern to tie up loose ends and partly by the demands of selecting the papers to appear along with the William James lectures in the projected book from Harvard University Press. There was also another spur to this retrospective reflection. Richard Grandy and Richard Warner were collecting and editing the essays eventually published as Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. They were themselves writing an introductory overview of Grice's work. Grice called his response to this 'Reply to Richards', fusing, as he puts it, the editors into a multiple personality. In this he develops some of the themes of his current work. But he begins with a short philosophical memoir: 'Life and opinions of Paul Grice'. The paper he offered at the end of his time in Seattle was, it seems, a preliminary sketch for this. The original, informal title was 'Prejudices and predilec-tions. Which becomes life and opinions'.One consequence of this enforced nostalgia was a renewed interest in the practices of ordinary language philosophy. Grice looked back at the influence of Austin with the amused detachment afforded by a distance of over 20 years, or perhaps more accurately with fond memories of the amused detachment with which he viewed Austin at the time. He was earnest, however, in the guarded enthusiasm with which he recounted the art of linguistic botanising'. He had never fully abandoned the practice in his own philosophy. For instance, in his notes on psychological philosophy, he had started making a list of 'lexical words' relevant to the topic. These included 'Nature, Life, Matter, Mind, Sort, End, Time'.  Perhaps catching himself in the act, next to this list he had posed the self-mocking question '"Going through Dictionary"??'28 In 'Reply to Richards', he suggests that this method has merits that might recommend it even to contemporary philosophers: 'I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing. This was a theme he repeated, often rather more forcefully, in a number of other papers, talks and informal discussions at that time. Nevertheless, Grice was well aware of how far he had moved away from Oxford philosophy in taking on metaphysical topics such as value. In 1978, in the introductory seminar to his course 'Metaphysics', he explained to his students that not very long before the word itself could be used as a term of abuse. At Oxford in the 1950s, metaphysics was viewed as 'both non-existent and disgust-ing'. Oxford philosophers, he suggests, would have said: 'All we need is tasteful and careful botanising and we'll have all any gentleman needs to know'. Twenty-five years later, Grice admitted, he was convinced that a more systematic treatment of philosophy was needed. 30  Grice's enthusiasm for the old-fashioned method of linguistic botanis-ing was accompanied, and perhaps reinforced, by a strong dislike and distrust of technology. This attitude applied to attempts to use technological tools or analogies in philosophy itself, and extended into the more personal domain. He was scathing about what he saw as attempts to 'reduce' the understanding of human beings to the understanding of computers. He may have had in mind recent debates about the possibility and nature of Artificial Intelligence, although he does not refer to them explicitly. In 1985, he wrote an overview of his earlier work on the philosophy of language, titled 'Preliminary valediction' and presumably serving as an early draft of the retrospective that appeared in Studies in the Way of Words. In this he makes an explicit link between his philosophical interest in ordinary language and his dislike oftechnological explanations in philosophy. In a single sentence, perfectly well formed, but long even for him, he tackles the need for a carefully considered argument to justify attention to ordinary language:  Indeed it seems to me that not merely is such argument required, but it is specially required in the current age of technology, when intuition and ordinary forms of speech and thought are all too often forgotten or despised, when the appearance of the vernacular serves only too often merely as a gap-sign to be replaced as soon as possible by jargon, and when many researchers not only believe that we are computers, but would be gravely disappointed should it turn out that we are, after all, not computers; is not a purely mechanical existence not only all we do have, but also all we should want to have?31  In arguing for the centrality of consciousness, that is in arguing against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Grice was again affirming his commitment to the significance of psychological concepts to rationality in general and to meaning in particular. The processes of the interpretation and production of meaning are significant for a human being in ways that are perhaps mysterious, but crucially cannot be observed in computers. Personally, too, Grice would have nothing to do with computers. When he retired from his full-time post at Berkeley he lost the secretarial support he had always relied on and was forced to get a PC at home. But it was Kathleen who learnt to use the computer and mastered word processing. Grice could never get beyond his horror of the spell checker which, he complained, rejected 'pirot' and questioned  'sticky wicket'.  Grice was not just looking back, reflecting on the philosophy of earlier decades and planning the publication of his manuscripts. He was also working on new projects. His obsession with these was such that even his interest in his own health seemed to be predicated on the desire to have time to finish them. Cancelling a lecture he had been scheduled to give in 1986, he wrote 'my doctor has just advised me that I am taking on too much and that unless I reduce my level of activity I shall be jeop ardising the enterprises which it is most important to me to complete.'32 From the notes and the work plans he was making at the time, it seems that Grice had two main enterprises in mind: producing a finished version of his lectures on value, and developing a project these had prompted. This new project was characteristic of the pattern of Grice's work in two ways. It was daringly ambitious, in that he foresaw for it a wide range of implications and applications. But it was also not entirelynew, in that the ideas from which it developed had long been present in his work. In effect, it was nothing less than the foundations of a theory to encompass the whole of philosophy, with all its apparent branches and subdivisions. Grice was working on a metaphysical methodology to explain how the theories that make up human knowledge are constructed. Or, in one of his own favourite phrases from this time, he was doing 'theory-theory'.  Grice had long been of the opinion that the division of philosophy into different fields and disciplines was an artificial and unproductive practice. This opinion was certainly reflected in the course of his own work, in which he followed what seemed to him the natural progression of his interests, without regard for the boundaries he was crossing between the philosophies of mind and of language, logic, metaphysics and ethics. In 1983, he recalled with some pride a mild rebuke he had received years earlier from Gilbert Harman, to the effect that when it came to philosophy, 'I seemed to want to do the whole thing myself' 33 To some extent, especially in the latter part of his career, Grice had actually defined his own philosophical interests in these terms. He contributed a brief self-portrait to the Berkeley Philosophy Department booklet in 1977, in which he described himself as working recently chiefly in the philosophy of language and logic; 'takes the view, however, that philosophy is a unity and that no philosophical area can, in the end, be satisfactorily treated in isolation from other philosophical areas'.34 He comments further on this attitude in his 'Reply to Richards':  When I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy' (or in 'Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.  Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in phi-losophy, namely all of them.35  Grice's distrust of subdivisions and labels extended to the classification of different schools of thought or philosophical approaches. Labelling philosophers according to the style of their subject and their approach to it was, he felt, unhelpful and even stultifying. In preparatory note for 'Reply to Richards' he lists some of the 'cons' of philosophy as being  'fads'  ', 'band wagons', 'sacred cows' (the 'pros' are simply 'fun' and 'col-laboration'). He then goes on to produce a list of '-isms' that might bear out his objections, including 'naturalism', 'phenomenalism', 'reduc-tionism', 'empiricism' and 'scepticism'. In a later note, he worked out a series of nicknames for the dedicated followers of different schools of thought. 'Constructivists' were 'Egg-heads'; 'Realists' were 'Fat-heads';  'Idealists' were 'Big-heads'; 'Subjectivists' were 'Hard-heads' or 'Nut-heads'; and 'Metaphysical Sceptics' were 'No-heads', or 'Beheads' 37 It is not clear whether Grice intended these jottings for any purpose other than his own amusement. It seems that he made public use of only one of these labels, when speaking to the American Philosophical Associa-tion, and drawing attention to his own belief in the crucial connection between value and rationality:  To reject or to ignore this thesis seems to me to be to go about as far as one can go in the direction of Intellectual Hara-Kiri; yet, I fear, it is a journey which lures increasingly many 'hard-headed' (even perhaps bone-headed) travellers.38  In 'Reply to Richards', and elsewhere, Grice is characteristically cagey about the exact consequences of his views on the entirety of philoso-phy. He is certain, however, that progress is to be made through his view of metaphysics as essentially a constructivist enterprise, in which categories and entities are added if they are explanatorily useful. In 'Method in philosophical psychology' he used the metaphor of offering houseroom to even unexplained conditions and entities if they were able to help with the housework. In the Carus Lectures, arguing that any account of value should be given metaphysical backing, he suggests that the appropriate metaphysics will be constructivist, not reductionist. In another arresting metaphor, he tells his audience that, unlike reductionist philosophers, 'I do not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware! The world is rich and complex, and the philosopher should offer an explanation that retains these qualities. The constructivist would begin with certain elements that might be seen as metaphysically primary, and would then 'build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical theory or concatenation of theories'.39 First, it would be necessary to define the suitable form for any theory to take, to engage in theory-theory. Grice does not here enter into a discussion of theory-theory itself, but it seems that his account of value is an example fitting the general constructivist approach he has in mind Th  e simple psychological attitudes of J-accepting and V-accepting areposited, together with the programme of creature construction, as primary elements in the theory. Grice's elaborate account involving rationality as a non-essential property of human beings, the process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation, the creation of people as value-givers and the derivation of absolute value, are built up from these starting points.  There is no finished written account of metaphysical constructivism and theory-theory, although they are outlined in 'Reply to Richards'.  Grice never wrote the work 'From Genesis to Revelation (and back): a new discourse on metaphysics', which he seems to have contemplated. 40  Probably the fullest record of his thoughts on this matter is a lengthy taped conversation from January 1983, in which he talks to Judith Baker and Richard Warner, setting out the ideas he hopes to have time to develop. The discipline of theory-theory, he explains, can be discussed in both general and applied terms. In general terms, it is concerned with examining the features any adequate theory would have to exhibit: with laying out the ground rules of theory construction. In its more applied aspect, it is concerned with detailing the theories formed by these rules, and with classifying them into types. Theory-theory includes in its scope, but is not restricted to, philosophical theory.  From this starting point, Grice goes on to suggest a hierarchical structure of theories, the scope and subject matter at each level being successively more restricted and specific. He offers an example of a theory from each of these levels; in effect each theory is a component of the one before. If philosophical theory is one type demarcated by theory-theory, then metaphysics is the pre-eminent form of philosophical theory. Concerned as it is with the fundamental questions of what there is, and how it is to be classified, it deserves the title of 'First Philoso-phy'. General theory-theory is concerned with specifying the appropriate subject matter and procedures of metaphysics, while applied theory-theory is concerned with the specific categories needed to delineate the subject matter, with investigating what kind of entities there are. Within metaphysics, each sub-branch has its own general and applied theory-theory. One such branch that particularly interests Grice is philosophical psychology. General theory-theory is concerned with the nature and function of psychological concepts, applied theory-theory with finding a systematic way of defining the range of psychological beings. Rational psychology is a special case. Here, general theory-theory is concerned with the essence of rational beings. Applied theory-theory widens the scope to consider features or properties other than the essential. In this way, it leads to the characterisation of a prac-tical theory of conduct, in part an ethical system. Finally, and rather briefly, Grice comments that philosophy of language is to be seen as a sub-theory of rational psychology.  Grice is even more tentative about the operation of metaphysical construction itself, in other words the procedures of metaphysics specified in general theory-theory. The relevant principles, he insists, are not fully worked out, but two ideas about the forms they might take have been with him for some time. The first idea he calls the 'bootstrap principle', in response to the realisation that a theory constructed along the lines he is describing must be able to 'pull itself up by its bootstraps', or rely on its own primitive concepts to construct potentially elaborate expla-nations. A metaphysical system contains both its primitive subject matter, and the means by which that subject matter is discussed and explained. The means are meta-systematic. In constructing the theory, it must be possible to include in the meta-system any materials that are needed. The only restriction on this, introduced in the interests of economical conduct, is that any ideas or entities used in the meta-system should later be introduced formally into the system. The legitimate routines or procedures for construction include 'Humean projection' and  'nominalisation'. First, if a particular psychological state is central to a theory, it is legitimate to use the object of those states in the meta-system. The objects of psychological states are the 'radicals' of thought described in Grice's work on rationality, Second, it is legitimate to introduce entities corresponding to certain expressions used in the relevant area of investigation.  The second general idea does not have a specific name, but can be summarised by saying that the business of metaphysics in any area of investigation is not just the production of one theory. Grice maintains that he wants to be free to introduce more than one metaphysical theory, because the production of different systems of explanation may be differently motivated. This principle, he observes, 'fits in nicely with my ecumenical tendencies'. A metaphysical system does not have to be unitary or monolithic. In fact, Grice doubts the existence of 'a theory to be revealed on The Day of Judgement which will explain everything'.  Rather than aiming at some ultimate truth, or correct version, Grice sees any theory as crucially a revision of some prior theory, or, if there is no such precedent, as building on common sense and intuition. Asked by one of his colleagues as to whether it is legitimate to reject a previous theory, or the prompting of common sense, once it has been revised, Grice expresses himself strongly opposed to the idea. The best understanding of some entity comes from an appreciation of all the guises inwhich it appears during the development of systems. The most appropriate theory on any given occasion is not always the most elaborate one available.  Grice referred to his metaphysical interests in some of the articles he wrote, or at least completed, during these final but productive years. In  'Actions and events', published in 1986, he responds to Donald Davidson's logical analysis of action sentences that included actions in the category of entities.4l The question relates, he argues, to the fundamental issue of metaphysics: the question of what the 'universe' or the  'world' contains. Grice is inclined to agree with Davidson over this act of inclusion, but to do so from a very different metaphysical position.  He suggests that Davidson, like Quine, is a 'Diagnostic Realist'; the actual nature of reality is unavailable for inspection, but the job of philosophers is to make plausible hypotheses about it. Grice's own metaphysical approach, however, is one of constructivism, of building up an account from primitives, rather than of forming theories consistent with scientific explanations. 'One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis. 42  'Actions and events' brings together many of Grice's apparently disparate philosophical interests into one article of broad scope and remarkable complexity. Still not recognising traditional philosophical boundaries, he moves from metaphysics, intention and language to rationality and the status of value. In a few concluding paragraphs, Grice turns to what he sees as the essential link between action and freedom. The link is treated briefly and cautiously in this published work, but was in fact a major concern in his thinking about value.  Grice's notes from the early 1980s show him applying the familiar techniques of 'linguistic botanising' to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as 'alcohol-free', 'free for lunch' and 'free-wheeling', and listed many possible definitions, including 'liberal', 'acting without restriction' and 'frank in conversation'43 Richard Warner has commented that their discussions in preparation for the third Carus lecture were concerned almost exclusively with freedom as a source of value, and that he himself encouraged Grice to pursue this line of enquiry rather than that of creature construction as being the more interesting and productive. * Essentially, Grice saw in the nature of action a means of justifying the problematic concept of freedom, and from this a defence of his objective conception of value. He introduces a classification of actions that is reminiscent of his hierarchy of living creatures.  Some actions are caused by influences external to a body, as is the casewith inanimate objects. Next, actions may have causes that are internal to the body but are simply the outcome of a previous stage in the same process, as in a 'freely moving' body. Then there are causes that are both internal and independently motivated. Actions provoked by these causes may be said to be based on the beliefs or desires of the creature in question and as functioning to provide for the good of the creature.  Finally, there is a stage exclusive to human creatures at which the creature's conception of something as being for its own good is sufficient to initiate the creature in performing an action. 'It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. '45  The particular nature of human action suggests the necessity of freedom. That is, humans act for reasons. These reasons may be more than mere desires and beliefs motivated by ones own survival; they may be freely adopted for their own sake. This in turn suggests that people must be creatures capable of ascribing value to certain ends, independent of external forces or internal necessity. In Grice's terms, the particular type of freedom demanded by the nature of human action  'would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are freely adopted or pursued by me'.* In this way, a consideration of action suggests the necessity of freedom, and freedom in turn offers an independent justification for people as ascribers of value. If people are inherently capable of ascribing value, then value must have an objective existence. Independent of the programme of creature construction, the concept of freedom may offer another version of the argument that value exists because valuers exist.  In 'Metaphysics, philosophical escatology and Plato's Republic' completed in 1988 and published only in Studies in the Way of Words, Grice suggests a distinction between 'categorial' and 'supracategorial' meta-physics. The first is concerned with the most basic classifications, the second with bringing together categorially different items into single classifications, and specifying the principles for these combinations.  This second type of metaphysics, closely related to his informal account of constructivism, he tentatively labels 'Philosophical Escatology'. 47 The study of escatology, or of last or final things, belonged originally to Christian theology. Grice is laying claim to an exclusively philosophical version of this discipline, and thereby linking metaphysical definitions to finality, or purpose.  The paper 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being' was published in 1988, but there is evidence that he had been working on it at least since the late 1970s. Alan Code mentions a paper 'Aristotle on being andgood' that Grice read at a conference at the University of Victoria in 1979, and that sounds in many ways similar to the published version. 48 Grice offers an explicit defence of metaphysics, contrasting it particularly with the rigid empiricism of logical positivism:  A definition of the nature and range of metaphysical enquiries is among the most formidable of philosophical tasks; we need all the help we can get, particularly at a time when metaphysicians have only recently begun to re-emerge from the closet, and to my mind are still hampered by the aftermath of decades of ridicule and vilification at the hands of the rednecks of Vienna and their adherents.49  Grice saw the 'revisionary character' of metaphysical theorising as a topic to which he would need to return. In fact, it is closely linked to another late area of interest, a topic he often described as 'the Vulgar and the Learned'. In this terminology, and indeed in the ideas it described, it seems likely that Grice was borrowing from Hume, one of the 'old boys' of philosophy he particularly admired. Hume had written about the relationship between philosophical terminology and everyday understanding in the following terms:  When I view this table and that chimney, nothing is present to me but particular perceptions, which are of a like nature with all other perceptions. This is the doctrine of philosophers. But this table, which is present to me, and that chimney, may and do exist sepa-rately. This is the doctrine of the vulgar, and implies no contradic-tion. There is no contradiction, therefore, in extending the same doctrine to all perceptions.50  Grice argued in his account of theory-theory that pre-theoretical intu-itions, or common-sense accounts, are often used as the foundations of metaphysical theories. In later notes he was particularly preoccupied by the role of such 'everyday' or 'vulgar' understanding in metaphysical construction. Very generally, he urges that theorists of metaphysics are well advised to take account of common-sense understanding. It is not that common sense is 'superior' to metaphysical accounts, or can replace them. The complex accounts offered by philosophers serve a different function from those of everyday life, and can coexist with them because they are appropriate to different purposes.  In his notes from around this time, he compares the vulgar and the learned with reference to what he calls 'Eddington's table' and 'thevulgar table'. Grice's reference here is to Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, first published in 1928. Eddington begins his book, originally delivered as a series of lectures, with the assertion that as he sat down to write he was confronted with not one table but two. There is the ordinary, familiar table: 'a commonplace object of that environ-ment which I call the world'. There is also a scientific table, an object of which he has become aware only comparatively recently. Whereas the ordinary table is substantial, the scientific table is mostly emptiness, while 'sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself'. Eddington argues that the two different descriptions of the table are discreet and serve distinct purposes. Although they might ultimately be said to describe the same object, the scientist must keep the two descriptions separate, in effect ignoring the 'ordinary table' and concentrating only on the  'scientific table'. Grice's brief notes suggest that he is happy to accept both the vulgar and the learned description of the table. There is, he notes, 'no conflict... Scientific purposes and everyday purposes are distinct'.52  Grice was advocating philosophical respect for common sense, and as such aligning himself with a philosophical tradition stretching back through Moore and Berkeley to Aristotle. Although he developed this position explicitly only towards the end of his life it is clear that, as so often in his work, he was returning to a theme, and to a philosophical outlook that had been with him for many years. It is not difficult to relate this idea to Austin's respect for ordinary language, and the indi-cation of everyday concepts and distinctions it contains. Indeed, notes from much earlier in Grice's career show that, while he was still at  Oxford, he was linking a philosophical interest in common sense to a respect for ordinary language. His jotted 'Aspects of respect for vulgar' include 'protection against sceptic', 'proper treatment of Folk Wisdom',  'protection of speech from change and impropriety' and, perhaps most tellingly 'proper position treatment of ordinary ways of speech (speech  phenomena)'.53  The same form of respect can also be detected, although more prob-lematically, in his later work on value. Subjectivists such as Mackie had suggested that they were themselves necessarily arguing against common sense, rejecting the idea apparent in ordinary language that values 'exist' as objective topics of knowledge. Grice himself rather irrev-erently sums up a position such as Mackie's in his notes from this periodas follows: 'value-predicates (e.g. "good", "ought") signify attributes which ordinary chaps ascribe to things. It is however demonstrable, on general grounds, that these attributes are vacuous. So position attribution by the vulgar are systematically false' S4 According to this account, in upholding objective value, Grice would be maintaining a straight for-wardly common-sense position. In fact Grice himself does not accept this simple identification of objectivism with common sense. He argues in the Carus lectures that 'it seems to me by no means as easy as Mackie seems to think to establish that the "vulgar valuer", in his valuations, is committed to the objectivity of value(s).5 In the taped conversation he suggests that the need to work on the status of common sense, intuition and pre-theoretical judgement is particularly acute for anyone who wants to take a constructivist approach to a topic such as value. It is not that the philosopher should simply take on board all 'vulgar' pronouncements on such a topic, but rather that a constructivist should attempt at least to use them as a starting point for any theory of value.  Grice's 'common sense' philosophy is, therefore, a more sophisticated approach than one relying simply on the understanding apparent in everyday language. Years earlier he defended common sense but attacked Moore's simplistic application of it in 'G. E. Moore and philosophers' paradoxes'. In the later work, he argues that although common sense may be the starting point, exactly how a theory is to be constructed from there is a matter for theory-theory: 'Moore-like proclamations cut no ice.'  Grice was also turning his attention to another loose end in his work: the study of perception. In particular, he returned to the area in which he had worked with Geoffrey Warnock 30 or more years before, planning a 'Grice/Warnock retrospective'. He sketched out a number of topics for this, but it does not appear to have progressed beyond note form. The first topic was to be 'The place of perception as a faculty or capacity in a sequence of living things'. Thinking about the old issue of perception in relation to his more recent interest in creature-construction, he wondered: 'at what point, if any, is further progress up the psychological ladder impossible unless some rung has previously been assigned to creatures capable of perception?'56 He dwells on the advantages of perception in terms of survival, the crucial factor for adding any capacity during creature-construction, and assesses the possible support this might offer for common sense against philosophers of sense data. If perception is to be seen as an advantage, providing knowledge to aid survival in a particular world, 'the objects revealed byperception should surely be constituents of that world'. It might be possible to say that sense data do not themselves nourish or threaten, but constitute evidence of things that do.  However, Grice notes that he is more tempted by an alternative expla-nation. 'Flows of impressions' do not so much offer evidence of what is in the world, as 'prompt, stimulate or excite certain forms of response to the possibility that such states of affairs do obtain'. These responses may be either verbal or behavioural. Both types of response suggest commitment on the part of the responding creature to the state of affairs in question. Here again, Grice seems to be offering a defence of a common sense approach to philosophical questions, but a more sophisticated one than that of simple realism. The existence of the material object is indicated not by the sense impressions themselves, but by the responses these elicit in the perceiving creature.  From the middle of the 1980s onwards, Grice was increasingly preoccupied with various publishing projects, mainly with book plans. His notes from the time suggest an explosion of energy in this area. A list from 1986 includes '"Method: the vulgar and the learned" with ?OUP.  "From Genesis to Revelations" ?HUP'. Other notes are uncompromisingly labelled 'work program', and show him carefully dividing up time by year, by month or even by day, including the injunction that he should set aside part of December 1986 to 'CATCH UP on prior topics'. 57 For most of Grice's potential audience, however, it was the William James lectures that were most eagerly awaited. With the exception of the few lectures already published, these remained as ageing manuscripts in Grice's idiosyncratic filing system. Even with his new enthusiasm for publishing, it took some persuasion from Harvard University Press, and from Kathleen, to revisit these. It is clear that he was not averse in principle to publishing the lectures; his flurry of lists from the early 1980s testify to this. But he had set himself an exacting programme of revising and adding to the them.  Grice was adamant from the start that, whatever else the book con-tained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publisher he wrote, 'the link between the two main topics of the James lectures is not loose but extremely intimate. No treatment of Saying and Implying can afford to omit a study of the notion of Meaning which plainly underlies both these ideas!58 Before the book had a name, he was planning that it should contain a Part A entitled 'Logic and conversation'. It seems that this was to include a number of postscripts to the lectures. Part B was provisionally entitled 'Other essays on language and related matters', andwas to contain a number of further postscripts and reassessments. Of all the proposed postscripts, only 'Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy', concerned mainly with revisiting the themes of 'Postwar Oxford philosophy', was ever written. The inclusion of 'In defence of a dogma' in Part B was a matter of some debate, Grice remaining resolutely in favour. When a reader for the publisher questioned this, Grice responded with a robust defence: 'the analytic/synthetic distinction is a crucially important topic about which I have said little in the past thirty years, and must sometime soon treat at some length.' In his original plan the book was also to include a transcription of a talk on this same topic between himself, George Myro, Judith Baker, George Bealer and Neil Thomason. Indeed, Grice suggested initially that Studies in the Way of Words should be published as authored by Paul Grice with others'.  Grice revisits the analytic/synthetic distinction in the 'Retrospective epilogue'. He introduces a number of inhabitants of 'philosophical Never-Never-Land', M*, A*, G* and R*, the fairy godmothers of Moore, Austin, Grice and  Ryle. These fairy godmothers are useful to philo-  sophical discussion because they hold explicitly all the views that their godchildren hold, without regard for whether these views are explicit or implicit in their actual work. R* suggests that the division of statements of human knowledge into 'analytic' and 'synthetic' categories, far from being an artificial and unnecessary complication by philoso-phers, is in fact an insightful attempt by theorists to individuate and categorise the mass of human knowledge. This view offers a particular challenge to Quine's attack on the distinction, with which Grice had taken issue in his joint article with Strawson over 30 years earlier. It is in tacit reference to this that Grice concludes his epilogue:  Such consideration as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A* and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day.59  It is tempting to read a note of wistful resignation into the manner in which Grice chose in 1987 to conclude Studies in the Way of Words.  However, letters he was writing at the time, which affirm his intention to revisit these topics at length, argue that he at least in part believed he had time to do so. Moreover, he submitted applications for Faculty Research Grant support for both the academic years 1986-7 and 1987-8,for a project on 'Metaphysical foundations of value and the nature of metaphysics'. Kathleen recalls that he was never successful in his bids for such research grants. Despite this, he does not seem to have made much effort to accommodate to the demands of the application process.  In answer to a question about the significance of his research project and the justification of the proposed expenditure, he wrote in 1986 'I hope the character of the enterprise will be sufficient evidence of its sig-nificance.' In 1987 he offered an even more terse account of his plans:  'their importance seems to me to be beyond question'. 6 He was applying for funding to cover the expenses of secretarial support in transcribing tapes on to which he had been dictating his notes and typing up manuscripts, and for duplication, supplies and mailing. His intention was to produce two books for Oxford University Press, one a revised version of the Carus lectures and one on 'Methodology in Metaphysical Theory', a study to include a consideration of 'the nature and degree of respect due from metaphysical theorists towards the intuitions and concerns of the common man'. The plan was to complete at least first drafts during 1987-8.  Whatever his official predictions, Grice was aware that his condition was worsening and that the prognosis was not good. In the summer of 1987 he underwent eye surgery in an attempt to rescue his failing sight, and by the end of the year he needed a hearing aid. In addition, his mobility became further restricted. The entrance to his house, and the balcony on which he loved to sit, were on the first floor over the garage; a further flight of stairs led to the second floor. By early in 1988, a stair lift was needed. Even so, Grice was effectively housebound, and received visits from publishers, colleagues and even students on his balcony.  From there he also continued to work on new ideas, apparently with a sense of urgency that was only increased by his condition. He jotted on the back of an envelope, Now that my tottering feet are already engulfed in the rising mist of antiquity, I must make all speed ere it reaches, and (even) enters, my head." He dealt with the business of seeing Studies in the Way of Words to completion. Lindsay Waters from Harvard University Press, who worked with Grice throughout the preparation of the book, has commented on the determination with which he did this, suggesting that 'He knew the fight with the manuscript editor was his last.'62  Paul Grice died on 28 August 1988, at the age of seventy-five. He had, perhaps, as many projects on the go as ever. Studies in the Way of Words was on the way to press; Grice had gone over the final changes with the manuscript editor just days before. His 'work in progress' was still onhis desk, and included notes on 'the vulgar and the learned' that indicate that he was turning his thoughts back to the topic of perception in relation to this idea. The causal theory of perception could, the notes suggest, be seen as a natural way of reconciling the vulgar and the sci-entific. Perceptions could be connected either with scientific features or with vulgar descriptions, as they were in his article 'The causal theory of perception'. The causal theory explains the way things appear on the basis of the way they are. It rules out the account from sense data theory, which explains the way things are on the basis of the ways things appear. Scientific theory, Grice had noted 'cuts us off from objects'.63 The proofs of 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being', an article he had at one point considered including in Studies in the Way of Words, were posted to him on August 17 and remained untouched.  Studies in the Way of Words, containing the long-awaited complete William James lectures and Grice's other most influential papers in the philosophy of language, was published by Harvard University Press in  1989. A number of reviewers took the opportunity, before engaging with the details of Grice's philosophy, to pay tribute to him. Peter Strawson described his 'substantial and enduring contribution to philosophical and linguistic theory' 6 Tyler Burge praised his 'wonderfully powerful, subtle, and philosophically profound mind'.6 Charles Travis argued that, 'H. P. Grice transformed, often deeply, the problems he touched and, thereby, the terms of philosophical discussion. Robert Fogelin suggested that 'even if Grice was one of the chief and most gifted practitioners of OLP, he was also, perhaps, its most penetrating critic. As Fogelin notes, Meaning revisited', with its enigmatic reference to The Mystery Package' cannot be fully interpreted without reference to Grice's work on values and teleology. When Grice died, the Carus lectures were still in manuscript form, and he had asked Judith Baker to see them through publication with Oxford University Press. She prepared the lectures for publication, together with part of the 'Reply to Richards' and 'Method in philosophical psychology'. The Conception of Value appeared in 1991. Reviewers were generally ambivalent, welcoming the contribution to debate, but expressing some reservations as to the details of Grice's position. For instance, Gerald Barnes describes Grice's defence of absolute value as 'unconventional, richly suggestive, often fascinating, and, by Grice's own admission, incomplete at a number of crucial points'.68 The John Locke lectures had to wait a further decade before they, too, appeared from Oxford University Press, edited and introduced by Richard Warner under the title Aspects of Reason. Again, reviewers had reservations. A. P. Martinich declaredhimself unconvinced by the appeal to the ordinary use of expressions such as 'reason', and criticised Grice's style of presentation for containing 'too many promissory and subjunctive gestures'. The body of published work, and the legacy of his teaching and collaborations, formed the basis of Peter Strawson and David Wiggin's assessment of Grice for the British Academy:  Other anglophone philosophers born, like him, in the twentieth century may well have had greater influence and done a larger quantity of work of enduring significance. Few have had the same gift for hitting on ideas that have in their intended uses the appearance of inevitability. None has been cleverer, or shown more ingenuity and persistence in the further development of such ideas.?º  Perhaps an even more succinct summary of Grice's philosophical life is the one implied by a comment he himself made as it became clear to him that he would not recover his failing health. Despite the indignities of his illness and treatment, he confided in Kathleen that he did not really mind about dying. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life, and had done everything that he wanted to do. Grice's career was charac-terised by years of self-doubt, by almost ceaseless battles with the minutiae of philosophical problems, and by a final frenzied struggle to finish an ever-multiplying list of projects. Yet it seems that, when he reviewed the effort in comparison with the results, he was content with the deal.By all the obvious measures of academic achievement, the big success story for Grice has been the response in linguistics to his theory of conversation. The 'Logic and conversation' series, particularly the individual lecture published under that title, has been cited widely and frequently from the first. Beyond frequency of reference, perhaps the greatest accolade is for a writer's name to be coined as an adjective, a process with few precedents in linguistics. There is 'Saussurian linguis-tics', the 'Chomskyan revolution' and 'Hallidayan grammar'. From the mid-1970s on, linguists could be confident that a set of assumptions about theoretical commitments could be conveyed by the phrase  'Gricean pragmatics'. The term has been used as a label for a disparate body of work. It includes relatively uncritical applications of Grice's ideas to a wide range of different genres, as well as attempts to identify flaws, omissions or full-blown errors in his theory. It also includes a variety of attempts to develop new theories of language use, based to varying degrees on Grice's insights.  These different types of work do not all agree on the efficacy of the Cooperative Principle, on the exact characterisation of the maxims, or even on the nature of conversational implicature itself. What they have in common, qualifying them for the title 'Gricean', is an impulse to distinguish between literal meaning and speaker meaning, and to identify certain general principles that mediate between the two. The latter is perhaps Grice's single greatest intellectual legacy. Stephen Neale has suggested that 'in the light of his work any theory of meaning that is to be taken at all seriously must now draw a sharp line between genuinely semantic facts and facts pertaining to the nature of human interaction." Grice's understanding that linguistic meaning and meaning in use may differ was shared with a variety of previous philosophers and indeedwith common sense. But he went much further in his claim that the differences were amenable to systematic, independently motivated explanation, and in his ambitious proposal to provide such an expla-nation. Whatever its flaws, imprecisions and even errors, the theory of conversation has provided a definite starting point for those interested in discussing the relevant layers of meaning. Stephen Levinson has gone so far as to suggest that 'Grice has provided little more than a sketch of the large area and the numerous separate issues that might be illuminated by a fully worked out theory of conversational implicature!?  The success of the theory of conversation was achieved despite its publication history. Demand was such that copies of the William James lectures were in fairly wide circulation around American and British universities soon after 1967 in the blurred blue type of a mimeograph, and many early responses to them refer directly to this unpublished version.  Some commentators did not have even this degree of access to the lec-tures. In an article published in 1971, Jonathan Cohen comments that he is responding to 'the oral publicity of the William James Lectures' 3 When the lectures began to appear in print, they were scattered and piecemeal. 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' appeared in Foundations of Language in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in The Philosophical Review in 1969. 'Logic and conversation', the second in the original lecture series, appeared in two separate col-lections, both published in 1975. Its publication was clearly the source of some confusion, with both sets of editors claiming to offer the essay in print for the first time. The Logic of Grammar, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, seems to have been Grice's preferred publication, and was the one he always cited. There, his lecture appears alongside essays by past and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Tarski and Quine. The editor's introduction places Grice in a tradition of philosophers interested in the application of traditional theories of truth to natural language. In Speech Acts, the third volume in the series Syntax and Semantics, on the other hand, 'Logic and conver-sation' is placed in the context of contemporary linguistics. Accompanying articles by, for instance, Georgia Green and Susan Schmerling discuss conversational implicature itself. The editors, Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, hail the first publication of 'the seminal work on this topic'.* It is rumoured that Grice signed the contract for his lecture to appear in this linguistics series while at a conference at Austin, Texas, and only after a long evening spent in the bar. Peter Cole included  'Further notes on logic and conversation' in Volume 9 of the same series in 1978.One catalyst for the emergence of pragmatics, and Gricean pragmat-ics in particular, was the interest in Grice's work from within generative semantics, the movement fronted by the young linguists working just across campus from Grice in the years immediately following his move to Berkeley. Attempting to integrate meaning, including contextual meaning, into their study of formal linguistics, these refugees from transformational orthodoxy discovered what they saw as a promising philosophical precedent in 'Logic and conversation'. Asa Kasher has suggested that Grice opened a 'gap in the hedge', allowing linguists to see the possibilities of 'extra-linguistic' explanations." Gilles Fauconnier has found a more startling metaphor; at a time when linguistics was largely concerned with syntax, and with meaning only in so much as it related to deep grammatical structure, 'Grice unwittingly opened Pandora's box'. 6 When linguists working within transformational grammar replied to the generative semanticists' accusation that they were artificially ignoring meaning and context, they too drew on 'Logic and conversation'.  In effect, they cited Grice's characterisation of 'what is said' and 'what is implicated' as a licence to draw a sharp distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic. In this way, they argued that it was legitimate and indeed necessary for a linguistic theory such as transformational grammar to be concerned with meaning only in terms that were insensitive to context. Features of context were to be dealt with in a separate, complementary theory, perhaps even by Grice's theory of conversation itself. Writing in the mid-1970s, transformational grammarians Jerrold Katz and Thomas Bever accuse the generative semanticists of a form of linguistic empiricism more extreme than Bloomfield. By attempting to fit every aspect of interpretation, however specific to context, into linguistic theory, the generative semanticists were failing to distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical regularities: failing to respect the distinction between competence and performance. Katz and Bever commend Grice's account of conversational implicature by way of contrast, as an example of a type of meaning properly and systematically handled outside the grammar by independently motivated cognitive principles? In the same volume, Terence Langendoen and Thomas Bever praise Grice for correctly distinguishing between grammatical acceptability and behavioural comprehensibility. Even Chomsky himself put aside his worries about behaviourism to draw on Grice's work. In a 1969 conference paper concerned with defending his version of grammar against criticisms from generative semanticists he suggests that if certain aspects of meaning  'can be explained in terms of general "maxims of discourse" (in theGricean sense), they need not be made explicit in the grammar of a particular language'!  In the 1970s, then, the theory of conversation was seen by some as a potential means of incorporating contextual factors into grammatical theory, and by others as a reason for refusing to do so. Generative semantics eventually failed, perhaps a victim of its own ambition, and of the increasingly complex syntactic explanations needed to account for contextual meaning. Former generative semanticist Robin Lakoff has attributed its eventual decline to a growing realisation that syntax was not in fact the place where meaning could best be explained; they came to understand that to deal with the phenomena we had uncovered, the relationships between form and function that our work had made manifest and unavoidable, we needed to shift the emphasis of the grammar from syntax to semantics and pragmatics.''' Generative semantics had succeeded in putting the discussion of contextual meaning on the formal linguistic map, and had paved the way for the emergence of pragmatics as a separate discipline. The sheer size of Grice's impact on this discipline makes anything approaching a comprehensive survey prohibitive, but a few key collections can provide a representative overview. By the end of the decade, pragmatics had its own international conference. In the proceedings of the 1979 conference held at Urbino Grice is cited, or at least alluded to, in 15 of the 37 papers." These papers range over topics such as language acquisition, second language comprehension, rhetoric and intonation, as well as theories of meaning, reference and relevance.  In 1975, Berkeley Linguistics Society, a student-run organisation, began hosting an annual conference, bringing together linguists from across America. At the first meeting, Grice's work formed the basis of two very different papers. Cathy Cogan and Leora Herrmann tackled colloquial uses of the phrase 'let's just say', arguing that it 'serves as an overt marker on sentences which constitute an opting out' from straightforward observance of the maxims. At the same conference, Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters presented a much more formal paper on conventional implicata, arguing that they could be used to explain various so-called presuppositional phenomena.13 Since then, meetings of the society have included an ever-increasing number of papers on Gricean topics. In 1990 a parasession at the annual meeting was devoted to papers on 'The Legacy of Grice'. In effect, the delegates all interpret this title in relation to the theory of conversation, which they applied to topics as diverse as the language of jokes, the grammaticalisation of the English perfect between Old English and Modern English, the teach-ing of literacy, and the forms of address adopted by mothers and fathers towards their children.' By the time the The Concise Encyclopedia of Prag-matics was published in 1998, Grice's work had earned mention in entries on 29 separate topics, including advertising, cognitive science, humour, metaphor and narrative. Again, the majority of these references are to 'Logic and conversation', and in her entry on 'conversa-tional maxims' Jenny Thomas comments that 'it is this work - sketchy, in many ways problematical, and frequently misunderstood - which has proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics."s The Journal of Pragmatics, which began in the mid-1970s, has included numerous articles with Gricean themes, and in  2002 published a special focus issue entitled 'To Grice or not to Grice'.  In his introductory editorial, Jacob Mey argues that the range of articles included, both supportive of and challenging to Gricean implicature, form 'a living testimony to, and fruitful elaboration of, some of the ideas that shook the world of language studies in the past century, and continue to move and inspire today's research'. 16  Nevertheless, Kenneth Lindblom suggests that the importance and implications of the theory of conversation tend to be underestimated, because it has been used by scholars in a range of fields with significant methodological differences.' Certainly, Gricean analysis has appeared in discussions of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, taking it well beyond the confines of its 'home' discipline of pragmatics. For instance, the relationship between Grice's theory and literary texts has long been a source of interest to stylisticians. As early as 1976, Teun van Dijk suggested that the maxims 'partially concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called "stylistic" , 18 He argues that a set of principles different from, but analogous to Grice's Cooperative Principle and maxims are needed to explain literature. For Mary Louise Pratt, however, the most successful theory of discourse would be one that could explain literature alongside other uses of language. In the case of literature, where the Cooperative Principle is particularly secure between author and reader, 'we can freely and joyfully jeopardize it'. l' Flouting and conversational implicatures are therefore particularly characteristic of literary texts but do not set them apart as intrinsically different from other types of language use. Other commentators have concentrated on Gricean analyses of discourse within literary texts, such as soliloquies in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello and dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Finnegans Wake.20  Conversational implicature has also proved suggestive in historical linguistics as an explanation for a variety of meaning shifts. The basicpremiss of this research is that meaning that is initially associated with a word or phrase as an implicature can, over time, become part of its semantic meaning. Peter Cole describes this process as 'the lexicaliza-tion of conversational meaning' 2 Elizabeth Traugott's work in this area has drawn on a wide range of historical data. For instance, in a 1989 paper she traces a general trend in the history of English for changes from deontic to epistemic meanings; both words and grammatical forms  ten in he ton or math 10g  that started out as weakly subjective become strongly subjective. For instance,  'you must go' changes its meaning from permission in Old  English to expectation in Present Day English. This process she describes as 'the conventionalising of conversational implicature' based on 'prag-matic strengthening' and derived ultimately from Grice's second maxim of Quantity22 Debra Ziegeler has followed up this study by suggesting that another process of conventionalisation can account for the hypothetical and counterfactual meanings associated with some modal verbs in the past tense, such as would, this time a process explained by the first maxim of Quality.23  It would be wrong to suggest that Grice's presence in linguistics has been greeted with constant, or universal, enthusiasm. The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is representative here, too. As well as the albeit modified praise from Thomas, the encyclopaedia includes an entry on  'Discourse' in which Alec McHoul accuses Grice of idealising conversa-tion. According to McHoul, Grice 'attempted to generalise from how he thought conversation operated', and ended up giving 'an ideal-rational version of socially pragmatic events so that it seems virtually irrelevant that the objects of analysis... constitute a form of social action'.24 McHoul is far from being a lone voice. The theory of conversation has frequently been accused of presenting an unrealistic picture of human interaction, and even of attempting to lay down rules of appropriate conversational etiquette. For instance, Dell Hymes suggests that Grice's account of conversational behaviour incorporates a tacit ideal image of discourse',25 and Sandra Harris identifies in it 'prescriptive and moral overtones' 26 For Rob Pope, an individual's willingness to accept the maxims as an accurate account of communication is dependent on 'the problem of how far you and I, in our respective world-historical posi-tions, find it expedient or desirable to espouse a view of human interaction based on consensus and/or conflict'? Geoffrey Sampson even claims that 'it would be ludicrous to suggest that as a general principle people's speech is governed by maxims' such as those proposed in the theory of conversation. However, he rather undermines his own argu-ment by presenting the observation that 'people often manifestly flout his maxims' as if it were a problem for Grice's theory.  A number of linguists have been quick to defend Grice from the suggestion that his maxims prescribe 'ideal' conversation. For instance, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson explain that the maxims 'define for us the basic set of assumptions underlying every talk exchange. But this does not imply that utterances in general, or even reasonably fre-quently, must meet these conditions, as critics of Grice have sometime thought'.2 Robin Lakoff argues that strict adherence to the maxims is not usual and that in many cases: 'an utterance that fails to incorporate implicature when it is culturally expected might be uncooperative and so liable to misunderstanding, hardly "ideal" 130  There are a number of features of the presentation of the theory, particularly read in isolation from the rest of the lectures, that may contribute to the accusation of idealising conversation. First, Grice never defines what he means by 'conversation'. It is clear from his earlier, unpublished writings that he adopted this term simply as a label for language in context, or as a reminder to his Oxford students that utterances do not generally occur in isolation from each other. However, in linguistics the term has acquired a much more specific and technical use. During the early 1970s, just as Grice's theory was becoming widely known, work by linguists such as Harvey Sacks was revealing the characteristics and regularities of naturally occurring casual conversation, dwelling on features such as turn taking and topic organisation." Linguists familiar with this work have perhaps been taken aback by Grice's apparently cavalier, unempirical generalisations. Second, Grice introduces the theory of conversation as an approach to specific philosophical problems, but his own enthusiasm for the particular conversational explanations to which it extends obscures this purpose. In the single lecture 'Logic and conversation' in particular, casual conversational examples appear to be the main focus. Further, Grice expresses both the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims as imperatives.  Despite his intention of generalising over the assumptions that participants bring to interactive behaviour, this grammatical choice gives his  'rules' a prescriptive appearance.  Perhaps most damagingly of all, Grice does not comment on his own methodology and purpose in 'Logic and conversation'. He does,  however, give some indication of these in the earlier, unpublished lectures on language and context, for instance when he defends his method of working with as few 'cards on the table' as possible, in theknowledge that this will result in certain deliberate simplifications. In another lecture, proposing to address some questions put to him in a previous discussion about the nature of his undertaking, he suggests how he would like his ideas to be evaluated. His theory building is dif ferent from his methodology in 'Meaning', which proceeded through the description of specific cases.  I am here considering what is (or may be) only an ideal case, one which is artificially simplified by abstracting from all considerations other than those involved in the pursuance of a certain sort of conversational cooperation. I do not claim that there actually occur any conversations of this artificially simplified kind; it might even be that these could not be (cf frictionless pulleys). My question is on the (artificial) assumption that their only concern is cooperation in the business of giving and receiving information, what subordinate maxims or rules would it be reasonable or even mandatory that participants should accept as governing their conversational practice? Since the object of this exercise is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why it is that a particular implicature is present, I would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be a) can it be used to construct explanations of the presence of such implicatures, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any  rival [I have tried to make a start on the first part of a)] b) Are the no doubt crude, pretheoretical explanations which one would be prompted to give of such implicatures consistent with, or better still favourable pointers towards, the requirements involved in the model?32  Grice's idealisations are of the scientific type, necessary to establish underlying principles of the subject matter, rather than of the type specifying that it always does, or should, conform to certain optimal standards.  Another criticism of Grice's theory that seems off-beam in the light of his unpublished justification, but registers a legitimate concern for linguists, is that it works for only one particular discourse type: roughly for conversations between social equals who are mutually interested in exchanging information on a particular topic. Some of the earliest commentaries on the theory of conversation to consider the social and institutional contexts of language were, perhaps surprisingly, from philosophers rather than from linguists. In a 1979 edition of The Philo-sophical Quarterly, David Holdcroft and Graham Bird contribute to a discussion of whether the Cooperative Principle is best seen as applying to all sequences of speech acts, or simply to informal conversations.  Holdcroft argues that the Cooperative Principle is not unproblemati-cally universal across all sequences; in cases where participants do not  'have equal discourse rights' the maxims do not straightforwardly apply.33 He offers the examples of the proceedings of a court of law and a viva exam, suggesting that different sets of maxims are accepted by participants in different cases. Bird argues that situations in which participants have unequal rights do not pose the problems to Grice that Holdcroft envisages; maxims may be suspended by mutual agreement without offering counter-examples to the theory. 34  These ideas were later addressed by linguists using actual conversational data rather than theorised 'types' of sequences. Norman Fair-clough pioneered critical discourse analysis, an approach concerned with relating the formal properties of texts to interpretation and hence to their relationship to social context. He suggests that mainstream discourse analysis 'has virtually elevated cooperative conversation between equals into an archetype of verbal interaction in general'.35 He holds Grice at least in part responsible for this because his emphasis on the exchange of information assumes equal rights to contribute for both parties. Fairclough analyses conversational extracts from police interviews of a woman making a complaint of rape and of a youth suspected of vandalism to argue that many interactions do not conform to this model. He notes that Grice's own proviso that in some types of conversation influencing others may be more important has too often been overlooked. Other critical discourse analysts offer qualified support for Grice, for instance arguing that the theory of conversation need not be limited to casual conversation, but can be generalised to explain discourse in institutional contexts only once it has been made to take account of societal factors. John Gumperz uses a variety of data to argue that interactions such as cross-examinations, political debates and job interviews demonstrate that 'conversational cooperation becomes considerably more complex than would appear on a surface reading of the Cooperative Principle.' William Hanks echoes many of the criticisms of the theory of conversation familiar to ethnolinguists, but argues that it should not be abandoned altogether within this discipline because 'some parts of Grice's approach are of telling interest to ethnog-raphy', in particular the active role assigned to the hearer in attributing conversational meaning. For Grice, as for sociolinguists, 'meaning arises out of the relation between parties to talk'.38If it is to some extent contrary to Grice's abstract, philosophical intentions that his theory should be applied to real language data, it is perhaps even more incongruous that it should be subjected to clinical testing. Nevertheless, the theory of conversation has generated much interest in the area of clinical linguistics, in particular the branch sometimes described as 'neuropragmatics'. Chomsky was interested in the theory of conversation because it suggested to him a principled way of distinguishing between centrally linguistic meaning that might be described as belonging to a speaker's competence or semantic ability, and context-dependent meaning belonging to performance or prag-matics. Clinical linguists have looked for evidence of a neurological basis for such a distinction. Many such studies have concentrated on patients with some degree of language impairment, in an attempt to discover whether semantics and pragmatics can be selectively impaired.  For instance, Neil Smith and lanthi-Maria Tsimpli, working within a broadly Chomskyan framework, have studied an institutionalised brain-damaged patient with exceptional linguistic abilities. Their findings suggest that his 'linguistic decoding' is as good as anyone else's but that he is unable to handle examples such as irony, metaphor and jokes, a distinction that they suggests points to a separation between linguistic and non-linguistic impairment.3º Such a suggestion seems to be supported by findings from researchers with a more clinical and less linguistic interest, who have suggested that core linguistic functions might be controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain while 'pragmatic', context-dependent meaning, together with emotions, is controlled by the right. 40  Other clinicians have adopted a more overtly Gricean framework. Elisabeth Ahlsén uses the Cooperative Principle as a tool for describing aphasic communication in which, she argues, 'implicatures based on the maxims of quantity and manner cannot be made in the same way as in the case of nonaphasic speakers.'* The theory of conversation has also been used as a tool for describing more general communication dis-orders. 42 Ronald Bloom and a group of fellow-experimenters argue that  'Gricean pragmatics has provided a theoretically meaningful framework for examining the discourse of individuals with communication disorders' 43 Clinicians using Gricean analyses tend to be reluctant to draw definite conclusions about the division of labour between the hemi-spheres. This is argued perhaps most explicitly by Asa Kasher and his team, who have investigated the processing of implicatures by using an 'implicature battery' for both right brain-damaged and left brain-damaged stroke patients. They use both verbal implicatures and non-verbal implicatures based on visual images, and conclude that 'both cerebral hemispheres appear to contribute to the same degree to processing implicatures.'* This scepticism about the localisation of pragmatic processing in the right hemisphere is shared by Joan Borod and others, who use a series of pragmatic features, including some based on Gricean implicature, to test language performance in right-hand brain-damaged, left-hand brain-damaged and normal control subjects. They conclude that 'deficits in pragmatic appropriateness are shared equally by both brain-damaged groups.'45 Elsewhere, Kasher has argued explicitly against the tendency to make sweeping generalisations over pragmatic phenomena that locate them all in the right hemisphere.  Implicature, he argues, is part of a larger competence, 'hence it would be implausible to assume that some domain-specific cognitive system produces conversational implicature' 46 As Kasher's position illustrates, the positing of a separate pragmatic faculty, to which implicature belongs, is not dependent on the faculty being physically autonomous.  It can be impaired selectively from language, an observation that in itself legitimises the hypothesis of a physical basis in the brain.  Another field in which the theory of conversation has been used enthusiastically is Artificial Intelligence, a striking application given Grice's personal animosity to computers. Computer programmers have realised that formal linguistic theories can go a long way towards specifying the rules that make up grammatical sentences, but have little to say about how those sentences can be used to form natural-sounding conversations. For instance, Ayse Pinar Saygina and Ilyas Ciceki are not impressed by the pragmatic skills of computers. They analyse the output of various programmes entered for the Loebner Prize, an annual competition to find the programme closest to passing the Turing Test, in which a computer is deemed to be intelligent if a human observer cannot distinguish its participation in a conversation from that of a human. Saygina and Ciceki argue that pragmatic acceptability, rather than the simple ability to generate natural language, is the biggest challenge to such programmes. Moreover, the programmes that are the most successful are those that adhere most closely to Grice's maxims, suggesting future applications for these, specifically that programmers will inevitably have to find ways of "making computers cooperate" ' 47  Various programmers have in fact made some attempts in this direc-tion. Robert Dale and Ehud Reiter consider an algorithm for natural-sounding referring expressions in computer-human interaction. They note that such an algorithm must produce expressions that successfully pick out the referent without leading 'the human hearer or reader tomake false conversational implicatures',48 Perhaps not surprisingly, they consider Grice's maxims to be 'vague' compared to the principles needed for computational implementation. Nevertheless, they base their algorithm on an interpretation of the maxims, claiming that the simpler interpretation produces a result that is 'faster in computational terms and seems to be closer to what human speakers do when they construct referring expressions'.4 Michael Young tackles the problem of intelligent systems designed to form plans to direct their own activities or those of others. 'There is a mismatch between the amount of detail in a plan for even a simple task and the amount of detail in typical plan descriptions used and understood by people' 5º In order to address this issue, Young proposes a computational model that draws on Grice's maxim of Quantity, which he labels the Cooperative Plan Identification architecture. He argues that this produces instructions that are much more successful in communicating a plan to a human subject than instructions produced by alternative methods.  Grice would have recognised discussion of irony and metaphor as more closely related to his work, although he would not necessarily have welcomed the form some of this debate has taken. The explana-tion of such 'non-literal' uses has generally been taken as a central task for the theory of conversation, and indeed Grice himself seems to encourage this view. In a rather hurried exegesis in the William James lectures, he explains irony and metaphor as floutings of the first maxim of Quality. 'X is a fine friend' said just after X has been known to betray the speaker cannot be intended to be taken as a true expression of belief.  Instead, the speaker must intend some other related proposition; 'the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward!»' Grice later restricts his definition of irony, claiming that it is 'intimately connected with the expression of a feeling, attitude or evaluation'.52 As an example of metaphor, 'You are the cream in my coffee' is also clearly false, but cannot be interpreted as meaning its simple opposite, which is a truism; 'the most likely sup-position is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance.'53  Some linguists working on such figures of speech have accepted an account along the lines suggested by Grice.5 Others, however, have taken issue with the apparent ease with which Grice's hearer in each case derives the interpretation. Their argument is that nothing within the Cooperative Principle or the maxims as they stand specifies why the hearer should reach that interpretation rather than some other. RobertHarnish wonders what tells us that the hearer in the irony example reaches the conclusion that 'X is a cad'; 'why should we suppose that the contradictory is the most obviously related proposition?' Similarly, if Grice's metaphor example is to be explained, 'we need some principles to guide our search for the correct supposition.'ss Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson argue that Grice's description of the process by which irony is interpreted 'is virtually free of rational constraints' 56 There is no reason why the negation of what is said should serve as the impli-cature, rather than some other closely related assumption. Wayne Davis worries about how a hearer is expected to identify accurately exactly what sort of interpretation is intended when, for instance, the maxim of Quality is flouted.s7  Some claim that experimental work also poses problems for Grice's account. Rachel Giora argues that the 'salient' meanings of metaphors and irony 'enjoy a privileged status: they are always accessed, and always initially, regardless of context'.58 Raymond Gibbs goes so far as to claim that 'the results of many psycholinguistic experiments have shown the traditional, Gricean view to be incorrect as a psychological theory'S His argument is that a figurative example does not require more processing time than a literal one; speakers often understand metaphorical or ironic meaning straight away without first having to analyse and reject literal meaning. Gibbs sees this as a threat to the whole distinction between the said and the implicated.  Not all experimental linguists would subscribe to Gibbs's conclusions.  Thomas Holtgraves points out that many metaphorical figures of speech such as 'he spilled the beans' have 'a conventional, nonliteral meaning that is comprehended directly' because in such cases 'the default meaning is clearly the nonliteral meaning' 6 Gerald Winer and his team compare the reactions of children and adults to a set of questions and observe that children tend to respond to literal but trivial meanings, adults to metaphorical interpretation. They argue that these findings are quite consistent with Grice's theory, which 'holds that people respond to the intended or inferred, rather than the literal, meaning of utter-ances'.61 Anne Bezuidenhout and J. Cooper Cutting suggest that experiments can never bear directly on the debate over the accuracy of Grice's theory because 'Grice was interested in giving a conceptual analysis of the concepts of saying, meaning, and so on, and not in giving a psychological theory of the stages in utterance processing. 2 They also express some concerns about the validity of results based on simple measurements of processing time, and the readiness of experimental linguists to reach generalised conclusions from these.Despite his own philosophical and analytical interests, then, Grice's theory has been debated in terms of its social application, its computational implementation and its psychological and even neurological plausibility. It has also been discussed by those whose studies extend across cultures, some of whom have criticised it as ethnocentric, as drawing unquestioningly on the mores of one society. In an echo of the accusations of elitism levelled at Austin and his 'empirical' approach to language, Grice has even been accused of concentrating on one privileged rank of that society. This particular criticism dates back to Elinor Ochs Keenan's article 'The universality of conversational postulates', first published in 1976. Keenan's basic tenet is that Grice's analysis is implicitly but inappropriately offered as applying universally. Her specific claim is that the maxims, in particular those of Quantity, do not hold among the indigenous people of the plateaus area of Madagascar.  Hence the maxims are culturally specific and the assumption that Grice's account demonstrates a pragmatic universal is flawed.  In Malagasy society, speakers regularly breach the maxim to 'be infor-mative', by failing to provide enough information to meet their interlocutor's needs. So if A asks B 'Where is your mother?', B might well reply 'She is either in the house or at the market', even when fully aware of the mother's location. Further, the reply would not generally give rise to the implicature that B is unable to provide a more specific answer because in that society 'the expectation that speakers will satisfy informational needs is not a basic norm' 63 Keenan suggests some reasons for this specific to Malagasy society. New information is such a rare commodity that it confers prestige on the knower, and is therefore not parted with lightly. Further, speakers are reluctant to commit themselves explicitly to particular claims, and therefore to take on responsibility for the reliability of the information. For these reasons, the expectations about conversational practice and the implicatures following from particular utterances are different from those assumed by Grice to be universal norms.  Keenan complains that 'the conversational maxims are not presented as working hypotheses but as social facts' and argues that much more empirical work on conversation must be conducted before true paradigms of conversational practice can be drawn up. Her criticism, then, is chiefly the familiar one that Grice has attempted to describe 'con-versation' without having considered the mechanics of any actual con-versation, with the added claim that such a consideration would reveal some significant variations between cultures. However, she welcomes Grice's attempt to posit universal conversational principles, because ofthe possibility it suggests for those engaged in fieldwork to move away from specific empirical observations 'and to propose stronger hypotheses related to general principles of conversation'. She suggests that the particular maxims may apply in different domains and to different degrees in different societies. In Malagasy society, determining factors include the importance of the information in question, the degree of intimacy between the participants, and the sex of the speaker. A number of linguists have defended Grice against Keenan's accusation. Georgia Green has suggested that even the discovery that a particular maxim did not apply at all in one society would not invalidate Grice's general enterprise. Since the maxims are individual 'special cases' of coopera-tion, 'discovering that one of the maxims was not universal would not invalidate claims that the Co-operative Principle was universal'. Robert Harnish argues that Grice nowhere claims that all conversations are governed by all the maxims; in many types of conversation, as in Keenan's examples, one or more of the maxims 'are not in effect and are known not to be in effect by the participants'. Geoffrey Leech points out that  'no claim has been made that the CP applies in an identical manner to all societies. '68  Keenan's criticisms of Grice, and indeed these responses to those crit-icisms, consider meaning as a social and interactive, rather than a purely formal phenomenon. This is a project shared to varying degrees by works that have attracted the title 'politeness theory'. Such works date back to the mimeograph days of 'Logic and conversation',  ', and indeed  can be seen as one area in which the newly emerging discipline of prag-matics took its inspiration and basic premisses from Grice. Looking back to the early 1970s, politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson comment that at that time the division of meaning into semantics and pragmatics was motivated chiefly by 'the basic Gricean observation that what is "said" is typically only part of what is "meant" the proposition expressed by the former providing a basis for the calculation of the latter. In studying politeness phenomena, linguists such as Brown and Levinson were seeking an explanation not so much of the mechanics of this calculation as of its motivation. John Gumperz observes in the foreword to Brown and Levinson's study that politeness theory concentrated on the social functions of language, thereby bringing Grice's work into the field of sociolinguistics for the first time.  Theorised conversational politeness, like cooperation, is neither a description of ideal behaviour nor a guide to etiquette. Indeed, politeness theorists are eager to stress that they are positing hypotheses about conventionalised and meaningful patterns of behaviour, rather thandescribing a general tendency in people to be 'considerate' or 'nice' to each other. The conventions of politeness are not accounted for in the maxims, and some have seen this as a weakness in Grice's account.  However, the tendency towards cooperation and that towards politeness are means towards different sets of ends: the former to informing and influencing and the latter to the maintenance of harmonious social relationships. Norms of politeness are therefore appropriate complements to, not subcategories of, norms of cooperation. This certainly seems to have been the view Grice himself took in his only reference to politeness in 'Logic and conversation':  There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as 'Be polite', that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve.?°  Those who have taken a closer interest than Grice in politeness have generally done so for one of two reasons. Some have given what for Grice are secondary purposes of conversation a more central impor-tance, arguing either explicitly or by implication that the maintenance of social relationships is at least as important a function of conversation as the 'rational' goals of informing and influencing. Others have seen in the phenomenon of politeness a possible answer to a question Grice has been criticised for never fully addressing: the question of why speakers convey meaning through implicatures at all, rather than through straightforward assertion. In other words, they have seen politeness not as a supplementary norm of conversation, but as a potential key to the operation of the Cooperative Principle itself.  Some of the earliest work in politeness theory came from Robin Lakoff. In common with other generative semanticists, she was dissatisfied with the tenet that judgements of grammaticality were autonomous and sufficient: that a fully successful transformational grammar would be able to legislate absolutely between 'good' and 'bad' strings. Rather, she argued, phenomena entirely dependent on context, and on aspects of context as specific as the relationship between two people, could effect such judgements and should be taken into account.  She has since argued that the notion of 'continuousness', the idea thatjudgements of acceptability must be arranged along a continuous scale rather than being binary and polar, is the single greatest contribution of generative semantics to the understanding of human language." In articles published in the early 1970s, Lakoff defended the importance of pragmatic explanations. In 'Language in context', for instance, she argues that transformational grammar had 'explicitly rejected' contextual aspects from consideration.?? Her particular claim is that certain features of English sentences can be explained only in terms of the relationship between the speaker and hearer. In this sense they are no different from, for instance, honorifics in Japanese; it is just that their context-bound nature is not immediately apparent because they are expressed using linguistic devices that have other, more centrally semantic, functions as well. So Lakoff discusses the use of modal verbs in offers and requests, considering why, for instance, 'You must have some of this cake' counts as a politer form than 'You should have some of this cake'. Their social meaning is often dependent not just on the form used but the implications this triggers. The verb 'must' implies, generally contrary to the facts of the case, that the hearer has no choice but to eat the cake, hence that the cake is not in itself desirable, and that the speaker is politely modest about the goods she is offering.  Lakoff draws an analogy between these politeness phenomena and some other conversational features 'not tied to concepts of politeness', such as those discussed in Grice's mimeograph. Like politeness phe-nomena, these features are not part of the grammar but can nevertheless have an effect on the form of utterances. Lakoff notes that expressions such as 'well' and 'why' may sometimes be labelled 'mean-ingless', but that they in fact have specific conditions for use. Because they can be used either appropriately or inappropriately, a linguistic theory needs to be able to account for them, yet the conditions governing their appropriateness are often dependent on a purely context-bound phenomenon such as the breaking of a conversational maxim.  They signal, respectively, that the utterance to follow is in some way incomplete, breaking the maxims of Quantity, and that a preceding utterance was in some way surprising, and so considered a possible breaking of the maxims of Quality. The attitudes of speakers to the information conveyed, just like their awareness of their relationships to each other, is sometimes communicated by the actual form of words used.  Therefore, any sufficient account of language must pay attention to contextual as well as syntactic factors.  In 'The logic of politeness', published the following year, Lakoff reiterates her belief in the necessity of contextual explanations to comple-ment syntactic ones, but this time goes further in arguing that prag-matics should be afforded a status equal to syntax or semantics. Ulti-mately, she would like to see pragmatic rules 'made as rigorous as the syntactic rules in the transformational literature (and hopefully a lot less ad hoc)'? The basic types of rules to be accounted for fall under two headings: 'Be clear' and 'Be polite'. These sometimes produce the same effect in a particular context and therefore reinforce each other, but more often place conflicting demands on the speaker, meaning that one must be sacrificed in the interests of the other. Grice's theory of conversation provides an account of the rules subsumed under 'Be clear'. It remains to be explained why speakers so often depart from these norms in their conversations and here, Lakoff implies, the second type of pragmatic rule comes into play. In cases when the interests of clarity are in conflict with those of politeness, politeness generally wins through. This is perhaps because: 'in most informal conversations, actual communication of important ideas is secondary to merely reaffirming and strengthening relationships.'75  Lakoff tentatively suggests three 'rules of politeness', analogous to the rules of conversation: 'don't impose', 'give options' and 'make A feel good - be friendly'? The first rule explains why people choose lengthy or syntactically complex expressions in apparent breach of clarity, such as 'May I ask how much you paid for that vase, Mr Hoving?' and 'Dinner is served'. The second rule explains the use of hedges ('Nixon is sort of conservative') and euphemisms (I hear that the butler found Freddy and Marion making it in the pantry'), expressions leaving hearers the superficial option of not interpreting an expression in a way they may find offensive. The third rule explains nicknames and particles expressing feeling and involving the hearer, particles such as like', 'y'know', '1 mean'. All these conversational features might appear to be in breach of one or more maxim; in effect the more powerful rules of politeness explain why and when the conversational maxims are breached. Lakoff even suggests that Grice's rules of conversation are perhaps best seen as  'subcases' of Rule 1; in other words that the tendency towards clarity is just part of a more general tendency not to impose on your addressee.  The other two types of politeness, particularly 'be friendly', take precedence over clarity when they come into conflict with it. For Lakoff politeness, perhaps including Grice's maxims, is a subsection of the more general category of 'cooperation'.  Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness is perhaps the most fully articulated and successful of the attempts to integrate sociolinguisticnotions of politeness with Grice's account of cooperation. The theory itself dates from just after the time when Lakoff was publishing on the need for linguistics to take account of contextual factors. Brown and Levinson first wrote up their ideas in the summer of 1974; these were eventually published as a long essay late in the 1970s, and in book form almost a decade later." They claim that their account is based on just the same basic premiss as Grice's: 'there is a working assumption by conversationalists of the rational and efficient nature of talk.'78 Brown and Levinson draw on sociology by introducing Erving Goffman's notion of 'face' into the discussion of politeness. In the 1950s, Goffman defined face as the positive social value a person claims, and argued that  'a person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participant'" Brown and Levinson refine Goffman's idea by distinguishing between 'positive' and 'negative' face. Participants in social situations are aware, both in themselves and in others, of the needs of both positive and negative face. Positive face is, generally, the desire to be liked, to be held in high regard by others. Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, to retain freedom of choice. Certain types of act can be classified as inherently impolite because they are threatening to one or other type of face for the addressee. Criticisms are inherently impolite because they threaten hearers' positive face by showing that they are in some way not held in high regard. Orders or requests are inherently impolite because they threaten negative face by seeking to impose the speaker's will on others and to restrict freedom of choice. In such circumstances the speaker has the option of producing the impolite act 'bald on-record'.80 That is, of producing it without any attempt to disguise it: to say 'You look fat in that dress', or 'Give me a lift to the station'. Brown and Levinson observe that in doing this, the speaker adheres precisely to Grice's maxims; 'You look fat in that dress' is clear, informative and truthful.  The speakers may be adhering to the maxims of conversation in these examples, but they are in breach of the rules of politeness prescribing maintenance of the other's face. Utterances such as 'That isn't the most flattering of your dresses' and 'I wonder if I could trouble you for a lift to the station' are less clear and less efficient than their 'on-record' coun-terparts. However, the very fact that speakers are putting more effort into producing these longer and more complex utterances ensures that they are seen to be striving to satisfy the hearers' face wants. Such ways of conveying meaning are very common in conversation, Brown andLevinson note. Successive commentators have been simply wrong in assuming that Grice specifies that utterances must meet the conditions of cooperation. Their purpose here, in fact, is 'to suggest a motive for not talking in this way' 81 Like Lakoff, they note that hedges are generally concerned with the operation of the maxims. They emphasise that cooperation is met, indicate that it may not be met, or question whether it has been met.82 Further, 'off-record' strategies are often accompanied by a 'trigger' indicating that an indirect meaning is to be sought. The individual conversational maxims determine the appropriate type of trigger.  Work on politeness in naturally occurring conversation has produced both supportive and more pessimistic responses to the Gricean frame-work. Susan Swan Mura draws on the transcriptions of 24 dyadic interactions to consider factors that might license deviation from the maxims. She concludes that for all the maxims the relevant factors provide for problem-free interaction in contexts where there is a threat of some sort to the coherence of the interaction. She concludes enthusiastically that 'this study also provides preliminary evidence that the Cooperative Principle represents a psychologically real construct, modeling the behavioural (in a non-Skinnerian sense of the term) basis for conversational formulation and interpretation.'83 Yoshiko Matsumoto, on the other hand, considers politeness phenomena in Japanese and notes that 'a socially and situationally adequate level of politeness and adequate honorifics must obligatorily be encoded in every utterance even in the absence of any potential face threatening act', arguing that this is a serious challenge to the universality of both Grice's and Brown and Levinson's theories.8  In his contribution to the literature on politeness, Geoffrey Leech draws together concepts from contemporary pragmatics and adds some of his own, to present what he describes as an 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' 85 He claims that the Cooperative Principle, although an important  account of what goes on in conversation, is not in itself sufficient to explain interpersonal rhetoric. Principles of politeness and also of irony must be added on an equal footing with cooperation; indeed, they can sometimes 'rescue' it from apparently false predictions. The result is a vastly more complex account of conversation than Grice had envisaged, as well as a more complex pragmatics in general. For example, Leech suggests that if, in response to 'We'll all miss Bill and Agatha, won't we?', a speaker were to say 'Well, we'll all miss BILL', thereby implicating that she will not miss Agatha, the speaker has apparently failed to observe the needs of Quantity. The speaker 'could have been moreinformative, but only at the cost of being more impolite to a third party: [the speaker] therefore suppressed the desired information in order to uphold the P[oliteness] P[rinciple]'.86  Leech's PP itself contains an elaborate list of additional conversational maxims. He initially describes these as comprising Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy, but later suggests that further maxims of politeness may prove necessary, including the Phatic maxim, the Banter maxim and the Pollyanna maxim.8 He seems, in fact to be prepared to add maxims in response to individual examples as they present themselves. This stance is open to the criticism that the choice of maxims becomes ad hoc, and the number arbitrary, significantly weakening the explanatory power of the theory. Indeed Brown and Levinson suggest that Leech is in danger of arguing for an 'infinite number of maxims', making his addition of the politeness principle in effect an elaborate description, rather than an explanatory account, of pragmatic communication.88  Leech's 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' is unusual among theories of politeness for advocating such a plethora of principles in addition to Grice's maxims of cooperation. It is certainly unusual in the more general framework of Gricean pragmatics. Here, the tendency in responses to the theory of conversation has been to attempt to reduce the number of maxims, to streamline the theory and therefore make it more powerfully explanatory and psychologically plausible. In their overview of the place of pragmatics in linguistics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Hartmut Haberlard and Jacob Mey criticise Leech for multiplying pragmatic principles and types, while most responses to Grice have been reductive in tendency. The general feeling that Grice's maxims need tidying up and clarifying is, they suggest, not particularly surprising 'if one considers the strong a priori character of Grice's maxims'. His main motivation in their choice and titles was to echo Kant's table of categories. Perhaps the most extreme of such theories was Relevance Theory (RT), developed by a number of linguists, but principally by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. It offered an account of communication and cognition drawing on Grice's theories of meaning and of conversation, especially on his distinction between what is said and what is meant, while at the same time departing from Grice sig-nificantly. From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, RT was perhaps the most influential school of thought in pragmatics and spawned a large number of articles, conference papers and doctoral theses, especially at its 'home' at University College, London. It was used as a framework for the analysis of various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in a varietyof languages, as well as an approach to texts as diverse as poetry, jokes and political manifestos.  In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson argue that Grice's account is too cumbersome and too ad hoc, consisting in a series of maxims each intended to account for some particular, more or less intuitive response.  Gricean pragmatics had for too long been bound by the outline provided by 'Grice's original hunches'? The dangers of this are apparent:  'It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for.'' Rather, the various maxims and submaxims can be subsumed into a suitably rich notion of relevance. This does not consist of a maxim, such as Grice's 'Be relevant', which speakers may adhere to or not, and which in the later case may lead to implicature. There is no place in Sperber and Wilson's theory for the notion of 'flouting' a rule of conversation. Rather, they posit a 'Principle of Relevance', a statement about communication; 'communicators do not "follow" the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to'. The principle applies 'without exception'. It is a fact of human behaviour explaining how people produce, and how they respond to, communicative acts. The principle states that every act of ostensive communication is geared to the maximisation of its own relevance; people produce utterances, whether verbal or otherwise, in accordance with the human tendency to be relevant, and respond to others' utterances with this expectation. Relevance is defined as the production of the maximum number of contextual effects for the least amount of processing effort. These notions are all entirely dependent on context; just as there is no place for flouting in Sperber and Wilson's theory, so there is no place for any notion of generalised implicature. Every implicature is entirely dependent on and unique to the context in which it occurs.  Sperber and Wilson take issue with Grice over what they see as his simplistic division of the semantic and the pragmatic, or the encoded and the inferenced. It is simply not possible, they argue, to arrive at a unique, fully articulated meaning from decoding alone: to produce a semantic form on which separate, pragmatic principles can then work.  In assuming that this was possible, Grice took an unwarranted step back towards the code model he so tellingly critiqued in his earlier article  'Meaning', returning to an outmoded reliance on the linguistic code to deliver a fully formed thought. He abandoned a 'common-sense' approach with psychological plausibility: the attempt to formalise and explain the notion that 'communication involves the publication and recognition of intentions'.' Cognitive principles such as relevance will be involved even at the stage of producing a Gricean 'what is said',determining features such as reference assignment and disambiguation.  Unlike  the Gricean maxims, the Principle of Relevance is not an autonomous rule applying after decoding has issued a unique linguistic meaning. Rather, both 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning rely on the Principle of Relevance. Sperber and Wilson argue, contra Grice, for the need to consider explicitness as a matter of degree.  Unlike the ethnologists and politeness theorists who claim common ground with Grice through an interest in social interaction, relevance theorists see their approach, and also Grice's maxims, as essentially cognitive in nature. For instance, Diane Blakemore has argued that RT responds to Grice's own dismissal of 'the idea that the maxims had their origin in the nature of society or culture on the grounds that this did not provide a sufficiently general explanation' and his warning that 'the key to a general, psychological explanation lay in the notion of relevance'.'4  There is some evidence that Grice was reluctant to be drawn on his views on RT. His only published comment is very brief and rather damning. In the retrospective overview of his own work in Studies in the Way of Words, he comments on the possible problem of the interdependence of his maxims, especially Quantity and Relation. However, he argues that Sperber and Wilson's account, far from clarifying this matter, in fact loses the significance of the link between relevance and quantity of information by considering relevance without specification of direction. The amount of information appropriate in any given context is determined by the particular aim of the conversation, or of what is deemed relevant to that aim. So success in conversation is not simply a matter of accumulating the highest possible number of contextual effects. Further, Grice argues that as well as direction of rele-vance, information is necessary concerning the degree of a concern for a topic, and the extent of opportunity for remedial action. In sum, the principle of relevance may well be an important one in conversation, but when it comes to implicature it might be said 'to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity'.9S This last suggestion seems to align Grice more with another branch of pragmatics, again one attempting to refine the notion of implicature and reduce the number of conversational maxims: the work of the so-called 'neo-Griceans'.  The term 'neo-Gricean' has been applied to a number of linguists, both American and British, and to a body of work produced since the early 1980s. Across the range of their published work, these linguists have revised their ideas many times, and used a sometimes bewildering array of terminology. Nevertheless, the work all remains located firmlywithin the tradition of Gricean pragmatics, seeking to elaborate a theory of meaning based on levels of interpretation. Neo-Griceans have tended towards two types of revision of Grice's theory of conversation, one much more radical than the other. First, very much in keeping with Grice's own speculations about the interdependence of Quantity and Relation, they have questioned the need for as many separate maxims as Grice originally postulated, and investigated ways of reducing these.  Second, and rather more at odds with Grice's own original conception, they have questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the levels of meaning. They have been concerned with what Laurence Horn has described as a problem raised by the Cooperative Principle, 'one we encounter whenever we cruise the transitional neighbourhood of the semantics/pragmatics border: how do we draw the line between what is said and what is implicated?'96  The neo-Griceans have upheld the importance of making some such distinction, but they have in various ways and with different terminologies challenged the viability of separating off entirely the 'literal' from the 'implied'. In this, they share the anxiety expressed by Sperber and Wilson in terms of the appropriate division between 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning. Sperber and Wilson argue that purely explicit meaning is generally not enough to render a full propositional form; implicit aspects of meaning must be admitted at various stages, leading to 'levels' of explicitness. Neo-Griceans have made similar claims,  leading them not actually to abandon the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, but to question the autonomy of the two, and the possibility of their applying to interpretation in series. The chief ways in which the neo-Griceans differ from relevance theorists, and stay closer to Grice, is in their maintenance of separate maxims of conversation that can be exploited and flouted, and the use they make of gen-eralised conversational implicatures (GCIs). These latter, rejected by RT because they take minimal account of context, are crucial to the devel-opment, and presentation, of much of the neo-Gricean literature.  In his 1989 book A Natural History of Negation, Laurence Horn comments that 'much of neo- and post-Gricean pragmatics has been devoted to a variety of reductionist efforts'!' He suggests that a premiss for him, and perhaps for many of the neo-Griceans, setting them apart from relevance theorists, is that 'Quality ... is primary and essentially unreducible.' What needs further to be said about conversation can be summarised in two separate, sometimes conflicting, driving forces within communication. These are, in general terms, the drive towards clarity, putting the onus on speakers to do all that is necessary to makethemselves understood, and the drive towards economy, putting the onus on hearers to interpret utterances as fully as necessary. Horn labels the principles resulting from these drives Q and R respectively (stand-ing for 'quantity' and 'relation', but with no straightforward correlation to Grice's maxims). He traces the development of this reductive model to early work by Jay Atlas and Stephen Levinson, and by Levinson on his own. But an important part of the account of 'Q-based implicatures' draws on work almost a decade earlier by Horn himself on the notion of 'scalar implicatures'.  Horn's development of the Gricean notion of Quantity to account for the interpretation of a range of vocabulary in terms of 'scalar implica-ture' is arguably one of the most productive and interesting of the expansions of 'Logic and conversation'. It is in many ways true to Grice's original conception of implicature, not least because it divides the  'meaning' of a range of terms into 'said' and 'implicated' components, removing the need to posit endless ambiguities in the language, and offering a systematic explanation of a wide range of examples. It is perhaps in keeping that such a thoroughly Gricean enterprise should remain in manuscript for many years, and then be published only partially (in A Natural History of Negation). The main source for Horn's account of scalar implicature remains his doctoral thesis, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, presented to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972.  In his later commentary on scalar implicatures, Horn describes them as the 'locus classicus' of GCIs based on his own notion of Quantity.98 Indeed, Grice himself seems to have seen examples of this type as particularly important, although he does not use the term 'scalar', or identify them as a separate category. In 'Logic and conversation', he introduces the notion of GCI as follows:  Anyone who uses a sentence of the form X is meeting a woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend. ... Sometimes, however, there would be no such implicature (T have been sitting in a car all morning') and sometimes a reverse implicature (I broke a finger yesterday'). I am inclined to think that one would not lend a sympathetic ear to a philosopher who suggested that there are three senses of the form of expression an X. ... [Rather] when someone, by using the form of expression an X, implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is presentbecause the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be assumed that he is no in a position to be specific.  This is a familiar implicature and is classifiable as a failure, for one reason or another, to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity."  The most easily identifiable type of GCI is based on the first maxim of Quantity, which calls for as much information as is necessary. In other words, it draws on Grice's earliest observation about the regularities of conversation: that one should not make a weaker statement when a stronger one is possible. Horn observes that there are many areas of vocabulary where similar apparent problems can be resolved by just such an analysis. A more general term often implicates that a more specific alternative does not apply, by means of the assumption that the speaker is not in a position to provide the extra information. Horn discusses this informativeness in terms of the 'semantic strength' of a lexical item. Such items can be understood as ranged on 'scales' of infor-mativeness, each scale consisting of two or more items.  In all cases, it is possible to describe the different meanings associated with a particular item in terms not of a semantic ambiguity, but of a basic semantic meaning and of an additional implicated meaning that arises by default, but can be cancelled in context. The first scale Horn discusses is that of the cardinal numbers. The numbers can be seen as situated on a scale, ranging from one to infinity: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...). Each item semantically entails all items to its left, and pragmatically implicates the negation of all items to its right. As Horn describes it:  Numbers, or rather sentences containing them, assert lower-  boundedness - at least n - and given tokens of utterances containing cardinal numbers may, depending on the context, implicate upper-boundedness - at most n - so that the number may be interpreted as denoting an exact quantity, 100  This explains the apparent ambiguity of a cardinal number in use.  'John has three children', for example, will generally be interpreted as meaning 'John has exactly three children', but is not logically incompatible with John's having four or more. Horn points to the fact that  'John has three children, and possibly even more' is acceptable, suggesting that 'no more than three' cannot be part of the semantic meaning of 'three'. If it were, this example should be simply logically contradictory. Rather than forcing the intolerable conclusion that allcardinal numbers are semantically multiply ambiguous, Horn's account allows that their semantic meaning is 'at least. but that they implicate 'at most..'. This is because, if the speaker were able to use an item further to the right on the scale, it would be more informative, hence more cooperative, to do so. Taken together, these two meanings give he interpretation 'exactly... Horn proposes similar scales fo vocabulary items from across the range of the lexicon, including adjec tives, (warm, hot), (good, excellent); verbs, (like, love), (dislike, hate); and quantifiers, (all, some). As Horn observes in his own later com-mentary, in all these examples 'since the implicature relation is context-dependent, we systematically obtain two understandings for each scalar value p ('at least p', 'exactly p') without needing to posit a semantic ambiguity for each operator'. 101  In this later work, Horn describes scalar implicatures as examples of Q-based implicatures, dependent on our expectations that speakers will seek to be as clear as possible. However, Q-based implicatures need to be balanced against R-based ones, drawing on the notion of economy.  The tension between these can offer a clear account of the issue to do with articles Grice originally identified:  Maxim clash, for example, arises notoriously readily in indefinite contexts; thus, an utterance of I slept in a car yesterday licenses the Q-based inference that it was not my car I slept in (or I should have said so), while an utterance of I broke a finger yesterday licenses the R-based inference that it was my finger I broke (unless I know that you know that I am an enforcer for the mob, in which case the opposite, R-based implicatum is derived). 102  There is some experimental support for the psychological plausibility of Horn's scalar implicatures, and hence for the Gricean framework on which they are based. Ira Noveck concludes from a number of experiments that although adults react to the enriched pragmatic meaning of scalars, young but linguistically competent children respond chiefly to their logical meaning. 'The experiments succeeded in demonstrating not only that these Gricean implicatures are present in adult inference-making but that in cognitive development these occur only after logical interpretations have been well established.'103  There have been some attempts to extend the range of Horn's notion of scalar implicature. Horn himself has offered a scalar analysis of the  'strengthening' of 'if' to mean 'if and only if', 104 Earlier, Jerrold Sadock sought to explain the meaning of 'almost' in terms of a semantic scale(almost p, p). Sadock observes that the argument for a relationship of implicature between the use of 'almost p' and the meaning 'not p' is considerably weakened by the difficulty of finding contexts in which it would be cancellable. His explanation is that this is because 'the context-free implicature in the case of almost is so strong'.10s In discussing the one example he does see as cancellable, he introduces a qualification that is again to do with the 'strength' of an implicature. Surely, Sadock argues, if a seed company ran a competition to breed an almost black marigold', and a contestant turns up with an entirely black marigold, it would be in the interests not just of fair play but of correct semantic interpretation to award him the prize. However, he cautions:  In the statement of the contest's rules, the word almost should not be read with extra stress. Stressing a word that is instrumental in conveying a conversational implicature can have the effect of emphasizing the implicature and elevating it to something close to semantic content. 106  Sadock does not go so far as claiming that an implicature can actually become part of semantic content, but his rather equivocal statement certainly suggests a blurring of what for Grice is a clearly defined boundary.  This blurring of the boundaries is more apparent, or more explicitly advocated, in other neo-Gricean work, initially from Gazdar and later from Atlas and Levinson. Gerald Gazdar is perhaps the least clearly  'Gricean' of the neo-Griceans, in that he departs most radically from Grice's bipartite conception of meaning. Nevertheless, he bases his pragmatic account at least in part on a conception of implicature drawing on 'Logic and conversation'. He proposes a 'partial formulization' of GCIs, drawing on Horn's original account, which he describes as 'basi-cally correct'.107 For Gazdar, the semantic representation of certain expressions carry 'im-plicatures', potential implicatures that will later become actual if not cancelled by context. The relationship between context, implicature and eventual interpretation is a formal process.  Stephen Levinson, sometimes in collaboration with other linguists, has developed a revised account of GCIs. Levinson's conception of the processes of interpretation is summarised in his exegesis of 'Logic and conversation' in his 1983 Pragmatics. He describes how the assumptions about conversation expressed in the maxims 'arise, it seems, from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language'. 10 These goals in conversation areclosely related to Horn's 'economy' and 'clarity', respectively, and in Levinson's work too they prompt the search for a reductive reformulation of the maxims. He is also concerned with developing an 'inter-leaved' account of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.  Along with RT, but differing overtly from it, Levinson's account offers perhaps the most developed alternative to the view of semantics and pragmatics operating serially over separate inputs.  In a joint article published in 1981, Atlas and Levinson lay claim to an explicitly Gricean heritage, but argue that 'Gricean theories need not and do not restrict their resources to Grice's formulations. 109 They argue that it is necessary to pay attention to semantic structure that exists above and beyond truth-conditions, and that in turn interacts with pragmatic principles to produce 'informative, defeasible implicata'. 110  This concern with layers of meaning not found in Grice's formulation has remained in Levinson's work. His 2000 book Presumptive Meanings is a sustained defence of the notion of GCI, based on Grice's original conception but reformulating and elaborating it. As in the defence from 20 years earlier, GCIs are seen as informative and defeasible. Their essential purpose is to add information to what is offered by literal meaning; as Levinson explains, they help overcome the problem of the 'bottle-neck' created by the slowness of phonetic articulation relative to the possibilities of interpretation. The solution, he suggests, takes the following form: let not only the content but also the metalinguistic properties of the utterance (e.g., its form) carry the message. Or, find a way to piggyback meaning on top of the meaning. "11  As part of this programme, Levinson offers a detailed characterisation of three separate levels of meaning in utterance interpretation. As well as 'sentence meaning' and 'speaker meaning', he argues the need for  'statement-meaning' or 'utterance-type meaning', intermediate between the two. It is at this level, he suggests, that 'we can expect the system-aticity of inference that might be deeply interconnected to linguistic structure and meaning, to the extent that it can become problematical to decide which phenomena should be rendered unto semantic theory and which unto pragmatics. 12 He places GCIs at this intermediate level; for him they are ambiguously located between semantics and pragmat-ics. Part of his argument here hinges on the idea, not dissimilar from that put forward by Sperber and Wilson, that the very first level is often not enough to give a starting point of meaning at all. Various factors in what Grice calls 'what is said' need to be determined with reference to precisely those inferential features described as GCIs. Levinson describes this process as 'pragmatic intrusion into truth conditions'. 113 Pragmaticinference plays a part in determining even basic sentence meaning, suggesting that pragmatics cannot be simply a 'layer' of interpretation applying after semantics. 114  Neo-Griceans have sometimes been described as engaging in 'radical pragmatics' because, as Levinson's model illustrates, they claim much richer explanatory powers for their pragmatic principles than is the case in traditional Gricean pragmatics. In 'Logic and conversation',  ', the layers  of meaning before the Cooperative Principle becomes effective are somewhat shady. Conventional meaning, always a problem area for Grice, is added to by various uninterrogated processes of disambigua-tion and reference assignment, to give 'what is said'. This may be enriched by conventional implicature, depending on the individual words chosen. It is only then that Grice's elaborate mechanism for deriving conversational implicatures is brought into play. For neo-Griceans such as Levinson, conventional meaning is a highly restrictive, although perhaps no less shady, phenomenon. It needs assistance from pragmatic principles before it can even offer a basis from which interpretation can proceed. In John Richardson and Alan Richardson's instructive extended metaphor:  Grice allowed himself considerable pragmatic machinery with which to try to bridge the gap between intuitive and posited meanings, whereas radical pragmaticians have been eagerly scrapping much of Grice's machinery while frequently allowing gaps between intuitive and posited meanings greater than anything Grice proposed - a geometrically more ambitious program. l1s  A number of recent articles reassess the claims that implicature must play a part in determining literal content. These generally take issue with linguists such as the relevance theorists and Levinson, and show a renewed interest in Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated, although they are by no means unanimously uncritical of his original characterisation of these. Kent Bach argues that 'what is said in uttering a sentence need not be a complete proposition'; if we observe what Bach sees as Grice's stipulation that 'what is said' must correspond directly to the linguistic form of the sentence uttered, it may be that what is said is not informationally complete. 16 However, this need not be a problem, because in the Gricean framework what is communicated is not entirely dependent on what is said but is derived from it by a process of implicature. Bach accuses some of Grice's commentators of confusing their intuitions about what is communicated, in whichimplicatures play a part, with judgements about semantic fact. Directly taking issue with RT, he argues that 'I have had breakfast' might be literally true even if the speaker had not had breakfast on the day of utter-ance; it is simply that intuitive judgements focus on a more limited interpretation. These intuitive judgements are not a good guide to the theoretical question of the constitution of 'what is said': 'the most natural interpretation of an utterance need not be what is strictly and literally said. 117  Mira Ariel has also dwelt on intuitive responses in her discussion of  'privileged interactional interpretation'. l18 What people respond to as the speaker's chief commitment does not always correspond either to Grice's 'what is said' or to some enriched form such as the relevance theorists' 'explicatures'. Jennifer Saul suggests that Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has been dismissed too hurriedly by his critics. To argue against Grice on the grounds of how people generally react to utterances is seriously to misrepresent his intention.  Further, within Grice's original formulation there is no reason why what is said needs to be a cooperative contribution recognised by either speaker or hearer: 'a speaker can perfectly well be cooperative by saying something trivial and implicating something non-trivial. 119  Grice's work was often characterised by the speculative and open-ended approaches he took to his chosen topics. At times the result can be frustratingly tentative discussions of crucial issues that display a knowing disregard for detail or for definitions of key terms. Ideas and theories are offered as sketches of how an appropriate account might succeed, or how a philosopher - by implication either Grice or some unnamed successor - might eventually formulate an answer. In the case of the theory of conversation, these characteristics are perhaps at least in part responsible for its success. Certainly, Grice offered enough for his description of interactive meaning to be applied fruitfully in a number of different fields across a vast range of data. But the sketchiness of some aspects of the theory, and the failure fully to define terms as central as 'what is said', have also indicated possibilities for theoretical adjustments and reformulations. There is something of an air of  'work in progress' about even the published version of 'Logic and con-versation' that indicates problems to be solved rather than simply ideas to be applied. Grice himself mounted a spirited defence of problems at the end of his own philosophical memoir:  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same oldproblems it would still not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up. 120  ready supply of problems is as valued by linguists as it is by philosc hers. The original, highly suggestive, but somehow unfinished natur of the lectures on logic and conversation is a telling example of a Gricean heresy, and one that may explain much of the story of their success.  Baker (1986: 277). Festschrift etc. H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Wittgenstein (1958: 43). See Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. In Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 516-17). E.g. Brown and Yule (1983: 31-3), Coulthard (1985: 30-2), Graddol et al. (1994: 124-5), Wardhaugh (1986: 281-4).  7. Respectively, Rundquist (1992), Perner and Leekam (1986), Gumperz (1982:  94-5), Penman (1987), Schiffrin (1994: 203-26), Raskin (1985), Yamaguchi  (1988), and Warnes (1990).  See, for instance, Grice (1987b: 339). Grandy and Warner (1986a: 1). Grice (1986a: 65, original emphasis). Grice (1986b: 10). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Misc. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47). Grice (1986a: 61). See, for instance, Burge (1992: 619). Grice (1986a: 61-2). See, for instance, Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Richard Warner, personal communication. Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Grice (1967b) in Grice (1989: 64). Handwritten version of Kant lectures, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Miscellaneous "Group" notes 84-85', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  25. 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  2 Philosophical influences  1. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1986a: 46). Quotation courtesy of the Old Cliftonian Society. Grice (1991: 57-8, n1). Grice (1986a: 46-7). Ibid. Quotations in this paragraph from Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Information from The Rossall Register, Rossall School, Lancashire. Martin and Highfield (1997: 337). Ayer (1971: 48). Rogers (2000: 144). 'Preliminary Valediction, 1985', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 48). 'Negation and Privation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Rogers (2000: 255). Rogers (2000: 146). Locke (1694: 37) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 38) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 39) in Perry (1975b). Ibid. Locke (1694: 47) in Perry (1975b). Reid (1785: 115) In Perry (1975b). Gallie (1936: 28). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 74). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 88). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 90). Perry (1975a: 155n). Perry (1975a: 136). Williamson (1990: 122). 3 Post-war Oxford  Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 10), Strawson in Magee (1986: 149). Grice (1986a: 48). Ryle (1949: 19). Rée (1993: 8). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 20). Pitcher (1973: 20). Grice (1986a: 58). Rogers (2000: 255). Manuscript: 'Philosophy and ordinary language', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 50). Frege (1892: 57). Russell (1905: 479). For instance, Magee (1986: 10). For instance in the introduction to Gellner (1979), written and first published in 1959. For instance Grice (1987b: 345). Moore (1925) reprinted in Moore (1959: 36). Grice (1986a: 51). Gellner (1979: 17, and elsewhere). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Rogers (2000: 254). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Williams and Montefiore (eds) (1966: 11). Wittgenstein (1922: 4.024). Wittgenstein (1958: 120). Ayer (1964). Austin (1962a: 3). Austin (1950) in Austin (1961: 99). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 130). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 137). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 138, original emphasis). Forguson (2001: 333 and n16). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 51), Grice (1987a: 181). Grice (1986a: 49). Quine (1985: 249). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 14). Notes for Ox Phil 1948-1970, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice (personal communication). Warnock (1973: 36). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 129, original emphasis). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Urmson et al. (1965: 79-80). 'Philosophers in high argument', The Times Saturday 17 May 1958. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Strawson in Magee (1986: 149), and Gellner (1979, passim) as examples of these two points of view. Russell (1956: 141). Gellner (1979: 23). Gellner (1979: 264). Mundle (1979: 82). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Grice (1986a: 51). Manuscript draft of 'Reply to Richards', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Ackrill (1963: vi). Strawson (1950: 326). Strawson (1998: 5). For instance, in Strawson (1952: 175ff). Strawson (1950: 344). Quine (1985: 247-8). Grice (1986a: 47). Grice (1986a: 49). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes for Categories with Strawson, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Quine (1953: 43). Grice and Strawson (1956) in Grice (1989: 205). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. 'The Way of Words', Studies in: Notes, offprints and draft material, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 54). Quinton (1963) in Strawson (1967: 126). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 37). Warnock (1973: 39). Perception Papers, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 30-1). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'More about Visa', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1955: 201). Grice (1961) and Grice (1962). Grice (1966). Warnock (1973: 39, original emphasis). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Quine (1985: 248). Grice (1958).   4 Meaning  Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Warnock (1973: 40). Grice (1957: 379). Stevenson (1944: 66). Stevenson (1944: 38). Stevenson (1944: 69). Stevenson (1944: 74, original emphasis). Grice (1957: 380). Stout (1896: 356). Notes on intention and dispositions - HPG and others in Oxford, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Dispositions and intentions', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ryle (1949: 103). Ryle (1949: 183). Stout (1896: 359). Hampshire and Hart (1958: 7). Grice (1957: 379). Peirce (1867: 1). Peirce (1867: 7). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1957: 382). Grice (1957: 385). Grice (1957: 386). Grice (1957: 387). Bennett (1976: 11). Schiffer (1972: 7). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962b: 149). Austin (1962b: 108). Austin (1962b: 114). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 155). Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 163). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 171-2). Searle (1986: 210). Searle (1969: 45). A similar point is made by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 25). Schiffer (1987: xiii). Schiffer (1972: 13). Schiffer (1972: 18-19). Cosenza (2001a: 15). Avramides (1989), Avramides (1997). Schiffer (1972: 3). Ziff (1967: 1, 2). Ziff (1967: 2-3). Malcolm (1942: 349). Malcolm (1942: 357, original emphasis). Grice (c. 1946-1950: 150). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 167). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 168). 5 Logic and conversation  See Quine (1985: 235). Grice (1986a: 59-60). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1973: 36). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chomsky (1957: 5). See Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 21). 'Lectures on negation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 12, 14a, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 13, 14b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 5, 2b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 10, 12a, in Ackrill (1963). Mill (1868:188). Mill's work in this area is discussed by Horn (1989), who refers to a number of other nineteenth and twentieth century logicians who made similar observations. Mill (1868: 210, original emphasis). Ibid.   16. 'PG's incomplete Phil and Ordinary Language paper'  ', H. P. Grice Papers,  BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California,    Berkeley.  17. Grice (1975a: 45-6).    18. Moore (1942: 541, original emphasis).    19. Bar-Hillel (1946: 334).    20. Bar-Hillel (1946: 338, original emphasis).    21. O'Connor (1948: 359).    22. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 224).    23. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 229).    24. Nowell-Smith (1954: 81-2).    25. Edwards (1955: 21).    26. Grant (1958: 320).    27. Hungerland (1960: 212).    28. Hungerland (1960: 224).    29. Strawson (1952: 178-9).    30. Grice (1961: 121).    31. Grice (1961: 152).    32. Grice (1961: 124).    33. Grice (1961: 125).    34. Grice (1961: 126).    35. Grice (1961: 132).    36. Warnock (1967: 5).    37. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    38. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 4, 1b, in Ackrill (1963).  39. Kant (1998: 212).    40. Kant (1998: 213).    41. Grice (1967a: 4).    42. Grice (1967a: 21).    43. Grice (1975a: 45).    44. Grice (1975a: 48).    45. Grice (1975a: 49).    46. Many of my students have pointed out to me that A could equally well  understand B as implicating that Smith is just too busy, with all the visits  he has to make to New York, for a social life at the moment. Green (1989:  91) argues that many different particularised conversational implicatures    are possible in this example.  Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47).  Ryle (1971: vol. II: vii).. Benjamin (1956: 318)0. Horn (1989), ch. 4. See also Levinson (1983), ch. 3 and McCawley (1981), ch. 8. This issue will be discussed in the final chapt 51. Martinich (1996: 1 52. Strawson (1952:   53. Strawson (1952:.    54. Strawson (1952: 83, 86, 891).  55. Strawson (1952: 36, 37, 85). 56. Grice (1967b: 58).  Grice (1967b: 60). Grice (1967b: 59). Grice (1967b: 77). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 88). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 93, 94, 95). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 99). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 117) Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 123, original emphasis). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 127). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 136, original emphasis). Grice (1967c: 139, original emphasis). Black (1973: 268). Grice (1987b: 349). Avramides (1989: 39). See also Avramides (1997). Loar (2001: 104). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 178). Chomsky (1976: 75). 6 American formalism  Grice (1986a: 60). All details from Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Strawson (1956: 110, original emphasis). Grice (1969b: 118). 'Reference and presupposition', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 119). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 143). Grice (1969b: 142). Later published in Chomsky (1972a). Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1989: 955). See, for instance, Sadock (1974). See, for instance, Gordon and Lakoff (1975). 'Notes for syntax and semantics', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Robin Lakoff for a very valuable discussion of the ideas in this paragraph. 'Urbana seminars', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1995: 194-5). Simpson (1997: 151). Carnap (1937: 2). Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The spelling 'carulize' may be Grice's own, a result of his not referring directly to Carnap, or may be simply an error of transcription; the typescript from which this quotation was taken was made from a recording of the lectures . Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Urbana seminars', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft  Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1981: 189). Ibid. Grice (1981: 190). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Harman (1986: 368). Grice (1971: 265). Grice (1971: 273). Kenny (1963: 207). Kenny (1963: 224). Kenny (1963: 229). Davidson (1970) in Davidson (1980: 37-8). 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Davidson (1980: vii). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 83). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 95). 'Reply to Davidson on "Intending"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cohen (1971: 66). 7 Philosophical psychology  Grice (1975a) and Grice (1978). For instance, although perhaps only semi-seriously, by Quine (1985: 248). 'Odd notes: Urbana and non Urbana', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For instance, the writer of Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Also Robin Lakoff and Kathleen Grice (personal communication). 'Tapes', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cartwright (1986: 442). 'Knowledge and belief', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker, personal communication. 'Urbana Lectures', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 62). 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Mackie (1977: 35). Mackie (1977: 38). For example, Nowell-Smith (1954: 79). Grice (1991: 23). Warner in Grice (2001: xxxvii, n). 'Odd notes Spring 1981', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Ban-  croft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 79). Grice (1991: 90). Grice (1991: 67, original emphasis). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 283). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 301). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 302). See Isard (1982), Cormack (1982). Bennett (1976: 206-10). Baker (1989: 510). Sbisa (2001: 204). Grandy (1989: 524). Kasher (1976: 210). 'Prejudices and predilections', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Neale (2001: 139). 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 58). Tape, 'PG seminar I Metaphysics S '78', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Preliminary valediction', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Course descriptions and faculty information, fall quarter 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 64). 'Festschrift notes (miscellaneous)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Recent work', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'PG's incomplete "Phil and ordinary language" paper', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 70).  'Miscellaneous notes '84-'85', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Davidson (1967). Grice (1986b: 3, original emphasis.). 'Notes with Judy', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Richard Warner (personal communication). Grice (1986b: 34). Ibid. Grice (1988b: 304). Code (1986: 413). Grice (1988a: 176). Hume (1740) in Perry (1975b: 174). Eddington (1935: 5-6). 'Notes on "vulgar" and "learned"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'To be sorted', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 41). Notes for Grice/Warnock retrospective' ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'The Way of Words, Studies In: Notes, offprints and draft material', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1987b: 384-5). 'Copy of Faculty Research Grant application 1987-8', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Folder', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lindsay Waters quoted in The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 19, 1998. 'Notes dictated to Richard Warner on perception', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1990: 153). Burge (1992: 621). Travis (1991: 237). Fogelin (1991: 213). Barnes (1993: 366). Martinich (2002: 273). Saygina and Ciceki (2002: 252). Dale and Reiter (1995: 234). Dale and Reiter (1995: 262). Young (1999: 216). Grice (1975a: 53). Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 53). Grice (1975a: 53). For example, Martinich (1984). Harnish (1976: 346, 347). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 201). Davis (1998: 65). Giora (1999: 919). Gibbs (1999: 468). Holtgraves (1998: 21), Holtgraves (1999: 520). Winer et al. (2001: 486). Bezuidenhout and Cooper Cutting (2002: 443). Keenan (1976: 70). Keenan (1976: 79). Ibid. Green (1989: 95n). Harnish (1976: 340n). Leech (1983: 80). Brown and Levinson (1987: 49). Grice (1975a: 47). Lakoff (1989: 960). Lakoff (1972: 926n). Lakoff (1972: 916). Lakoff (1973: 296). Lakoff (1973: 298). Ibid. Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). Brown and Levinson (1987: 4). Goffman (1955) reprinted in Laver and Hutcheson (1972: 323). Brown and Levinson (1987: 94). Brown and Levinson (1987: 95). Brown and Levinson (1987:164). Mura (1983: 115). Matsumoto (1989: 207). Leech (1983: xi). Leech (1983: 81). Leech (1983: 141, 144, 147). Brown and Levinson (1987: 4). Haberlard and Mey (2002: 1674). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 38). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 36). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 162). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 24). Blakemore (1990: 364). Grice (1987b: 372). Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527-8).   1. Neale (1992: 509).    2. Levinson (1983: 118).    3. Cohen (1971: 68n).    4. Cole and Morgan (eds) (1975: xii).    5. Kasher, cited in Mey (1989: 825).    6. Fauconnier (1990: 391).    7. Katz and Bever (1976: 49).    8. Langedoen and Bever (1976: 253).    9. Chomsky (1972b: 113).    10. Lakoff (1989: 981).    11. Parrett et al. (eds) (1981).    12. Cogan and Herrmann (1975: 60).    13. Karttunen and Peters (1975).    14. Attardo (1990), Carey (1990), Elster (1990) and Rundquist (1990).    15. Thomas in Mey (ed.) (1998: 170).    16. Mey (2001: 911).    17. Lindblom (2001: 1602).    18. van Dijk (1976: 44).    19. Pratt (1977: 215).    20. Gilbert (1995), Gautam and Sharma (1986), Herman (1994).    21. Cole (1975: 273).    22. Traugott (1989: 50).    23. Ziegeler (2000).    24. McHoul in Mey (ed.) (1998: 227-8).    25. Hymes (1986: 49).    26. Harris (1995: 118).    27. Pope (1995: 129, original emphasis).    28. Sampson (1982: 203, original emphasis).  29. Brown and Levinson (1987: 95).    30. Lakoff (1995: 191).    31. See, for instance, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Sacks (1992).    32. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H.P.Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135    c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    33. Holdcroft (1979: 131).    34. Bird (1979).    35. Fairclough (1985: 757).    36. Sarangi and Slembrouck (1992).    37. Gumperz (1990: 439).    38. Hanks (2001: 208).    39. Smith and Tsimpli (1995: 69, 74).    40. Moscovitch (1983), Gardner et al. (1983: 173), Caplan (1987: 358).    41. Ahlsén (1993: 61).    42. For instance, Prutting and Kirchner (1987).    43. Bloom et al. (1999: 554).    44. Kasher et al. (1999: 586).    45. Borod et al. (2000: 118).    46. Kasher (1991: 139).  Horn (2000: 321). Horn (1989: 194). Horn (1989: 204). Grice (1975a: 56-7). Horn (1972: (41). Horn (1989: 266-7). Horn (1989: 196). Noveck (2001: 183). Horn (2000). Sadock (1981: 265). Sadock (1981: 265n). 07. Gazdar (1979: xi, 55).  Levinson (1983: 101). Atlas and Levinson (1981: 11). Atlas and Levinson (1981: 56). Levinson (2000: 6). Levinson (2000: 23). 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Michael (1999) 'Using Grice's maxim of Quantity to select the content of plan descriptions', Artificial Intelligence 115: 215-56.  Ziegeler, Debra (2000) 'The role of quantity implicatures in the grammaticalisa-tion of would', Language Sciences 22.1: 27-61.  Ziff, Paul (1967) 'On H. P. Grice's account of meaning', Analysis 28: 1-8. A number of people have made this book possible by giving generously of their time to talk about Paul Grice, his life and his work, whether by letter, by e-mail or in person. I would therefore like to thank the fol-lowing, in an order that is simply alphabetical, and in the hope that I have not omitted anyone who should be thanked: Professor Judith Baker; the staff at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, in particular David Farrell; Tom Gover of the Old Cliftonian Society; Kathleen Grice; Adam Hodgkin; Professor Robin Lakoff; The Rossallian Club; Michael Stansfield, college archivist at Corpus Christi and Merton colleges;  Professor Sir Peter Strawson; Professor Richard Warner. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Grice for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and to quote from manuscript material; and to the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which gave permission to quote from their manuscript holdings.There is an inherent tension in writing about Paul Grice because two separate academic disciplines lay claim to his work, and do so with jus-tification. Those who know him as a philosopher may not be aware of the full significance of his role in the development of present day linguistics, while those whose interest in him originates from within linguistics may be unfamiliar with the philosophical questions that are integral to his work. Grice would not have considered himself to be anything other than a philosopher, so the title of this book might seem odd or even provocative. But I chose it in order to reflect the profound influence he has had on a discipline other than his own. Grice's work is of interest to philosophers and to linguists alike.  I myself belong to the second group. My first encounter with Grice's work was when I was introduced to his theory of conversation as a student, and was struck by the ambition and elegance of his proposed solution to a range of linguistic problems, as well as by the questions and difficulties it raised. I have since been pleased to recognise just these reactions to the theory in many of my own students. As I read more of Grice's work, I became intrigued by the question as to whether there was a unity to be found in his thought that would incorporate the familiar work on conversation into a larger and more significant philosophical picture. This book is my attempt to answer that question. I certainly hope that it will be of interest to readers from both philosophical and linguistic backgrounds, with the following words of caution to the former.  Grice's work draws on a range of previous writings that often go unac- knowledged, presumably because he assumed that his audience would be aware of its philosophical pedigree. The questions he is addressing can be less familiar to linguists, so on a number of occasions I have offered an overview of the history of an idea or an exegesis of a work.  I run the risk that these sections may appear to be superficial, or alternatively to be labouring the obvious, to readers well versed in philoso-phy, but I have offered the degree of detail necessary to enable those unfamiliar with the relevant background to follow Grice's arguments and appreciate the nature of his contribution. Further, my intention inthese sections is to sketch the relevant history of a philosophical debate, rather that to offer either a critique of or my own contribution to that debate. I can only ask for tolerance of these aspects of my book from readers already familiar with the relevant areas of philosophy.In 1986 Oxford University Press published a volume of essays drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, who was then 73. It was not formally described as a Festschrift, but Grice's name was concealed as an acronym of the title, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, and many of those who contributed to the volume took the opportunity of paying tribute to his work and influence. Among these, Gordon Baker revealed that what he admired most was Grice's  'skilful advocacy of heresies'.' In a similar vein, Grice's colleague Richard Grandy once introduced him to an audience with the comment that he could always be relied on to rally to 'the defence of the underdogma'.?  Given Grice's conventional academic career together with his current status in philosophy and, particularly, in linguistics, these accolades may seem surprising. His entire working life was spent in the prestigious universities of Oxford and Berkeley, making him very much an establishment figure. Much of his philosophy of language , particularly his theory of conversational implicature, has for a number of decades played a central role in debates about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, or meaning as a formal linguistic property and meaning as a process taking place in contexts and involving speakers and hearers. But the canonical status of Grice's ideas masks their unconventional and even controversial beginnings. As Baker himself ob-serves, Grice's heresies have tended to be transformed by success into orthodoxies.  In fact, Grice's work was often characterised by the challenges it posed to accepted wisdom, and by the novel approaches it proposed to established philosophical issues. The theory of conversational implicature is a good example. It is often summarised as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the fact, familiar to common sense, thatwhat people literally say and what they actually mean can often be quite different matters. In particular, the theory is concerned with some apparent discrepancies between classical logic and natural language.  More generally, it addresses the question of whether the meaning of everyday language is best explained in terms of formal linguistic rules, or in terms of the vagaries and variables of human communication.  Grice's theory developed against the background of a sharp distinction of approaches to these issues. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who saw logic as the appropriate apparatus for explaining meaning, dismissed the differences displayed by natural language as examples of its inherent imperfection. Everyday language was just too messy and imprecise to form an appropriate topic for philosophical inquiry.  The opposing view is perhaps best summed up by the slogan from Wittgenstein's later work that 'meaning is use'? Philosophers from this school of thought argued that if natural language diverges from logical meaning, this is simply because logic is not the appropriate philosophical tool for explaining language. Meaning in language is an important area of study in its own right, but can be considered only in connection with the variety of ways in which language is used by speakers.  Grice's approach to this debate was to argue that both views were wrong-headed. He proposed to think outside the standard disjunction of positions. Logic cannot give an adequate account of natural language, but nor is language simply a multifarious collection of uses, unamenable to logical analysis. Rather, logic can explain much, but not all, of the meaning of certain natural language expressions. More generally, formal semantic rules play a vital part in explaining meaning in everyday lan-guage, but they do not do the whole job. Other factors of a different but no less important type are also necessary for a full account of meaning. Most significantly, Grice argued that these other, non-semantic factors are not a random collection entirely dependent on individual speakers and contexts, but can be systematised and explained in terms of general principles and rules. The principles that explain how natural language differs from logic can also explain a wide range of other features of human communication.  In this novel attitude, Grice was certainly rejecting formal approaches, with their claim that the only meaning amenable to philosophical discussion was that which could be described in terms of truth-conditions, and could enter into truth-functional relationships. But also, and perhaps more surprisingly, he was rejecting a belief in everyday use as the chief, or indeed the only, location of meaning. This was a central tenet of philosophy at Oxford while Grice was developing his theory ofconversation, or at least of that subsection of Oxford philosophy known as the philosophy of ordinary language. Grice himself was an active member of this subsection and is often referred to as a leading figure in the movement. However, his use of formal logic in explaining conversational meaning demonstrates that his heretical impulse extended even to ordinary language philosophy itself. Indeed, the success of his theory of conversational implicature has been credited with the eventual demise of this movement as a viable philosophical approach.* Grice's readiness to question conventions, even those of his own subdiscipline, makes him hard to categorise in terms of the usual philosophical distinctions. He does not sit easily on either side of the familar dichotomies; he is neither exactly empiricist nor exactly rationalist, neither behaviourist nor mentalist. This makes synoptic discussions of his work difficult, as is perhaps entirely appropriate for a philosopher who readily expressed his dislike of attempts to divide philosophy up into a series of '-ologies' and '-isms'.  The theory of conversation is undoubtedly the best known of Grice's work. The particular, and often exclusive, emphasis on it can be explained perhaps in part by its intrinsic potential as a tool for linguistic analysis, and perhaps also, more accidentally, by the historical inaccessibility of much of his other writing. A notorious perfectionist, Grice was seldom happy that his work had reached a finished, or acceptable, state, and was therefore always reluctant to publish. Those who knew him have related this reluctance to the penetration of his own philosophical vision, turned as relentlessly on his own work as on that of others. His Oxford colleague Peter Strawson has suggested that this resulted in an uncomfortable degree of self-doubt:  I suspect, sometimes, that it was the strength of his own critical powers, his sense of the vulnerability of philosophical argument in general, that partially accounted, at the time, for his privately expressed doubts about the ability of his own work to survive criti-cism. After all, if there were always some detectable flaws in others' reasoning, why should there not be detectable, even though by him undetected, flaws in his own?  Certainly, Grice's account of conversation as an essentially cooperative enterprise is generally discussed, and frequently criticised, in isolation from the rest of this work, seen as a free-standing account of linguistic interaction. It is paraphrased, often in just a few pages, in most introductory text books on pragmatics and discourse analysis.' It hasbeen used or referred to in analyses of gendered language, children's language, code switching, courtroom cross-examination, the language of jokes, oral narrative and the language of liturgy, along with many other topics? However, it is only one aspect of a large and diverse body of work from a career of over four decades. In the context of this work, it can be seen as an intrinsic part of the gradual development of Grice's thinking on a range of philosophical topics. It also offers an analytic tool that Grice himself applied in his later work to a variety of philosophical problems, although never to the data of actual conversation.  To some extent, then, Grice's later use of the theory of conversation offers its own explanation of the significance, and the theoretical purpose, of that work. More than that, however, Grice's less-known work merits attention in its own right. It ranges over a wide range of topics: not just the philosophy of language but epistemology, per-ception, logic, rationality, ethics and metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of running threads, and some striking continuities of theme and approach, throughout this diverse oeuvre. Grice himself argued that the disparate themes and ideas of his career displayed a fundamental unity.® In general, however, as Richard Grandy and Richard Warner observe in their introduction to Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, 'the systematic nature of his work is little recognised'!'  Throughout his work Grice focused on aspects of human behaviour, linguistic or otherwise, and the mental processes underlying them.  Increasingly central in his work was the idea that an analysis of these processes revealed people to be rational creatures, and that this rationality was fundamental to human nature. In an overview of his own work, Grice himself suggested, with typical tentativeness, that: 'It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves. '° He also displayed a sophisticated respect for common sense as a starting point in philosophical inquiry. It is sophisticated in that he did not espouse the straightforward adoption of common sense attitudes and terminology into philosophy. Rather, he urged that the philosopher remain aware of how the themes of philosophical inquiry are usually understood by non-philosophers. In a large part, this meant paying serious attention to the language in which particular issues were ordinarily dis-cussed, or to what Grice once described as 'our carefree chatter'." In this focus at least he retained an approach recognisable from his background in ordinary language philosophy. However, he proved himself ready to go beyond the dictates of common sense where the complexity of the subject matter demanded. Philosophy, he argued, is a difficult subjectthat deals with difficult issues, and it is often necessary to posit entities not current in everyday thought: to construct theoretical, empirically unverifiable entities if they are explanatorily useful. Within these para-meters, as he once suggested, 'whatever does the job is respectable'. 12 He was certainly not a simple egalitarian in philosophy. In the early 1980s he noted down, apparently for his own edification, the following complaint:  It repeatedly astonishes me that people who would themselves readily admit to being devoid of training, experience, or knowledge in philosophy, and who have plainly been endowed by nature with no special gifts of philosophical intelligence should be so ready to instruct professional philosophers about the contents of the body of philosophical truths. 13  Despite his readiness to add entities to philosophical explanations when this seemed appropriate, Grice was concerned that such explanations should remain as simple as possible, in the philosophical sense of simplicity as drawing on as few entities as possible. In the lectures on conversation he endorsed 'Modified Occam's Razor', which he defined as 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'.I This philosophical parsimony was carried over into other areas of his work; he sought general explanations that would account for as wide a range of subject matter, for as few theoretical constructions, as possible. If he prized philosophical simplicity, Grice's ideas were often far from reductive in more general terms. In particular, he did not shrink from explanations that saw people as separate and different: different from animals, in terms of communicative behaviour, or from automata, in terms of rational thought.  More generally, Grice sustained an enthusiasm for the business of philosophy itself, accompanied by a conviction, unfashionable at the start of his career, that the works of philosophers from other schools of thought and different ages deserve thoughtful and continual re-analysis. His work reveals a belief that philosophical investigation and analysis are worthwhile ventures in their own right and a willingness to employ them to offer suggested approaches, rather than completed solutions, to philosophical problems. Further, Grice was always ready to hunt out and consider as many possible counter-arguments and refutations of his own ideas as he could envisage, often advancing some particular idea by means of a detailed discussion of an actual or potential challenge to it. These factors together lend a 'discursive' and at times afrustratingly tentative air to Grice's work. But despite the earnestness of Grice's interest in philosophy, and the rigour with which he pursued it, his tone was often playfully irreverent. This was, to some extent, the result of a deliberate policy that philosophy could, indeed should, be fun. 'One should of course be serious about philosophy', he argued, 'but being serious does not require one to be solemn.'5 Grice was not a gifted public speaker, given to elaborate divergences in exegeses, and to stuttering and even mumbling in presentation. l Nevertheless, his presentations could be entertaining occasions; tape recordings of him speaking about philosophy, both informally and formally, are often punctuated by laughter.  Grice himself suggested that his search for the fun, even the funny in philosophy was prompted by 'the wanton disposition which nature gave me'." But it had been reinforced 'by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect'. He had no time for those whose method of conducting philosophical debate was that of 'nailing to the wall everything in sight'. In his view, philosophy was best when it was a collaborative, supportive activity. This idea was, to some extent, inherent in his philosophical background; ordinary language philosophy was frequently undertaken as a group activity. However, it is an idea that was peculiarly suited to his person-ality. Grice could be extremely convivial; he was often surrounded by people, and preferred to develop his ideas by discussion rather than by solitary composition. He was no ascetic; he ate, drank and smoked copi-ously. But conviviality is not the same as affability. His delight in philosophical discussion often spilled over into an intense desire to 'win' the argument. He could be curt in response to points of view with which he was not in sympathy. On those occasions when he sought intuitive responses to his linguistic examples, he could be dismissive of those who got it 'wrong'. Moreover, those who know him have suggested that at times his tendency towards self-doubt could manifest itself in gloomi-ness, even moroseness. 18  Grice's tendency was to become entirely absorbed with whatever he was engaged in, if it interested him intellectually. Often this was some philosophical issue of substance or of composition. His wife Kathleen recalls that he frequently stayed up late into the night, often pacing up and down as he battled with some problem.l' Sometimes other people were caught up in this absorption. During his time at Oxford, he conducted a long collaboration with Peter Strawson. In later life, Gricehimself would recount how he was once phoned up by Strawson's wife who told him to stop bothering her husband with late night phone calls.20 This obsessiveness was characteristic of all the activities to which he devoted his considerable energies. Kathleen remembers that he was always engaged on some project; if it was not philosophy then it was playing the piano, or chess, bridge or cricket. These last two were more absorbing than mere hobbies. He played both bridge and cricket competitively at county level. Cricket, in particular, was an obsession that almost rivalled philosophy; he played for a number of different clubs and 'became an inelegant but extremely effective and prolific opening batsman'.2 During his Oxford career, he spent the large part of each summer on cricket tours.  Grice's immense energy in these different directions was undoubtedly aided by the amount of time he had at his disposal, in part the consequence of not having to concern himself too much with everyday prac-ticalities; according to Kathleen, from childhood onwards he always had, or found, people to look after him. He certainly pursued his interests to the exclusion of the mundane, often neglecting food and sleep if a particular problem, or game, had his attention. In those areas where he did have practical responsibility, Grice was legendarily untidy. He took little concern over his clothes, or his personal appearance gener-ally. His desk was constantly covered by huge and apparently unsorted piles of paper. However, he would not allow anyone else to touch these, claiming that he knew exactly where everything was. After he died, these papers were deposited in the Bancroft library at the University of California, Berkeley, as the H. P. Grice Papers. This archive, which amounts to 14 large cartons, contains whatever Grice had about himself at the end of his life, mainly heaped on his desk or crammed under his bed. It consists largely of papers from after his move to Berkeley in 1967.  But it also includes those papers from his Oxford days, dating right back to the 1940s, that had seemed important enough to him to take and keep with him.  The cartons contain a mixture of finished manuscripts, draft versions, lecture notes and odd jottings. These are often crammed with writing, but never with anything extraneous to the matter in hand; it seems that Grice never doodled. They offer some clue to at least one reason for Grice's reluctance to publish. Grice seems to have been more struck than most by the essentially inconclusive nature of his own work; no project was, for him, ever really completed, or ever separate from the work that preceded and followed it. So notes and manuscripts were stored along with those from decades earlier if they were perceived to be on a relatedtheme. Papers covered in Grice's cramped hand in faint pencil, characteristic of his work from Oxford, were annotated and added to by notes in ball-point made years later in Berkeley. Ideas generally associated exclusively with his late work, such as those relating to rationality and to finality, are explored in notes dating back to the 1960s. Work often remained in manuscript form for so long that it needed to be updated as the years went by. In the original version of 'Indicative conditionals', part of the William James lectures of 1967, Grice uses the example:  'Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M.'. At a later date 'MacMillan' has been crossed out and 'Heath' written over the top in a different coloured ink. This was the example used when the lecture was eventually published. 22  Above all, the H. P. Grice papers confirm that for Grice there was no real distinction between life and work. He was not in the habit of keeping regular hours of work, or of distinguishing between philosophical and private concerns. In the same way, his current philosophical preoccupation would spill over into his everyday life. Any piece of paper that came to hand would be covered in logical notation, example sentences, trial lists of words, invented dialogues, or whatever else was preoccupying him at that moment, all written in what Grice himself described as 'a hand which few have seen and none have found legible'.2 So the cartons contain not just the orthodox pages of ruled note paper, but also a miscellany of correspondence (often unopened), financial statements, menus, paper napkins, playing card boxes, cigarette packets and even airline sick bags that came to hand as ideas occurred to him during a flight. Some of these suggest that Grice's writing style was not as spontaneous as it may sometimes appear. Certainly the manuscripts of articles and the lecture notes, always written out in full, were produced in longhand with little significant revision.  But Grice was not averse to jotting down what he once described as  'useful verbiage' in preparation for these. In conjunction with some work on the place of value in human nature drawing on, but diverging from a number of previous philosophers including John Stuart Mill, he noted down the phrase: 'so as not to be just Grice to your Mill..!.24 While working on an account of value and freedom drawing on both Aristotle and Kant, he tried out possible hybrids: 'Ariskant? Kantotle?'. 25 This book considers Grice's work within a broadly chronological framework, following the course of his philosophical life. However, because Grice did not work on discreet topics in neat succession, it is sometimes necessary to group together strands of work on related topics even where they in fact extend over years or decades. Nevertheless, thechronological arrangement makes possible an understanding of the development, as well as the remarkable unity, of Grice's thinking. It also allows some scope for considering the impact on it of the work of other philosophers, and of the various personal associations he formed throughout his life. The final chapter is concerned with the impact of Grice's ideas on linguistics. It is concerned with the development of what has become known as 'Gricean pragmatics' and therefore concentrates on responses to the theory of conversation.In a conversation recorded in 1983, Grice commented that fairly early in his career he stopped reading current philosophy.' In the light of his constant engagement with the work of his contemporaries, this characteristically mischievous claim need not be taken at face value. Indeed, his own immediate elaboration somewhat modifies it. Instead of spending his time trying to keep up with all the philosophical journals, he concentrated increasingly on the history of philosophy, choosing his reading matter by strength of ideas rather than by date of composition.  To this it might be added that he also devoted a great deal of time to face-to-face discussion with those he chose as his philosophical col-leagues. Grice's exaggerated claim therefore draws attention to two constant influences on his own philosophy: debate and collaboration with others engaged in similar fields of enquiry, coupled with what in the same conversation he calls 'respect for the old boys'.  It is tempting to identify the emergence of this tension between old and new ideas, or perhaps more accurately this dialogue between orthodox and challenging ways of thinking, throughout Grice's early life.  Born on 15 March 1913, he was the first son of a wealthy middle-class couple, Herbert and Mabel (née Felton) Grice, and grew up in Harborne, an affluent suburb of Birmingham. He was named after his father, but preferred his middle name, and was from an early age known generally as Paul. His early publications were credited to 'H. P. Grice', and are sometimes still cited as such, but in later years he published as simply  'Paul Grice'  '. Herbert Grice is described in his son's college register as  'business, retd'. In fact he had owned a manufacturing business making small metal components that prospered during the First World War.  When the business subsequently began to fail, Mabel stepped in to save the family finances by taking in pupils. She included Paul and hisbrother Derek in this miniature school, meaning that the first few years of their education were conducted at home. This reversal of roles explains Herbert's early 'retirement'. After the failure of the manufacturing business, he did not attempt another venture, preferring instead to concentrate on his skills as a concert cellist. His musical talent was inherited by both his sons; Herbert, Paul and Derek would often perform domestically as a trio.  Family life at Harborne was punctuated not just by musical recitals, and by innumerable games of chess, but also by controversy and debate, although the topic was generally theological rather than philosophical.  Herbert had been brought up in a nonconformist tradition, while Mabel was a devout Anglo-Catholic. The third adult member of the household, an unmarried aunt, had converted to Catholicism. Grice recalled fondly the many doctrinal clashes he witnessed as a result of this mix, particularly those between his aunt and his father. He suggested that his father's self-defence in these circumstances awakened, or at least rein-forced, his own tendency towards 'dissenting rationalism'; this tendency stayed with him throughout life? It would seem from this that he lent more towards his father's way of thinking, but certainly by the time he reached adulthood he had abandoned any religious faith he may initially have held. He did not retain the Christianity with which he had been surrounded as a child, but he kept the enthusiasm for debate in general, and for the habits of questioning received wisdom and challenging orthodoxy on the basis of personal reasoning in particular.  When Grice was 13 his education was put on to a more formal footing when he went as a boarder to Clifton College in Bristol. This public school, exclusively male at the time, provided excellent preparation for Oxford or Cambridge for the sons of those wealthy enough to afford it, or for those who, like Grice, passed the scholarship examination. Boys belonged to one of a number of 'houses',  ', rather in the style of Oxbridge  colleges, and received the education in classics that would equip them for entry to university. It seems that Grice excelled at this; at the end of his Clifton career, in July 1931, he won a classical scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He had not concentrated exclusively on academic matters, however. He had been 'Head of School' during his final year, and had also kept up his musical interests. He performed a piano solo in the school's 1930 Christmas concert. Joseph Cooper, Grice's contemporary at Clifton who went on to become a concert pianist and then chairman of the BBC television programme 'Face the Music', played a piece by Rachmaninoff at the same concert. 'Weenjoyed Grice's playing of Ravel's "Pavane"', runs the school's report on the concert, 'its stateliness provided an effective contrast to the exuberance of the Rachmininoff.'3  Corpus Christi had a strong academic tradition, but was not as socially fashionable as some of the larger colleges. It therefore tended to attract students from more modest backgrounds than colleges such as Christ Church or Magdalen, where social success often depended on demonstrable affluence. However, despite such distinctions between individual colleges, Oxford in general was a place of privilege. Students were nearly all male, were predominantly from public schools, and were generally preparing to take their places as members of the establish-ment. Fashionable political opinions were left wing, and students of Grice's generation tended to see themselves as rebelling against nineteenth-century notions of responsibility and propriety. Such rebel-liousness, however, was of a very passive nature; it lacked the zeal and the active protest that was to characterise student rebellion in the 1960s.  It did little to affect the day to day life in Oxford, where the university was legally in loco parentis, and where all undergraduates lived and dined in college. Some 50 years later, Grice recalled the atmosphere of the time with amused but affectionate detachment:  We are in reaction against our Victorian forebears; we are independent and we are tolerant of the independence of others, unless they go too far. We don't like discipline, rules (except for rules of games and rules designed to secure peace and quiet in Colleges), self-conscious authority, and lectures or reproaches about conduct....  We don't care much to talk about 'values' (pompous) or 'duties' (stuffy, unless one means the duties of servants or the military, or money extorted by the customs people). Our watchwords (if we could be moved to utter them) would be 'Live and let live, though not necessarily with me around' or 'If you don't like how I carry on, you don't have to spend time with me.  Grice was at Corpus Christi for four years. Classics was an unusual subject in this respect; most Oxford degree programmes were a year shorter. At that time, philosophy was taught only as part of the Classics curriculum, and it was in this guise that Grice received his first formal training in the subject. The style was conservative, based largely on close reading of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. This seems to have suited Grice's meticulous and analytical style of thought well, as the tutorial teaching method suited his dissenting and combativenature. Although there were lectures, open to all members of the uni-versity, teaching was based principally at tutorial, therefore college, level. Students would meet individually with their tutors to read, and then defend, an essay. In reflecting on his early philosophical educa-tion, Grice always emphasised what he saw as his own good fortune in being allocated as tutee to W. F. R. (Frank) Hardie. A rigorous classical scholar and an exacting tutor, Hardie might not have been everyone's first choice, but Grice credited him with revealing the difficulty, but also the rewards of philosophical study. Grice also, it seems, relished the formalism that Hardie imposed on his already established appreciation of rational debate. Under Hardie's guidance, this appreciation developed into a belief that philosophical questions are best settled by reason, or argument:  I learnt also form him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).  Grice even recounts with approval, but reluctant disbelief, the story that a long silence in another student's tutorial was eventually broken by Hardie asking 'And what did you mean by "of"?' No doubt the contemporary detractors of ordinary language philosophy would have seen Grice's enthusiasm for this anecdote of the 1930s as a sign that he was perfectly suited to the style of philosophy that would flourish at Oxford in the following two decades. This was crucially concerned with minute attention to meaning and to the language in which philosophical issues were traditionally discussed.  Grice's admiration for Hardie was later to develop into friendship; they were both members of a group from Oxford that went on walking holidays in the summers leading up to the Second World War, and Hardie taught Grice to play golf. The friendship was based in part on a number of characteristics the two had in common. There was their shared rationalism; Grice found welcome echoes of his own approach in Hardie's 'reluctance to accept anything not properly documented'?  Moreover, Hardie never admitted defeat. Discussions with him, Grice later observed, never actually ended; they would simply come to a stop.  In response, Grice learnt to adopt a similar stance in philosophical argument, clinging tendentiously to whatever position he had set out to defend. Once, when Grice was taught by a different philosophy tutor for one term, the new tutor reported back to Hardie that his studentwas 'obstinate to the point of perversity'. To Grice's enduring delight, Hardie received this report with thorough approval.  However some may have judged his style of argument, Grice's undergraduate career was an indisputable success. Students took 'Modera-tions' exams five terms into their degree, before proceeding to what was popularly known as 'Greats',  , the stage in the degree at which philoso-  phy was introduced. Grice achieved First Class in his Moderations in  1933. In the summer of 1935 he took his finals, and was awarded First Class Honours in Literae Humaniores, as 'Greats' was officially called. His studies did not take up all of his time during these years, however, and he mixed academic success with extracurricular activities, particularly sporting ones. He played cricket, and in the summer of 1934 captained the college team. In the winter he followed up this success by becoming captain of the college football team. During this same period, he was president of the Pelican Philosophical Society and editor of the Pelican Record. Both took their name from the bird forming part of the Corpus Christi crest that had become the informal symbol of the college.  After Grice completed his undergraduate studies, there was a brief hiatus in his academic career. There were at that time few openings at Oxford for those graduates who had not yet gained a University Lectureship or been elected to a College Fellowship. For the academic year 1935-6 Grice left Oxford, but not the elite education system of which he had been part for the past decade, when he went as Assistant Master to Rossall in Lancashire. At a time when there were very few Universities in the country, an Honours degree, especially from Oxford or Cambridge, was regarded as more than adequate a qualification to teach at a public school such as Rossall. It was not at all uncommon for Assistant Masters to stay in post for just a year or two before moving on to a more permanent position or embarking on a career in some other field. Indeed, of the 11 other Assistant Masters appointed between 1933 and 1937 by the same headmaster as Grice, only four stayed for more than a year; none of the other seven went on to careers as school masters.® In Grice's case, his appointment at Rossall filled the time between his undergraduate studies and his return to Oxford in 1936. It was also in 1936, unusually a year after the completion of his studies, that Grice was willing, or perhaps able, to pay the fee necessary for con-ferment of his BA degree.  He was enabled to return to Oxford by two scholarships, both of which would have required him to sit examinations. First was an Oxford University Senior Scholarship, an award for postgraduate study at anycollege and in any subject. In the same year, Grice was awarded a Harmsworth Senior Scholarship, a 'closed' scholarship to Merton college. The Harmsworth Scholarships, funded by an endowment from former college member Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, were a relatively new venture, aimed specifically at raising the profile of postgraduate achievement at the college. A history of Merton notes that the scheme  'brought to the college a succession of intelligent graduates from all col-leges. In that way a window was opened on to the world of graduate research at a time when there were few opportunities at that level in the university as a whole." The scholarships had been available only since 1931, and only three were awarded each year, across the range of academic subjects. Grice's contemporaries were Richard Alexander Hamilton, also from Clifton College, in sciences, and Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn in modern languages. Grice was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton between 1936 and 1938, but no award or higher degree resulted from his time there. He was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1939 but this was a formality, available seven years after initial matriculation to students who had received a BA, upon payment of a fee. Nevertheless, the time spent at Merton was an important period in Grice's philosophical development not least because it was during this time that he became aware of subjects and methodologies then current in philosophy, and indeed taking shape in Oxford itself. He added knowledge of contemporary and dissenting philosophy to his existing familiarity with established orthodoxy.  Grice's experiences of undergraduate study had been typical of the time. The philosophy taught and conducted at Oxford between the wars was extremely conventional, that is to say speculative and metaphysical in nature, with an almost institutionalised distrust of new ideas. The business of philosophy was centred on the exegesis of the philosophi-cal, and particularly the classical 'greats'. Indeed, until just before the Second World War, no living philosopher was represented on the Oxford philosophy syllabus. The picture was different at Cambridge.  From early in the century, Russell had been developing his analytic approach to issues of knowledge and the language in which it is expressed, arguing that suitable rigorous analysis can reveal the 'true' logical form beneath the 'apparent' grammatical surface of sentences.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus, first published in English in 1922, had taken these ideas further, arguing that such analysis could reveal many of the traditional concerns of philosophy to be merely 'pseudo-problems' However, such was the insularity of academic institutions at the time that Oxford had not officially, and barely in practice, been aware ofthese developments in Cambridge, let alone of those in other parts of Europe.  This isolation was fairly abruptly ended, at least for some of the younger philosophers at Oxford, during the period when Grice was at Merton. This change was due in a large part to A. J. Ayer, and to the publication of his controversial first book Language Truth and Logic in  1936. Ayer had himself been an undergraduate at Oxford between 1929 and 1932 but, unusually, had read many of Russell's works, as well as the Tractatus. He had been encouraged in this by his tutor, Gilbert Ryle, a socially conservative but intellectually progressive don, who had even taken Ayer on a trip to Cambridge where he had met Wittgenstein personally. Ayer was impressed by the methods of analytic philosophy in general, and in particular by Wittgenstein's ambitious claims that it could 'solve' age-old philosophical problems for good by analysing the language in which they were traditionally expressed. He was even more profoundly affected by the ideas with which he came into contact during a visit to Austria after finishing his studies. There he became acquainted with a number of members of the Vienna Circle, and attended several of their meetings. Then as now, this group of scientists and philosophers were referred to collectively as 'the logical positivists' They represented a number of separate interests and specialisms, but shared at least one common goal: the desire to refine and perfect language so as to make it an appropriately precise tool for scientific and logical discussion. They distinguished between meaningful statements, amenable to scientific study and discussion, and other statements, strictly meaningless but unfortunately occurring as sentences of imperfect everyday language. Their chief tool in this procedure was the principle of verification.  The logical positivists divided the category of meaningful statements into two basic types. First, there are those expressed by analytic, or necessarily true, sentences. 'All spaniels are dogs' is true because the meaning of the predicate is contained within the meaning of the subject, or because 'dog' is part of the definition of 'spaniel'. They added the statements of mathematics and of logic to the category of analytic sentences, on the grounds that a sentence such as 'two plus two equals four' is in effect a tautology because of the rules of mathematics. The second category of meaningful statements is those expressed by synthetic sentences, or sentences that might be either true or false, that are capable of being subjected to an identifiable process of verification. That is, there are empirically observable phenomena sufficient to determine the question of truth. All other statements, those neither expressed byanalytic sentences nor verifiable by empirical evidence, are meaning-less. This includes statements concerning moral evaluation, aesthetic judgement and religious belief. For the logical positivists, such statements were not false; they merely had no part in scientific discourse.  The doctrine of the Vienna Circle was radically empiricist and strictly anti-metaphysical.  When Ayer returned to Oxford in 1933 as a young lecturer, he set himself the task of introducing the ideas of logical positivism to an English-speaking audience. Language, Truth and Logic draws heavily on the ideas of the Vienna Circle, but also includes elements of the British analytic philosophy Ayer had found persuasive as an undergraduate. In the opening chapter, provocatively entitled 'The Elimination of Meta-physics', he outlines the views of logical positivism on meaning. He also offers his own formulation of the principle of verification:  We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. 10  In subsequent chapters, Ayer applies this criterion uncompromisingly to the analysis of statements such as those of ethics and theology, those of our perceptions of the material world, and those relating to our knowledge of other minds and of past events.  Language, Truth and Logic, which was widely read and discussed both within Oxford and beyond, tended to polarise opinions. Not surpris-ingly, many of the older, established Oxford philosophers reacted strongly against it and the explicit challenge it posed to philosophical authority. It dismissed many of the traditional concerns of philosophy on the grounds that they were based on the discussion of meaningless metaphysical statements; it proposed to solve many apparent philosophical problems simply by analysis of the language in which they were expressed and, of course, it rejected all religious tenets. However, to many of the younger philosophers it offered a welcome and exhilarating change for precisely these same reasons. Ayer became a central figure in a group of young philosophers who met to discuss various philosophical topics. The meetings took place in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College during term times for about two years from early 1937. Here Ayer first began to talk, and to disagree, with another young philosopher, J. L. Austin.In the decade immediately following the Second World War, Austin was to be instrumental in the development of ordinary language phi-losophy, which dominated Oxford, and was deeply influential on Grice personally. In the late 1930s, however, his philosophical position was yet to be fully articulated. Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, has suggested that Austin was initially very impressed by Ayer, who was the only member of the group to have published, but that 'during the course of the All Souls Meetings... Austin staked out, if not a set of doctrines, then an approach which was very much his own'." This approach brought him increasingly into conflict with Ayer. Initially their disagreements were amicable enough, but in later years their differences of opinion were to lead to an increasing and unresolved hostility.  Grice perhaps identifies what it was that Austin found increasingly unsatisfactory about Ayer's logical positivism when he observes in an unpublished retrospective that: 'between the wars, in the heyday of Philosophical Analysis, when these words were on every cultured and progressive lip, what was thought of as being subjected to analysis were not linguistic but non-linguistic entities: facts or (in a certain sense) propositions, not words or sentences'.12 Analytic philosophy, whether in terms of Russell's 'logical form', or of the verificationists' 'meaning-fulness'  ', was concerned with explaining problematic expressions by translating statements in which such expressions occur into more ele-mentary, logically equivalent statements in which they do not occur. It considered language as an important tool for the clarification of concepts and states of affairs, not as an appropriate target of analysis in its own right. Indeed language, as used in ordinary discourse, offered potential dangers that the philosopher needed to avoid; it could mislead the unwary into inappropriate metaphysical commitments.  The major advocates of philosophical analysis between the wars, Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, all shared the conviction that everyday language was 'imperfect' and needed to be purified and improved before it could be ready for philosophical use. This disdain for ordinary language is at least in part the source of Austin's growing discontent with analytic philosophy in general, and with its spokesman Ayer in particular. Austin became increasingly convinced that ordinary language was a legitimate focus of philosophical enquiry. Not only was it 'good enough' as a tool for philosophy, it was also possible that the way in which people generally talk about certain areas of experience might offer some important insights into philosophically problematic concepts. For instance, there is the problem of our knowledge of other minds. For Ayer, statements about the mental states of others weremeaningless and unacceptable as they stood. A statement such as 'he is angry' was not amenable to any process of verification, and committed its speaker to the existence of unempirical concepts such as minds and emotions. To avoid the unpleasant prospect of having to dismiss all such statements as simply meaningless, Ayer insisted in Language, Truth and Logic that they must be translatable into verifiable statements.  Statements about others' mental states are most appropriately translated into statements about their physical states: about their appearance and behaviour. Such statements, which concern phenomena that can be directly perceived, are amenable to verification. Assumptions about mental states are merely inferences from these. Austin's defence of statements about other minds would run as follows. People use statements such as 'he is angry' all the time, with no confusion or misun-derstanding. Therefore, it seems appropriate to take such statements seriously: to analyse them as they stand rather than to treat them as being in some way 'really' about perceptions and inferences. Further-more, the fact that people ordinarily talk in this way might be seen as good grounds for accepting emotions and mental states as valid concepts.  Grice had a lot in common with the group meeting in All Souls. He was much the same age; of the main members of the group, Austin was two years older than him, Ayer three and Berlin five, while Stuart Hampshire was a year younger. Moreover, like both Ayer and Austin he had studied Classics at Oxford, and been introduced to the study of philosophy in 'Greats'. But college life was so insular that he was not aware of this group or party to its discussions. Merton was in many ways a similar college to Corpus Christi: small and relatively low in the social hierarchy of colleges. Indeed, it had a growing reputation for offering places to students without traditional Oxford credentials: to those from the Midlands and the North of England, and to grammar school pupils.  In contrast, Christ Church and Magdalen, where Ayer and Austin were respectively, were both large and prestigious colleges. All Souls was exclusively a college of Fellows, offering no places to undergraduate or postgraduate students. Grice was later to account for his own absence from the meetings by explaining that he was 'brought up on the wrong side of the tracks'. 13 He did read Language Truth and Logic, and like many of his contemporaries was extremely interested in the methodology it suggested for tackling philosophical problems. However, he recalled in later life that from the beginning he had certain reservations about Ayer's claims that were never laid to rest; 'the crudities and dogmatism seemed too pervasive'. 14Grice may have been unimpressed by some of Ayer's more sweeping claims, but they opened up to him analytic possibilities that affected his own style of philosophy. An early typescript paper on negation has survived. This was a topic to which Grice returned in a series of lectures in the early 1960s, but on which he never published. The paper is not dated, but the use of his parents' address in Harborne suggests that it was written before he obtained a permanent position at Oxford, therefore presumably before the Second World War. He tackles the epistemological problem posed by negative statements such as 'this is not red' or 'I am not hearing a noise'.  '. Such statements raise the question of how  it is that we become acquainted with a negative fact. Grice argues that knowledge of negative facts is best seen as inferential. We are confident in our knowledge of a negative because we have evidence of some related positive fact. So our knowledge that a certain object is not red might be derived by inference from knowledge that it is green, together with an understanding that being green is incompatible with being red.  The second example sentence is more problematic. It expresses a 'priv-ative fact', an absence. If the inferential account of negative knowledge is to be maintained, it must be possible to suggest a type of fact incompatible with the positive counterpart of the negative, that is with the sentence 'I am hearing a noise', for which the speaker can have adequate evidence. Grice's suggestion is that the incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the speaker entertains the positive proposition in question, without having an attitude of certainly to that proposition. If you think of a particular proposition, and are aware that you do not know it to be true, then you may be said to be inferring knowledge of a negative. If you entertain the proposition that you are hearing a noise, but do not know this proposition to be true, then you are in a position to assert 'I do not hear a noise'. More generally, to state 'I do not know that A is B' is in effect to state 'Every present mental process of mine has some characteristic incompatible with knowledge that A is B'. 15  Although Grice does not acknowledge any such influences, his paper can be placed very much within the analytic tradition, and its main proposal draws on verificationist assumptions. The problem it tackles is the issue of how we are 'really' to understand negative statements: how we are to translate them so that they do not contain the problematic term  'not'. Grice's proposed analysis can be subjected to a process of verifi-cation, on the understanding that perception though the senses (it is green') and introspection (every present mental process of mine...) are empirical phenomena.On completion of his Harmsworth studentship in 1938, Grice was appointed to a lectureship in philosophy at the third college of his Oxford career, St John's. In the complex social hierarchy of Oxford col-leges, this was definitely a step up; St John's was larger, more affluent and more prestigious than either Merton or Corpus Christi. More impor-tantly, it was a sign that Grice's career was progressing well. Although it carried a relatively high teaching load, and brought with it no benefits of college membership, a lectureship was a good position from which to impress the existing Fellows of the college, who had control over the appointment of new members. In fact, Grice was elected to the position of full Fellow, tutor and lecturer in philosophy after just one year. He was to hold this post for almost 30 years, but initially he stayed at St John's for only one because his career, like that of many of his con-temporaries, was interrupted by war service. Grice was commissioned Lieutenant in the Navy in 1940. Initially, he was on active service in the North Atlantic. Then in March 1942 he joined Navy Intelligence at the Admiralty, where he stayed until the war ended.  The war years saw the publication of Grice's first article, 'Personal Identity', in Mind. Neither the topic nor the journal were particularly surprising choices for a young Oxford philosopher at that time. Mind, edited by G. E. Moore, was one of the leading, indeed one of the few, journals of contemporary philosophy, and had reflected the interest in logical positivism of the 1930s. After the war, under the editorship of Gilbert Ryle, it would become the acknowledged organ for much of the work from the new school of Oxford philosophy.l The topic of personal identity was one of long-standing philosophical interest, and had received renewed attention during the 1930s; indeed, it was one of the topics discussed in the meetings at All Soul's. It is ultimately concerned with a question that was to underlie Grice's work throughout his life: the question of what it is to be a human being. Discussing personal identity means considering the relative importance of, and relationship between, physical and mental properties. Describing identity exclusively in terms of physical bodies presents problems, but so does describing it entirely in terms of mental entities. The former position would suggest that a single body must always be the location of a single iden-tity, or person, regardless of personality change, memory loss or mental illness. Moreover, it would seem to entail that, since the composition of a physical body does not stay the same throughout a lifetime, someone must be regarded as having separate identities, or being different people as, say, a baby, an adult, and an old man. An account of personal identity based exclusively on mental sameness, however,would force us to accept that one mental state transferred into another body, perhaps by surgery or reincarnation, should result in no change of identity. Philosophers wrestled with hypothetical 'problem cases'. If it were possible to take the brains out of two bodies and swap them over, would this be best described as a brain transplant or a body trans-plant? Ayer, Austin and their companions had concerned themselves with the status of Gregor Samsa from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis': 'was he an insect with the mind of a man, or a man with the body of an insect?'. 17  In attempting to negotiate between these two opposing, equally prob-lematic, accounts, Grice looks to 'memory theories' of personal iden-tity. In this, he draws on work produced almost 250 years previously by John Locke, while acknowledging some of Locke's critics and attempting to suggest a way of addressing them. In other words, Grice's first published work shows the characteristic combination of old and new ways of thinking. He draws on work from philosophical 'old boys', such as Locke and his eighteenth-century critic Thomas Reid. At the same time, he looks for solutions to their problems in a much newer style of philosophy, one in general terms analytic, and in more particular terms concerned with the close analysis of individual linguistic examples.  Locke argues that, unlike in the case of inanimate masses, the identity of living creatures must depend on more than bodily unity. As evidence he suggests the examples of an oak growing from a seedling into a great tree and then cut back, or a colt growing into a horse, being sometimes fat and sometimes thin; throughout these changes they remain the same oak, and the same horse. In search of an appropriate substitute for bodily sameness, he discusses what might be seen as a hierarchy of living beings, and considers where a notion of identity can be located in each case. In general, at each stage of the hierarchy, what is required is an account of function. The parts of a tree form a single entity not because they remain physically constant, but because they are arranged in such a way as to fulfil certain functions: the processes of nutrition and growth that together ensure the continued existence of the tree. In much the same way, the identity of an animal can be described in terms of the fulfilment of the functions that ensure its sur-vival. Even 'man' is no different in this respect; human identity consists in the collection of parts functioning together over the course of a lifetime, to ensure the growth, maturation and survival of the individual human being. Various different particles of matter form a single human at different points in time precisely because they all participate in a single, continued, life.Locke points out that this account of a man or human being, although it does not rely on simple bodily identity, does make necessary reference to the physical body. The parts of the body may change over time, but, united by common functions, they together form part of the definition of 'a man'  '. If we relied only on mental identity, or 'the  identity of soul', we would not be able to resist the idea that physically and temporally separate bodies might all belong to the same man. Locke suggests that an account based just on the soul could not rule out the unacceptable claim that the ill-assorted list: 'Seth, Ismael, Socrates, Pilate, St Austin, and Caesar Borgia, ... may have been the same man.'18 Furthermore, the form of a man is a necessary part of our understanding of the concept of a man, and of the meaning of the word 'man'.  Even if we were to hear a creature that looked like a parrot hold intelligent conversation and discuss philosophy, functions normally associated exclusively with people, we would hardly be tempted to say that it must be a man, but rather we would say that it was 'a very intelligent rational parrot'. 19  Locke's next move is to suggest a categorial distinction between 'man' and 'person'.  , a distinction he admits is at odds with normal under-  standing and speech. He offers a very specific definition of a person as  'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places' 20 The point of this distinction is to explain the 'extra' properties persons are generally seen as possessing, beyond those of animals.  It might be said variously to account for consciousness, self-awareness or the soul. The identity of a person, then, consists not just in the unity of functioning parts, the criterion that accounts alike for the identity of a plant, or an animal, or a 'man'. The identity of a person depends on the continuation of the 'reason and reflection' across a range of different times and places. In Locke's words, 'as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person'? Locke offers his own solution to what has come to be known as the 'brain transplant' problem, which he explains in terms of the transfer of souls. In Locke's fanciful illustration, the soul of a prince is transferred into the body of a cobbler, the cobbler's soul having been removed. We would say that what was left was the same person as the prince, since he would have the thoughts of the princeand the consciousness of the prince's past life. However, we would at this point be forced to acknowledge the distinction Locke is drawing between 'man' and 'person', by saying that this was the same man as the cobbler, as demonstrated by the continuity of bodily functioning.There is one fairly obvious problem with an account of identity dependent on the extension back in time of a single consciousness.  Locke in effect dismisses this problem by arguing that it is an error arising from a particular way in which language is generally used. The problem is concerned with memory loss. If he were completely and irrevocably to lose his memory, Locke suggests, we would still want to say that he was the same person as the one who performed the actions he has now forgotten. Yet on Locke's own account, if his consciousness could no longer be extended back to these past actions, he could not be the same person as the one who performed them. Locke suggests that our reluctance to accept this conclusion, our inclination to insist that he is still the same person, can be traced to a lack of reflection about the use of the pronoun 'I'. In this case, the amnesiac Locke would in fact be using 'I' to refer not to the person, but to the man. Locke does not himself offer any examples, but the following illustrates his point.  If, having lost his memory and then been instructed about his own past life, he were to state 'I was exiled by James Il', he would be using the pronoun to refer only to the same man, or living creature, as he is now, not to the same person. Our tendency to maintain that 'I' must in these examples stand for the same person is because of our failure to distinguish properly between 'man' and 'person': our habit of conflating the two. Once this conflation is recognised for what it is, the problem can be resolved; it may be possible for a single man to be more than one person during his life. Indeed, although our use of the pronoun sometimes seems to miss this, elsewhere in the language it is apparently acknowledged:  when we say such a one is not himself, or is beside himself; in which phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least first used them, thought that self was changed; the selfsame person was no longer in that man.22  Grice's account of personal identity relies on Locke's theory, but draws more directly on two later philosophers. Thomas Reid, writing about a hundred years after Locke, produces a 'problem example'. Ian Gallie, just a few years before Grice, offers a more developed discussion of the use of the first person pronoun. Reid points out that the notion of consciousness extending back in time can only make sense if it is understood as memory; Locke's account can only be coherently understood as a memory theory of identity. Further, he cautions that although the expressions 'consciousness' and 'memory' are sometimes used inter-changeably in normal speech, it is important for philosophers not to confuse the two. 'The faculties of consciousness and memory are chiefly distinguished by this, that the first is an immediate knowledge of the present, the second an immediate knowledge of the past. 23 But if personal identity is dependent on knowledge of the past or on memory, the following case, which has become known as the 'brave officer' example, presents severe difficulties. A boy is whipped for stealing apples. When the boy grows up, he joins the army and, as a young officer, captures an enemy standard. In later life, the officer is made a general. It is perfectly possible that, when rescuing the standard, the officer was able to remember, even did actively remember, that he was whipped as a child. It is also possible that the elderly general can remember clearly the time when he captured the standard but, with memory fading, has forgotten all about being whipped as a boy. The memory is lost irrevocably; even if prompted about the incident, he cannot remember it. According to Locke's account, we would have to say that the young boy was the same person as the brave officer, and the brave officer was the same person as the old general, but that the old general was not the same person as the young boy. Not only does this offend against our intuitive notions of identity, it also runs counter to basic logic. If A is identical to B, and B is identical to C, then it follows that C must be identical to A.  In 'Personal identity', Grice acknowledges his considerable debt to Gallie's article 'Is the self a substance?', which was published in 1936, also in Mind. It is a revealing choice of inspiration, perhaps reflecting Grice's growing interest in the style of philosophy being practised by some of his Oxford contemporaries: the analysis of specific linguistic examples as a means of approaching more general philosophical prob-lems. Gallie does not directly discuss the memory theory of identity. He assesses the case for the existence of a 'self', a metaphysical entity or substance, remaining constant across a series of temporally different mental experiences. As an enduring ego it forms a mental unit of iden-tity, in addition to any purely physical phenomenon. From the outset, he proposes an account of 'self' in terms of 'a certain class of sentences in which the word "I" (or the word "me") occurs' 2 Such sentences can, he suggests, be grouped into two or perhaps three sets. The first of these is the set of sentences in which 'my mind' could be substituted for 'T'.  Gallie admits that in some cases the result may be 'unusual English', but maintains that it is enough that they would not be false. Examples include 'I feel depressed' and 'I see it is raining'. The second set of sentences is defined negatively; such substitution is impossible in examplessuch as 'I am under 6 feet in height' and 'I had dinner at 8 o'clock to-night'. Gallie acknowledges but dismisses from discussion a third but purely philosophical use of 'T'; expressions such as 'I hear a noise now' and 'I see a white expanse now' are concerned with facts of which the speaker has introspective knowledge, rather than with any claims about properties of longer duration. Gallie's starting point is the contention that examples from his first set offer evidence that the self must exist.  If we use T' in these cases, and use it legitimately, there must be something to which we are referring; there must be a mental property that endures across a range of temporarily distinct experiences.  Grice's article also starts with a discussion of 'I' sentences, but his analysis of them is rather more subtle than Gallie's, and his claims about their significance more ambitious. He divides Gallie's two basic categories into three, although he implicitly dismisses the idea that Gallie's  'philosophical' uses constitute a separate class. His starting point is not with minds but with bodies; the easiest sentences to define are those into which the phrase 'my body' can be substituted, sentences such as  'I was hit by a golf ball' and 'I fell down the cellar steps'.  . A second class,  one not distinguished by Gallie, seems to require something extra as well as a physical body to be involved. This includes sentences such as  'I played cricket yesterday' and 'I shall be fighting soon', in which substituting 'my body' for 'I' does not provide an exact or full paraphrase.  These sentences in turn are to be distinguished from a further class in which substitution of 'my body' is even less satisfactory, sentences such as 'I am hearing a noise' and 'I am thinking about the immortality of the soul'. Grice is not explicit about what would count as a suitable substitute for 'I' in these sentences. By implication, the 'I' of bodily identity is easier to paraphrase than the 'T' of mental identity, and Grice is not prepared as Gallie was to offer a paraphrase into 'unusual English' But he does suggest tentatively that, in the cricket and fighting sen-tences, reference to the physical body would need to be supplemented with 'something about the sort of thoughts and intentions and decisions I had.'25  Grice's ambitious claim is that the dispute about personal identity is really a disagreement about the status of certain 'I' sentences. Examples not concerned with bodily identity, sentences of the 'I am hearing a noise' category, are central to the type of identity philosophers have generally discussed. Philosophers over the centuries who have addressed the nature of personal identity have been concerned with the correct analysis of this type of 'I' sentence, whether they knew it or not. More-over, Grice argues, they have also been concerned with the correctanalysis of a class of sentences closely related to these but containing the word 'someone' instead of the word 'I'. An adequate account of personal identity must be able to offer an analysis both of 'I am hearing a noise' and of 'someone is hearing a noise'.  Grice's theory of personal identity is based on Locke's account, but attempts a modification to answer its critics. His analysis of the relevant  'I' and 'someone' sentences is in terms of a particular relationship between experiences divided by time and place. A series of such experiences can be said to belong to the same person. The relationship in question cannot be a simple one of memory, or possible memory, because this raises the 'brave officer' problem; a person having a particular experience may be quite incapable of remembering an earlier experience, but yet be the same person as the person who had that expe-rience. As a maneuver to avoid this problem, Grice introduces the phrase 'total temporary state' (t.t.s.), as a term of art to describe all the experiences to which an individual is subject at any one moment. These t.t.s.'s can occur in series, and describing a person means describing what it is that makes any particular series the t.t.s.'s of one and the same person. Grice's suggestion is that every t.t.s. in a 'person' series contains or could contain an element of memory relating it to some other t.t.s. earlier in the same series. In this way, the 'brave officer' problem is avoided. The t.t.s of the general contains a memory trace of the experience of the brave officer, and the t.t.s. of the brave officer contains a memory trace of the experience of the boy. The three t.t.s.'s are linked into a series and it does not matter that there is no direct link between that of the general and that of the boy.  Grice analyses 'someone hears a noise'  ', the example type he identi-  fied as central to personal identity, in terms of his notion of t.t.s.:  a (past) hearing of a noise is an element in a t.t.s. which is a member of a series of t.t.s.'s such that every member of the series either would, given certain conditions, contain as an element a memory of some experience which is an element in some previous member, or contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member; there being no subset of members which is independent from all the rest.26  Each t.t.s. contains at least one memory link, or potential memory link, either forward or backward in an appropriate series. Sentences containing the problematic 'I' and 'someone'  ', the 'I' and 'someone' that cannotbe paraphrased in terms of bodies, can be re-expressed in terms that remove the problem word and replace it with a suitably defined series of t.t.s.'s. Personal identity is shown to be a construction out of a series of experiences.  Grice considers various possible objections that might be raised to his analysis, including the objection that it is just too complicated as an account of a set of apparently simple sentences. He is himself unsure that this is a particularly damning objection, but argues that his analysis of 'self'-sentences is in any case:  probably far less complicated than would be the phenomenalist's analysis of any material object-sentence, if indeed a phenomenalist were ever to offer an analysis of such a sentence, and not merely tell us what sort of an analysis it would be if he did give it.?7  This is an interesting dig. Phenomenalism was most closely associated at this time with the logical positivists, and therefore at Oxford with Ayer. It was a form of scepticism, holding that we do not have direct evidence of material objects; we have evidence only of various 'sense data'  ', and infer the existence of material objects from these. In other words, phenomenalists claimed that statements about material objects need to be translatable into empirically verifiable statements about sense data. Grice's objection is that the appropriate translations were never actually offered, merely discussed; his complicated analysis of  'someone is hearing a noise', on the other hand, offered something def-inite. This is closely related to the type of objection Austin was raising to Ayer's method; his theories introduced technical terms such as 'sense data', but did not explain them in ordinary language.  In the light of Grice's sideswipe at sense data theories, it is perhaps surprising that John Perry, in his commentary, should find phenome-nalist tendencies in Grice's account of personal identity. His reason lies in the analytic approach Grice shares with phenomenalism. Both were concerned with analysing sentences that contain a problem expression (for the phenomenalists words referring to material objects, for Grice the relevant uses of 'I' and 'someone') in such a way that these expressions are removed and empirically observable phenomena are substi-tuted. Sense data and total temporary states are both available to introspection. For phenomenalists, material objects are logical constructions based on the evidence of sense data; they need to be recog-nised as such and the 'true' form of the sentences expressing them needs to be understood. For Grice, persons are logical constructions fromexperiences. Perry does, however, acknowledge an important difference between Grice's enterprise and that of other analytic philosophers, of whom he takes Russell to be a prime example:  In Russell's view, the logical construction was the philosopher's contribution to an improved conception of, say, a material object, free of the epistemological problems inherent in the ordinary conception.  So analysis, for Russell, does not preserve exact meaning. But Grice intends to be making explicit, through analysis, the concept we already have.28  In other words, Grice sees ordinary ways of talking as adequate and valu-able, if in need of clarification. For analytic philosophers such as Russell, ordinary language is simply not good enough; it needs to be purged of inappropriate existential commitments and vague terms before it can be a fit tool for philosophy or science.  Grice's account of personal identity has been generally well received in its field. Despite his reservations, Perry describes it as 'the most subtle and successful' attempt to rescue Locke's memory theory? Similarly, Timothy Williamson cites Grice's paper as the first in a succession of responses to the 'brave officer' problem in terms of a transitive relation between a set of spatio-temporal locations.3º In many ways it seems far removed from the work for which Grice is now best known. And indeed when he returned to philosophy after the war he was concerned with rather different topics. But this early article shows some of the traits that were to become characteristic of his work across a range of subjects, in particular a close attention to the nuances of language use. One theme in particular, the notion of what it is to be a person, and Locke's idea of an ontological distinction between 'man' and 'person' was to prove central to much of Grice's later philosophy.  The publication of 'Personal identity' meant that Grice's professional life was not entirely put on hold during the war years, and neither was his personal life. In 1943 he married Kathleen Watson. Kathleen was from London, but they had met through an Oxford connection. Her brother J. S. Watson had held a Harmsworth senior scholarship shortly after Grice and the two had become friends. James married during the war and, when his best man was killed on active service shortly before the ceremony, called on Paul at short notice to perform the duty. Paul and Kathleen met at the wedding. At the time of his own wedding, Paul still had two years of war service ahead of him, but it meant that when he returned permanently to Oxford he would not be living in St John's,as he had done briefly as a bachelor. There were no rooms for married Fellows in college; indeed, women were not permitted on the premises, even at formal dinners. Paul and Kathleen settled in a flat on the Woodstock Road rented from his college. His Fellowship at St John's was, of course, still open to him, as was the prospect of a closer involvement with the new style of philosophy taking shape in Oxford.The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford philosophy during the decade or so from 1945 was very different from that which Grice had known before the Second World War. As students and dons alike returned from war service, the process of change that had begun with a few young philosophers during the 1930s picked up momentum. Old orthodoxies and methods were overthrown as a host of new thinkers and new ideas took their place. The style of study was questioning, exploratory and cooperative. Many of the philosophers who were active in this period, such as Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson, have since testified to the spirit of optimism, enthusiasm and sheer excitement that predom-inated.' The reasons for these emotions were similar to those that had drawn A. J. Ayer to the work of the Vienna Circle just over a decade earlier. A new style of philosophy was going to 'solve' many of the old problems. Once again, this was to be achieved by close attention to and analysis of language. For logical positivists this involved 'translating' problematic statements of everyday language into logically rigorous, empirically verifiable sentences. For the new Oxford philosophers, however, no such translations would be necessary. A suitably rigorous attention to the facts of language was going to be a sufficient, indeed the only suitable, philosophical tool.  In retrospect, Grice suggested the following causes of the differences after the war:  the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene.?Gilbert Ryle, the tutor who had introduced Ayer to Wittgenstein and encouraged him to travel to Vienna, was a decade or more older than Grice and his contemporaries, having been born in 1900. However, his influence on Oxford philosophy during the 1940s and 1950s was con-siderable. His philosophy of mind, in particular, was widely known through his teaching, and was eventually published as The Concept of Mind in 1949. In this book, Ryle argues against the received idea of the mind as a mental entity separate from, but in some way inhabiting, the physical body: Descartes's 'ghost in the machine'. All that can legitimately be discussed are dispositions to act in a certain way in certain situations. The error of dualism can be attributed to the tendency to analyse minds as 'things' just as bodies are things. Taken together with a strict distinction between mental and physical, this gives rise to the error of defining minds as 'non-physical things'. This error stems from a basic category mistake involving the type of vocabulary used in discussions of minds. Differences between the physical and the mental have been 'represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of "thing", "stuff", "attribute", "state", "process"  "change"  ', "cause" and "effect"' 3 Only close attention to language  reveals this tendency among philosophers to extend erroneously terms applicable to physical phenomena, and thus to enter into unproductive metaphysical commitments. Ryle was keen to see this philosophical approach adopted more widely, and after he took over as editor of Mind in 1947, began what Jonathan Rée has described as a 'systematic cam-paign' to take control of English philosophy. He drew together some of the more promising young Oxford philosophers and 'by galvanising them into writing, especially about each other, in the pages of Mind, he gave English academic philosophy in the fifties an energy and sense of purpose such as it has never seen before or since."  The style of philosophy Ryle was deliberately promoting found resonances in the work of J. L. Austin, who was continuing to develop the notions about ordinary language with which he had confronted Ayer before the war. Ayer himself had returned to Oxford only briefly, before taking up a chair at University College London in 1946. The ideas of logical positivism were, in any case, losing their earlier glamour and appeal for younger philosophers, and Austin became the natural leader of the next wave of Oxford philosophy, both before and after his appointment as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. This promotion may seem surprising today; Austin had published just three papers by 1952, none of which were strictly about moral philosophy. It seems that credit was given to the importance of his ideas, and his rep-utation as an inspiring and charismatic teacher, a reputation achieved despite his rather austere personality. Few if any of his colleagues felt that they really got to know him personally. This was perhaps in part because, as Geoffrey Warnock has suggested, he was 'a shy man, wary of self-revelation and more than uninviting of self-revelation by others'. It may also have been in part because, unusually among his peers, he eschewed college social life, preferring to spend his time quietly at home with his family in the Oxfordshire countryside. Never-theless, most people who knew him had their favourite story to sum up what could be a formidable and confrontational, but also a humourous and humane personality. George Pitcher relates how Austin once attended a meeting at his college concerned with plans for the college buildings. The meeting got embroiled in a long and seemingly unrec-oncilable discussion about the President's Lodgings. When finally asked for his opinion, Austin's response was 'Mr President, raze it to the ground. Grice recalls how a colleague once challenged Austin with Donne's lines 'From the round earth's imagined corners,/ Angels your trumpets blow' as an example of non-understandable English. 'It is perfectly clear what it means,' replied Austin, 'it means "Angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth" "  Such anecdotes illustrate Austin's ability to cut through protocol and rhetoric and reveal the plain facts underneath: often to reveal that things are just as simple as they seem, and a lot more simple than they are made out to be. This was the spirit in which he approached philosophy. He was undoubtedly lucky in this project in the number of dedicated and talented young philosophers who, as Grice puts it,  'appeared' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early post-war years, undergraduates and new tutors were generally older than had been the tradition, and eager to study, their university careers having been postponed or interrupted by the war. Austin played an active role in spotting and encouraging talent, building up what quickly came to be seen as his own 'school' of philosophy. This development seems rather at odds with his views on discipleship. Ben Rogers has suggested that, unlike Wittgenstein, Austin 'discouraged anything like a cult of personality: he wanted to put philosophy on a collective footing' However, there is some evidence that Austin was at least in part predisposed to encourage, and even to enjoy, his status as leader. Grice reports that Austin was once heard to remark to a colleague, 'if they don't want to follow me, whom do they want to follow?"The style of philosophy developed and practised by Austin and his followers has been variously labelled as 'Oxford philosophy', linguistic philosophy' and 'ordinary language philosophy'. It is in fact far from uncontroversial that a single, identifiable approach united the philosophers working in Oxford at this time, even those in Austin's immediate circle. Grice himself denies this assumption in a number of published commentaries, such as the uncompromising claim that: 'there was no  "School"; there were no dogmas which united us.' Perhaps the only common position of the Oxford philosophers, certainly the only one Grice acknowledges, was a belief in the value, indeed the necessity, of the rigorous analysis of the everyday use of words and expressions. They worked on a wide range of philosophical problems, and even when addressing the same issue they often disagreed on analysis or conclu-sion. But in approaching these problems they were in agreement that careful attention to the words in which they were conventionally expressed was the best path to understanding, tackling and perhaps eliminating the problems themselves. The origins of this approach are controversial. Commentators have looked beyond Ryle and Austin to suggest Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and even Gotlob Frege as candidates for the title 'father' of ordinary language phi-losophy. There is certainly something in all these claims; each thinker was  influential in the development of the analytic tradition from which ordinary language philosophy emerged. But under Ryle's and Austin's guidance it developed in directions not envisaged, and in some cases explicitly not approved, by its putative mentors.  In the late nineteenth century Frege proposed analysis of language as a method for tackling philosophical problems. He was chiefly a math-ematician, but in the course of his work addressed the language of logical expressions, and the potential problems inherent in it. Frege's most influential contribution to the philosophy of language is his distinction between 'sense' and 'reference'. Any name, whether a proper name or a description, that points to some individual in the world, does so by way of a particular means of identifying that individual. A name therefore has both a reference, the individual it denotes, and a sense, the means by which reference is indicated. In this way, Frege explains statements of identity. If we attend only to reference, an example such as 'Sophroniscus is the father of Socrates' would have to be dismissed as uninformative; it would simply offer a logical tautology, stating of an individual that he is identical with himself. If, however, we attend to sense as well as reference, we can analyse this example as making an informative statement to the effect that the two names may differ insense but share the same reference. The example is significant because, although there is no difference between the denotation of the two names, there is nevertheless 'a difference in the mode of presentation of the thing designated'."  Russell proposed the 'translation'  account that became characteristic  of analytic philosophy. Suitably rigorous attention could reveal the logical structure beneath a grammatical form that was often misleading and imperfect. His main difference from Frege was in his analysis of descriptions. Russell observes in his 1905 article 'On denoting' that 'a phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; for example,  "the present king of France" 1 For Frege such examples posed no problem. It was perfectly possible to say that such an expression had a sense but no reference. But the consequences of this position are unacceptable to Russell because of their impact on logic. If 'the king of France' simply has no reference, then any sentence of which it is subject, such as Russell's famous example 'the king of France is bald', must also fail to refer to the world; in other words it must fail to be either true or false. For Russell this result is intolerable because it dispenses with clas-sical, two-valued logic, in which every proposition must be capable of being judged either 'true' or 'false'  . Classical logic states that if a propo-  sition is true then its negation must be false, and vice versa. But under Frege's analysis 'the king of France is bald' and 'the king of France is not bald' are indistinguishable in terms of truth value; both fail to be either true or false. Not only is this unacceptable, argues Russell, it also goes against the facts of the matter; 'the king of France is bald' is a simple falsehood.  Russell uses the label 'definite descriptions' for phrases such as 'the king of France', and claims that they are a particular type of expression demanding a particular type of analysis. Despite appearances, they are not denoting expressions, and they do not function as subjects of sentences in which they superficially appear to be in subject position. The subject/predicate form of a sentence containing a definite description, a sentence such as 'the king of France is bald', is misleading. That is, the logical structure of the sentence is at odds with its purely grammatical form; it is actually a complex of propositions relating to the existence, the uniqueness, and then the characteristics, of the individual apparently identified. Russell's rendition of this example can be paraphrased as: 'there exists one entity which is the king of France, and that entity is unique, and that entity is bald! Re-analysed in this way, it is possible to demonstrate that, in the absence of a unique king of France, one of these propositions is simply false. If it is not true thatthere is a present king of France, the first part of the logical form is false, making the sentence as a whole also false.  Russell's theory of descriptions has been seen as the defining example of analytic philosophy. Ayer often repeated his admiration for it in these terms. His close attention to language as well as to logic further caused Russell to be credited with inspiring ordinary language philosophy. 13 However, he would certainly not have been pleased by this latter acco-lade; he was still active in philosophy when the new approach was in the ascendant and he publicly and vociferously opposed it.' His own motivation in 'On denoting', and elsewhere, was not to describe natural language for its own sake, but to explain away the apparent obstacles it offered to classical logic. If every statement containing a denoting phrase could be explained as a complex proposition not involving a denoting phrase as a constituent, bivalent logic could be maintained.  Like Frege, Russell's first and primary philosophical interest was in mathematical logic. His interest in the analysis of language and therefore in meaning grew out of a concern for analysing the language in which the ideas of logic are expressed, and ultimately for refining that language.  Russell's Cambridge colleague and almost exact contemporary G. E.  Moore would perhaps have been less uncomfortable with being credited as genitor of ordinary language philosophy. Like many of the Oxford philosophers a generation later, he came to philosophy from a background in classics, and remained sensitive to details of meaning.  This was coupled with a rather leisured approach to philosophical enquiry; a private fortune enabled him to spend seven years at the start of his career away from all professional responsibilities, pursuing his own philosophical interests. Certainly, the result was a thorough and meticulous attention to the language in which philosophical discussion is couched. Another common feature between Moore and many ordinary language philosophers, one identified by Grice, was an anti-metaphysical, determinedly 'common-sense' approach to philosophical issues. 15  An illustration of both the rigorous analysis and the confidence in intuitive understanding can be found in Moore's article 'A defence of common sense', published in 1925. This was a forerunner of the infamous British Academy lecture of 1939 in which he held up his own hand as incontrovertible and sufficient 'proof' of the existence of material objects. In the published article, too, Moore addresses the question of the status of our knowledge of external objects, as well as our belief in the existence of other human beings, and indeed the viability of anyphysical reality independent of mental fact. In asserting such viability Moore is, as he explains, arguing against the sceptical view that all that we have access to are 'ideas' of objects, offered to us by means of our sense impressions, never the objects themselves. Such philosophical views were dominant in English philosophy when Moore himself was a young man, and were in part what he was reacting against in defending common sense. Moore's 'defence' rests almost entirely on his assertion of what he knows to be the case, by introspection based on the dictates of common sense. He knows with certainty of the existence and continuity of his own body, as well as its distinction from other, equally real physical objects. Not only that, but all other human beings have a similar, but distinct set of knowledge relating to their own bodies.  Further, to describe these as common-sense beliefs is actually to admit that they must be true, since the very expression 'common sense' implies that there is a set of other minds holding this belief and therefore that other minds, and other people, exist. Common sense should extend to analysis of the language of philosophy as well. In assessing the truth of a sentence such as 'The earth has existed for many years past', it is necessary to consider only 'the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions'  '. Moore comments dryly that the existence of such  a unique, ordinary meaning 'is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing'. This capacity, he suggests, has led to the erroneous argument that a statement such as this is questionable, and perhaps even false.  This insistence that philosophers attend to the ordinary use of the expressions with which they are dealing, together with the expression of bafflement that they should declare themselves unsure of the nature of such ordinary use, was to become as characteristic of Austin's work as it was of Moore's. Austin was widely known to be impressed by Moore's work, and inspired by his methodology, although he was less convinced that intuitive convictions and commonplace orthodoxies could be accepted at face value without further exploration. Grice recalls him declaring, with a characteristic combination of scholarly enthusiasm and school-boy jocularity: 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man.'" This pithy summary of his own philosophical influences introduces one of the most controversial issues concerning the origins of ordinary language philosophy: the impact of Wittgenstein. Some commentators have argued that Wittgenstein's later work was crucially important; Ernest Gellner, for instance, discusses 'linguistic philosophy' as if it were uncontroversially a product of Philosophical Investigations. 18 But in his biographical sketch of Austin, Geoffrey Warnock argues cat-egorically that Wittgenstein did not influence the philosophical method Austin promoted."' The issue is a difficult one to settle. Ben Rogers suggests that: 'Oxford philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s was more indebted to Wittgenstein than it liked to admit, 20 and it is certainly possible that his ideas informed discussion at the time, even if his intellectual presence was not directly acknowledged. Philosophical Investigations, presenting Wittgenstein's later work on language, was not published until 1953, but earlier versions of it were circulated and read in Oxford in the immediate post-war years. Other commentators, such as Williams and Montefiore, emphasise what they see as the striking differences between Wittgenstein and Austin. The two men's personalities, they suggest, were reflected in their different styles of philoso-phy: Wittgenstein's intense and introspective, Austin's scholarly and meticulous.22  Wittgenstein's early work had been inspired by his former tutor Russell. Although highly original, it was very much within Russell's formal, analytic tradition. Language operates by expressing propositions that may differ from apparent surface form but map on to the world by means of the basic properties of truth and falsity. 'To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true,' Wittgenstein suggests in his Tractatus, prefiguring the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle23 However, the work Wittgenstein produced when he returned to philosophy after a self-imposed break was notoriously different from that of his youth. It shows some striking similarities to ordinary language philosophy. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that language is better defined in terms of the uses to which it is put than the situations in the world it describes. Words are tools for use and, just as a tool may not always be used for the same function, meaning is not necessarily constant. Coining one of the most enduring metaphors in the philosophy of language, he argues that a word is best described as having a loose association of meanings that are essentially independent but may display certain 'family resemblances'  '. He argues  that apparent philosophical problems are in fact issues of language use; correct investigation of the language in which problems are posed reveals them to be merely 'pseudo problems'  '. Also, and perhaps even  more strikingly, he comments that, in philosophical discussion as else-where, 'When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day.'24  Whatever positive influences may have acted on Austin, it is certain that he was at least in part reacting against some other philosophical styles. In particular, he was taking issue with logical positivism, and withthe work of his old sparring partner A. J. Ayer. Soon after the war, Austin developed his response to Ayer on sense data. This was presented as a series of lectures, first delivered in 1947, and was published only posthumously, when Geoffrey Warnock edited the lecture notes under the title Sense and Sensibilia. Austin deals in detail and critically with Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, the book published in 1940 that expanded on and developed the implications of the verificationist account presented in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued in the earlier book that the operation of the principle of verification for an individual is not directly dependent on the physical world, but relies on the data we receive through our senses. These 'sense data' are the only evidence we have available by which to subject sentences making statements about the world to appropriate processes of verification. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer addresses the question of whether our knowledge is determined by material objects themselves or by our personal sense data. He develops a phenomenalist approach to this question, arguing that beliefs and statements about material objects are only legitimate if they are translated into beliefs and statements about our sense data. In this way, he maintains that discussion of the status of material objects is primarily a dispute about language. It is a dispute about the best way to analyse statements of experience. Sentences concerned with material objects and those concerned with sense data are simply uses of two different types of language. They refer to the same things in two different ways, rather than describing ontologically different phenomena.  25  Austin disliked the idea that philosophers need to 'see through' ordinary language before they can say anything rigorous about material objects. In his lectures on perception he argues that belief in sense data is an error into which philosophers have been led by the words they coin. The term itself is introduced artificially; ordinary people in everyday life find no need of it. Even the word 'perception' has an unnecessarily technical ring for Austin. People rarely talk about perceiving material objects, and still less frequently of experiencing sense data.  They do talk about seeing things, and so philosophers should attend to the suggestions this offers as to how the world works. The 'plain man' can cope perfectly well with distinguishing appearance from reality, with describing rainbows, or with commenting that ships on the horizon may appear closer than they are. Philosophers need only look to the actual use of words such as 'reality', 'looks' and 'seems' to understand this. Ordinary language has its own, perfectly adequate way of dealing with the difference between appearance and reality. Near thebeginning of his lectures, Austin sums up his response to sense data theorists:  My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described... Ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realised.26  In other work, Austin objects to the assumption he finds in logical positivism and elsewhere that the most important or the only philosophically interesting function of language is to make statements about the world. Philosophers concerned with questions of truth and falsity, and with determining meaning in terms of verification, overlook the many different ways in which speakers actually use language, and fall into the fallacy of seeing it as merely a tool for description. 'The principle of Logic that "Every proposition must be true or false" has too long operated as the simplest, most persuasive and most pervasive form of the descriptive fallacy.2 Only a careful consideration of the way in which people actually use language enables philosophers to dispense with this fallacy. Even when people do make statements of fact, it is often necessary to consider 'degrees' of success, rather than simple truth.  It is only with such a concept that we can make sense of various loose ways of talking, such as 'the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg', or explain why a statement may be true, but somehow 'inept' , such as saying 'all  the signs of bread' when clearly in the presence of bread.  Austin's approach, then, was based on a distrust of philosophical constructions and technical terminology, especially terminology he suspected of being unnecessary or poorly defined, but it was not entirely negative. He wanted to replace these with a serious and rigorous attention to the way in which any matter of philosophical interest is discussed in everyday language. He sets out these ideas particularly clearly and characteristically stridently in 'A plea for excuses' , a paper delivered  to the Aristotelian Society in 1956, which came to be seen almost as a manifesto for ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers have for too long conducted their discussion in real or feigned ignorance of the way in which key words and phrases are used in ordinary, everyday lan-guage. It is not just that the language of everyday is a worthy subject and adequate vehicle for philosophical enquiry. Rather, it is the only tool with a claim to being sufficient for philosophical purposes, honedas it is by generations of use to describe the distinctions and connections human beings have found necessary. These can reasonably be claimed to be more sound and subtle 'than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon - the most favoured alternative method'28 Meanings, including the meanings of philosophical terms, can only coherently be discussed with reference to the ways in which words are used in ordinary discourse.  More specifically in 'A plea for excuses', Austin is concerned with a rigorous examination of the circumstances in which excuses are offered, and the different forms they may take. For instance, excuses are only offered for actions performed freely. A consideration of the ordinary use of 'freely' to describe an action reveals that it does not introduce any particular property, but serves to negate some opposite, such as  'under duress'. It would be used only when there is some suggestion that the opposite could or might apply. There would be something strange about applying the term 'freely' to a normal action performed in a normal manner. Austin sums up this claim in the slogan 'no modification without aberration'? For many ordinary uses of many verbs, there is simply no modifying expression, either positive or negative that can appropriately and informatively be applied. The  'natural economy of language' dictates that we can only add a modifying expression 'if we do the action named in some special way or cir-cumstance'.30  Austin promoted his approach to philosophy through personal contact, including his own teaching, at least as much as through published papers such as 'A plea for excuses'. Lynd Forguson has studied undergraduate Oxford philosophy examination papers and observed that questions reflecting ordinary language philosophy began to appear as early as 1947, and were increasingly frequent throughout the 1950s.  For instance, students were asked: 'Is it essential to begin by deciding the meaning of the word "good" before going on to decide what things are good?'31 Perhaps most significantly Austin's ideas were disseminated through active collaboration in philosophy with his colleagues. This did not take the form of any co-authored papers or books. Indeed, both Grice and Stuart Hampshire have suggested that Austin's independent character and idiosyncratic style would have made him an awkward writing companion.32 His approach to collaboration in philosophy was to draw together the responses and insights of as many different informed observers of language use as possible. In the late 1940s, he instituted a series of 'Saturday Mornings'  ', meetings that ran in term time  and brought together a number of like-minded Oxford philosophers.Grice was present from the start. Other members included R. M. Hare, Herbert Hart, David Pears, Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson. Grice recalls how Austin described these meetings, perhaps semi-seriously, as a weekend break from the regular work of 'philosophical hacks', enabling them to turn their attention to less narrowly philosophical topics. Perhaps with this explanation in mind, Grice labelled the meetings 'The Play Group'. He seems to have been inordinately pleased with this name, and employed it in both spoken and written accounts of Oxford philosophy throughout his life. He used it at the time with some of his colleagues but never, it seems, with Austin himself. Austin was not the sort of man with whom to share such a joke. 34  The American logician W. V. O. Quine spent the academic year 1953-4 at Oxford as visiting Eastman professor. In his memoir of this period he passes on the rumour that attendance at Saturday Mornings was controlled by rules devised by Austin to preclude particular individu-als.35 There does not seem to be any explicit first-hand support from members of the group for this allegation. However, there is some evidence from them that Austin imposed criteria for attendance that would, in effect, have ruled out anyone older than himself who might prove a challenge to his leadership. Geoffrey Warnock remarks simply that attendance was 'restricted to persons both junior to Austin and employed as whole-time tutorial Fellows' 3 Many years later, when Grice was thinking back to the days of the Play Group, he jotted down a list of Oxford philosophers of the time. Interestingly, he divides his list into three categories: 'yes' (Austin, Grice, Hampshire, Strawson, Warnock...), 'no' (Anscombe, Dummett, Murdoch...) and 'overage' (Ryle, Hardie ...).37  Initially, at least, Austin seems to have stuck to his self-imposed remit.  The Play Group engaged not so much in philosophical debate as in intellectual puzzles and exercises pursued for their own sake. A favourite occupation was to analyse and categorise the rules of games, or to invent games of their own. Kathleen Grice recalls that one term they seemed to spend most of their time drawing dots on pieces of paper. Another term they decided to 'learn Eskimo' 38 However, they gradually turned their attention to more obviously philosophical occupations. Austin liked to pick a text per term for the group to read and discuss. However, some of the group did not find this a particularly fruitful philosophical method, largely because of Austin's preferred pace, which was painstakingly slow. 'Austin's favoured unit of discussion in such cases was the sentence', Warnock recalls, 'not the paragraph or chapter, still less the book as a whole. 39 At other times, the Play Group put into practiceAustin's views about the correct business of philosophers by engaging in 'linguistic botanising'.  Austin admired the sciences, and regretted that his own education had given him little real knowledge or expertise in them. His idea was to apply the same techniques of rigorous observation and attention to detail as would be used in a discipline such as botany to the material of linguistic use. The language, and the way in which it was ordinarily used, were there as empirical facts to be observed by those with the sensitivity to do so. Only in this way could its categories and fine distinc-tions, honed over generations, become available to the philosopher.  Examples of this philosophical method are to be found in many of Austin's own writings. For instance, in 'A plea for excuses', where he advocates philosophical attention to 'what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it', he suggests some of the words and phrases related to excuses that may shed light on its use: abstract nouns such as 'misconception', 'accident', 'purpose' and verbs such as  'couldn't help', 'didn't mean to', 'didn't realise'. 4º He proposes a philosophical methodology of 'going through the dictionary'; only such a rigorous analysis of the language will give a thorough and objective overview of the subject matter, which can then be subjected to a process of introspective analysis.  At the Play Group, linguistic botanising was no less painstaking, but it took a discursive, collaborative form. The members would, in effect, pool their linguistic resources in order to draw up lists of words related to the particular subject under discussion. They would then analyse the uses and nuances of these words, deciding which were suitable, and which unsuitable, in various different contexts. As Grice later explained it, they would examine a wide range of the relevant vocabulary, to 'get a list of "okes and nokes"'* J. O. Urmson has described the processes involved more fully:  Having collected in terms and idioms, the group must then proceed to the second stage in which, by telling circumstantial stories and constructing dialogues, they give as clear and detailed examples as possible of circumstances under which this idiom is to be preferred to that, and that to this, and of where we should (do) use this term and where that.... At [the next] stage we attempt to give general accounts of the various expressions (words, sentences, grammatical forms) under consideration; they will be correct and adequate if they make it clear why what is said in our various stories is or is not felic-itous, is possible or impossible.  42Austin argued that this process was both empirical and objective.  Several philosophers conferring together would avoid the possible distortions and idiosyncrasies that might skew the findings of a single researcher, as well as bringing together a wide range of different experiences and specialisms. At a conference in 1958, he was challenged to say what set of criteria was adequate for judging a philosophical analysis of a concept. He is reported as replying, 'If you can make an analysis convince yourself, no matter how hard you try to overthrow it, and if you can get a lot of cantankerous colleagues to agree with it, that's a pretty good criterion that there is something in it. '43 Their task was not just to list and to categorise areas of vocabulary, but to analyse the conceptual distinctions these indicated. Only after selecting relevant terms and discussing their usage was it legitimate to compare the findings with what philosophers had traditionally said. Despite his frosty demeanour and austere habits, Austin displayed huge enthusiasm and optimism, attitudes that infected the members of the Play Group. Grice has commented that Austin clearly found philosophy tremendous fun, although he 'would not be vulgar enough to say anything like that'. 4  If Austin's method attracted devotees, however, it also attracted critics. The practitioners of ordinary language philosophy saw it as an exciting new approach capable of overthrowing past orthodoxies and offering solutions to age-old problems, but its critics saw it as sterile and complacent, valuing lexicographical pedantry over real philosophical argument.4 Some of its more high profile opponents, such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, targeted what they saw as the shallow insights, even the platitudes, to which the Oxford philosophers limited them-selves. Maintaining his position that ordinary language is simply not good enough for rigorous philosophical enquiry, Russell derided what he saw as the triviality of ordinary language philosophy; 'To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. Other critics targeted the practitioners more directly, characterising them as spoilt and snobbish, 'playing' at philosophy without feeling the need to justify their leisurely activities.  Ernest Gellner, a former student of Austin's, published a book in 1959 exclusively concerned with attacking the Oxford philosophers and their method. Gellner finds his own way of repeating Russell's mockery when he suggests that ordinary language philosophy suggests that 'the world is just what it seems (and as it seems to an unimaginative man at about mid-morning)' 4 This style of philosophy 'at long last, provided a philosophic form eminently suitable for gentlemen' because it demanded immense leisure and 'yet its message is that everything remains as itis'.48 C. W. K. Mundle argues that Austin's elitism mars his philosophy.  He detects prescriptivism beneath Austin's apparently descriptivist concern for 'what we should say'. 'In the name of ordinary language, he demands standards of purity and precision of speech which are extraordinarily rare except among men who got a First in Classical Greats.'49 There is undoubtedly some substance in the accusations of elitism.  The members of the Play Group shared an understanding that detailed analysis and meticulous enquiry were important ends in themselves, but also a certainty of leisure and means to pursue these ends. Their appointments did not carry the pressure to publish that to modern academics is a matter of course, a fact almost certainly crucial to the success of ordinary language philosophy. Linguistic botanising was often conducted self-consciously for its own sake, without expectations of spe-cific, publishable 'results'. Stuart Hampshire has admitted that Austin's method depended on a comparatively careless attitude to time and pub-lication: 'you're apt to get discouraged about publishing because you can't fit it all neatly into a journal article.  150  At the time, the Oxford philosophers were in general reluctant to argue their own case. Partly in response to this, Grice later took on the task of offering a first-hand account of ordinary language philosophy in defence against some of its critics. The subject clearly exercised him from the mid-1970s on; he talked, both formally and informally on the topic, and wrote copious notes about it. In a move that would have seemed to the critics to have confirmed their worst fears about snobbery and self-importance, he compares post-war Oxford to the Academy at Athens, with Austin by implication playing the role of Aristotle. In fact the comparison is not as pompous as it may first appear; Grice is not suggesting that mid-twentieth-century Oxford was as important to the history of philosophy as ancient Athens. Rather, he sees certain similarities between the two enterprises that gave ordinary language philosophy a philosophical pedigree its critics claimed it lacked. He sees reflections of Austin's method in what he describes as the 'Athenian dialectic': the interest in discourse ingeneral, and in the facts of speech in particular. The connection is summed up for Grice in the two aspects of the Athenian interest in ta Zeyoueva. The phrase can refer to 'what is spoken', both in the sense of ordinary ways of talking, and of generally received opinions. Both schools were concerned not just with the analysis of language, but with seeing the way people speak as a reflection of how they generally understand the world, a reflection of the  'common-sense' point of view. The difference is, Grice argues, that Austin and his school concentrated more closely on the first aspect;Aristotle and his on the second. Aristotle was concerned not so much with methodology as with picking out foundations of truth. Austin was interested in the 'potentialities of linguistic usage as an index of conceptual truth, without regard for any particular direction for the deployment of such truth.'51  Grice also addresses critics of ordinary language philosophy more directly, accusing them of simple misrepresentation. Gellner's book, in particular, he describes informally as 'a travesty'. In effect, he accuses the critics of inverted snobbery: of assuming that ordinary language philosophy must be trivial and elitist because it was practised by a socially privileged group of people in an ancient university. He admits that the style of philosophy came easiest to those who had received a classical, therefore a public school, education. Education in the classics had fitted the Oxford philosophers to the necessary close attention to linguistic distinctions: ordinary language philosophy involved 'the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage' 5 Grice's response is perhaps confused. At times he seems to accept the accusation of elitism but to argue against its derogatory implications. Why should high culture in philosophy be considered bad, he wonders, if it is prized in art, literature and opera? At other times, however, he seems simply to reject the accusation, arguing that anyone with suitably acute powers of observation could engage in this kind of analysis. This ambivalence is most apparent in some of his comments that did not make it into print. In a section of the handwritten draft of the 'Reply to Richards', but not of the published version, he comments on the accusation of elitism:  To this the obvious reply would seem to be that if it were correct that philosophy is worth fostering, and that proficiency demands a classical education, then that would provide additional strength to the case for the availability of a classical education. But I doubt if the facts are as stated; I doubt if 'linguistic sensitivity' is the prerogative of either the well-to-do or of the products of any particular style of education. 53  Grice's attitude to his social environment may have been, or have become, somewhat ambivalent, but during the 1940s and 1950s he was central to the ordinary language philosophy movement. He attended Austin's Saturday Mornings regularly and enthusiastically. Outside these meetings, he worked collaboratively with other members of the group.He even collaborated with Austin himself, although in teaching rather than writing. The two taught joint sessions on Aristotle. Grice later claimed that these were particularly easy teaching sessions for him because no preparation was necessary. They would simply arrive in class and Austin would start talking, freely and spontaneously. At some point Grice would find something with which he disagreed and say so, 'and the class would begin'* It seems that their style of teaching often rested on each holding fast to an opposing position. Speaking long after he had left Oxford, Grice recalled Austin's typical response when challenged on some point: 'Well, if you don't like that argument, here's another one.'55 Grice may have been amused by Austin's view of philosophy in terms of 'winning', but he himself was not likely to back down on a position once he had taken it up. However, this method had its successes. Their pupil J. L. Ackrill went on to become a Fellow of Brasenose College, and to publish his own translation of Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione in 1963. Among his acknowledgements to those who had helped him in understanding these works, he comments:  I am conscious of having benefited particularly from a class given at  Oxford in 1956-7 by the late J. L. Austin and Mr H. P. Grice.'56  For Grice himself, the most fruitful collaboration during this period was the joint work he undertook with Peter Strawson. Strawson had gone up to Oxford in 1939 and had been Grice's tutee. He later commented that: 'tutorials with [Grice] regularly extended long beyond the customary hour, and from him I learned more of the difficulty and possibilities of philosophical argument than from anyone else.'" Strawson's career also had been interrupted by the war, and he did not gain a permanent position until 1948, when he was appointed Fellow of University College. He was one of the younger members of the Play Group, but nevertheless a central figure in ordinary language philosophy, and unusually successful in completing work. In 1950 he published 'On referring', in which he offered a response to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, an account that had been widely praised, and practically unchallenged, since it first appeared in 1905. Russell had argued that natural language can be misleading as to the structure of our knowledge of the world; Austin and his followers that, on the contrary, it is the best guide we have to that structure. Strawson suggests that, preoccupied with mathematics and logic, Russell had overlooked the fact that language is first and foremost a tool in communication. Russell had ignored the role of the speaker: '"mentioning", or "referring", is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do. Once an appropriate distinction is drawn between'a sentence' and 'a use of a sentence', it is possible to consider how most people would actually react on hearing the 'king of France' example (in which, for some reason, Strawson changes 'bald' to 'wise'). When used in 1950, or indeed in 1905, the example is not false. Rather, the question of whether it is true or false simply does not arise, precisely because the subject expression fails to pick out an individual in the world, and therefore the expression as a whole fails to say anything.  For Strawson, then, 'the king of France is wise' does not entail the existence of a unique king of France. Rather, it implies this existence in a 'special' way. In later work he uses the label 'presupposition' to describe this special type of implication. This was a term originally used by Frege in his discussion of denoting phrases and, like Frege, Strawson notes that presupposition is distinct from entailment because it is shared by both a sentence and its negation. Both 'the king of France is wise' and 'the king of France is not wise' share the presupposition that there exists a unique king of France, although their entailments contradict each other. On Russell's analysis, the negative sentence is ambiguous. Both the existence and the wisdom of the king of France are logical entailments, so either could be denied by negating the sen-tence. Strawson argues that Russell has attempted, inappropriately, to apply classical logic to what are in fact specific types of natural language use. 'Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language'; he concludes, 'for ordinary language has no exact logic.'60  Stawson and Grice taught together, covering topics such as meaning, categories and logical form. W. V. O. Quine, who attended some of their weekly seminars in the spring of 1954, paints a picture of these sessions:  Peter and Paul alternated from week to week in the roles of speaker and commentator. The speaker would read his paper and then the commentator would read his prepared comments. 'Towards the foot of page 9, I believe you said. Considered judgement was of the essence; spontaneity was not. When in its final phase the meeting was opened to public discussion, Peter and Paul were not outgoing.  'I'm not sure what to make of that question.' 'It depends, I should have thought, on what one means by .. 'This is a point that I shall think further about before the next meeting. '61  This style of debate was obviously not to Quine's taste, and there is certainly something reminiscent of Grice's former tutor W. F. R. Hardie in what he describes. Grice worked and talked very much within theformal and mannered social milieu of Oxford at the time. His lecture notes from the period, generall y written out in full, contain many references to what 'Mr Stawson proposed last week' or 'Mr Warnock has suggested'. But there is evidence also that the apparently prevaricating answers Quine ridicules were genuine responses to the complexity of the matter in hand. Grice often begins his lectures with a return to 'a question raised last week to which I had no answer'. Indeed, he later argued explicitly that philosophy works best not as a series of rapid retorts to impromptu questions, but as a slow and considered debate:  The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpov ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightening chess.  62  This slow, thoughtful style was carried over to the deliberation and composition of Grice and Strawson's writing and was, Grice later sug-gested, the reason why the collaboration eventually ceased. Strawson, who seems to have been much more interested in finished products than Grice was, eventually could no longer cope with the laborious process, in which complete agreement had to be reached over a sentence before anything could be written down. But it lasted long enough for Grice to be impressed by the 'extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport' they developed, such that 'the potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me.'63 One of their writing projects developed from their teaching on categories. Their topic dated back to Aristotle, and had also been discussed by Kant. It is a type of descriptive metaphysics, in that it involves analysis and classification towards an account of the very general notion of 'what there is'. In metaphysics, this account is offered in terms of the nature and status of reality, rather than in terms of the types of description of individual aspects of that reality to be found in the sciences. In particular, it is concerned with reality as reflected in human thought. Kant had argued that the study of human thinking is important precisely because it is the only guide we have to reality. The facts of 'things in themselves', aside from our human perceptions of them, are unknowable. For Aristotle, these questions had been closely linked to his interest in the study of language.  Human language is the best model we have available of human thought.  We structure our language to reflect the structure of our thought. So, for instance, the division of sentences into subjects and predicatesreflects the way we cognitively divide the world into things and attrib-utes, or particulars and universals.  Grice and Strawson's long, slow collaboration on this topic was not very productive, by modern standards at least, in that it resulted in no published work. But Grice himself valued it very highly, and commented late in his life that he had always kept the manuscripts with him. Unfortunately, only a fragment of these appears to have survived.  However, this is accompanied by rough notes indicating something of their working method. They apply a distinctively 'Austinian' approach to Aristotle's use of language, experimenting together to see which English words can successfully combine with which others, trying out combinations of possible subjects and predicates. Notes in Grice's hand record that 'healthy' can be applied to, or predicated of, 'person', 'place'  'occupation', or 'institution', while 'medical' can be applied to 'lecture'  'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription', and 'advice'. 65 Grice notes that the neutral term 'employment' can cover the importantly different terms 'use', 'sense' and 'meaning', and that here it is perhaps most appropriate to say that the predicate has the particular range of 'uses'. This aspect of the work seems to take over Grice's attention at one point. The notions of 'sense', 'meaning' and 'use' need to be distinguished not just from each other, but between discussions of sentences and of speakers. 'Need to distinguish all these from cases where speaker might mean so-and-so or such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of the sentence' he notes, '"Jones is between Williams and Brown" either spatial order or order of merit, but doubtful this renders it an ambiguous sentence.'  The notes also explore the difference in grammatical distribution between substantial and non-substantial nouns. 'Mercy' can be both referred to and predicated, whereas 'Socrates' can only be referred to.  In other words, it seems that although both substantials and non-substantials can occupy subject position, substantials must be seen as the primary occupiers of this slot because they cannot occur as predi-cates. To demonstrate this point he distinguishes between establishing existence by referring to, and by predicating, expressions. The distinction is established by means of a comparison between two short dia-logues. The following is perfectly acceptable; evidence is successfully offered for the existence of a universal by predicating it of a particular:  Bunbury is really disinterested. Disinterested persons (real disinterestedness) does not exist. A: Yes they do (it does); Bunbury is really disinterested.In contrast descriptive statements do not guarentee the existence of their subjects, but rather stand in a 'special relation' to statements of existence. This special relation is, they note, elsewhere called 'presup-position'; it seems that at this stage at least, Grice was prepared to endorse Strawson's response to Russell. The following is 'not linguistically in order :  Bunbury is really disinterested. There is no such person as Bunbury. A: Yes there is, he is really disinterested.  Producing a sentence in which something is predicated of a substantial subject is not enough to guarentee the existence of that subject. They note that the situation would be quite different if 'in the next room' were substituted into A's response. Here A's choice of predicate does more than just offer a description of Bunbury; it points to a way of verifying his existence. Our use of language, then, very often presupposes the existence of substantial objects. Furthermore, substances are in a sense the basic, or primary objects of reference. Grice and Strawson admit that they have no conclusive proof of this latter claim, but they offer their own intuitions in support, presumably drawn from their experiments with substantial and non-substantial subjects. Further, substances are, in general, what we are most interested in talking about, asking about, issuing orders about; 'indeed the primacy of substance is deeply embedded in our language'  Grice later suggested that the closest echoes of this joint work in published writing were in Strawson's book Individuals, subtitled 'An essay in descriptive metaphysics', published in 1959. In this Strawson considers in much more detail the implications of various kinds of descriptive sentences for the theory of presupposition. But there were also resonances of the joint project in various aspects of Grice's own later work. Two points from the end of the manuscript fragment, one a non-linguistic parallel and one a consequence of their position, indicate these. The parallel comes from a consideration of the basic needs for survival and the attainment of satisfaction people experience as living creatures. Processes such as 'eating', 'drinking', 'being hurt by', 'using',  'finding', are entirely dependent on transactions with substances. Grice and Strawson suggest that it is not entirely fanciful to consider that the structure of language has developed to reflect the structure of these most basic interactions with the world.The relevant consequence of their position relates to a familiar target for ordinary language philosophers: the theory of sense data. Their argument is in essence a version of the argument from common sense, although they do not explicitly acknowledge this. If substances are a primary focus of interest, and if this fact is reflected in the language, then this offers good evidence that the world must indeed be substantial in character. If the proponents of sense data were correct, if all we can accurately discuss are the individual sensations we receive through our sense, then 'substantial terminology would have no application'. Of course, this argument is fundamentally dependent on faith in ordinary language. In effect it claims that, since people talk about, and indeed focus their talk on, material objects, we have adequate grounds for accepting that material objects exist.  The second major collaboration between Grice and Strawson, which produced their only jointly published paper, was composed uncharacteristically rapidly. It was written in the same year as Quine observed their joint seminars, and indeed was in direct response to his visit.  Quine introduced to Oxford an American style of philosophy. This had its roots in logical positivism, but had developed in rather different directions. In particular, Quine's empiricism took the form of an extreme scepticism towards meaning. He argued that it was legitimate to look at meaning in terms of how words are used to refer to objects in the world, but not to discuss meanings as if they had some existence independent of the set of such uses. In an essay published in 1953 he argues that the error of attributing independent existence to meaning explains the tenacity of the doctrine of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, even in empirical philosophies where it should have been abandoned.  Quine argues that, although it is a basic doctrine of many empirical theories, the analytic/synthetic distinction is inherently unempirical. It relies on the notion that words have meaning independent of individ-ual, observable instances of use. The sentence 'no bachelor is married' can be judged analytic and therefore necessarily true only on the assumption that 'bachelor' is synonymous with 'unmarried man'. Yet such an assumption depends on a commitment to abstract meaning. It is legitimate only to consider the range of phenomena to which the two terms are applied, a process that must inevitably be open-ended. In other words, we are committed to the truth of so-called analytic sentences for exactly the same reason that we are committed to the truth of certain synthetic sentences, such as 'Brutus killed Caesar'  Our past  experience of the world, including our experience of how the words ofour language are applied, has led us to accept them as true. However, our belief in any statement established on empirical grounds is subject to revision in the light of new experience. We may find it hard to imagine what experience could lead us to abandon belief in 'no bachelor is married', but that is simply because of the strength of our particular empirical commitment to it. The difference between analytic and synthetic statements, then, is not an absolute one, but simply a matter of degree. The distinction reflects 'the relative likelihood, in practice, of choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience'.66  One weekend during Quine's 1953-4 visit, Grice and Strawson put together their response to this argument, to be presented at a seminar on the Monday. In 1956 Strawson revised the paper on his own and sent it to The Philosophical Review, where it was published as 'In defence of a dogma'. Their defence is exactly of the type that Quine might have expected to encounter in Oxford in the 1950s; it rests on the way in which some of the key terms are actually used. The terms 'analytic' and  'synthetic' have a venerable pedigree. Generations of philosophers have found them useful in discussions of language and, moreover, are generally able to reach consensus over how they apply to novel, as well as to familiar examples. But the argument does not end with philosophical usage. Grice and Strawson argue that closely related distinctions can be found in everyday speech. The notion of analyticity rests, as Quine had noted, on the validity of synonymy. The expression 'synonymous' may not be very common in everyday speech, but the equivalent predicate 'means the same as' certainly is. Borrowing an example from Quine's essay, Grice and Strawson note that 'creature with a heart' is extensionally equivalent to 'creature with kidneys'; it picks out the same group of entities in the world precisely because all creatures with a heart also have kidneys. However, Grice and Stawson argue that the relationship between these two expressions is not the same as that between  'bachelor' and 'unmarried man'. Many people would be happy to accept that '"bachelor" means the same as "unmarried man"' but would reject  '"creature with a heart" means the same as "creature with kidneys"'.  In effect, Grice and Strawson are defending the existence of exactly the type of meaning Quine dismisses. The element distinguishing the second pair of terms, but not the first, cannot be anything to do with the objects in the world they are used to label, because in this they are exactly equivalent. Rather, there must be some further notion of  'meaning' that people are aware of when they deny that 'creature with heart' and 'creature with kidneys' mean the same. It is this notion ofmeaning, which forms part of the description of the language but does not directly relate to the world it describes, that Quine rules inadmissi-ble. This also allows for the existence of analytic sentences. 'A bachelor is an unmarried man' is analytic precisely because its subject means the same as its predicate. This can be confirmed by studying just the lan-guage, not the world. In much the same way, the meaning of some sentences makes them impossible in the face of any experience. That is, we just cannot conceive of any evidence that would lead us to acknowledge them as true. Grice and Strawson contrast 'My neighbour's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types' with 'My neighbour's three-year-old-child is an adult. The first may well strike us as impossible, but we can nevertheless imagine the sort of evidence that would force us, however reluctantly, to change our mind and accept it as true. But in the second case, unless we allow that the words are being used figuratively or metaphorically, there is just no evidence that could be produced to lead us to change our minds. The impossibility of the second example is entirely dependent on the meanings of the words it contains.  It is clear that the nature of analytic and synthetic sentences, and of our knowledge of them, exercised Grice a good deal both at this time and later. Kathleen Grice recalls that, during the 1950s, he delighted in questioning his children's playmates about 'whether something can be red and green all over'  ', and enjoyed their subsequent confusion, insist-  ing that spots and stripes were not allowed. As he observes in his own notes, 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is a supposed candidate for a statement that is both synthetic and a priori. Grice was presumably amusing himself by testing this claim out on some genuinely naive informants. In later years, he expressed himself still committed to the validity of the distinction between synthetic and analytic sentences, and indeed as seeing this as one of the most crucial of philosophical issues.  However, he had grown unhappy with his and Strawson's original defence of it. In particular, he no longer felt that it was enough to argue that the distinction is embedded in philosophical conscience. The argument indicates that the distinction is intelligible, in that it is possible to explain what philosophers mean by it, but not that it is theoretically necessary. In other words, 'the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny'? Certainly their case in defence of the distinction may seem rather weak as a piece of ordinary language philosophy. Austin had rejected other terms, such as 'sense data', precisely because theiruse seemed to be restricted to philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, philosophers as distinguished as Anthony Quinton found their argument against Quine compelling, paraphrasing them as saying that: 'An idea does not become technical simply by being dressed up in an ungainly polysyllable.' Grice never really returned to the task of mounting a new defence for the distinction, although he maintained that it was important and, crucially, 'doable'. 72  Grice's other major collaboration of the 1950s was with Geoffrey Warnock, a regular member of the Play Group, and later Principal of Hertford College. As with Strawson, Grice's collaboration with Warnock grew out of a joint teaching venture, and again this took the form of a series of evening lectures at which they alternated as speaker and com-mentator. The pace was leisurely and exploratory; a single topic might be developed over the course of a term, or even over successive years.  Their theme was perception, the subject of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia lectures. In these, Austin had applied his method of trying out examples to investigate shades of meaning for some of the relevant termi-nology. For instance, he argued that the terms 'looks', 'appears' and  'seems', which Ayer had assumed to be as good as synonymous, in fact displayed some striking differences in meaning when considered in a set such as 'the hill looks steep', 'the hill appears steep', 'the hill seems steep'73  Warnock has commented that, perhaps because of the intense treatment in these lectures, the vocabulary of perception was never discussed on Saturday mornings.* However, this was an omission that he and Grice made up for in private; their surviving notes are full of lists of words and usages by means of which they hoped to discover the understanding of perception embedded in the language. For instance, they draw up a list headed 'Syntax of Illusion', considering the various constructions in which the word 'illusion' can appear, and the shades of meaning associated with these. 'Be under the illusion (that)' and 'have the illusion (that)' are grouped together, presumably as predicates that can attach to people. 'Gives the illusion (that)' and 'creates the illusion (that)' are listed separately, with the note that these might 'apply exclusively to cases where anyone might be expected, in the circs, to handle the illusion'. The example 'it is an illusion' is accompanied by the unanswered question 'what is it?"7s  Grice and Warnock are concerned here with the so-called 'argument from illusion'. This had been put forward by a number of philosophers in support of the need to explain perception in terms of sense data. Austin spends a considerable proportion of Sense and Sensibiliaattacking Ayer over exactly this issue, although he acknowledges that Ayer's commitment to it is tentative. The argument draws on the fact that in a number of more or less mundane situations things appear to be other than they in fact are. For instance, a stick placed partially in water has the appearance of being bent, even though it is perfectly straight. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, your body appears to be located several feet behind the mirror when in fact it is located several feet in front of it. In these cases, the argument goes, there must be something that looks bent, or behind the mirror, that is distinct from the material object in question. The term 'sense data' is necessary in order to discuss this; the individual receives sense data that are distinct from the material object in question. From here, the argument is extended to cover all perception, even when no such illusions are involved. Seeing these types of illusion does not feel like a qualitatively different experience from seeing things as they actually are, hence it would be bizarre to maintain that the object of perception is of one kind in the cases of illusion and of another kind in other cases. It must be the case that all we ever do perceive are sense data, not material objects themselves.  Austin spends several lectures addressing these issues, arguing that it is an unnecessary imposition to claim that there must be one type of object of perception. Ayer and others have illegitimately assumed that optical illusions, such as the ones discussed, along with dreams, mirages, hallucinations and various other phenomena can all be explained in the same way. Rather, we see a whole host of different entities in different situations. These different types of experience are in fact generally fairly easy to distinguish, as any reflection on the language available to discuss them will reveal. People ordinarily are quite capable of saying that 'the stick looks bent but it is really straight'; it is philosophical sophistry to claim that there must be something, distinct from the stick itself, which has the 'look' in question. With typical bluntness, Austin dismisses the question of what you see when you see a bent stick as 'really, completely mad'. And with perhaps some sleight of hand he dismisses the mirror example by arguing that what actually is several feet behind the mirror is 'not a sense datum, but some region in the adjoining room'.76  In their lectures on perception, Grice and Warnock take up the question of whether or not it is legitimate to talk of any intermediary between material objects and our perceptions of them. They notice an asymmetry between the senses, or at least the vocabulary that describes them. The verbs 'hear', 'smell' and 'taste' can all take objects that donot describe material phenomena. It is possible to 'hear a car', but is equally possible to 'hear the sound of a car'  . In a similar way, it is pos-  sible to describe the 'smell of a cheese' or the 'taste of a cake'. This is not the case for the other two senses. The objects of touch are always material and not, or not primarily, the 'feeling' of material things.  Feeling, they note, perhaps entails having sensations, but it is not the case that these sensations are what we feel. Furthermore, there is no word at all to occupy this intermediary place in the case of sight. Certainly there is no general word analogous to 'sounds'. This conclusion was not reached lightly. Notes in Grice's hand on the back of an envelope try out a list of words in an attempt to find a suitable candidate for the role, but all are rejected. The following types of objects, he notes, fail to fit the bill because they are not universal objects of seeing;  'surface, colour, aspect, view, sight, gleam, appearance...' can all be used, but only in special circumstances. In most cases, we simply talk of seeing the object in question.  In response to this lack of a word analogous to 'sound', Grice and Warnock do something rather surprising for philosophers of ordinary language; they make one up. They introduce the word 'visa' to describe the non-material intermediaries between material objects and sight.  Commenting later on this enterprise, Grice was keen to point out that ordinary language philosophy did not in fact rule out the introduction of jargon, so long as it was what he rather enigmatically describes as  'properly introduced'." Their manoeuvre was rather different from that of introducing a technical term such as 'sense data',  ', and then basing a  philosophy around the existence of sense data. Instead, they were giving a name to what they had discovered to be a gap in the language in order to explore the language itself: to consider why no such word, and therefore presumably no such concept, was necessary. Their suggestion is that sight and touch are the two essential senses. That is, they are the senses on which we rely most closely to tell us about the material world. Touch is primary. Material objects are most essentially present to us through touch, and this is the sense we would be least ready to disbelieve.  However, because our capacity to touch material objects at any one time is limited, we rely to varying degrees on our other senses. Of these, sight correlates most closely with touch. It offers us the best indication of what an object would feel like. It is also more constant; an object capable of being heard may sometimes fail to produce its distinctive sound, but an object capable of being seen cannot fail to produce its  'visum'. For precisely this reason, the word 'visum', to describe something separate from the object producing it, does not exist.There are two possible accounts of the absence of a word such as  'visum'. The stronger account is that there is no space in the language for such a word; it could not exist. The weaker claim is that such a word could exist, but there is simply no need for it, because we never need to talk about the perceptions of sight without talking about material objects themselves. Warnock held to the stronger view and Grice to the weaker. This difference seems to have been rather a fraught one; Grice begins one lecture with the following extended metaphor.  I begin with an apology (or apologia). Last week it might well have appeared to some that W. was doing the digging while I was administering the digs. I should not like it to be thought that I am not in sympathy with his main ideas about 'visa'; the only question in my mind is precisely what form an answer on his general lines should take; and if I am busier with the awl than with the spade, the reason (aside from ineptitude with the latter instrument) is that I am pretty sure that he is digging in the right place.  78  It seems that the previous week Warnock had argued that if there were a word 'visum'  ', then, analogous to sound, it would have to be possible  to say that a material object could be 'visumless', but that this would not fit into our existing conceptual framework. Grice's argument is that if we want to use such a word, we can always make use of one of his suggestions, such as 'colour expanse'. It is probably correct to say that whenever we see a material object we see a colour expanse, but such an expression is reserved for those occasions when appearance and reality differ. It would not be strictly false to use them on other occasions, but:  'it would be unnatural or odd to employ this expression outside a limited range of situations, just because the empirical facts about perception mentioned by W. ensure that normally we are in a position to use stronger and more informative language! Grice's implication is that if a speaker is in a position to say something more informative, the less informative statement would not be used.  There was no joint publication for Grice and Warnock. On his own, Warnock did publish in this general field, although he did not make direct use of the notion of 'visa'. His 1955 paper to the Aristotelian Society, 'Seeing', is chiefly concerned with a close examination of 'the actual employment of the verb "to see"' 79 Warnock considers the implications of the various categories of object that the verb commonly takes.  In a footnote he acknowledges his general debt to 'Mr H. P. Grice'. Grice himself made even less direct use of their joint project in his own laterwork, although in the early 1960s he published two papers concerned with general questions about the status of perception. Later in that same decade he wrote a reflection on Descartes, although this was not published for more than 20 years.81 Descartes's scepticism leads Grice to reconsider the claims of phenomenalism, and to argue for a clearer distinction between 'truth-conditions', 'establishment-conditions' and  'reassurance-conditions' for statements about material objects.  It is evident that in drawing on the vocabulary of perception, Grice and Warnock were not just dutifully following Austin's lead; both were enthusiastic about the enterprise, and impressed by its results. Warnock recalls that at one point during this process Grice exclaimed, 'How clever language is!', and goes on himself to gloss this remark by explaining:  'We found that it made for us some remarkably ingenious distinctions and assimilations.'8 At this stage at least, Grice was committed to the close study of ordinary language as a productive philosophical enter-prise, and to Austin's notion of 'linguistic botanising' as a philosophical tool. He was very much a part of the social, as well as the philosophical, milieu of 1950s Oxford. He and Kathleen still lived on the Woodstock Road with their children Karen and Tim, born in 1944 and 1950. However, he took a full and active role in the life of St John's College which meant dining there frequently. Kathleen remembers the college as a distant, hierarchical institution. Women were permitted to enter college only once a year, when the porters and college servants arranged a Christmas party for the wives and children of Fellows.83 Quine's thumbnail sketch of his impressions of Grice in 1953, unflattering in the extreme, suggests that his concern for college proprieties was even stronger than his disregard for personal appearance:  Paul was shabby... His white hair was sparse and stringy, he was missing some teeth, and his clothes interested him little. He was vice-president of St John's college, and when I came as guest to a great annual feast there I was bewildered to encounter him impeccably decked out in white tie and tails, strictly fashion-plate.84  The vice-presidentship in question was a one-year appointment, and seems to have been largely social in nature, concerned with the organ-isation and running of college events. However, Grice's academic standing was also rising; in 1948 he was appointed to a University lectureship in addition to his college fellowship. This meant giving lectures open to all members of the university, in addition to the tutorial teaching duties at St. John's. Grice was also making a growing number of visitsaway from Oxford to give lectures and seminars. Most significantly, he began to make fairly frequent trips to America, where he was invited to speak at various universities. He was in fact one of the few to talk about ordinary language philosophy outside Oxford at that time, giving the lecture later published as 'Post-War Oxford Philosophy' at Wellesley College, Massachusetts in 1958.8 However, during this time he was gradually moving away from some of the strictures and dogmas of that approach. In many ways, Grice never fully abandoned ordinary language philosophy; his notes testify to the fact that he frequently returned to it as a method, in particular using 'linguistic botany' to get his thinking started on some topic. However, his philosophy began to diverge from it during this period in some highly significant ways that were to make themselves manifest in his best known work.G rice's growing unease with ordinary language philosophy brought him into conflict with J. L. Austin. Speaking long after leaving Oxford, he mentioned that he himself had always got on well with Austin, at least  'as far as you can get on with someone on the surface so uncosy'! But he clearly found that engaging with him in philosophical discussion could be a frustrating enterprise. Austin would adopt a stance on some particular aspect of language, often formed on the basis of a very small number of examples, and defend his position against a barrage of objections and counter-examples, however obvious. His tenacity in this would be impressive; Grice knew he himself had won an argument only on those occasions when Austin did not return to the topic the following week.  There is something in this reminiscent of the criticisms of obstinacy levelled against Grice himself as an undergraduate. However, it seems that there was more to Grice's frustration than simply encountering someone even less ready to back down in an argument than he was himself. He was becoming increasingly unhappy with the methodology supporting Austin's hasty hypothesis formation: the absolute reliance on particular linguistic examples. It is not that Grice lost faith in the importance of ordinary language or the value of close attention to differences in usage. However, along with some of Austin's harsher and more outspoken critics, Grice came to regard his approach as unfocused and even trivial. In his reminiscences of Oxford, he complained that Austin's ability to distinguish the philosophically interesting from the mundane was so poor that the Saturday morning Play Group sometimes ended up devoting an inordinate amount of time to irrelevant minu-tiae. They once spent five weeks trying to discern some philosophically interesting differences between 'very' and 'highly', considering why, forinstance, we say 'very unhappy' but not 'highly unhappy'. The result was 'total failure'. On another occasion, Austin proposed to launch a discussion of the philosophical concept of Pleasure with a consideration of such phrases as I have the pleasure to announce..!. Stuart Hampshire remarked to Grice that this was rather like meeting to discuss the nature of Faith, and proceeding to discuss the use of 'yours faithfully'.  In a similar vein, Grice was far from convinced that Austin's trusted method of 'going through the dictionary' had much to offer in the way of philosophical illumination. Speaking publicly in the 1970s, he commented that he once decided to put this method to the test by using it to investigate the vocabulary of emotions. He started at the beginning of a dictionary in search of words that could complement the verb 'to feel'. He gave up towards the end of the Bs, on discovering that the verb would tolerate 'Byzantine', and realising that 'the list would be enor-mous'? He never found any satisfactory way of narrowing such a list so as to include only philosophically interesting examples, and clearly believed that Austin had no such method either. Grice did not hesitate to explain his views to Austin, whose reply was typical of both his commitment to his methodology, and his intransigent response to opposi-tion. Grice reports himself as commenting that he, for one, 'didn't give a hoot what the dictionary says', to which Austin retorted, 'and that's where you make your big mistake. 3  The differences between Austin and Grice were not simply matters of personality or even of methodology. They reflected some important ways in which the two philosophers disagreed over what was appropriate in an account of language. Grice was increasingly convinced of the necessity for explanations that took the form of general theories, rather than the ad hoc descriptions that were Austin's trademark. He believed that Austin should be prepared to go further in drawing out the theoretical implications of his individual observations. Indeed, it has been suggested that Austin was suspicious of broad theories, generally supposing them to be over-ambitious and premature.* Grice also differed from Austin in his growing conviction that a distinction needed to be recognised between what words literally or conventionally mean, and what speakers may use them to mean on particular occasions. This conviction is not present in his earliest work. In 'Personal identity', for instance, he writes of 'words' and of 'the use of words' interchangeably.  However, the distinction is the subject of the long digression in his notes for the 'Categories' project with Strawson. It was to play an increasingly prominent part in his work, and to set him apart mostsharply from the orthodoxies of ordinary language philosophy. For Austin, as for Wittgenstein in his later work, use was the best, indeed the only, legitimate guide to meaning. The privilege afforded to use left no room for a distinction between this and literal meaning. Grice did not claim that actual use is unimportant. Indeed, in many of his writings he studied it with as much zeal as Austin. Rather, he saw it as a reliable guide just to what people often communicate, not necessarily to strict linguistic meaning.  Both the general interest in explanatory theories and the more particular focus on the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning are apparent in 'Meaning', a short but hugely influential article first published in 1957. It is tempting to trace the development of Grice's ideas through his work during the 1950s, but in fact this is ruled out by the article's history. Grice wrote the paper in practically its final form in 1948 for a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society but, as usual, he was hesitant to disseminate his ideas more widely. Almost a decade later, Peter Strawson was worried that the Oxford philosophers were not sufficiently represented in print. Unable to convince Grice to revise his paper and send it to a journal, he persuaded him to hand over the manuscript as it stood. Strawson and his wife Ann edited it and submitted it to the Philosophical Review. The paper therefore dates in fact from before Grice's collaborations with Warnock and with Strawson, from before Austin's development of speech act theory, and before even the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind.  'Meaning' offers a deceptively straightforward-looking account of meaning, apparently based on a common-sense belief about the use of language. In effect, Grice argues that what speakers mean depends on what they intend to communicate. However, his project is much more ambitious, and its implications more far-reaching, and also more prob-lematic, than this suggests. First, he introduces hearers, as well as speak-ers, into the account of meaning. The intention to communicate is not sufficient; this intention must be recognised by some audience for the communication to succeed. Hence the speaker must have an additional intention that the intention to communicate is recognised. More sig-nificantly, Grice proposes to broaden out his account to offer a theory of linguistic meaning itself. Linguistic meaning depends on speaker meaning, itself explained by the psychological phenomenon of inten-tion; conventional meaning is to be defined in terms of psychology.  In the opening paragraphs of 'Meaning', Grice does something Austin seems never to have attempted. He focuses the methodology of ordinary language philosophy on the concept of meaning itself, consider-ing and comparing some different ways in which the word 'mean' is used. His conclusion is that there are two different uses of 'mean' reflecting two different ways in which we generally conceive of meaning. The first use is exemplified by sentences such as 'those spots mean measles' and 'the recent budget means that we shall have a hard year'. The second includes examples such as 'those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full' and 'that remark, "Smith couldn't get on without his trouble and strife", meant that Smith found his wife indispensable'. Grice draws up a list of five defining differences between these sets of examples, differences themselves expressed in terms of linguistic relations. For instance, the first, but not the second set of examples entail the truth of what is meant. It is not possible to add 'but he hasn't got measles', but it is possible is to add 'but the bus isn't in fact full - the conductor has made a mistake'. Further, the examples in the first set do not convey the idea that anyone meant anything by the spots or by the budget. It is, however, possible to say that someone meant something by the rings on the bell (the conductor) and by the remark (the original speaker). And only in the second set of examples can the verb 'mean' be followed by a phrase in quotation marks. So 'those three rings on the bell mean "the bus is full"' is pos-sible, but not 'those spots mean "measles"'.  Grice characterises the difference between his two sets of uses for  'mean' as a difference between natural and non-natural meaning. The latter, which includes but is not exhausted by linguistic meaning, he abbreviates to 'meaningn'. In pursuing the question of what makes  'meaning' distinctive, he considers but rejects a 'causal' answer. He offers the following as a summary of this type of answer, paraphrasing and partly quoting C. L. Stevenson:  For x to meann something, x must have (roughly) a tendency to produce in an audience some attitude (cognitive or otherwise) and the tendency, in the case of a speaker, to be produced by that atti-tude, these tendencies being dependent on 'an elaborate process of conditioning attending the use of the sign in communication'.  This account makes the causal answer look very much like be-haviourism, with its notion of meaning as, in effect, the tendency for certain responses to be exhibited to certain stimuli. However, in the work from which Grice quotes, a book called Ethics and Language published in 1944, Stevenson is careful to distance himself from straightforwardly behaviouristic psychology. He argues that such an accountwould be too simplistic to explain a process as complex as linguistic meaning because it could refer only to overt, observable behaviour.  Rather, meaning is a psychologically complex phenomenon. The  'responses' produced will include cognitive responses, such as belief and emotion. Therefore, any account in terms of responsive action must be allowed 'to supplement an introspective analysis, not to discredit it'.  Stevenson, like Grice after him, draws attention to a distinction between two ways in which 'mean' is used, although he does so only in passing. He, too, defines one class of meaning as 'natural', a class he illustrates by suggesting that 'a reduced temperature may at times  "mean" convalescence'? He contrasts these uses of 'mean' with linguistic meaning which, he argues, is dependent on convention. The ways in which speakers use words on individual occasions may vary considerably, but conventional meaning must be seen as primary and relatively stable, underlying any of the more specific meanings in context. A word may be used in context to 'suggest' many things over and above what by convention it 'means'.  '. So, for instance, the sentence  'John is a remarkable athlete' may have a disposition to make people think that John is tall, 'but we should not ordinarily say that it "meant" anything about tallness, even though it "suggested" it'. The connection between 'athlete' and 'tall' is not one of linguistic rule, so tallness cannot be part of the meaning, however strongly it is suggested. What is suggested can sometimes be even more central, as in the cases of metaphors. Here, a sentence is 'not taken' in its literal meaning, but can be paraphrased using an 'interpretation' that 'descriptively means what the metaphorical sentence suggests'?  Grice's critique of the 'causal' theory of meaning includes a response to Stevenson's 'athlete' example. He argues that, in declaring 'tallness' to be suggested rather than meant, Stevenson is in effect pointing to the fact that it is possible to speak of 'nontall athletes': that there is no contradiction in terms here. This argument, Grice claims, is circular. He does not elaborate this point, but he presumably means that in establishing the acceptability of this way of speaking we need to refer to the conventions of linguistic behaviour, yet it is these very conventions we are seeking to establish. Grice adds that, on Stevenson's account, it would be difficult to exclude forms of behaviour we would not normally want to regard as communicative at all. It may well be the case that many people, seeing someone putting on a tailcoat, would form the belief that that person is about to go to a dance, and that the belief would arise because that is conventional behaviour in such circum-stances. But it could hardly be correct to conclude that putting on a tail-coat means n that one is about to go to a dance. To qualify by stating that the conventions invoked must be communicative simply introduces another circle: 'We might just as well say "X has meaning. if it is used in communication", which, though true, is not helpful.'o As a solution to the problems inherent in the notion of conventional behaviour, Grice introduces intention, doing so abruptly and without much elaboration. However, the concept would probably not have been much of a surprise to his original audience in 1948, having had a long pedigree in Oxford philosophy. Grice later commented that his interest in intention was inspired in part by G. F. Stout's 'Voluntary action' Stout was a previous editor of Mind, and his article was published there in 1896. In it he argues that if voluntary action is to be distinguished from involuntary action in terms of 'volition', it is necessary to offer a unique account of volition, distinguishing it from will or desire. He suggests that in the case of volition, but not of simple desire, there is necessarily 'a certain kind of judgement or belief', namely that 'so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the attainment of the desired end'." Indeed, if there is any doubt about the outcome of the volition, expressed in a conditional statement, this must refer to circumstances outside our control. This explains the difference between willing something and merely wishing for it. However, there is another crucial distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. In the case of the former, the action takes place precisely because of the relevant belief; a voluntary action happens because we judge that we will do it. An involuntary action may be one we judge is going to take place, but only because other factors have already determined this.  Further light is shed on Grice's interest in intention by a paper called  'Disposition and intention' he circulated among his colleagues just a few years after he had first written 'Meaning'. The paper was never pub-lished, and has survived only in manuscript, accompanied by a number of written responses in different hands. Reading these, it is not hard to imagine how a writer who tended towards perfectionism and self-doubt could be further dissuaded from publication by the results of canvassing opinion. Oxford criticism might be couched in genteel terms, but it could be harsh. One commentary begins: 'What it comes to, I think, is this; it seems to me that there is something wrong with the way Grice  goes to work....  ^ In 'Dispositions and intentions', Grice declares that  his purpose is to consider the best analysis of 'psychological concepts', concepts generally expressed in statements beginning with phrases such as 'I like.., 'I want..!, I expect... Such statements present analytical problems because they seem to refer to experience that is essen-tially private and unverifiable. Grice proposes to compare two common approaches to this problem. One he labels the 'dispositional' account, whereby the relevant concept is seen as a disposition to act in certain ways in certain hypothetical situations. Thus a statement of 'I like X' could be seen as specifying that the subject would act in certain ways in the interests of X, should the situation arise. The alternative is to consider such statements as describing 'special episodes', in other words to concede that they can be understood as descriptive only of private sensations, directed simply at the individual concept in question. These sensations take the form of special and highly specific psychological entities, such as liking-feelings'. Grice is dismissive of a third pos-sibility, an explanation from behaviourism describing psychological concepts purely in terms of observable responses. He rejects such approaches as 'silly'.  Grice argues that although the dispositional account runs into difficulty in certain cases, such as 'I want..!, 'I expect..' and, signifi-cantly, T intend.., it is not appropriate simply to switch to the 'special episode' account. The problems for the dispositional account are connected to their analysis in terms of hypotheticals. It would seem reasonable in the case of any genuine hypothetical to ask 'how do you know?' or 'what are your grounds for saying that?'. But in the case of the psychological concepts mentioned above, no such evidence can generally be offered, or reasonably expected. Speakers cannot be expected to be judging such concepts from observation, not even from a special vantage point; they can only be judging from personal ex-perience. In Grice's metaphor, 'I am not in the audience, not even in the front row of the stalls, I am on the stage.'3 The 'special episode' account does not fare much better. Every case of wanting, for instance, must create a separate psychological episode. The system of explanation quickly becomes unwieldy; wanting an apple, for instance, must be a discrete phenomenon, different from wanting an orange or a pear or a banana.  The third alternative, any version of a behaviourist account, is simply doomed to failure in cases such as 'want'. Grice singles Gilbert Ryle out for criticism. Ryle's account of psychological concepts is at best not clearly distinguished from behaviourism because of its ambiguity over whether the evidential counterparts of dispositions can be private or must always be observable by other people. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle describes certain statements concerned with psychological concepts as acts characteristic of certain moods. This is in keeping with his refusal to distinguish between physical and mental entities or activities. Whenwe feel bored, we are likely to utter 'I feel bored' in just the same way as we are likely to yawn. We do not observe our own mood and then offer an account of it; we simply act in accordance with it. Thus the statement is not produced as a result of assessing the evidence, but may itself form part of that relevant evidence, even to the speaker. 'So the bored man finds out he is bored, if he does find this out, by finding that among other things he glumly says to others and to himself "I feel bored" and "How bored I feel" '14 In response to such statements, we may want to ask 'sincere or shammed?', but not 'true or false?'. This is because statements such as 'I feel bored', ' I want..!' or 'I hope ..! act not as descriptive statements about ourselves but as 'avowals': unreflective utterances that may be treated as pieces of behaviour indicative of our frame of mind. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions, Ryle argues that the grammatical form of such sentences 'makes it tempting to misconstrue [them] as self-descriptions'. 15 In fact they are simply things said in the relevant frames of mind. However, unlike other forms of behaviour, speech is produced to be interpreted.  Grice argues that the difference between speech and other forms of behaviour is much greater than Ryle allows. In particular, while it is possible to 'sham' behaviour such as yawning without being false, a  'shammed' statement of 'I feel bored' will be simply false. A statement of boredom is not of the same order as a yawn when it comes to offering information precisely because, as Ryle acknowledges, it is uttered voluntarily and deliberately. Grice adds another possible indicator of boredom into the comparison. When listening to a political speech, we might give an indication that we feel bored by saying 'I feel bored', by yawning, or indeed by making a remark such as 'there is a good play coming on next week'. This last remark is also voluntary and deliber-ate, but it does not offer anything like the same strength of evidence of our state of boredom as the alleged 'avowal', precisely because it is not directly concerned with our state of mind. Only 'I am bored' is a way of telling someone that you are bored. Furthermore, although it might be possible to some extent to sustain a theory of avowals or other behav-iour as offering information about the state of mind of others, it will hardly do for one's own state of mind. A man does not need to wait to observe himself heading for the plate of fruit on the table before he is a position to know that he wants pineapple.  Grice's suggested solution to the apparent failure of the 'dispositional' and the 'special event' accounts, together with the unsustainability of a behaviourist approach, rests on intention. When analysing manyverbs of psychological attitude used to refer to someone else, we can produce a straightforward hypothetical, saying 'if so and so were the case he would behave in such and such a way'. However, the same does not seem to be the case when talking about oneself. 'If so and so were the case I would behave in such and such a way' cannot really be understood as a statement of hypothetical fact, but as a statement of hypothetical intention, just so long as the behaviour in question can be seen as voluntary. Further, it is simply not possible to say 'I am not sure whether I intend.', in the way it is possible to doubt other psychological states. It might be possible to utter such a sentence meaning-fully, but only to express indecision over the act in question, as when someone replies to the question 'Do you intend... ?' by saying 'I'm not sure'  '. It cannot mean that the speaker does not know whether he or she  is in a psychological state of intending or not.  Grice argues that a correct analysis of intention can form an important basis for the analysis of a number of the relevant psychological con-cepts. He offers a twofold definition of statements of intention, which relies on dispositional evidence without divorcing itself completely from the privileged status of introspective knowledge. The first crite-rion, familiar from Stout's original paper, is that the speaker's freedom from doubt that the intended action will take place is not dependent on any empirical evidence. Grice's second stipulation is that the speaker must be prepared to take the necessary steps to bring about the fulfil-ment of the intention. There would be something decidedly odd about stating seriously, 'X intends to go abroad next month, but wouldn't take any preliminary steps which are essential for this purpose'. Grice's analysis of statements of intention ends his unpublished paper rather abruptly, without returning to the other psychological verbs discussed at the outset. Having established that a doubt over one's own intention is something of an absurdity, he offers a characteristically tantalis-ing suggestion that 'we may hope that this may help to explain the absurdity of analogous expressions mentioning some other psychological concepts, though I wouldn't for a moment claim that it will help to explain all such absurdities.' Although his analysis of psychological concepts is here incomplete, he has established two significant com-mitments. First, he has justified the inclusion of psychological concepts in analyses; they do not need to be 'translated' away into behavioural tendencies or observable phenomena. Second, he has established the concept of intention as primary; it offers an illustration of how a psychological concept may be described, and is also in itself implicit in the analysis of other such concepts.Grice was not the only Oxford philosopher to revisit the topic of intention in the mid-twentieth century. In 1958, Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart published 'Decision, intention and certainty'. This echoes Grice's earlier, unpublished paper in arguing that there is a type of certainty about future actions, independent of any empirical evidence, that is characteristic of intention. They distinguish between a 'prediction' of future action and a 'decision' about it. A statement of the first is based on considering evidence, but a statement of the second on considering reason, even if this is not done consciously. People who say 'I intend to do X' may reasonably be taken to be committed to the belief that they will try to do X, and will succeed in doing X unless prevented by forces outside their control. Hampshire and Hart's claims are similar to those of Stout, but there are interesting differences in approach and style, revealing of the distance between the philosophical methods characteristic of their times. Stout is representative of an older style of Oxford philosophy, complete with sweeping generalisations and moralistic musings. In discussing the tendency of voluntary determination to endure over time and against obstacles, he comments that: 'If we are weak and vacillating, no one will depend on us; we shall be viewed with a kind of contempt. Mere vanity may go far to give fixity to the will.16 After logical positivism, and after Austin's insistence on close attention to the testimony of ordinary language, such unempirical excesses would not have been tolerated. Hampshire and Hart stick to more sober reflections on the language of intention and certainty. They come very close to one of Austin's observations in 'A plea for excuses' when they comment that: 'If I am telling you simply what someone did, e.g. took off his hat or sat down, it would normally be redundant, and hence mis-leading, though not false, to say that he sat down intentionally."' They describe the adverb 'intentionally' as usually used to rule out the suggestion that the action was in some way performed by accident or mistake. Also like Austin, they do not dwell on the possible consequences of the inclusion of the 'redundant' material.  An interest in the psychological concept of intention, and a reaction against the behviouristic tendencies he identified in work by Stevenson and by Ryle, were not the only sources of inspiration for Grice's  'Meaning'. In the following brief paragraph from that article, he comments on theories of signs:  The question about the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is, I think, what people are getting at when they display an interest in a distinction between 'natural' and 'conventional' signs.But I think my formulation is better. For some things which can mean. something are not signs (e.g. words are not), and some are not conventional in any ordinary sense (e.g. certain gestures); while some things which mean naturally are not signs of what they mean (cf. the recent budget example). 18  The mention of 'people' is not backed up by any specific references, but the unpublished papers Grice kept throughout his life include a series of lectures notes from Oxford in which he presents and discusses the  'theory of signs' put forward in the nineteenth century by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. These suggest that Grice's account of meaning developed in part from his reaction to Peirce, whose general approach would have appealed to him. Peirce was anti-sceptical, committed to describing a system of signs elaborate enough to account for the classification of the complex world around us, a world independent of our perceptions of it, and available for analysis by means of those perceptions. His theory of signs was therefore based on a notion of categories as the building blocks of knowledge; signs explain the ways we represent the world to ourselves and others in thought and in language.  In a paper from 1867, Peirce reminds his readers 'that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it'l' Conceptions, and the signs we use to identify them, comprise our understanding of the world. Signs act by representing objects to the understanding of receivers, but there are a number of different ways in which this may take place. There are some representations  'whose relation to their object is a mere community of some quality, and these representations may be termed likenesses', such as for example the relationship between a portrait and a person. The relations of other representations to their object 'consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed indices or signs'; a weathercock represents the direction of the wind in this way. In the third case, there are no such factual links, merely conventional ones. Here the relation of representation to object 'is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed symbols'; such is the relationship between word and object.2º Peirce later extended the general term 'sign' to cover all these cases, and used the specific terms icon, index and symbol for his three classes of representation.  In his lectures and notes on 'Peirce's general theory of signs', Grice analyses Peirce's use of the term 'sign', and proposes to equate it witha general understanding of 'means'. His chief argument in favour of this equation is that Peirce is not using 'sign' in anything recognisable as its everyday or ordinary sense. In a piece of textbook ordinary language philosophy, he argues that 'in general the use (unannounced) of technical or crypto-technical terms leads to nothing but trouble, obscuring proper questions and raising improper ones'.?' Restating Peirce's claims about 'signs' in terms of 'means' draws attention to shared features of a range of items commonly referred to as having 'meaning', as well as highlighting some important differences between Peirce's categories of  'index' and 'symbol'. Grice does not seem to have anything to say about Peirce's 'icons'.  , perhaps because this type of sign is least amenable to  being re-expressed in terms of meaning.  Using his translation of 'is a sign of' into 'means', Grice reconsiders Peirce's own example of an index. He observes that the sentence 'the position of the weathercock meant that the wind was NE' entails, first, that the wind was indeed NE; and second, that a causal connection holds between the wind and weathercock. This feature, he notes, seems to be restricted to the word 'means'. You can say 'the position of the weathercock was an indication that the wind was NE, but it was actually SE'; 'was an indication that' is not a satisfactory synonym of 'means' because it does not entail the truth of what follows. The causal connection also offers an interesting point of comparison to different ways in which 'mean' is used. Grice draws on an example that also appears in 'Meaning' when he suggests a conversation at a bus stop as the bus goes. The comment 'Those three rings of the bell meant that the bus was full' could legitimately be followed by a query of 'was it full?'.  At this early stage in the development of his account of meaning, Grice was obviously troubled by the relationship between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and that between the meaning words have by convention and the full import they may convey in particular contexts. There is no fully developed account of these issues in the lec-tures, but there are a few rough notes suggesting that he was aware of the need to identify some differences between 'timeless' meaning and speaker meaning. At one point he notes to himself that the following questions will need answers: 'what is the nature of the distinction between utterances with "conventional" meaningn and those with non-conventional?' and 'nature of distinction between language and use language? (sic)'. Elsewhere, he ponders the difference between 'what a sentence means (in general; timeless means; if you like the meaning of (type) sentence)' and 'what I commit myself to by the use of a sentence (if you like, connect this with token sentence)'. It is not clear fromthis whether he is seeing 'non-conventional' aspects of meaning as separate from, or coterminous with, those aspects of meaning arising from particular uses in context. However, the first two questions suggest that  'non-conventional' and 'use' are at least potentially separate issues.  When Grice collected his thoughts on meaning into the form in which they were eventually published, he produced a definition dependent on a complex of intentions. In the case of straightforwardly informative or descriptive statements, meaning is to be defined in terms of a speaker's intention to produce certain beliefs in a hearer. It is also necessary that the speaker further intends that the hearer recognise this informative intention and that this recognition is itself the cause of the hearer's belief. This definition excludes from meaningn a case where 'I show Mr X a photograph of Mr Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs X', but includes the related but crucially different case where 'I draw a picture of Mr Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr X'.22 In the former case, the effect would be produced in Mr X whether or not he paid any attention to the intention behind the behaviour. In the second example the recognition of this intention is crucial, and precisely this case would normally be seen as a piece of communication. A similar distinction can be made when the definition is extended to include communication intended to influence the action of others. A policeman who stops a car by standing in its way will produce his desired effect whether or not the motorist notices his intention. A policeman who stops a car by waving is relying on the motorist recognising the wave as intended to make him stop. The latter, but not the former, is an example of meaningnn. Avoiding the problem he identified in Stevenson's work, that of being unable to offer a full account of partic-ular, context-bound uses, Grice proposes to describe meaning in relation to a speaker and a particular occasion in the first place, and the meaningn of words and phrases as secondary, and derived from this.  He tentatively suggests that 'x means. that so-and-so' might be equated with some statement 'about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x'.23  In the concluding paragraphs of his article, Grice alludes briefly to two further aspects of meaning that draw on the questions he was posing himself in his notes and that were to prove central to his later work. First, although he is dealing primarily with specific instances of meanings on particular occasions, his account of meaning is not intended to cover the total significance potentially associated with the use of an expression. He draws a distinction between the 'primary' intention of an utterance, relevant to its meaning, and any furtherintentions: 'If (say) I intend to get a man to do something by giving him some information, it cannot be regarded as relevant to the mean-ingen of my utterance to describe what I intend him to do.2 Even though conventional meaning is to follow from intention, Grice hints that some types of intention, possibly highly relevant to how an utterance is received, cannot properly be described as part of the meaningN of that utterance. In his published paper, Grice is noncommittal about the precise number of distinctions between 'levels' of significance needed, and his rough notes suggest that this was an area in which he was unsure. Second, the hearer may sometimes look to specific context to determine the precise intention behind an utterance; he may con-sider, for instance, which of two possible interpretations would be the most relevant to what has gone before, or would most obviously fit the speaker's purpose. Grice notes that such criteria are not confined to linguistic examples:  Context is a criterion in settling the question of why a man who has just put a cigarette in his mouth has put his hand in his pocket; relevance to an obvious end is a criterion in settling why a man is running away from a bull. 25  Grice's suggestion that conventional meaning can be defined in terms of intentions has been widely praised. The philosopher Jonathan Bennett suggests that the idea of meaning as a kind of intending was commonplace, but that 'Grice's achievement was to discover a defensible version of it.26 Grice's postgraduate student and later colleague Stephen Schiffer went further, describing 'Meaning' as 'the only published attempt ever made by a philosopher or anyone else to say precisely and completely what it is for someone to mean something'27 However, commentators were not slow to point out the problems they saw as inherent in such an account. Responses to 'Meaning' have been numerous, and ranged over more than 40 years, but some raising the most fundamental objections were from Oxford in the years immediately following its publication. Austin did not produce a formal response, and Grice has suggested that they never even discussed it informally. This, he suggests, was not at all unusual. Austin rarely discussed with Grice, or with other colleagues, views that had become established through publication. He preferred his conversations to be about new directions and new channels of thought. 28  To those Oxford philosophers who did discuss 'Meaning' in print, a comparison with Austin's account of 'speech acts' was almost inevitable.Austin's version of speaker meaning was developed during the 1940s and 1950s. Various versions of it appeared in lectures and articles during this period, but the most complete account was presented when Austin was invited to deliver the prestigious William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. An edited and expanded version of his notes from these was published posthumously as How to do Things with Words. Austin's ideas changed and developed over the course of time, and even during the lectures themselves, but some basic fundamental principles can be iden-tified. These drew on his notion of the 'descriptive fallacy', the idea that linguistic study is ill served by the traditional philosopher's focus on language as a tool for making statements capable of being judged to be either true or false. Throughout the development of speech act theory, Austin's assumptions were very different from Grice's working hypothesis in 'Meaning' that language is primarily used to make informative, descriptive statements. For Austin, making statements of fact was only one, and not a particularly significant one, of the many different things people do with words. He proposed to analyse the range of functions language can be used to perform.  Initially, Austin concentrates on explicit 'performatives' , statements  that appear to describe but in fact bring about some state of affairs, usually a social fact or interpersonal relationship. He considers ritualised performatives, which require a very particular set of circumstances to be successful, such as 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' (during the appropriate ceremony), 'I do' (at the relevant point in a marriage service) or 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' (in a will). He then expands his field to include more every day examples, such as 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'  ', and 'I promise to...'. Charac-  teristically, Austin proposes 'going through the dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit' in search of performative verbs.2 Later, however, he realises that even this could not give an exhaustive list of what people do with words. People do things with all sorts of different types of utterances. Someone who utters, 'Can you pass the salt?' may well succeed in making a request by means of apparently asking a question.  In response to his observations about the possible differences between the apparent form of an utterance and its actual function, Austin proposes to divide the analysis of meaning into three levels, or three separate acts performed in the course of a single utterance. The 'locutionary act' is determined by the actual form of words uttered, established by their sense and reference: '"meaning" in the traditional sense' sense'.3° At the level of 'illocutionary act', the notion of force becomes relevant. It isdetermined by the matter of how the locution in question is being used, of what is being done in saying what is said. This can be seen as at least in part dependent on the individual intentions of the speaker, but these in turn depend on, and follow from, certain conventions of language use. So, in the example above, we can understand that the speaker intends to request that the hearer pass the salt, but only because there are conventions of use determining that questions of ability can be used with this force. The illocutionary act is not a simple consequence of the locutionary, but is concerned with conventions 'as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance'. 31 Finally, and separately, it is necessary to consider the effect of the utterance. Austin is here perhaps making a concession to the 'causal' theories of meaning Grice considered but dismissed. Austin refers to the effect achieved by the utterance, but unlike Stevenson he sees this as just one component of meaning, not a sufficient definition. The 'per-locutionary act' is defined by this effect, which may coincide with what the speaker intended to bring about, but need not. The perlocutionary act, then, is not a matter of convention, and cannot be determined simply with reference to the words uttered.  It is no surprise that Grice's 'Meaning' should have been discussed in the light of Austin's speech act theory. The two seem in many ways to cover similar ground, in that both oppose much of the traditional philosophical literature on meaning by insisting on the roles of context and of speaker intention. In fact, some commentators have been tempted to read Grice's paper as an implicit response, or challenge, to speech act theory. As Grice himself has pointed out, there is no such direct link.  'Meaning' existed in almost its finished state before the ideas in How to do Things with Words were made public, or even in some cases devel-oped. As he became aware of Austin's ideas, Grice did recognise some connections to his own themes and preoccupations, but continued to find his own treatment of them more compelling. In particular, he remained convinced that an account of meaning needed to give prominence to psychological notions, and was unhappy with what he saw as Austin's excessive dependence on conventions; Austin was 'using the obscure to explain the obscure' 32 From this, it would seem that his main objection to speech act theory was that it did not offer much explanation of meaning. For Grice, the observable facts of the conventions of use are in need of explanation, and this is best done with reference to individual instances of intention. Austin, on the other hand, was seeking to explain these conventions simply by drawing attention to another, more complex level of conventions.Peter Strawson picks up on exactly this difference between Grice and Austin when he reflects on 'Meaning' in his 1964 article 'Intention and convention in speech acts'.  '. His chief concern is the validity of Austin's  notion of illocutionary act, based as it is on conventions, both the conventions of the language that define the locutionary act, and the further conventions of use that mediate between this and illocutionary force.  However, Strawson argues, there are many cases where the difference between locutionary and illocutionary act cannot be explained simply with reference to conventions. In certain circumstances, to say 'the ice over there is very thin' may well have the force of a warning, but there is no particular convention of language use specifying this. Similarly, the difference between an order and an entreaty may depend not on any identifiable convention, but on a range of factors concerned with the speaker's state of mind and consequent presentation of the utter-ance. Strawson looks to Grice's notion of non-natural meaning to explain this additional, non-conventional set of factors. His paraphrase of Grice's account, expressed in terms of three separate intentions, was to prove instructive to future commentators:  § non-naturally means something by an utterance x if S intends (i) to produce by uttering x a certain response (r) in an audience A and intends (iz) that A shall recognise S's intention (i) and intends (i3) that this recognition on the part of A of S's intention (i) shall function as A's reason, or part of his reason, for his response (r).33  On Strawson's interpretation, one of the defining intentions is focused on Grice's indication that the speaker provides the hearer with a 'reason' to think or act in a certain way. He proposes to modify Grice's account before enlisting it to explain the notion of illocutionary force, because of certain counter-examples to which it is subject as it stands. It is possible to envisage contexts in which S utters x with exactly the three intentions described above, but in which it does not seem appropriate to say that S was trying to communicate with A. Strawson does not illustrate this problem with a specific example, but he suggests a schematic outline. S may intend to get A to believe something, fulfilling (i). S may arrange fake evidence, or grounds for this belief, such that A can see the evidence, and indeed such that A can see S fabricating it. S knows that A will be perfectly aware that the evidence is faked, but assumes that A will not realise that S has this awareness. The intention behind this is for A to have the relevant belief precisely because he recognises that S intends him to have this belief; this is S's (i2). Further, it is S's intentionthat the recognition of (i) will be the reason why A acquires the belief; indeed, A will have no other reason to form this belief, knowing that the evidence for it is faked. This fulfils (i3). In effect, an intentional account of meaning would have to include an extra layer of intention, because for S to be telling something to, or communicating with A, S must be taken to intend A to recognise the intention to make A recog-nise the intention to produce the relevant belief in A. In other words,  § must have a further intention (4) that A should recognise intention (i2). If S's intention (i), and hence intention (i2) is fulfilled, then A may be said to have understood the utterance, a definition Strawson links to Austin's notion of 'uptake' !, and hence to the successful accomplishment  of illocutionary force. Strawson argues that the complex intention (i4) is the necessary defining characteristic of saying something with a certain illocutionary force. He hints that his additional layer of intention may not in fact prove sufficient, and that 'the way seems open to a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognised' 34 Grice's definition of meaning as determined entirely by speaker intention is at odds with, or according to Strawson can be complementary to, Austin's reliance on convention. But it also opposes him to the notion, common in philosophy and later in linguistics, that meaning is determined by the rules of the language in question, defined independently of any particular occasion of utterance. Austin does allow some space to this type of meaning, specifying that the usual sense and reference of the words uttered constitute the locutionary act. He does not, however, develop this notion, or explain its relationship to his more central concern with speaker meaning. Strawson seems to downplay the importance of linguistic meaning for  Austin when he places him on the same general side as Grice in what he describes elsewhere as the 'Homeric struggle' between 'the theorists of communication-intention and the theorists of formal semantics' 35 Unlike Austin, Grice's more extreme arguments that meaning is to be explained entirely in terms of 'communication-intention' do not presuppose any notion of semantic meaning. This is an aspect of Grice's theory on which other commentators, such as John Searle, have focused.  Searle was a student at Oxford during the 1950s, where he was taught by both Austin and Strawson. He completed a doctoral dissertation on sense and reference in 1959 before returning to his native America. Well versed in both the traditional philosophy of meaning and Austin's concentration on communication, he worked on the theory of speech acts, publishing a book on the subject in 1969 in which he classifies possible illocutionary acts into a restricted number of general categories. Healso introduces the notion of indirect speech acts, in which one illocu-tionary act is performed by means of the apparent performance of a different illocutionary act. Austin's example 'Can you pass the salt?' succeeds as a request both because the apparent act, that of asking for information about the hearer's ability, is not appropriate in the context, and because rules of language use specify that this form of words can be used to make a request. For Searle, language is essentially a rule-governed form of behaviour. It is centred on the speech act, the basic unit of communication, but its rules include the specific semantic properties of its words and phrases.  This particular point gives rise to Searle's objections to Grice's total reliance on individual speaker intention in explaining meaning. Searle does allow for intentions in his account; indeed he is interested in basing it on just such psychological concepts and proposes to develop Grice's account in order to do so. In a later discussion he comments that his analysis in Speech Acts 'was inspired by Grice's work on meaning' 36 However, like Austin before him, he sees semantic rules as underlying the range of intentions with which a speaker can appropriately produce any particular utterance. Searle is much more explicit than Austin in specifying that linguistic rules come first and restrict intentional possi-bility. Unlike Grice, he therefore singles out linguistic acts as separate from general communication; in the case of language, meaning exists independent of intention, or of occasion of use. Searle illustrates this with his own counter-example to Grice. An American soldier is captured by Italian troops in the Second World War. Neither the soldier nor his captors speak German, and the soldier speaks no Italian. The soldier wishes to make the Italian troops believe that he is German. He utters the only German sentence he knows, which happens to be 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', a line of poetry remembered from childhood that translates as 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. He hopes that his captors will guess that he must be saying 'I am a German soldier'. The soldier intends to get his captors to believe he is a German soldier. He intends that they should recognise his intention to get them to believe this, and that this recognition should serve as their reason for entertaining that belief. All the circumstances are in place for a case of Grice's meaningwn. Yet, Searle argues, it would surely be unreasonable to maintain that when the soldier says 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', he actually non-naturally means 'I am a German soldier'. The rules of German do not allow this; the words mean 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. Searle concludes that Grice's account is inadequate as itstands because Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention. 37  Like Strawson, Searle proposes to amend Grice's intentional account in the light of his own counter-example. In effect, he argues that the notion of intention must be expanded to include convention. When speakers use words literally, part of their intention is that hearers recog-nise the communicative intention precisely because of the pre-existing rules for using the words chosen. Searle attempts to balance the twin effects of intention and convention in his account of meaning. The result is rather further removed from Grice than Searle acknowledges when he suggests that he is offering an 'amendment'. It returns to the traditional idea of conventional, or linguistic, meaning as the basic location of meaning on which intention-based speaker meaning is dependent.38 The magnitude of the consequences of Searle's attempt to introduce conventions into an intentional account is perhaps illustrative of the gulf between semantic and psychological approaches to meaning. It also highlights the scale of Grice's undertaking in producing an account of meaning relying entirely on the latter.  Stephen Schiffer was a graduate student in the 1960s when, as he has since described, he was 'much taken with Grice's program'39 He was impressed by what he saw as Grice's reduction of the semantic to the psychological, but also believed he had identified the inadequacies of this particular account of speaker meaning. In the 1972 book in which he attempted to develop and improve on Grice's account, he notes that it is not possible to claim priority for conventional meaning and at the same time define meaning in terms of intention. To maintain that speaker meaning, 'what S meant by x',  ', is primary, but also that speaker  meaning could be in any way dependent on the meaning of x would be simply circular. Schiffer does not see the exclusive concentration on intention as necessarily problematic, or at least not for this reason: 'To say this does not commit Grice to holding that one can say whatever one likes and mean thereby whatever one pleases to mean. One must utter x with the relevant intentions, and not any value of 'x' will be appropriate to this end: I could not in any ordinary circumstances request you to pass the salt by uttering "the flamingoes are flying south early this year".  '40 Schiffer's own response is that conventional meaning  does exist, but is secondary to intentional meaning, because it is built up in a speech community over time, resultant on the fulfilling of certain communicative intentions.  The problems Schiffer identifies for Grice are not problems with the notion that meaning is best given a psychological rather than a seman-tic definition, an assumption with which he agrees. Rather, Schiffer questions the adequacy of intention as the relevant psychological state.  He echoes Strawson's schematic counter-example to argue that it can be possible for all the intentions Grice defines to be in place, but for no act of communication to be achieved. Strawson's example indicated that another layer of intention (Strawson's i) must be added to the defini-tion. Schiffer argues explicitly for the consequence Strawson only sug-gested, namely that the need for regressive intentions will in fact prove to be infinite. He constructs a series of more and more elaborate counter-examples to show that the levels of intention necessary fully to define meaning can never be exhausted. In the first such example, § produces a cacophonous rendition of 'Moon Over Miami' with the intention of driving A out of the room. S's intention is that A will leave the room not just because A cannot stand the noise, but because A recognises that Sis trying to get rid of A. Further, S intends that A recognise the intention that A recognise the intention to get A to leave the room, because S wishes A to be aware of S's disdain. 'In other words'  ', Schiffer explains,  'while A is intended to think that S intends to get rid of A by means of the repulsive singing, A is really intended to have as his reason for leaving the fact that S wants him to leave.'41 In order to rule out the unacceptable suggestion that by singing 'Moon Over Miami' S meant that A was to leave the room, Schiffer proposes another level of intention. Further, more complex, examples call for further such layers. For Schiffer, the infinitely regressive series of intentions that intentions be recognised that this causes makes for an unacceptable definition of meaning.  For Schiffer the best hope for a psychological account of meaning lies in an appeal to a special type of knowledge. This type of knowledge occurs when two people are in the following relation to a piece of infor-mation, or to a proposition p. S and A both know that p; S knows that A knows that p; A knows that S knows that p; A knows that S knows that A knows that p; S knows that A knows that S knows that p; and so on without limit. Such a pattern also leads to an infinite regress but, Schiffer argues, a harmless one. It is just the sort of situation we do in fact find in everyday life, as when S and A are sitting facing each other with a candle in between. Schiffer coins the phrase 'mutual knowledge* for the recursive set of knowing he describes. S and A mutually know* that there is a candle on the table. Once Grice's account of meaning is adapted to refer to mutual knowledge*, the apparent counter-examples are all ruled inadmissible, and therefore no longer pose a problem. The intentions S has in producing an utterance must be 'mutual known* by S and A for a true instance of meaning to take place. Mutual knowl-edge* with its infinite regress, is missing in each of the counter-examples.  'Meaning' might appear to be offering a definition of the concept of meaning by proposing to substitute the concept of intention: in the vein of the logical positivists to be 'translating' problematic sentences into those that do not contain the problem term. This was certainly Schiffer's interpretation when he described Grice's account as 'reduc-tionist'. However, more recent commentators have been keen to defend Grice against this interpretation. For instance, Giovanna Cosenza has suggested that the analysis would be reductionist 'only if Grice had seriously considered speakers' intentions and psychological states as more fundamental, more basic, either epistemologically or metaphysically, than all the concepts related to linguistic meaning', and claimed that Grice did not hold this view.4 Anita Avramides has also argued that Grice's account of meaning need not be seen as reductionist. *3  Grice was certainly distancing himself from those accounts of what he would call 'non-natural meaning' in which the notion of convention was primary. However, he was somewhat tentative about the precise relation between the two central concepts; his belief that convention could be entirely subsumed within an intentional account is expressed more as a hope than as a conviction. He seems, further, to have been troubled by the exact relationships between the different messages potentially conveyed by a single utterance. Even if the definition of convention is to be dependent on intention, some messages are more closely or more obviously related to conventional meaning than others. He as yet had no formal account of how the 'full significance' of an utterance might be derived or calculated. Nor had he yet drawn a clear distinction between messages conveyed by the words uttered and messages conveyed by the very act of utterance. This is a distinction Schiffer describes by differentiating between 'S meant something by (or in) producing (or doing) x' and 'S meant something by x'.* A very similar point is made by Paul Ziff in his 1967 response to 'Meaning'.  Ziff is decidedly dismissive of Grice's 'ingenious intricate discussion' of meaning and the 'fog' to which it gives rise.* He argues that the meanings of words and phrases, and indeed the lack of meaning of nonsense  'words'  , are quite independent of any individual's intention. Like Schiffer, he argues that 'Grice seems to have conflated and confused "A meant something by uttering x" ... with the quite different "A meant  something by X"146  The responses and criticisms of his peers were to feed into Grice's own thinking about meaning over the following years. His published outputduring the 1950s was restricted to 'In defence of a dogma' and  'Meaning', hardly an impressive record even by the standards of the time. Peter Strawson was responsible for seeing both these papers into print, while those he left alone fell victim to Grice's perfectionism.  Some, like 'Intentions and dispositions' were never published, while others waited in manuscript for 30 or more years. Of these, 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes' and 'Common sense and scepticism' indicate a development in Grice's thinking on the need to distinguish between what our words literally mean and what we mean by using those words. They also suggest something of Grice's ambivalence towards the place of conventional meaning. Like much of his work, these papers developed from his teaching: the former from a lecture delivered in 1950 and the latter from joint classes with A. D. Woozley at the same time or even earlier.  Grice's project in these papers was a typically 'ordinary language' enterprise: the desire to tackle a familiar philosophical problem by means of a rigorous examination of the terms characteristically employed to discuss it. The problem in question was how to address scepticism. In response to G. E. Moore's 'defence from common sense' the American philosopher Norman Malcolm had suggested that Moore was in effect approaching the problem via an appeal to ordinary lan-guage, although apparently without knowing it. We use expressions to refer to and to describe material objects, and we do so in a 'standard' or 'ordinary' way. To claim, as some philosophers have done, that there are no material objects, is therefore to 'go against ordinary language'. 47 In effect, such philosophers are claiming that some uses of ordinary language are self-contradictory, or always incorrect, an inadmissible claim because 'ordinary language is correct language'. 48 Grice challenges Malcolm's interpretation of Moore. Malcolm draws an unwarranted polarity between 'ordinary' and 'self-contradictory' in language use, he suggests. The two properties need not be incompatible; people do routinely say things that are literally self-contradictory or absurd. Further-more, not every meaningful sentence would actually find a use in ordinary language. In 'Common sense and scepticism', he offers a striking example of what he means. 'It would no doubt be possible to fill in the gaps in "The — archbishop fell down the — stairs and bumped  —- like —," with such a combination of indecencies and blasphemies that no one would ever use such an expression', but we would not therefore want to treat the expression as self-contradictory. 4 In 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes', he suggests that it is often necessary to acknowledge a difference between 'what a given expression means (ingeneral)' and 'what a particular speaker means, or meant, by that expression on a particular occasion. Figurative or ironic utterances, for instance, involve 'special' uses of language.  As a general definition, 'what a particular speaker means by a particular utterance (of a statement-making character) on a particular occasion is to be identified with what he intends by means of the utterance to get his audience to believe!»' For this intention to be successful, the speaker must at least rely on the audience's familiarity with 'standard' or 'general' use, even if individual occasion meaning is to differ from this. In this way Grice is able to offer his own challenge to the sceptic.  Faced with everyday statements about material objects, the sceptic is forced to claim either that, on particular occasions, people use expressions to mean things they have no intention of getting their audience to believe, or that people frequently use language in a way quite unlike its proper ('general') meaning, leaving the success of everyday communication unexplained. Although in general agreement with Malcolm's aim in refuting scepticism, Grice is unhappy with the apparent simpli-fications, and some of the implications, of his argument. He replaces it with his own more sophisticated argument from ordinary language, an argument depending in particular on a detailed examination of the nature of 'meaning'.As Grice's enthusiasm for ordinary language philosophy became increasingly qualified during the 1950s, his interest was growing in the rather different styles of philosophy of language then current in America.  Recent improvements in communications had made possible an exchange of ideas across the Atlantic that would have been unthinkable before the war. W. V. O. Quine had made a considerable impression at Oxford during his time as Eastman Professor. Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from him over certain specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Quine, who was visiting England for a whole year, and who brought with him clothes, books and even provisions in the knowledge that rationing was still in force, travelled by ship.' However, during the same decade the rapid proliferation of passenger air travel enabled movement of academics between Britain and America for even short stays and lecture tours. Grice himself made a number of such visits, and was impressed by the formal and theory-driven philosophy he encountered. Most of all he was impressed by the work of Noam Chomsky.  It may seem surprising that the middle-aged British philosopher interested in the role of individual speakers in creating meaning should cite as an influence the young American linguist notorious for dismissing issues of use in his pursuit of a universal theory of language. But Grice was inspired by Chomsky's demonstration in his work on syntax of how  'a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control'. Less for-mally, he expressed admiration for an approach that did not offer  'piecemeal reflections on language' but rather where 'one got a pictureof the whole thing' Chomsky's first and highly influential book Syntactic Structures was well known among Grice's Oxford contemporaries.  The Play Group worked their slow and meticulous way through it during the autumn of 1959. Austin, in particular, was extremely impressed.  Grice characterised and perhaps parodied him as revering Chomsky for his sheer audacity in taking on a subject even more sacred than phi-losophy: the subject of grammar. Grice's own interest was focused on theory formation and its philosophical consequences. Chomsky was taking a new approach to the study of syntax by proposing a general theory where previously there had been only localised description and analysis. He claimed, for instance, that ideally 'a formalised theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed'. Grice's aim, it was becoming clear, was to do something similar for the study of language use.  Meanwhile, ordinary language philosophy itself was in decline. As for any school of thought, it is difficult to determine an exact endpoint, and some commentators have suggested a date as late as 1970. However, it is generally accepted that the heyday of ordinary language philosophy was during the years immediately following the Second World War.  The sense of excitement and adventure that characterised its beginning began to wane during the 1950s. Despite his professed dislike of disci-pleship, Austin seems to have become anxious about what he perceived as the lack of a next generation of like-minded young philosophers at Oxford. It became an open secret among his colleagues that he was seriously contemplating a move to the University of California, Berkeley?  No final decision was ever made. Austin died early in 1960 at the age of 48, having succumbed quickly to cancer over the previous months.  Reserved and private to the last, he hid his illness from even his closest colleagues until he was unable to continue work. His death was certainly a blow to ordinary language philosophy, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it was the immediate cause of its demise. Grice, who seems to have been regarded as Austin's natural deputy, stepped in as convenor of the Play Group, which met under his leadership for the next seven years. Individuals such as Strawson, Warnock, Urmson and Grice himself continued to produce work with recognisably 'ordinary language' leanings throughout the 1960s.  Grice's interests at this time were not driven entirely by philosophical trends in Oxford and America; he was also turning his attention to some very old logical problems. In particular, he was interested in questions concerning apparent counterparts to logical constants in natural language. For instance, in the early 1960s he revisited a theme he hadfirst considered before the war, when he gave a series of lectures on  'Negation'  . In these, he concerns himself with the analysis of sentences  containing 'not', and with the extent to which this should coincide with a logical analysis of negation. Consideration of a variety of example sentences leads him to reject the simple equation of 'not' with the logical operation of switching truth polarity, usually positive to negative. He argues that 'it might be said that in explaining the force of "not" in terms of "contradictory" we have oversimplified the ordinary use of  "not"! In another lecture from the series he suggests that the lack of correspondence between 'not' and contradiction 'might be explained in terms of pragmatic pressures which govern the use of language in general'® Grice was hoping to find not just an account of the uses of this particular expression, but a general theory of language use capable of extension to other problems in logic. He would have been familiar enough with such problems. The discussion of some of them dates back as far as Aristotle, in whose work he was well read even as an undergraduate.  In Categoriae, Aristotle describes not just categories of lexical meaning, but also the types of relationships holding between words. To the modern logician, the use of terms in the following passage may be obscure, but the relationship of logical entailment is easily recognisable.  One is prior to two because if there are two it follows at once that there is one whereas if there is one there are not necessarily two, so that the implication of the other's existence does not hold reciprocally from one.'  The relationship between 'two' and 'one', or indeed between any two cardinal numbers where one is greater than the other, is one of asymmetrical entailment. 'Two' entails 'one',  ', but 'one' does not entail 'two'  A similar relationship holds between a superordinate and any of its hyponyms, or between a general and a more specific term. To use Aristotle's example: 'if there is a fish there is an animal, but if there is an animal there is not necessarily a fish.'º The asymmetrical nature of this relationship means that use of the more general term tells us nothing at all about the applicability of the more specific. Aristotle also considers the relative acceptability of general and specific terms, and in doing this he goes beyond a narrowly logical focus.  For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more informative and apt to give the species than the genus. For example,it would be more informative to say of the individual man that he is a man than that he is an animal (since the one is more distinctive of the individual man while the other is more general)."  Applying the term 'animal' to an individual tells us nothing about whether that individual is a man or not. Therefore, if the more specific term 'man' applies it is more 'apt', because it gives more information.  This same point arises in a discussion of the applicability of certain descriptions later in Categoriae. Aristotle suggests that: 'it is not what has not teeth that we call toothless, or what has not sight blind, but what has not got them at the time when it is natural for it to have them.'2 A term such as 'toothless' is only applied, because it is only informative, in those situations when it might be expected not to apply. Here, again, the discussion of what 'we call' things goes beyond purely logical meaning to take account of how expressions are generally used. Logically speaking a stone could appropriately be described as toothless or blind; in actual practice it is very unlikely to be so described.  Grice's self-imposed task in considering the general 'pragmatic pressures' on language use was, at least in part, one of extending Aristotle's sensitivity to the standard uses of certain expressions, and examining how regularities of use can have distorting effects on intuitions about logical meaning. He was by no means the first philosopher to consider this. For instance, John Stuart Mill, in his response to the work of Sir William Hamilton, draws attention to the distinction between logic and  'the usage of language', 13 He reproaches Hamilton for not paying sufficient attention to this distinction, and suggests that this is enough to explain some of Hamilton's mistakes in logic. Mill glosses Hamilton as maintaining that 'the form "Some A is B" ... ought in logical propriety to be used and understood in the sense of "some and some only" ' 14 Hamilton is therefore committed to the claim that 'all' and 'some' are mutually incompatible: that an assertion involving 'some' has as part of its meaning 'not all'. This is at odds with the observations on quantity in Categoriae and indeed, as Mill suggests, with 'the practice of all writers on logic'. Mill explains this mistake as a confusion of logical meaning with a feature of 'common conversation in its most unprecise form'. In this, he is drawing on the extra, non-logical but generally understood 'meanings' associated with particular expressions. In a passage that would not be out of place in a modern discussion of lin-guistics, Mill suggests that:If I say to any one, 'I saw some of your children to-day,' he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so.  15  Mill draws a distinction between what 'words mean' and what we generally infer from hearing them used. In what can be seen as an extension of Aristotle's discussion of 'aptness', he argues that it is a mistake to confuse these two very different types of significance. A more specific word such as 'all' is more appropriate, if it is applicable, than a more general word such as 'some'. Therefore, the use of the more general leads to the inference, although it does not strictly mean, that the more specific does not apply. 'Some' suggests, but does not actually entail 'not all'.  Besides his interest in logical problems with a venerable pedigree, Grice was also concerned with issues familiar to him from the work of recent or contemporary philosophers. In both published work and informal notes he frequently lists these and arranges them in groups.  Part of his achievement in the theory he was developing lay in seeing connections between an apparently disparate collection of problems and countenancing a single solution for them all. For instance, in Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that, although the expressions 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' appear to be simple opposites, they both require a particular condition for applicability, namely that the action in question is in some way reprehensible. If they were simple opposites, it should always be the case that one or other would be correct in describing an action, yet in the absence of the crucial condition, to apply either would be to say something 'absurd'. Similarly, although if someone has performed some action, that person must in a sense have tried to perform it, it is often extremely odd to say so. In cases where there was no difficulty or doubt over the outcome, it is inappropriate to say that someone tried to do something: so much so that some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have claimed that it is simply wrong. Another related problem is familiar from Austin's work; it is the one summed up in his slogan 'no modification without aberration'. For the ordinary uses of many verbs, it does not seem appropriate to apply either a modifying word or phrase or its opposite. Austin was therefore offering a gen-eralisation that includes, but is not restricted to, Ryle's claims about  'voluntary' and 'involuntary'. For many everyday action verbs, the act described must have taken place in some non-standard way for anymodification appropriately to apply. Austin offers no theory based on this observation, and indeed Grice was unimpressed by it even as a gen-eralisation; he claimed in an unpublished paper that it was 'clearly fraudulent'. 'No "aberration" is needed for the appearance of the adverbial "in a taxi" within the phrase "he travelled to the airport in a taxi"; aberrations are needed only for modifications which are corrective qualifications. 16  Grice's general account of language, conceived with the twin ambitions of refining his philosophy of meaning and of explaining a diverse range of philosophical problems, gradually developed into his theory of conversation. Like his project in 'Meaning', this draws on a  'common-sense' understanding of language: in this case, that what people say and what they mean are often very different matters. This observation was far from original, but Grice's response to it was in some crucial ways entirely new in philosophy. Unlike formal philosophers such as Russell or the logical positivists, he argued that the differences between literal and speaker meaning are not random and diverse, and do not make the rigorous study of the latter a futile exercise. But he also differed from contemporary philosophers of ordinary language, in arguing that interest in formal or abstract meaning need not be abandoned in the face of the particularities of individual usage. Rather, the difference between the two types of meaning could be seen as systematic and explicable, following from one very general principle of human behaviour, and a number of specific ways in which this worked out in practice. In effect, the use of language, like many other aspects of human behaviour, is an end-driven endeavour. People engage in communication in the expectation of achieving certain outcomes, and in the pursuit of those outcomes they are prepared to maintain, and expect others to maintain, certain strategies. This mutual pursuit of goals results in cooperation between speakers. This manifests itself in terms of four distinct categories of behaviour, each of which can be sum-marised by one or more maxims that speakers observe. The categories and maxims are familiar to every student of pragmatics, although in later commentaries they are often all subsumed under the title  'maxims'  Category of Quantity  Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).  Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.  Category of Quality  Do not say what you believe to be false.  Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.  Category of Relation   Be relevant.  Category of Manner  Avoid ambiguity of expression.  Avoid ambiguity.  Be brief.  Be orderly.!7  Grice uses the simple notion of cooperation, together with the more elaborate structure of categories, to offer a systematic account of the many ways in which literal and implied meaning, or 'what is said' and what is implicated', differ from one another. In effect, the expectation of cooperation both licenses these differences and explains their usually successful resolution. Speakers rely on the fact that hearers will be able to reinterpret the literal content of their utterances, or fill in missing information, so as to achieve a successful contribution to the conversation in hand. The noun 'implicature' and verb 'implicate' (as used in relation to that noun) are now familiar in the discussion of pragmatic meaning, but they were coined by Grice, and coined fairly late on in the development of his theory. In early work on conversation he suggested that a 'special kind of implication' could be used to account for various differences between conventional meaning and speaker meaning. He ultimately found this formulation inadequate, together with a host of other words such as 'suggest', 'hint' and even 'mean', precisely because of their complex pre-existing usage both within and outside philosophy.    The difference between saying and meaning had an established philosophical pedigree, as well as a basis in common sense. A literature dating back to G. E. Moore, but largely concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s, offers a significant context to Grice's work. Little of this is now read and none of it attempts anything as ambitious as a generalising theory of communication. With typical laxness, Grice does not refer to this body of work in any of his writings on the topic, although he must have been aware of it; much of it originated from the tight circle of Oxford phi-losophy. Writing for his fellow philosophers, and in the conventions ofhis time, he was able to refer vaguely and generally to the debate in the expectation that the relevant context would be recognised  G. E. Moore had argued that when we use an indicative sentence we assert the content of the sentence, but we also imply personal commitment to the truthfulness of that content; 'If I say that I went to the pictures last Tuesday, I imply by saying so that I believe or know that I did, but I do not say that I believe or know this."8 This distinction was picked up by a number of philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel discussed the sense of 'imply' identified by Moore, proposing to describe it as 'pragmatical'. Bar-Hillel identifies himself as a supporter of 'logical empiricism' (he quotes approvingly a comment from Carnap to the effect that natural languages are too complex and messy to be the focus of rigorous scientific enquiry) and his article is aimed explicitly at rejecting philosophy of the 'analytic method' in general and of Moore in particular. However, he suggests that by using sentences that are 'meaningless' to logical empiricists, such as the sentences of metaphysics or aesthetics, 'one may nevertheless imply sentences which are perfectly meaningful, according to the same criteria, and are perhaps even true and highly important' 2º A full account of the pragmatic sense of 'implies' might, he predicts, prove highly important in discussing linguistic behaviour. A few years later D. J. O'Connor contrasted the familiar 'logical paradoxes' of philosophy with less well known 'pragmatic paradoxes'. O'Connor draws attention to certain example sentences (such as 'I believe there are tigers in Mexico but there aren't any there at all') which, although not logically contradictory or necessarily false, are pragmatically unsatisfactory. His purpose is to distinguish between logic and language and to urge philosophers to attempt to 'make a little clearer the ways in which ordinary language can limit and mislead us'. 21  The philosophical significance of implication was also discussed by those more sympathetic to ordinary language, in particular by members of the Play Group. Writing in Mind in 1952, J. O. Urmson acknowledged the 'implied claim to truth' in the use of indicative statements, but felt the need to clarify his terms: 'The word "implies" is being used in such a way that if there is a convention that X will only be done in circumstances Y, a man implies that situation Y holds if he does X.22 Urmson suggests the addition of an 'implied claim to reasonableness'; 'it is, I think, a presupposition of communication that people will not make statements, thereby implying their truth, unless they have some ground, however tenuous, for those statements. 23 Read with hindsight, Urmson's suggestion looks like a hint towards Grice's second maxim ofQuality. Another member of the Play Group, P. H. Nowell-Smith, appears to add something like a maxim of Relevance, a notion that Grice discusses as early as the original version of 'Meaning'. In his book Ethics, Nowell-Smith suggests that there are certain 'contextual implications' that generally accompany the use of words, but that are dependent on particular contexts. Without reference to Urmson, he phrases these as follows:  When a speaker uses a sentence to make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.... A speaker contextually implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his statement.... What a speaker says may be assumed to be relevant to the interests of his audience.24  For Nowell-Smith the contextual rules are primary, and do not operate with reference to logical meaning; in effect there is no 'what is said'. In fact, he specifies that logical meaning is a subclass of contextual impli-cation, because it is meaning we are entitled to infer in any context whatsoever. Other philosophers concerned with implication, however, did identify different levels of meaning. In The Logic of Moral Discourse, 1955, Paul Edwards distinguishes between the referent of a sentence (the fact that makes a sentence true or, in its absence, false: in effect the truth-conditions) and 'what the sentence expresses' (anything it is possible to infer about the speaker on the basis of the utterance).25  Some attempted syntheses of thinking about implication lacked much in the way of generalising or explanatory force. In his 1958 article 'Prag-matic implication', C. K. Grant's account of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena leads him to the claim that 'a statement pragmatically implies those propositions whose falsity would render the making of the statement absurd, that is, pointless.26 What is implied by a statement of p, he insists, is not just the speaker's belief in p, but some further proposition. Isobel Hungerland, writing in 1960, reviews the range of attempts to mediate between asserted and implied meaning and exclaims 'What a range of rules!'? Her suggestion of a generalisa-tion across these rules is that 'a speaker in making a statement contextually implies whatever one is entitled to infer on the basis of the presumption that his act of stating is normal. 28  Grice was working on his own generalisation, which was to link together the range of principles of language use into one coherent account, and to give this a place in a more ambitious theory of lan-guage. If the maxims of Quality and of Relation were familiar from con-temporary work in Ethics, those of Quantity and Manner drew on Grice's long-standing concern about stronger and weaker statements.  This was the idea that had interested him in his rough notes on 'visa' for his work on perception with Geoffrey Warnock. The earliest published indication appeared in 1952, in a footnote to Peter Strawson's Introduction to Logical Theory. In discussing the relationship between the statement 'there is not a book in his room which is not by an English author' and the assumption 'there are books in his room', Strawson draws attention to the need to distinguish between strictly logically relations and the rules of 'linguistic conduct' 29 He suggests as one such rule:  'one does not make the (logically) lesser when one could truthfully (and with equal or greater linguistic economy) make the greater, claim. It would be misleading, although not strictly false, to make the less informative claim about English authors if in a position to make the much more informative claim that there are no books at all. Strawson acknowledges that 'the operation of this "pragmatic rule" was first pointed out to me, in a different connection, by Mr H. P. Grice!  It was typical of Grice that he did not publish his own account of this pragmatic rule until almost ten years after Strawson's acknowledgement.  'The causal theory of perception' appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, after Grice delivered it as a symposium paper at the meeting of the Society in Cambridge in July 1961. His main focus is his long-standing interest in the status of our observations of material objects. Grice offers tentative support for a causal account of percep-tion. Theories of this type date back at least to John Locke. They maintain that we directly perceive through our faculties of sense a series of information, given the title 'sense data' by later philosophers, and infer that these are caused by material objects in the world. For Locke, the inference was justifiable, but his account of perception, and causal theories ever since, had been dogged by accusations of scepticism. If we have no direct access to material objects, but only to the sense data they putatively cause, the way is left open to doubt the independent existence of such objects.  Grice's defence is tentative, even by his own circumspect standards.  He proposes to advance a version of the causal theory 'which is, if not true, at least not obviously false'.3° Some of the defence itself is presented in quotation marks, as a fictional 'opponent' argues with a fictional 'objector' to the causal theory, implicitly distancing Grice from the arguments on either side. This tentativeness might in part be explained by the extreme heresy of Grice's enterprise for a philosopher of ordinary language. Some of Austin's most strident remarks about ordi-nary language had appeared in his attack in Sense and Sensibilia on philosophical theories of perception, and their reliance on the obscure and technical notion of 'sense data'. Austin's chief target here had been phe-nomenalism which, in claiming that sense data are the essence of what we think of as material objects, is often seen as a direct competitor to the causal theory of perception. Although defending one of phenome-nalism's rivals, Grice was suggesting reasons for retaining Austin's particular bugbear, 'sense data', as a term of art. Indeed, he even goes so far as to hint that his own, speculative version of the causal theory 'neither obviously entails nor obviously conflicts with Phenomenalism'.31  Grice defends sense data because, as he argues, the sceptic who wants to question the existence of the material world needs to make use of them and the sceptic's position at least deserves to be heard. He defends it also because of his own ideas about language use. Indeed, his essay on perception seems at times in danger of being hijacked by his interest in language. This is not entirely out of keeping with the subject; through Locke and Berkeley to Ayer and Austin, the philosophy of perception had focused on the correct interpretation of sentences in which judgements of perception are expressed. However, Grice makes no secret of his hope that his interpretation of such sentences will fit with views of language and use motivated by other considerations. Much of the essay is taken up with a discussion of general principles governing the use of language. This is inspired by a standard argument for retaining  'sense data' as a technical term; it would appear to underlie ordinary expressions such as 'so-and-so looks @ [e.g. blue] to me'. In effect, a suitably rigorous account of the meaning of such expressions would need to include reference to something such as a sense datum that corresponds to the subjective experience described. A potential objector might point out that such expressions are not appropriate to all instances of perception; they would only in fact be used in contexts where a condition of either doubt or denial (D-or-D) as to the applicability of @ holds. 'There would be something at least prima facie odd about my saying "That looks red to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted by a British pillar box in normal daylight at a range of a few feet.'32  Grice considers two possible ways of explaining this oddity. It could be seen as 'a feature of the use, perhaps of the meaning' of such expressions that they carry the implication that the D-or-D condition is ful-filled. Use of such expressions in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a misuse, and would fail to be either true or false.Alternatively, such statements could be seen as true whenever the property @ applies but, in the absence of the D-or-D condition, severely mis-leading. Use in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a more general error, because of 'a general feature or principle of the use of language' 33 Grice des cribes how until recently he had been undecided as to which of these two explanations to favour. He had, however, lent towards the second because it 'was more in line with the kind of thing I was inclined to say about other linguistic phenomena which are in some degree comparable.  934  Towards the end of his discussion, Grice hesitantly suggests a first attempt at formulating the general principle of language use: 'One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for so doing. 35 This is, of course, remarkably similar to the observation attributed to him by Strawson a decade earlier.  It seems that during the intervening years Grice had become increasingly impressed by how many different types of meaning this rule could explain, in other words by how general and simple an account of language use it suggested. In two interesting respects the formulation of the rule had changed. First, it had changed from a statement about what  'one does' in language use to what 'one should do'. This brought it nearer to the first maxim of Quantity it was eventually to become.  Second, the new formulation of the rule introduces possible exceptions, by alluding to 'good reasons' for breaking it. Again, Grice does not elaborate on this qualification, but the consideration of reasons for breaching the maxims, together with a discussion of the consequences of doing so, was to be vital to the subsequent development of his work.  It was what was to give it explanatory and generalising abilities beyond those of a simple list of 'rules' of linguistic behaviour.  Grice's claims about the use of language offer support to the defender of sense data. They allow the defender to describe statements of the  'so-and-so looks @ to me' type as strictly true regardless of whether the D-or-D condition holds. If such statements call for the use of sense data as a technical term to explain their meaning, then sense data are applicable to any description of perception. It is simply that in most non-con-troversial contexts such statements will be avoided because, although perfectly true, they will introduce misleading suggestions. Here, perhaps, was Grice's greatest heresy. Austin's rejection of sense data relied on an appeal to what people ordinarily say, together with an assumption that this is the best guide to meaning and truth. Grice's tentative support for it relies on a distinction between what people can truthfully say, and what they actually, realistically do say. Despite itsemphasis on linguistic use, 'The causal theory of perception' was well received as a contribution to the philosophy of perception. It was anthologised in 1965 in Robert Swartz's Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing.  In 1967, Grice's sometime collaborator Geoffrey Warnock included the essay in his volume on The Philosophy of Perception, singling it out for praise as an 'exceedingly ingenious and resourceful contribution'. 36  As was the case throughout his working life, Grice made no firm distinction between his teaching and the development of his own philosophical ideas. A series of lecture notes from the 1960s on topics relating to speaker meaning and context therefore provide an insight into the lines along which his thinking was developing, as do some rough notes from the same period. What his students gained from the fresh ideas in Grice's lectures, however, they paid for in his cavalier attitude to the topic and aims of the class. He begins one lecture, which is entitled simply 'Saying: Week 1':  Although the official title of this class is 'Saying', let me say at once that we are unlikely to reach any direct discussion of the notion of saying for several weeks, and in the likely event of our failing to make any substantial inroads on the title topic this term, my present intention is to continue the class into next term.37  Grice's interest in these lectures was in finding out what can be learnt about speaker meaning, specifically about what sets it apart from linguistic meaning, from close attention to its characteristics and circum-stances. The opening of another of the lectures, entitled 'The general theory of context', tells rather more of his purpose and method than is made explicit in much of the later, published work.  Philosophers often say that context is very important. Let us take this remark seriously. Surely, if we do, we shall want to consider this remark not merely in its relation to this or that problem, i.e. in context, but also in itself, i.e. out of context. If we are to take this seriously, we must be systematic, that is thorough and orderly. If we are to be orderly we must start with what is relatively simple. Here, though not of course everywhere, to be simple is to be as abstract as possible; by this I mean merely that we want, to begin with, to have as few cards on the table as we can. Orderliness will then consist in seeing first what we can do with the cards we have; and when we think that we have exhausted this investigation, we put another card on the table, and see what that enables us to do.It is not hard to discern Austin's influence here, in the insistence that a particular philosophical commonplace, if it is to be accepted as a useful explanation, must first be subject to a rigorous process of analy-sis. The call for system and order, however, is Grice's own. He had reacted against precisely the tendency towards unordered, open-ended lists in Austin's work. He argues in these lectures that thinking seriously about context means thinking about conversation; this is the setting for most examples of speaker meaning. He proposes, therefore, to compile an account of some of the basic properties common to conversations generally. His method of limiting his hand was to result in certain highly artificial simplifications, but he made these simplifications deliberately and knowingly. For instance, the relevant context was to be assumed to be limited to what he calls the 'linguistic environment': to the content of the conversation itself. Conversation was assumed to take place between two people who alternate as speaker and hearer, and to be concerned simply with the business of transferring information between them.  A number of the lectures include discussion of the types of behaviour people in general exhibit, and therefore the types of expectations they might bring to a venture such as a conversation. Grice suggests that people in general both exhibit and expect a certain degree of helpfulness from others, usually on the understanding that such helpfulness does not get in the way of particular goals, and does not involve undue effort. If two people, even complete strangers, are going through a gate, the expectation is that the first one through will hold the gate open, or at least leave it open, for the second. The expectation is such that to do otherwise without particular reason would be interpreted as deliberately rude.  The type of helpfulness exhibited and expected in conversation is more specific because of a particular, although not a unique, feature of con-versation; it is a collaborative venture between the participants. At least in the simplified version of conversation discussed in these lectures, there is a shared aim or purpose. However, an account of the particular type of helpfulness expected in conversation must be capable of extension to any collaborative activity. In his early notes on the subject, Grice considers  'cooperation' as a label for the features he was seeking to describe. Does  'helpfulness in something we are doing together'  ', he wonders in a note,  equate to 'cooperation'? He seems to have decided that it does; by the later lectures in the series 'the principle of conversational helpfulness' has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation'.  During the Oxford lectures Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regu-larities, or principles, detailing expected behaviour. The term 'maxim' to describe these regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.  Grice's initial choices of term are 'objectives', or 'desiderata'; he was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose of achieving the joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits two such desiderata: those relating to candour on the one hand, and clarity on the other. The desideratum of candour contains his general principle of making the strongest possible statement and, as a limiting factor on this, the suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead.  The desideratum of clarity concerns the manner of expression for any conversational contribution. It includes the importance of expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main import of an utterance be clear and explicit. These two factors are constantly to be weighed against two fundamental and sometimes competing demands. Contributions to a conversation are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the principle of Conversational Benevolence. The principle of Conversational Self-Love ensures the assumption on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble in framing their contribution.  Grice suggests that many philosophers are guilty of inexactness in their use of expressions such as 'saying', 'meaning' and 'use'  ', applying  them as if they were interchangeable, and in effect confusing different ways in which a single utterance can convey information. For instance, Grice refers back to the discussion at a previous class he had given jointly with David Pears, when the exact meaning of the verb 'to try' was discussed. This, of course, was one of the specific philosophical problems he was interested in accounting for by means of general principles of use. Stuart Hampshire had apparently claimed that if someone, X, did something, it is always possible to say that X tried to do it. This was challenged; in situations when there is no obvious difficulty or risk of failure involved it is inappropriate to talk of someone's trying to do something. Grice's answer had been that, while it is always true to say that X tried to do something, this may sometimes be a misleading way of speaking. If X succeeded in performing the act, it would be more informative and therefore more cooperative to say so. Therefore, an utterance of 'X tried to do it' will imply, but not actually say, that X did not succeed.  In his consideration of the desiderata of conversational participation, Grice initially compiles a loose assemblage of features. By the later lectures these appear in more or less their final form under the categories Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner (or, sometimes, Mode). Inarranging the desiderata in this way, Grice was presumably seeking to impose a formal arrangement on a diverse set of principles. But it seems that he had other motives: semi-seriously to echo the use of categories in such orthodox philosophies as those of Aristotle and Kant, and more importantly to draw on their ideas of natural, universal divisions of experience. The regularities of conversational behaviour were intended to include aspects of human behaviour and cognition beyond the purely linguistic. Grice's collaborative work with Strawson had been concerned with Aristotle's division of experience into 'categories' of substances.  Aristotle's original formulation of the list of such properties allows that they can take the form of 'either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected'.38 He concentrates mainly on the first four, and these received most attention in subsequent developments of his work. They were the starting-point for Kant's use of categories to describe types of human experience, and his argument that these form the basis of all possible human knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes to divide the pure concepts of understanding into four main divisions:  'Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distinct from it in execu-tion. '39 These are categories 'Of Quantity', 'Of Quality', 'Of Relation' and  'Of Modality', with various subdivisions ascribed to each. Kant's claims for both the fundamental and the exhaustive nature of these categories are explicit:  This division is systematically generated from a common principle, namely the faculty for judging (which is the same as the faculty for thinking), and has not arisen rhapsodically from a haphazard search for pure concepts, of the completeness of which one could never be certain.  40  Kant goes so far as to suggest that his table of categories, containing all the basic concepts of understanding, could provide the basis for any philosophical theory. These, therefore, offered Grice divisions of experience with a sound pedigree and an established claim to be universals of human cognition.  Early in 1967, Grice travelled to Harvard to deliver that year's William James lectures, the prestigious philosophical series in which Austin had put forward his theory of speech acts 12 years earlier. Grice's entitled his lectures 'Logic and conversation'. He was presenting his current thinking about meaning to an audience beyond that of his students andimmediate colleagues and was clearly aware of the different assumptions and prejudices he could expect in an American, as opposed to an Oxford, audience. 'Some of you may regard some of the examples of the manoeuvre which I am about to mention as being representative of an out-dated style of philosophy', he suggests in the introductory lecture, 'I do not think that one should be too quick to write off such a style.'41 Addressing philosophical concerns by means of an attention to everyday language was still a highly respectable, even an orthodox approach in Oxford. In America it was seen by at least some as belonging to an unsuccessful, and now rather passé, school of thought. In pleading its cause, Grice argues that it still has much to offer: in this case, the possibility of developing a theory to discriminate between utterances that are inappropriate because false, and those that are inappropriate for some other reason. Despite the difficulties inherent in such an ambitious scheme, and the well-known problems with the school of thought in question, he does not give up hope altogether of 'system-atizing the linguistic phenomena of natural discourse'.  Grice's ultimate aim in the lectures is ambitious and uncompromis-ing; his interest 'will lie in the generation of an outline of a philosophical theory of language' 4 He argues for a complex understanding of the significance of any utterance in a particular context; its meaning is not a unitary phenomenon. Conventional meanin g has a necessary, but by no means a sufficient role to play. Indeed conventional meaning is itself not a unitary phenomenon. Some aspects of it involve the speaker in a commitment to the truth of a certain proposition; this is  'what is said' on any particular occasion. Other aspects may be associated by convention with the words used, but not be part of what the speaker is understood literally to have said. The examples 'She was poor but honest' and 'He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave' convey more than just the truth of the two conjuncts, more than would be conveyed by 'She was poor and honest' or 'He is an Englishman and he is brave'.  '. An idea of contrast is introduced in the first example and one of consequence in the second. These ideas are attached to the use of the individual words 'but' and 'therefore', but do not contribute to the truth-conditions of the sentences. We would not want to say that the sentences were actually false if both conjuncts were true, but we did not agree with the idea of contrast or of consequence. We might, rather, want to say that the speaker was presenting true facts in a misleading way. These examples demonstrate implicated elements associated with the conventional meaning of the words used, elements Grice labels  'conventional implicatures'There is another level at which speaker meaning can differ from what is said, dependent on context or, for Grice, on conversation. In 'con-versational implicatures' meaning is conveyed not so much by what is said, but by the fact that it is said. This is where the categories of conversational cooperation, and their various maxims, play their part.  The onus on participants in a conversation to cooperate towards their common goal, and more particularly the expectation each participant has of cooperation from the other, ensures that the understanding of an utterance often goes beyond what is said. Faced with an apparently uncooperative utterance, or one apparently in breach of some maxim, a conversationalist will if possible 'rescue' that utterance by interpreting it as an appropriate contribution. In this way, Grice offers a more detailed account of the idea he explored in 'Meaning', and in his notes from that time: that there are three 'levels' of meaning, or three different degrees to which a speaker may be committed to a proposition. His model now includes, 'what is said', 'conventional meaning' (including conventional implicatures) and 'what is conversationally implicated'.  The presentation of the norms of conversational behaviour in the William James lectures is rather different from Grice's handling of them in his earlier work. The maxims, or the categories they fall into, are no longer presented as the primary forces at work. Instead, all are assumed under a general 'Principle of Cooperation'. The principle appeared late in the development of Grice's theory. It enjoins speakers to: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.'43 The name 'Cooperative Principle' was even later; it was added using an omission mark in a manuscript copy of the second William James lecture. Grice may well have been attempting to give a name, and an exact formulation, to his previously rather nebulous idea of cooperation or 'helpfulness'. However, the effect was to change what was presented as a series of 'desiderata', features of conversational behaviour participants might expect in their exchanges, to something looking like a powerful and general injunction to correct social behaviour.  In the development of his theory of conversation, Grice was much exercised by the status of the categories as psychological concepts. He questioned whether the maxims were the result of entering into a quasi-contract by engaging in conversation, simply inductive generalisations over what people do in fact do in conversation, or, as he suggested in one rough note, just 'special cases of what a decent chap should do'.  He remained undecided on this matter throughout the development ofthe theory, content to concentrate on the effects on meaning of the maxims, whatever their status. By the time of the William James lectures, however, he seems to be closer to an answer. He is 'enough of a rationalist' to want to find an explanation beyond mere empirical generalisation.  4 The following suggestion results from this impetus:  So I would like to be able to show that observation of the Cooperative Principle and maxims is reasonable (rational) along the following lines: that anyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation/communication (such as giving and receiving information, influencing and being influenced by others) must be expected to have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges that will be profitable only on the assumption that they are conducted in general accordance with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims.45  This is a wordy explanation, and also a troublesome one. It seems to create a loop linking the aim of explaining cooperation to an account of conversation as dependent on cooperation, a loop from which it does not successfully escape. The link between reasonableness and cooperation is far from explicit. Nevertheless, this passage offers Grice's account of his own preferences in seeking an answer to the question over the status, and hence the motivation, for the Cooperative Principle. His preference, particularly his reference to 'rational' behaviour, was to prove important in the subsequent development of his work.  However derived, the maxims operate to produce conversational implicatures in a number of different ways. In many cases, they simply  'fill in' the extra information needed to make a contribution fully coop-erative. A says 'Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days' and B replies, 'He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately'. B's remark does not, as it stands, appear relevant to the preceding remark.  But it is easy enough to supply the missing belief B must hold for the remark to be relevant. B conversationally implicates that Smith has, or may have a girlfriend in New York.46  In other cases the speaker seems to be far less cooperative, at least at the level of 'what is said'. In order to be rescued as cooperative contributions to the conversation, such examples need to be not so much filled out as re-analysed. Because of the strength of the conviction that the speaker will, other things being equal, provide cooperative contri-butions, the other participant will put in the work necessary to reach such an interpretation. In perhaps his most famous example of con-versational implicature, Grice suggests the case of a letter of reference for a candidate for a philosophy job that runs as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc! The information given is grossly inadequate; the writer appears to be seriously in breach of the first maxim of Quan-tity, enjoining the utterer to give as much information as is appropri-ate. However, the receiver of the letter is able to deduce that the writer, as the candidate's tutor, must know more than this about the candidate.  There must be some reason why the writer is reluctant to offer the extra information that would be helpful. The most obvious reason is that the writer does not want explicitly to comment on Mr X's philosophical ability, because it is not possible to do so without writing something socially unpleasant. The writer is therefore taken conversationally to implicate that Mr X is no good at philosophy; the letter is cooperative not at the level of what is literally said, but at the level of what is impli-cated. In examples such as this a maxim is deliberately and ostentatiously flouted in order to give rise to a conversational implicature; such examples involve exploitation.  These examples, and others Grice discusses in the second William James lecture, are all specific to, and entirely dependent on, the individual contexts in which they occur. Grice labels all such example  'particularised conversational implicatures'. There are other types of conversational implicature in which the context is less significant, or at least can operate only as a 'veto' to implicatures that arise by default unless prevented. These are implicatures associated with the use of particular words. Unlike conventional implicatures, they can be cancelled: that is explicitly denied without contradiction. These 'generalised conversational implicatures' account for many of the differences between the logical constants and the behaviour of their natural language counterparts. In effect, Grice claims that there simply is no difference between, say '', 'n', 'v' and 'not', 'and', 'or' at the level of what is said.  The well-known differences are generalised conversational implicatures often associated with the use of these expressions, implicatures determined by the categories and maxims he has established.  Part of Grice's motivation for this proposal was the desire for a simplification of semantics. The alternative to such an account was to posit a semantic ambiguity for a wide range of linguistic expressions. Grice argues against this, proposing a principle he labels 'Modified Occam's Razor', which would rule against it in decisions of a theoretical nature.  The principle states that 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond neces-sity' 47 Grice's reference was to William of Occam, or Ockham, thefourteenth-century philosopher credited with the dictum 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. This is known as 'Occam's razor' although it is not clearly attributable to any of his writings, and it is not at all uncommon for philosophers to discuss it in isolation from Occam's actual work. It is taken as a general injunction not to complicate philosophical theories; the best theory is the simplest theory, invoking the fewest explanatory categories. The preference for simple philosophical theories that do not add complex and potentially unnecessary categories was one with an obvious appeal to philosophers of ordinary language. Indeed, when Gilbert Ryle published his collected papers in 1971, he commented on the 'Occamising zeal' particularly apparent in the earlier articles. Another contemporary philosopher to draw on an Occam-type approach to discussions of meaning was B. S.  Benjamin, whose article 'Remembering' is referred to in the first William James lecture. He does not draw an explicit comparison to Occam's razor, but he does pose himself the question of whether the verb  'remember' should be analysed as multivocal or univocal. For Benjamin, a 'universal core of meaning is preserved in its use in different contexts'.49  Grice himself did not develop the connection between conversational implicature and the logical constants in any great depth, either in the William James lectures or elsewhere. This is perhaps surprising, given that he introduces his theory in terms of the question of the equiva-lence, or lack of equivalence, between certain logical devices and expressions of natural language. The implications of this question, together with the specific answers offered by conversational implicature, are treated in detail by others.5° A. P. Martinich has suggested that the initial concentration on, and subsequent abandonment of, the logical particles is a serious flaw in the construction of the second, and most widely read, of the William James lectures. In a book aimed at describing and promoting good philosophical writing, Martinich identifies this as 'one of the greatest articles of the twentieth century', but argues that the more general theory of 'linguistic communication' ought to have been made the focus from the outset. He comments that on first reading Grice's article he was unimpressed by what he saw as an unacceptably complex mechanism to solve a very particular logical problem: 'Once I realised that the solution was a minor consequence of his theory I was awed by its elegance and simplicity.'51  Grice's discussion of logic is mainly restricted to the fourth William James lecture, which he later labelled 'Indicative conditionals' after the chief, but not the only, logical constant it discusses. Indicative condi-tions had been a central theme of some lectures on logical form Grice delivered at Oxford while working on his theory of conversation. There he had commented extensively on Peter Strawson's treatment of this topic in his 1952 book Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice does not mention Strawson at all in this fourth William James lecture. He does, however, discuss the views of what he calls a '"strong" theorist', views that accord with Strawson's in the insistence that the logical implica-tion, 'po q' is different in meaning from various expressions in natural language, most notably 'if p then q'. Strong theorists, Grice suggests, have tended to stress the difference between what he calls natural or ordinary language conditionals and 'artificial' conditionals, defined by logic and determined by truth-conditional properties.  Strawson argues that, while logical conditionals can be given a full definition in terms of a truth table involving the two simple propositions involved ('p' and 'q'), such an account will not be sufficient for natural language expressions such as 'if p then q'. The logical account specifies that if p is true, q must also be true. If p is false, however, nothing can be predicted about the truth value of q; a false antecedent coupled with a false consequent is assigned the overall value 'true', but so is a false antecedent coupled with a true consequent. This truth-conditional account seems insufficient as a definition of natural language 'if ... then ...' in at least two ways. There is a suggestion in most actual instances that there is some causal connection between the antecedent and the consequent. One of Strawson's own examples is: 'If it rains, then the party will be a failure!' Such examples, he notes, are not about linguistic elements or logical relations: 'they suggest connections between different things in the world, discovered by experience of these things 52 Later, he comments that most examples of the 'if ... then .. construction would suggest either that the truth of the antecedent is in some doubt, or that it is already known to be false. It is only in such cases that we would be likely to label the resulting statement true, or perhaps 'reasonable'. Strawson's suggestion is that 'if p then q' entails its logical counterpart 'P > q'. However, 'a statement of the form "p > q" does not entail the corresponding statement of the form "if p then 9" 153 There are aspects of the meaning of 'if p then q' that go beyond, and are not included in, the meaning of the logical conditional.  In his Oxford lecture notes, Grice singles Strawson out as an example of a philosopher who has not paid sufficient attention to the different ways in which a natural language expression can convey significance when it occurs in context. For Grice, this oversight has serious consequences for an understanding of the meaning of various crucial exam-ples. Certainly, as well as discussing the 'meaning' of particular expres-sions, Strawson writes, apparently without distinction, of the 'use'  'employment', 'sense' and 'implication' of 'if ... then ...' statements.54 He describes the speaker's relation to the relevant meaning as one of  'suggesting', 'using', 'indicating', 'saying' and even 'making' 55  Grice's contention, although not explicitly expressed in 'Indicative conditionals', is that there is a great deal of difference between the members of the sets that Strawson uses interchangeably. In particular, sufficient attention to the difference between saying and implicating can explain away the apparent differences between 'p> q' and 'if p then q'. He begins the fourth William James lecture uncompromisingly enough by proposing to consider the supposed divergence between 'if' and 's' and to demonstrate that 'no such divergence exists'. He suggests that 'if p then q' is distinguished from 'p> q' by the 'indirectness condition' associated with it: the commitment to some causal or rational link between p and q. Grice's claim, in effect, is that the literal meaning of 'if p then q', 'what is said' on any particular occasion of utterance, is simply equivalent to the logical meaning of 'p > q'. The indirectness condition is a generalised conversational implicature. Like all generalised conversational implicatures, it can be cancelled without contradiction, either by circumstances in the context or by explicit denial. In a game of bridge: 'My system contains a bid of five no trumps, which is announced to one's opponents on inquiry as meaning "If I have a red king, I also have a black king" !5 Here, Grice suggests, the indirectness condition simply does not arise because it is blocked by the context. There is no suggestion that having a black king is causally linked to having a red king, and the meaning is the same as that of the logical condition. To say 'if Smith is in the library he is working' would normally suggest the indirectness condition. But it is perfectly possible to say I know just where Smith is and what he is doing, but all I will tell you is that if he is in the library he is working', in a situation where the speaker had just looked in the library and seen Smith there working. In such a case also, the indirectness condition is not attached to the use of the expression.  Grice suggests what he describes as two separate possibilities as to how the indirectness condition might be produced as an implicature, although it is not in fact clear that these are necessarily mutually exclu-sive. The first relies on his original 'general principle' about the tendency towards stronger rather than weaker statements, and the first maxim of Quantity that results from it. It is less informative to say 'if p then q' than it is to say 'p and q', because the former does not givedefinite information about the truth values of p and q. Therefore, any utterance of 'p> q' will, unless prevented by context, give rise to the implicature that the speaker does not have definite information about the truth values of p and q. The same explanation can be extended to utterances of the form 'p or q'. These too seem to differ systematically from the apparently equivalent logical disjunction, 'p v q'. The truth-conditional meaning of logical disjunction states simply that at least one of the simple propositions involved must be true. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, for both propositions to be true. Yet in natural language there is something distinctly odd about saying 'p or q' if you know for certain that both p and q are true. In Grice's terms, 'p or q' shares the logical meaning of 'p v q', but in addition carries a gener-alised implicature that they are not both true. If the speaker were in a position to offer the more informative form 'p and q', then it would be conversationally more helpful to do so.  Grice's second suggestion is that implicated meanings of such expressions may follow from their role in conversation, and in human interaction and thought more generally. The familiar logical constants enable people to work out the problems presented to them by everyday life. In particular, disjunction enables people to consider alternatives and eliminate the untenable. It enables people to give partial answers to 'Wh'-questions such as 'Who killed Cock Robin?'. The most helpful answer would be a single subject ('the sparrow', 'the wren'), but if the speaker is not in a position to offer one, a series of disjuncts is a way of setting out the possibilities. Conditionals, on the other hand, enable people to ponder the consequences of certain choices. They are, there-fore, necessary to the successful operation of reasoning beings. It would simply not be rational to use a conditional in certain contexts: contexts where there is no doubt about the truth of the antecedent, for instance.  For this reason, on the assumption that our interlocutors are rational beings, we tend to interpret a conditional as indicating that a simple coordination will not do. Similarly, it would not be rational to use a disjunction in a context where we know that one of the disjuncts is true; we would in effect be attempting to solve a problem that had already been solved. Grice suggests, with typical tentativeness, that:  It might be that either generally or at least in special contexts it is impossible for a rational speaker to employ the conditional form unless, at least in his view, not merely the truth-table requirements are satisfied but also some strong connection holds. In such a case a speaker will nonconventionally implicate, when he uses theconditional form in such a context, that a strong connection does hold.  59  Grice offers this account in terms of the behaviour of a 'rational' speaker in at least potential opposition to an account drawing on the first maxim of Quantity. Elsewhere, however, he discusses the maxims as describing individually rational forms of behaviour. It is therefore conceivable that it might be possible to integrate the two suggestions, seeing conditionals as used rationally to introduce the implication of strong connection, precisely because their 'tentative' state does not offer the information that would be cooperative if available.  In the later 'Logic and conversation' lectures, Grice continues his pro-gramme for a philosophical theory of language by returning to older preoccupations, particularly to the problems identified in, and raised in response to, 'Meaning'. In effect, the theory of conversation offers a much fuller account of the notion of speaker meaning than had been developed in 'Meaning', together with a principled system linking this to conventional meaning. When first introduced in the second lecture, conventional meaning itself receives rather cursory treatment. Grice suggests that 'what is said' can be roughly equated with conventional meaning, including assigning of reference to referring expressions and any necessary disambiguation. He almost immediately complicates this definition by stipulating that some aspects of conventional meaning can be implicated. Grice returns to the notion of 'what is said' in the fifth William James lecture, later published under the title 'Utterer's meaning and intentions'  Grice's contention is still that intentions on individual occasions must be the primary criteria in determining meaning. However, simply referring to what some individual meant by some action on some particular occasion is not sufficient to arrive at an account of 'what is said'. It does not rule out a host of examples that have nothing at all to do with saying, such as flashing your headlights to indicate that the other driver has right of way. Grice's solution is in effect to do something close to the manoeuvre suggested by Searle in Speech Acts. He proposes to import into the definition of 'meaning' a specification that the utterer's action must constitute a unit in some linguistic system that has, or contains, the meaning intended by the utterer. In other words, 'U did something x which is an occurrence of a type S part of the meaning of which is  "p" 16 Furthermore, he introduces a notion of what U 'centrally meant' in doing x, in order to distinguish a core meaning from other aspects of what may be conveyed by an utterance, in particular from its con-ventional implicatures. In effect, Grice is introducing the notion of conventional meaning into utterer meaning, making it serve as part of the definition of what a speaker can legitimately intend by an utterance, while still maintaining that individual speaker intention is the primary factor in meaning. Grice extends his discussion of the different 'levels' of meaning to allow for four separate levels, labelled 'timeless meaning',  'applied timeless meaning', 'occasion meaning of utterance type' and  'utterer's occasion meaning'.  In the same lecture, Grice responds to some of the criticisms of  'Meaning'  '. Most of these, such as Schiffer's identification of an unten-  able infinite regress, were not published at the time. Grice is replying to objections put to him 'in conversation'. His response to Schiffer is, in effect, that the mental exercises required in recognising the infinite regress in intentions quickly become 'baffling'. Whatever they may demonstrate in theory, they are impossibly complex for any real-life situation:  At some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of A by U will be impracticably difficult; and I suspect the limit was reached (if not exceeded) in the examples which prompted the addition of a fourth and fifth condition. So U could not have the intention required of him in order to force the addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations he would be requiring of A too difficult, but it would be impossible for U to find cues to indicate to A that the calculations should be made, even if they were within A's compass. So one is tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.  62  Searle's 'American soldier' counter-example was already published in article form, and Grice responds to it by arguing that Searle is unjustified in claiming that the soldier did not mean 'I am a German officer'.  Regardless of what the utterance conventionally meant in German (the question about lemon blossom), if the soldier used it with the intention of getting his captors to believe that he was a German officer, this was what he meant by the utterance. Grice offers a revised definition of his account of meaning. Intention is still the central notion, which Grice discusses in terms of 'M-intentions', emphasising the importance of the speaker's desire for some response from the audience.  The remaining two lectures in the 'Logic and conversation' series develop further this notion of M-intending. At the start of the penultimate lecture, published under the title 'Utterer's meaning, sentencemeaning and word-meaning', Grice displays a typical mixture of caution and ambition. He is concerned with the relationship between what a particular person meant on a particular occasion, and what a sentence or word means. What he has to say about this 'should be looked upon as an attempt to provide a sketch of what might, I hope, prove to be a viable theory, rather than as an attempt to provide any part of a finally acceptable theory' 63 Speakers may have one of two attitudes to an utterance, which will determine their M-intentions. They may wish to get hearers to believe something, or they may wish to get hearers to do something. These two attitudes, or moods, relate to indicative or assertive utterances and to imperative utterances. The two moods are represented by the symbols + and ! respectively. Grice proposes that the symbol * stand as a 'dummy operator' in the place of either of these.  Thus a general statement of the form 'Jones meant that *p' could be filled out using a specific mood operator and an indicative sentence to give either 'Jones meant that + Smith will go home' or 'Jones meant that ! Smith will go home'.  • A further expansion, substituting a clause in indi-  rect speech, yields 'Jones meant that Smith will go home' and 'Jones meant that Smith is to go home',  ', both instantiations of the original  formula.  M-intentions in relation to imperative types are now defined as the intention that hearers should intend to do something, rather than the earlier, simpler definition that they should do something. The M-intended effect of an indicative-type utterance is no longer necessarily that the hearer should believe something 'but that the hearer should think that the utterer believes something'6 The effect of these two changes, particularly the first, is that all possible M-intentions are defined in terms of some psychological notion. Grice explicitly defends his use of what he calls 'intensional' concepts: those defining meaning not just in relation to how language maps on to the world, but also to how it relates to individual minds. Psychological concepts should not be ruled out, he argues, if they have something explanatory to offer to a theory of language. In this lecture, Grice indicates an account of how timeless meaning in a single idiolect may develop to become timeless meaning for a group. In effect, he is arguing that individual speaker meaning can, over time, yield conventional meaning. The exact status of this conventional meaning is perhaps still uncertain. Meaning is best explained in terms of the practices of a group; drawing on this, conventional meaning comes from 'the idea of aiming at conformity'. 65 Grice recognises a tension, or an 'unsolved problem' in the relationship between these two types of meaning. Briefly, 'linguistic rules' can beidentified such that our linguistic practice is 'as if we accepted those rules and conscientiously followed them'. But the desire to see this as an explanation rather than just an interesting fact about our linguistic practice leads us to suppose that there is a sense in which 'we do accept these rules'. This then leaves the problem of distinguishing ontologically between acceptance of the rules and existence of the practice.  In the final William James lecture, Grice attempts a restatement of his position on meaning. To say that someone, U, means something, p, by some utterance of C, is to talk about 'U's disposition with regard to the employment of C'. This disposition 'could be (should be) thought of as consisting of a general intention (readiness) on the part of U; U has the general intention to use C on particular occasions to means that p' (Grice is here using 'mean,' for 'speaker meaning'). Although he still wants to claim that all meaning is ultimately dependent on intention, Grice is no longer claiming that all meaning is derived from speaker meaning, therefore specifically from M-intentions. His extensive modifications of his theory of meaning have themselves been the subject of criticism. In 1973 Max Black, responding to the lectures so far published, commented on Grice's 'almost unmanageable elaborations' of his own theory. He likens the tenacity with which Grice clings to the original idea to the latter fate of the Principle of Verifiability', with its numerous qualifications and reservations in the face of counter-examples.  Employing an accusation that had long haunted Grice, he suggests that this tenacity goes beyond 'an admirable stubbornness' , amounting to  'something that might be called a "philosophical fixation"'.  The exact nature of conventional meaning and its relation to the more central notion of speaker's meaning are perhaps the least well resolved aspects of the William James lectures. They are, however, crucial to Grice's central programme. A fully integrated philosophy of language relating abstract linguistic meaning to what individual speakers do in particular contexts needs at least a clear account of the status of linguistic meaning. Grice seemed uncomfortable with its pres-ence, but increasingly to be aware of his need to account for it. Towards the end of his life, he commented that the relationship between word meaning and speaker meaning was the topic 'that has given me most trouble'. However, some later commentators have been more optimistic on his behalf. Anita Avramides has argued that it is possible to reconcile a psychological account of meaning with a conventional account, urging that 'Grice's work on meaning is, I believe, of a hearty nature and can endure alteration and modification without becoming obsolete.' Brian Loar has dismissed possible criticisms that Grice's account of speaker meaning must always presuppose linguisticmeaning, claiming that 'the basic illumination shed by Grice's account of speaker's meaning does not depend on such precise conceptual explication.'1  The problems surrounding conventional meaning prompted some of the earliest published responses to the William James lectures, perhaps in part because the last two lectures in the series, both concerned with this general topic, were the first to appear in print: 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in 1969. In 'Meaning and truth', his discussion of the  'Homeric struggle' between formal semanticists and communication-theorists, Strawson suggests that the latter must always acknowledge that in most sentences 'there is a substantial central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of truth-conditions or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from that of a truth-condition.' Strawson singles out Grice's 1968 article as an example of a communication theorist implicitly making such as acknowledgement.  Another published response to these early articles came from Chomsky. It is clear from his 1976 book Reflections on Language that Grice's admiration for his work was not reciprocated. Chomsky detects a return to behaviourism in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning'. This is rather surprising, given Grice's own explicit rejection of behaviourism, and given his spirited defence of the need to allow psychological concepts into the theory of language. Chomsky picks up on Grice's reliance on having 'procedures' to produce certain effects as an account of timeless meaning for a particular individual.  Such an account, Chomsky argues, simply cannot explain the creativity of language use: the ability of speakers to produce and hearers to interpret an infinity of new sentences. He is uncomfortable with the loose ends and pointers to unresolved problems typical of Grice's work.  In particular, and not surprisingly, he picks up on Grice's discussion of the status of linguistic rules. This question, Chomsky insists, is 'the central problem, not a marginal one' 73 His own answer is, of course, that speakers really do follow linguistic rules in constructing utterances, and that these rules can tell us everything about the linguistic meaning of an utterance, and nothing about what an individual speaker meant in producing the utterance. In this book, as elsewhere, Chomsky is advocating a complete divorce between the discussion of linguistic meaning and the study of communication. Communication, he argues, is not the only, and by no means a necessary, function of language. Here is the source of the ultimately irresolvable difference between Chomsky and Grice. For Grice, communication is primary; the best chance for explaining language is by way of explaining communication.Grice returned to Oxford after the William James lectures, but only for one term. In the autumn of 1967 he took up an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley. The move was permanent; during the rest of his life he was to make only a handful of brief return visits to England. It was also in many ways incongruous. A thoroughgoing product of the British elite educational system, Grice delighted in the rituals and formalities of college life. And even Kathleen was amazed that he was ready to turn his back on cricket, concluding that it was only because at 54 he was too old to play for county or college that he was prepared to move at all. But there was no reluctance in Grice's acceptance of his new appointment. In fact, he engineered the move himself. While at Harvard, he had made his interest known generally in the American academic community. When the offer came from Berkeley he had accepted it enthusiastically and, somewhat naively, without negotiation.  Grice's only published comment on the reasons for his move to America is in the philosophical memoir in his Festschrift, part of his description of the development of the theory of conversation:  During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed, the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States.'  Certainly, the later William James lectures show an increasing formal-ism. For instance, in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning and word-meaning' Grice uses symbols to generalise over variables and producegeneric logical forms to be instantiated in particular utterances. He had found this way of working with language appealing on his earlier visits to America, and two of his major philosophical influences at this time, Chomsky and Quine, were American.  There were other, more personal reasons for the move. Grice had become a confirmed admirer of all things American. He appreciated the comparatively relaxed social mores; the informality of the 1960s, which had not yet fully penetrated the Oxford colleges, suited his own disregard for personal appearance. He loved the Californian sunshine. And he was enthusiastic about the ready availability of what he saw as the most important commercial commodities. Asked by one colleague what was attracting him away to America he replied, 'Alcohol is cheap, petrol is cheap, gramophone records are cheap. What more could you want?' Perhaps above all, he liked the openness and warmth of American society. One incident in particular, from a few years earlier, had strengthened him in this opinion. He had recently returned to Oxford after a stay of several months in Stanford. He ran into a relatively close colleague, who followed up a platitudinous declaration that they must meet up some time with the comment, 'I don't seem to have seen you around. Have you been away?' For Grice, this was indicative of a certain coldness and distance in British, or at least Oxford, society that contrasted poorly with his recent experiences in America. Certainly, he took to his new lifestyle with ease and enthusiasm. Soon after the move he bought  a house in the Berkeley Hills, with a balcony overlooking San Francisco Bay. Kathleen, who had stayed in England to oversee their two children's university entrances, moved to Berkeley only in 1969, by which time the matter of the house was all settled. She took a job teaching children with special needs, and would often return after a day's work to find every window sill covered with dirty glasses, some covered in paint smudges. Grice was in the habit of extending his hospitality to every visitor to the house, whether colleague, student or decorator, but not of tidying up afterwards.?  Berkeley in 1967 was a centre for the anti-Vietnam War movement, for the student protests and for the associated questioning of social and political orthodoxy. However, such challenges were not necessarily felt within the institution of the university itself. The philosophy department had maintained a sharp hierarchical distinction between faculty and students, even at graduate level. Grice, who specified that he would teach only graduate students, had an impact on this. For all its formality and traditionalism, the Oxford college tutorial system had the effect of promoting regular contact, and free exchange of ideas, between tutorsand students. Grice had greatly benefited from this, first as a student of  W. F. R. Hardie, and later as a tutor to younger philosophers such as Peter Strawson. At Berkeley he taught his students in small groups, and encouraged them to talk to him outside class times about philosophical ideas, including their own. At his instigation, the weekly philosophy research seminars were followed by an evening for both faculty and students in a local restaurant or at his house. In turn, he was a regular and enthusiastic attender of student parties. His motives were, of course, a mixture of the intellectual and the social, but the effect was to offer students an unprecedented access to the time and ideas of a member of faculty.  Just as he retained a distinctly 'Oxford' ethos in his teaching, despite his enthusiasm for his new post, so Grice remained unmistakably British, and more specifically old-school British establishment. Perhaps even more strikingly after 1967 than before, his supposedly 'everyday' linguistic examples were peopled by majors, bishops and maiden aunts, set at tea parties and college dinners. He continued to produce manuscripts in British English spelling, to be painstakingly changed to American spellings by the copy editors. And in tape recordings even from 20 years after the move, his conservative RP accent stands out in sharp contrast to those of his American colleagues. Nor did Grice entirely leave behind the methods and orthodoxies of Oxford philosophy when he moved to Berkeley to be in closer contact with American formalism. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy have drawn attention to the different ways in which analytic philosophy developed in America and in Britain. For instance, writing in 1956, Strawson describes the American tradition as turning away from everyday language in order to concentrate on formal logic, a tendency he sees represented in the work of Carnap and of Quine. This he contrasts with the British, or rather English, tradition, exemplified by Austin and Ryle, with its continued close attention to common speech. He sees the former approach as representing a desire to create something new, and the latter a desire to understand what already exists; he even goes so far as to suggest that these 'national preferences' are indicative of 'a characteristic difference between the New World and the Old'.3 Grice could be seen as making a strong statement of academic intent by moving to America, but even in the work he produced immediately after that move, perhaps the most formal work of his career, he retained a distinctively 'Old World' sensitivity to ordinary language.  Grice's first publication after the move, apart from the two William James lectures that appeared in print in the late 1960s, was 'Vacuousnames', published in 1969. This was firmly located in a formalist tra-dition, appearing in a volume of essays responding to the work of Quine and including contributions by linguists and logicians such as Chomsky, Davidson and Kaplan. It was concerned with issues of refer-ence, in particular the question of how best to analyse sentences containing names that fail to refer, sentences such as 'Pegasus flies'. Grice had in fact been working on reference for some time, both before and after his move. He was lecturing on the topic in Oxford in October 1966, and gave a paper closely related to 'Vacuous names' at Princeton in November 1967. He comments at the start of the published paper on his own inexperience in formal logic: 'I have done my best to protect myself by consulting those who are in a position to advise me; they have suggested ideas for me to work on and have corrected some of my mistakes.* It seems that he had undertaken, quite self-consciously, to educate himself in predicate logic, so as to be in a position to answer the question in which he had become interested. The quantity of notes that survive from this period, and the wide range of materials they cover, testify to the perseverance, and also the relentlessness, with which he pursued this end. Tiny, scrawled logical symbols cover headed note-paper from both St John's College and the Berkeley department, and envelopes addressed to Grice both at Woodstock Road and at various temporary addresses from his early months in Berkeley.  In some of the notes from early in his Berkeley career, Grice devotes a lot of attention to the way in which expressions such as 'reference' and 'referring' are used in everyday language. He considers expressions such as 'in saying p, S was making a reference' and 'in what S said p occurred referentially'. Such locutions, he notes to himself, are 'princi-pally philosophical in character; ordinary chaps don't often say this sort of thing'.' Instead, he investigates expressions that do occur in ordinary language, such as the phrase 'when he said... he was referring to .., for instance 'when he said "The Vice President has resigned" he meant/was referring to the secretary'. People do regularly use the expression 'refer' to describe not just what phrases literally denote, but what people intend to pick out, or point to. Grice tackles the apparent paradox introduced by such an example. If what the speaker meant was that the secretary (Jones) had resigned, and it is true that the secretary had resigned, what he said is true. However, what he said entails that there is (was) a vice-president. In a situation where it is not true that there is (was) a vice-president, what is said is not true. It seems at least possible that the speaker's remark must be both true (because the secretary has resigned) and not true (because there is no vice-president) atthe same time. Grice notes that the 'truth of what is said (in suitable cases) must turn not only on denotation but also on reference': on what the speaker intends to pick out as well as on what the words literally indicate.  In 'Vacuous names'  ', Grice declares himself keen to uphold if possible  a number of intuitively appealing dogmas. These should ideally inform the construction of a predicate calculus to explain the semantics of natural language. The dogmas include a classical view of logic, in which if Fa is true then ~Fa must be false, and vice versa. They also include the closely related claim that 'if Pegasus does not exist, then "Pegasus does not fly" (or "It is not the case that Pegasus flies") will be true, while  "Pegasus flies" will be false'." If these truth relations hold, 'Pegasus flies' logically entails that Pegasus exists. In this, Grice is proposing to sustain a Russellian view of logic. This may seem like an unexpected or contradictory proposal from a philosopher of ordinary language who had collaborated with Strawson and employed his 'presuppositional' account of such examples in their joint work on categories. However, Grice had been moving away from a straightforwardly presuppositional account for some time. As early as the notes for the lectures on Peirce from which 'Meaning' developed, he had pondered the idea that examples Strawson would describe as presuppositional might provide illustrations of the difference he was investigating between sentence meaning and speaker meaning? Grice does not argue that Strawson's account of presupposition does not work, or does not explain accurately how people understand utterances in context. But he suggests that it is not necessary to use Strawson's observation as an explanation of sentence logic as well as speaker meaning.  In the years since he made these notes, he had of course refined this notion in much more detail, developing in the William James lectures the idea that logical form may be quite different from context-bound interpretation, with general principles of language use mediating between the two. He adopts this approach in 'Vacuous names'  '. He con-  siders two different uses of the phrase 'Jones's butler' to refer to an indi-vidual. On one occasion, people might say 'Jones's butler will be seeking a new position' when they hear of Jones's death, even if they do not know who the butler is; they might equally well say 'Jones's butler, whoever he is, will be seeking a new position'. On a different occasion, someone says 'Jones's butler got the hats and coats mixed up', describing an actual event, but mistakenly applying the name 'Jones's butler' to a person who is actually Jones's gardener; Jones does not in fact have a butler. In effect Grice wields Modified Occam's Razor, although he doesnot name it, when he insists that there is no difference in the meaning of the descriptive phrase in these two instances, only in the use to which it is put. I am suggesting that descriptive phrases have no relevant systematic duplicity of meaning; their meaning is given by a Russellian account.' So in the second case, when 'Jones's butler' fails literally to refer, 'What, in such a case, a speaker has said may be false, what he meant may be true (for example, that a certain particular individual [who is in fact Jones's gardener] mixed up the hats and coats)." For Grice, our responses to speakers' everyday use of expressions may not be the best guide to logic.  Grice was genuine in his desire to find out more about both logic and linguistics. His notes from the years immediately following the move to Berkeley reveal that, as well as setting himself the task of learning predicate calculus, he was reading current linguistic theory. Along with his own extensive notes on the subject, he kept a copy of Chomsky's 'Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation', in a version circulated by the Indiana University Linguistics Club early in 1969.1º He also had a number of articles on general semantics, on model-theoretic semantics, and on the semantics of children's language. The notes show him at work on the interface between semantics and syntax. There are tree diagrams and jottings of transformational rules mapping one diagram on to the next. There are sketches of phrase structure rules, such as 'NP → Art + N' and 'N → Adj + N', accompanied by the list 'N: boy, girl, tree, hill, dog, cat'." He seems to have been interested for a while in reflexive pronouns, listing verbs with which they were optional, or verb phrases from which they could be deleted ('shave myself'/'shave', 'dress myself'/'dress') and those from which they could not ('cut myself'/'cut', 'warm myself'/'warm'). He also dabbled in pho-netics, making notes to remind himself of words representative of the various vowel sounds, and drawing up a table of the distinctive features of the consonants Ip, lt and kJ.  Given this flurry of interest in linguistics, and his stated intention of putting himself into closer connection with practising linguists, it is striking that Grice does not seem to have sought any contact with linguists working at Berkeley. This is all the more surprising given that the interests of some Berkeley linguists at the time might be seen as corresponding remarkably closely to his own. If Berkeley was a hub of student uprising in 1967, it was to become a centre for a different, quieter revolution in the early 1970s. The generative semanticists were in revolt against what were now the orthodoxies of Chomskyan linguistics.  Chomsky was maintaining his hard line on the difference betweenlinguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. He argued that generative grammar was concerned with syntactic structure, and with semantic meaning to the extent that it depended on deep structure. It had nothing whatsoever to say about how speakers use language in context.  The generative semanticists argued that, if grammar really was to offer an account of the human mind, it should be able to explain all aspects of meaning, including the obvious fact that meaning is often indirect, or non-literal. Robin Lakoff has described how, in making such claims, linguists such as Paul Postal, George Lakoff, James McCawley and John Ross were seen as directly opposing Chomsky. Their attempts to find ways of incorporating various aspects of utterance meaning into a formal theory of language led to more and more complicated linguistic rules, and eventually to the failure of generative semantics as an enter-prise. Along the way, however, they picked up on work from ordinary language philosophy as 'the magic link between syntax and pragmat-ics'." Speech act theory offered a way of incorporating utterance function into grammar. Generative semanticists attempted to account for implicit performatives, where no overt performative verb is present, in terms of a 'performative marker' in deep structure.13 Grice's theory of conversation suggested possibilities for incorporating context-sensitive rules into grammar, and thereby explaining a wide range of non-literal or indirect meaning.14  However, there was little personal contact between Grice and the linguists who were making such enthusiastic use of his work. Programmes of the Berkeley linguistics colloquium, sent to Grice in the philosophy department, provided him with paper for his incessant jottings and list-ings, but were left unopened. McCawley's work on the performative hypothesis gets a mention in a handout for Grice's students from 1971, but references in his more public lectures and in his published work are always to philosophers rather than linguists. Aware of what linguists were doing, but not in active dialogue with them, he worried privately in his notes over whether logicians and linguists actually mean the same by their apparently shared vocabulary such as 'syntax' and 'semantics'.  T have the feeling', he confesses, 'that when I use the word "semantic" outside logical discussion, I am using the word more in hope than in understanding.'5  There are, perhaps, two explanations for Grice's silence on the topic of generative semantics in particular, and of linguistics more generally, although there is no evidence that Grice himself endorsed either of these. One is to do with the specific differences between Grice's enterprise and that of his contemporaries in linguistics, the other with themore general differences between linguistics and philosophy as disci-plines. Although one of Grice's central interests at the time was that of linking semantics and syntax into a coherent theory of language, he saw semantics as primary and syntax as derived from it. As he suggested in one talk on the subject:  What I want to do is in aid of the general idea that one could work out for a relatively developed language a syntax such that all the way down any tree which would terminate in the [sic] sentence of the language would be a structure to which a semantical rule was attached.17  His theory of meaning was the driving force behind his theory of lan-guage. The generative semanticists, on the other hand, took syntax as primary. Syntax, with a much more precise definition than Grice was using, was the governing factor in language. Their aim was to use it to explain as many aspects of meaning as possible.  More generally, as Robin Lakoff has pointed out, the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics have different expectations of a 'theory' of language and make different assumptions about the role of examples. 18 Linguists, at least those within a broadly 'Chomskyan' framework, are generally committed to the scientific validity of their theories. Examples are used to demonstrate a point and, in the face of counter-examples, the theory must be modified or in the worst case abandoned.  Philosophers in Grice's style are concerned with producing philosophically revealing accounts of the relevant phenomena, and examples are used to illustrate these accounts. Some of the more recent reactions to the theory of conversation from within linguistics highlight these different expectations. For instance, Paul Simpson has complained that  'Grice's own illustrations are all carefully contrived to fit his analytic model; as a result there emerge from the theory too few explicit criteria to handle the complexity of naturally occurring language.'' For Grice's purposes, the close fit of illustration and model is no problem; to a linguist it is a major fault.  In 1970, Grice gave a series of lectures and seminars at the University of Urbana under the uncompromisingly ambitious title 'Lectures on language and reality'. He explains at the start of these that his overarching theme will be reference, a topic that has interested him for some time. His interest follows on his belief that a clear account of reference is essential to a full understanding of many other central topics in the philosophy of language. More specifically and recently, he has come tosee its significance to the connections between grammar and logic, between syntax and semantics. In the first lecture he launches into an elaborately coded account of language, based on a pseudo-sentence invented by Rudolf Carnap. In the introduction to The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap presents a typically logical positivist account of the philosopher's reason for taking language seriously. A suitably rigorous language will provide the necessary tools for logical and scientific exposition. This language is to be a formal system, concerned with types and orders of symbols but paying no attention to meaning. 'The unsystematic and logically imperfect structure of the natural word-languages' makes them unamenable to such formal analysis, but in a 'well-constructed language' it is possible to formulate and understand syntactic rules. 20  For instance, given an appropriate rule, it can be proved that the word-series 'Pirots karulize elatically' is a sentence, provided only that 'Pirots' is known to be a substantive (in the plural), 'karulize' a verb (in the third person plural), and 'elatically' an adverb... The meaning of the words is quite inessential to the purpose, and need not be known.  Carnap does no more with his invented example, proposing instead to stick to symbolic languages.  Grice's approach and purpose in 'Lectures on language and reality' are very different from Carnap's, although he does not refer directly to these differences, and indeed mentions Carnap only in passing. Still at heart a philosopher of ordinary language, Grice is convinced that natural language is a worthwhile focus of philosophical investigation in its own right, and that its apparent logical imperfections are not insurmount-able. Moreover, it is philosophically important because of the purposes to which it is put, not because of its potential for logical expression.  Perhaps with an eye to the subversiveness of his undertaking, he borrows from Austin's paper 'How to talk: some simple ways' in suggesting that his programme might be subtitled 'How pirots carulize elatically: some simpler ways'.21  Grice uses Carnap's nonsense words, and others like them, to build up a fragment of a fantasy world. So his audience is treated to pieces of information such as 'a pirot a can be said to potch of some obble & as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble e, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o1 as being fid to one another'. 22 Some way into the first lecture he offers the audience the key to thiscode. Pirots are much like ourselves, and inhabit a world of obbles very much like our own world. To potch is something like to perceive, and to cotch something like to think. Feng and fang are possible descrip-tions, much like our adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles.  Part of the reason for the elaborate story of obbles, he suggests, is because:  it seems to me very important that, when one is considering this sort of thing, one should take every precaution to see that one isn't taking things for granted and that the concepts which one is going to use have, as their basis, concepts which will only bring in what is required for them to do whatever job it is that one wants them to do.  Carnap wanted to use semantically opaque forms to hint at how an analysis of syntax might proceed without reference to meaning. Grice's intention in borrowing his example is to consider what concepts might be necessary to the discussion of meaning and reference, freed from the normal preconceptions of such a discussion.  It is when the behaviour of pirots is considered, when a group of pirots in a particular gaggle interact together, that the notion of reference becomes important. Situations in which pirots want to communicate about obbles are when language 'gets on to the world'. In effect, Grice is encouraging the dispassionate consideration of what rational beings are likely to do with a communication system. The regularities of syntax are based on language's function of referring to the world; the types of meanings the pirots need to express determine the structures of the language. A successful language is one able to offer true descriptions of the world. The business of language, its driving force, is com-munication. Grice may appear to have moved rather a long way from the ideals of ordinary language philosophy, in constructing an artificial code, or language fragment. However, he emphasises that he see this as a necessary simplification, as a way of modelling and defamiliarising natural language in order to study it more clearly. His interest remains with the issue of how language maps on to reality: how it exists principally as a system for communicating about the world shared by a community of speakers. He is interested in the workings of natural language rather than the regularities of the constructed, purified language of logic. The transcriptions of the Urbana seminars show one participant asking him whether it would not be better to stick to a logical lan-guage, with its simple, familiar structures: 'why bother with ordinarylanguage?' Grice's simple reply is 'I find ordinary language more interesting. 23  Grice returns to the debate between Russell and Strawson over denoting expressions that fail to refer in the fourth Urbana lecture, the only one to be published (some years later, as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature'). Here again, his inclination is in favour of Russell's theory of descriptions to account for examples such as 'the king of France is bald', and to find alternative explanations for the 'presuppo-sitional' effects associated with them. Characteristically tentative, Grice does not explicitly endorse the Russellian position, but proposes to investigate it and test the extent of its applicability. This time, he states explicitly that he will apply the 'dodge' of implicature.  On Russell's interpretation of 'the King of France is bald', both the unique existence and the baldness of the king of France are logical entailments of the sentence; 'the king of France is not bald' is ambigu-ous, with both entailments of the positive sentence equally possible candidates for denial. Strawson objected that a person who utters 'the king of France is not bald' will generally be taken to be committed to the existence of the king and to be denying his baldness. The supposed ambiguity is rarely if ever a feature of the use of such an expression.  Grice concurs with Strawson's suggestion that the commitment to existence seems to be shared by the assertion and its denial. However, he argues, it is not necessary to assume that the commitment is of the same order, or to the same degree, in both cases. If Russell's interpretation is retained, it follows that the denial must be semantically ambiguous between a negation with scope over the whole sentence, and negation with scope simply over the baldness. The latter does, whereas the former does not, retain semantic commitment to the existence of the king of France. On this interpretation the existence of the king of France is an entailment of the positive assertion, and of one (strong) reading of the denial. However, 'without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of "the king of France is not bald" as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of the king of France.'2 In response to this, it is possible to argue that on the weak reading of the denial the commitment to the existence of the king, although not a logical entail-ment, arises as a conversational implicature in use.  The implicature envisaged by Grice in this latter case is a generalised conversational implicature; it arises by default when the expression is used, unless cancelled explicitly or by features of the context. It is present because of the speaker's choice of the form of expression. For this reason Grice proposes to explain it in terms of the general categoryof Manner. In his original account of this category he suggested four maxims, and hinted that it might be necessary to add more. Here, he suggests one such addition, namely the maxim 'Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appro-priate', or 'Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply' 25 It is reasonable to expect that conversational contributions will be expressed in a manner conducive to the most likely possible reply or range of replies.  The facilitation of likely responses is also advanced to counter another of Strawson's objections to Russell. On Russell's account, an utterance of 'the king of France is bald' is simply false. Yet, Strawson observes, our most likely response on hearing it uttered would not be to say 'you're wrong' or 'that's false', but to be in some sense lost for an answer.  According to Grice, the speaker in such a situation has not framed the utterance in a way that makes a reply easy. One possible likely response to a statement is a denial. In a conversational contribution entailing several pieces of information it is possible that any one of these pieces may be denied, but some particular aspect is often a most likely candi-date. If all pieces of information are equally likely to be denied, the most cooperative way of phrasing the utterance would be as a simple conjunction of facts. The speaker would be expected to utter something close to the Russellian expansion, something such as 'there is one unique king of France, and this individual is bald'. In producing the contracted form 'the king of France is bald', however, the speaker is apparently assuming that possible responses do not include the denial of the unique existence of the king of France. Grice suggests that it is generally information with 'common-ground' status that is not considered a likely basis for denial. This may be because the information is commonly known, and known to be commonly known between speaker and hearer. But this explanation will not always serve:  For instance, it is quite natural to say to somebody, when we are discussing some concert, My aunt's cousin went to that concert, when we know perfectly well that the person we are talking to is very likely not even to know that we have an aunt, let alone know that our aunt has a cousin. So the supposition must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that we would expect the hearer to take from us (if he does not already know). That is to say, I do not expect, when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin went to a concert, to be questioned whether I have an aunt and, if so, whether my aunt has a cousin.This is the sort of thing that I would expect him to take from me, that is, to take my word for. 6  The king of France is bald' presents the baldness as available for discussion, as possibly controversial. The existence, however, is not treated as something likely to be challenged. This explains the difficulty encountered by anyone who does in fact want to challenge it. Similarly, the negative statement is interpreted as a challenge to some actual or potential statement in which the baldness, not the existence, of the king of France is at issue. This explains why it is generally taken to commit the speaker to the belief that the king of France exists, even if it does not in fact logically entail this.  Grice's treatment of presuppositional phenomena in 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' is sketchy and partial. He offers a fairly detailed account of examples containing definite descriptions, but his rapid survey of other types of presuppositional phenomena suggests that his account may not be easily extendable. The paper offers a further example of an attempt to apply the phenomenon of conversational implicature to a philosophical problem of long standing, and in particular to preserve a classical account of logic in the face of apparently intractable facts of language use. In considering the link between grammatical structure and the status of information, it draws on Grice's general interest in ways in which meaning may drive syntax. He does not generalise from the particular consideration of referring expressions in this paper. However, an unpublished paper from much later in his life does suggest the directions in which his thoughts may have devel-oped. In 1985, Grice was seeking to reconcile the Oxford school of philosophy with Aristotle's idea that philosophy is about the nature of things, rather than language. He proposes to adopt the hypothesis that opinion is generally reflected in language, with different 'levels' representing different degrees of commitment. Some aspects of knowledge receive the deepest level of embedding within syntax, residing in what Grice describes as the 'deep berths' of language. It is not possible for a speaker even to use the language without being committed to these.  The deepest levels are at a premium, so it is in the interests of speakers to reserve these for their deepest commitments. People might challenge these, Grice suggests, but it would be dangerous to do so. If we subscribe to this account, we might be tempted to argue that first principles of knowledge are to be found in the syntactic structure, rather than the vocabulary, of language: 'how we talk ought to reflect our most solid, cherished and generally accepted opinions 2 In this discussion of whatis presented as uncontroversial and what as available for denial, Grice might be described as interested in the ways in which different syntactic devices available for conveying information bring with them different existential and ontological commitments.  The fourth Urbana lecture, taken on its own, offers an account of how a possible addition to the category of Manner suggests a new approach to the problems posed by Russell's theory of descriptions. In the somewhat abridged form in which it was published as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' this is, of course, how it is generally read.  In the context of the Urbana lectures as a whole, however, it can also be seen as part of a much more ambitious project to describe how lan-guage, as a system to serve the communicative needs of rational beings,  'gets on to' the world, or functions to refer and describe. In this context, it is also apparent that Grice saw the question of the nature of reference as central to the philosophy of language, and particularly to his current interest in the division between syntax and semantics, or logic and grammar. Ultimately, it might be hoped that the structure of language could be shown to be revealing of the structure of human knowledge, precisely because language is dependent on knowledge.  The theory of reference was not the only topic in the philosophy of language to which Grice returned during the early 1970s. His new interest in the relationship between semantics and syntactic form, and hence in the expression of human thought, also prompted him to revisit the topic of intention. He had been elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, and in the summer of 1971 he made one of his rare return visits to England in order to give an Academy lecture. For his topic, he chose to return to the themes of his discussion paper 'Intentions and dispositions' some 20 years earlier. In the mean time, Hampshire and Hart had published their 'Decision, intention and certainty'. Gilbert Harman has repeated the rumour that this paper, containing a similar idea to that in 'Intentions and dispositions', 'prompted Grice to develop his alternative analysis'28 In his British Academy lecture, 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice refers rather vaguely to 'an unpublished paper written a number of years ago', and a thesis advanced in it that he now wants to criticise. He reformulates his original two-pronged account as a three-pronged one by making independence from empirical evidence into a separate criterion. 'X intends to do A' can truthfully be used only in cases where X is ready to take any preparatory steps necessary to do  A. Further, such a statement implies or suggests that X is not in any doubt that X will in fact do A. Finally, this certainty on the part of the speaker must be independent of any empirical evidence. Drawing onthe old ordinary language technique of devising a dialogue as context for a particular word, Grice offers the following illustration:  I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. You will enjoy that. I may not be there. I am afraid I don't understand. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Then you should have said to begin with, 'I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like, 'I should probably be going', or, 'I hope to go', or, 1 aim to go', or, 'I intend to go if I can'. Grice seems unconcerned by the highly artificial nature of this 'con-versation', compared to the structure and flow of naturally occurring talk. He comments that 'it seems to me that Y's remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained. 2 His point is that it seems legitimate to object to a use of 'I intend.' in cases where the speaker is not sure that it will be possible to fulfil the intention. The omission of such an addition as '... if I can' is possible only in cases where the doubt is perfectly obvious to both speaker and hearer, as when the speaker is making plans to keep ducks in extreme old age, or to climb Everest.  Grice's criticism of his own earlier analysis focuses on the implication that an intention is a type of belief, and the secondary notion that it is a belief independent of evidence. He argues that there are simply no parallels to be found for this type of belief; neither a hunch nor a memory will fit the bill. A belief such as an intention would have to be  - one that could not be true, false, right or mistaken - simply does not properly bear the title of belief at all. This means that intention lacks a clear definition, leaving it open to a sceptical attack challenging the coherency of ever saying 'I intend.. To use the statement 'I intend to do A' is to involve oneself in some degree of factual commitment and there must be something giving one the right to do this. Usually that something is evidence, but in the case of intention it has been established that there is nothing that would count as adequate evidence.  Grice responds to this possible sceptical position by rejecting the assumption that in stating an intention one is involved in a factual com-mitment. Characteristically, he develops this objection by means of a careful analysis of language. He suggests that there is a difference between two uses of the 'future tense' in English, a difference notmarked linguistically, or marked only in careful use in the distinction between 'I will..' and 'I shall ... In most normal uses, 'I will ..! can be used either with a future intentional or a future factual meaning.  Strictly speaking, if we intend to go to London tomorrow, we can only honestly use the expression 'I will go to London tomorrow' in its future intentional meaning; to do otherwise would be to suggest that it is somehow beyond our control. And for these future intentional statements it is simply not legitimate to ask for an evidential basis, any more than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!'. In each case to ask for evidence would be 'syntactically' inappropriate.  Having drawn attention to this distinction, Grice ponders the links it suggests between intending and believing with respect to a future action. He proposes the term 'acceptance' as one that can express 'a  generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief'.3° Using the notion of acceptance in the original three-pronged analysis might, he suggests, rescue it from the criticisms based on its reliance on belief as central to intention. In the case of intention but not of belief, X accepts that X will do A and also accepts that X doing A will result from that acceptance. No external justification is required.  In the case of belief, however, some external justification, or evidence, is needed for the acceptance.  At the start of 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice acknowledges a debt to Kenny's concept of 'voliting'. He does not refer directly to Kenny's work, but its influence appears in relation to the notion of 'acceptance'.  Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher who was President of the British Academy, had published a collection of essays entitled Action, Emotion and Will since Grice's first attempt at analysing intention.  Kenny argues that expressions of desire and of judgement both display a similar complexity; both take as object not a thing but a state of affairs, despite surface appearances to the contrary. 'Wanting' always specifies a relation to a proposition; so, for instance 'wanting X' is in fact  'wanting to get X'. For this reason, we might 'expect that an analysis of a report of a desire should display the same structure as the analysis of a report of a judgement' 3' Kenny introduces the artificial verb 'volit' to generalise over the range of attitudes a speaker can adopt to a proposition that express approval, whether this be approval of actual states, as in 'x is glad that p' or of possible states as in 'x wishes that p'. This positive attitude distinguishes 'voliting' verbs from simple judgement, which may be neutral or even disapproving. Kenny's 'volition' also covers intention. Later, Kenny proposes to borrow Wittgenstein's term  'sentence-radical' to describe the propositional form that can serve asthe object of any verb of 'voliting'. So 'You live here now' and 'Live here now!' share the same sentence-radical as a common element of meaning, and it is necessary to distinguish this from the 'modal com-ponent, which indicates what function the presentation of this state of affairs has in communication' 32 By means of this idea, Kenny is able to identify a connection between his verbs of volition a nd those of judgement.  There is some relation which holds between a man's Idea of God and his Idea of England no matter whether he judges that God punishes England or he wants God to punish England. Any theory of judgement or volition should make this common element clear.33  In 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice employs Kenny's notion of  'voliting' in drawing a connection between intention and willing, but he does not make much use of Kenny's analysis in terms of 'sentence-radicals'. This clearly influenced his thinking in this area, however, and its effects can be seen in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', a paper written and circulated in 1972, but never published. The connection between probability and desirability, or at least between probability statements and desirability statements, had been discussed by Donald Davidson in a paper Grice heard at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina in the autumn of  1967. Davidson was another of the highly formal American philosophers of logic and language influential on Grice's thinking and methodology at this time. In this paper, eventually published in 1970, Davidson uses pr and pf, qualitative operators with scope over pairs of propositions that express attitudes of the probable and the obligatory respec-tively. Thus, 'pr (Rx, Fx)' can be instantiated as 'That the barometer falls probabilizes that it will rain', or, more naturally 'If the barometer falls, it almost certainly will rain'. A moral judgements such as lying is wrong' is to be understood, again as a relation between two proposi-tions, as something such as 'That an act is a lie prima facie makes it wrong'. This can be symbolised as 'pf (Wx, Lx)'.34  Grice considers attitudes towards probability and desirability in terms of the functions they serve in human cognition. This is reminiscent of his work in 'Indicative conditionals' on the purpose of logical connectives such as 'v' and 's' in terms of their roles in reasoning processes.  Here, he argues that probabilistic argument functions in order to reach belief in a certain proposition. Moreover:The corresponding function of practical argument should be to reach an intention or decision; and what should correspond to saying 'P', as an expression of one's belief, is saying 'I shall do A', as an expres. sion of one's intention or decision. 35  Going further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability are not merely analogous; they can both be replaced by more complex structures containing a common element.  Grice proposes two types of operators, Op^ and Op". In combination, these replace Davidson's pf and pr. The operators grouped together as Op® represent moods close to ordinary indicatives and imperatives. They can be divided into two types: Op", and Op", corresponding to t and ! respectively. A-type operators, on the other hand, represent some degree or measure of acceptability or justification. They can take scope over either of the B-type operators, yielding 'Op^ + Op", + p', or 'Op^, +t + p' for an expression of 'it is probable that p' and 'Op", + Op" + a', or 'Op+! + p' for an expression of 'it is desirable that a'.  Moving on from operators to consider the psychological aspect of rea-soning, Grice proposes two basic propositional attitudes: J-acceptance and V-acceptance, to be considered as more or less closely related to believing and wanting. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol 'V', he proposes 'X y' [p]' for J-accepts and 'X y? [pl' for V-accepts. There are further, more complex attitudes y and y*. These are reflexive: attitudes that x can take to J-accepting or V-accepting. y is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either J-accepting [p] or J-accepting [-pl; x wants to decide whether to believe p or not. y* is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either x V-accepts [p] or x V-accepts I-pl; x wants to decide whether to will p or not. On the understanding that willing p gives an account of intending p, this offers a formalisa-tion of intending.  Grice notes that for each attitude there are two further subdivisions, depending on whether the attitude is focused on an attitude of x or of some other person. Therefore 'x y', Ipl' is true just in case 'x y? [x y'  [p] or x y' I-pll' is true; 'x y's Ipl' is true just in case 'x V-accepts (y}) ly V-accepts (y*) [x J-accept (y') [p] or x J-accept (v') [-p]ll' is true. Grice suggests an operator, Opa, corresponding to each particular propositional attitude y', where 'i' is a dummy taking the place of either 1, 2, 3, or 4, and where 'a' is a dummy taking the place of either 'A' or 'B'.  He now has four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets of propositional attitudes, which he describes as follows:Op'a Judicative  (A cases Indicative, B cases Informative)  Op a Volitive  (A cases Intentional, B cases Imperative)  Op a Judicative Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Imperative)  Op*a Volitive Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Inquisitive)  For all 'moods' except the second, the syntax of English does not reflect the distinction between the A and B cases. Grice notes that 'in any application of the scheme to ordinary discourse, this fact would have to be accommodated'. This suggests that he was thinking of his scheme as at least in principle applicable to an analysis of everyday language. For present purposes, he proposes to concentrate on the simple judicative and volitive operators. This is presumably because these express his basic psychological categories of J-accepting and V-accepting. He has, however, established that it is possible to discuss more complex opera-tors, and therefore more complex psychological attitudes, a topic to which he was to return. The attitudes expressed by t, and by the pair and !'s and ! ('I shall do A' and 'Do A') can be expressed by a general psychological verb of 'accepts'. So, for instance, 'x J-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts [-pl' and 'x V-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts l'ap!'.  Grice makes it clear that, in discussing meaning, he is still describing a way of speaking, a type of procedure for achieving a goal. The semantic characterisation of the operators consists in specifying the associated procedures.  This position has an obvious kinship with views of Searle; one place where we differ is that I am not prepared to treat as primitive the notion of rule (whether constitutive or otherwise), nor that of convention (indeed I am dubious about the relevance of the latter notion to the analysis of meaning and other semantic concepts). The notion of a rule seems to me extremely unclear, and its clarification would be one result which I hope might be obtained, ultimately, from the line of investigation which I am pursuing in this paper.  The written dialogue between Davidson and Grice continued. In 1978 Davidson published a paper entitled simply 'Intending', part of whichhe devoted to a response to Grice's 'Intention and uncertainty'. Like his earlier paper, 'Intending' was the result of various drafts and conference papers, including one presented at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy in October 1974. There, Davidson has commented,  'it  received a thorough going over by Paul Grice.36 In 'Intending', Davidson suggests, or rather presupposes, that it is reasonable to 'want to give an account of the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science' 37 He sees a problem here in accounting for 'pure intending', a type not accompanied by any observable be-haviour or consequence. He proposes instead a definition, or a path towards a definition, in terms of beliefs and attitudes that can be taken as rationalising an intention. Davidson acknowledges Grice's point that intentions are often conditional on certain issues, and that the conditions are often not expressed, or not articulated, for various reasons. He quotes Grice's dialogue about the fact that X might miss the concert by being in prison. His argument is that, however misleading X's original statement of intention may have been, it was not strictly incorrect. It is not inaccurate to say 'I intend to go to the concert' when you know that there may well be a reason why you cannot go, anymore than it is contradictory to say 'I intend to be there, but I may not be there'.  Indeed, stating every condition that might prevent the fulfilment of an intention is not practicable, even if it were desirable. 'We do not necessarily believe we will do what we intend to do, and ... we do not state our intentions more accurately by making them conditional on all the circumstances in whose presence we think we would act.'38 Davidson considers intention in terms of wanting, but not as a subclass of wanting. Indeed, he argues that it is possible for someone to say that he wants to go to London next week, but he does not intend to go because there are other things he wants to do more. Rather, both intending and wanting are separate sub-parts of a general psychological pro-attitude, and they are expressed by value judgements.  Grice's 'thorough going over' of Davidson's paper was never pub-lished, but it was tape recorded and subsequently transcribed. In it he outlines the position he took in Intention and uncertainty'. X intends to do A' entails that X believes X will do A; X's belief depends on evi-dence, but the relevant evidence derives from X's own psychological state. For Davidson the relationship between intention and belief is not one of entailment, but rather by saying 'I intend..' in certain circumstances you suggest that you believe you will do it. Grice wonders whether it might be possible to explain Davidson's position in terms ofa conversational implicature from 'I intend..' to 'I believe ... But he comments wryly that 'I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing alleged entailments by implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoeuvre is appropriate in this case.'39  Grice builds his case around a distinction between extensional and non-extensional intentions. In effect, a non-extensional intention is one that the subject in question would recognise. This is the one most commonly considered in discussions of intention, Grice argues. If 'The Dean intends to ruin the department (by appointing Snodgrass chair-man)' is true on a non-extensional reading, then the Dean would, if forced, be in a position to aver 'I intend to ruin the Department'. If the Dean says 'I shall ruin the Department' he is expressing, rather than stating his intention. It would, contra Davidson's claim, be inconsistent for the Dean to say 'I shall ruin the Department, but maybe I won't in fact ruin it'. The apparent counter-examples can be explained in terms of 'disimplicature'. In effect, context sometimes means that normal entailments are suspended. If we say that Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore, in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailment that Hamlet's father was in fact on the ramparts. In such a context, the speaker 'disimplicates' that Hamlet's father was on the ramparts. In the same way, when context makes it quite apparent that there may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are not committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it. A speaker who says 'Bill intends to climb Everest next week' disimplicates that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved.  The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation, but it does not seem to be one to which he returned. As it is presented in 'Logic and conversation', and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said': to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature, Grice appears to be conceding that the meaning conveyed by a speaker in a context may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used. In the cases under discussion, there is some particular element, some entailment,  that is 'dropped' in  context. However, he also hints that disimplicature can be 'total, as in  "You are the cream in my coffee"'. This remark appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting that, in a context which makes the whole of 'what is said' untenable, it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning. The mechanismsof disimplicature are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in terms of the assumption that the speaker is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality. If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimpli-cature is total, the hearer is forced to seek a different interpretation of the utterance.  There are undoubtedly problems inherent in the notion of disimpli-cature, which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea. In a 1971 article, Jonathan Cohen suggests a 'Seman-tical Hypothesis' as an alternative explanation of the phenomena of logical particles that Grice explains by means of his 'Conversationalist Hypothesis'. Cohen's suggestion is that some natural language expres-sions, such as 'either... or', differ from their apparent logical counter-parts. In this particular case, 'either... or' differs from 'V' by entailing, as part of its dictionary meaning, that there is indirect evidence for the disjunction. In examples such as 'The prize is either in the garden or in the attic, but I'm not going to tell you which', however, this meaning does not survive. This is because 'it is deleted or cancelled in certain con-texts, just as the prefixing of "plastic" to "flower" deletes the suggestion of forming part of a plant.'40 The idea of 'disimplicature' seems remarkably close to Cohen's looser notion of 'deletion', laying open the possibility that the very natural language expressions Grice was seeking to explain might after all differ semantically from their logical equivalents.  In his reply to Davidson, as in his earlier unpublished paper, Grice considers the role of intentions in actual everyday cognition. 'First we are creatures who do not, like the brutes, merely respond to the present; we are equipped to set up, in the present, responses in the more remote future to situations in the less remote future. Grice pictures our view of the future as an appointment book in which various entries are inscribed. We are aware of a distinction between entries we have no control over (inscribed in black) and those that are there by our control, or depend on us for their realisation (inscribed in red). These latter entries are intentions. If we can foresee an unpleasant consequent of such entries, we will try to avert it if we can by deleting a red entry. The Dean derives the conclusion from the existing entries that 'Early December Dean gets fired'. He is understandably unhappy about this, but is in a position to do something about it if he can find that one of the entries from which he drew the conclusion is in red. He is able to delete, for instance, 'Dean appoints Snodgrass' inscribed in red in mid-November.  The conclusion Grice draws from this is:that we need a concept which is related to that of being sure in the kind of way which I have suggested intending is related to being sure; and if we need such a concept we may presume that we have it.  This sentence contains a large leap in the argument, but the recording of his original presentation reveals that Grice got a big laugh from the audience at this point. He presents this conclusion gleefully, provocatively 'trying it on', suggesting that 'intend' seems to him a good candidate for the name of the concept in question. This was, however, to prove a serious manoeuvre in his methodology. In the field of philosophical psychology in particular, he was to argue that the need for a particular concept in rational creatures was good enough reason to assume its existence, or at least posit it for the purpose of theorising.  Grice challenges Davidson's views on wanting, describing his picture of a person's mental life as one of a series of wants competing to be assigned the status of intention. For Grice this is just too neat and organ-ised to be plausible. It does not even reflect how the matter is described in ordinary language. There is in fact a vast range of terms in the  'wanting-family' of verbs, and these demand careful attention. Contra Davidson's claim, we would be very unlikely to say 'I want to go to London next week but I don't intend to because there are other things I want more'. We are far more likely to use some phrase such as 'I would like to go to London but... In the following elaborately extended metaphor, Grice expresses his unease with the notion of a series of competing wants, arguing that rationality is necessary to impose some order or restraint on pre-rational emotions and impulses:  It seems to me that the picture of the soul suggested by D's treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one might almost say, com-puterised. It is a picture of an ideally decorous board meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the stand-point of their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action; normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another over-impressed with the presentations made by some particular member. My soul doesn't seem to me, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout, won't listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the chair-man, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since some-times the meeting breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.  In the final section of his reply, Grice returns to the discussion of methodology. He takes issue with Davidson's aim of avoiding the mysterious and the unexplained in accounting for intention. On the con-trary, in philosophy of mind, 'a certain kind of mysteriousness' is to be prized. A concept is useful to the extent that it can explain behaviour, and this consideration outweighs some degree of opaqueness in the concept itself, as in the case of Grice's J-accepting and V-accepting. A psychological theory will be more or less rich, depending on the complexity of the behaviour, and therefore of the necessary psychological states, of the creature under investigation.  In the seven years from the time of his move to America, Grice had developed his interest in the philosophy of language to include the relationship between semantics and syntax. This had involved him in considerations of how the structure of language may mirror the structure of thought, which had in turn led him back with new insights to some old interests, including the nature of intention, and the role of psychological concepts such as this in linguistic meaning. Interest in how language is used to express thought about the world prompted a consideration of psychological concepts and ultimately a return to a topic from much earlier in his career: the philosophical status of rationality.In 1975 Grice was made full professor at Berkeley, and in the same year he was elected president of the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association. Now in his sixties, there was no apparent diminution in his restless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He travelled frequently to speak at conferences, deliver lecture series and lead discussions, mainly within the United States. His reputation benefited from this exposure, and also from the wider dissemination of his work on implicature. He finally published the second and third William James lectures belatedly and apparently reluctantly during the 1970s, under the titles 'Logic and conversation' and 'Further notes on logic and conversation'!'  Meanwhile, Grice was cutting an increasingly striking figure around the Berkeley campus. He was always a large man and, apparently unmoved by California's growing interest in healthy eating, he had recently been putting on weight. In his youth he had been proud of his blond curls, but now his hair was thinning and whitish, and grew down over his collar. His clothes were chosen for comfort and familiarity rather than for style or fashion. He was most offended, however, when it was once suggested that his trousers were held up by a piece of string.  Wasn't it obvious, he demanded, that he was using two old cricket club ties? Grice did not, perhaps, deliberately cultivate his image as an eminent but eccentric Englishman abroad, but he does seem to have taken some pleasure in the effect he produced. Drinking one evening in Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, he was approached by a total stranger who wanted to know who he was: I don't recognise you, but I'm sure you must be someone distinguished.' Perhaps more telling than the anecdote itself is the fact that Grice was immensely pleased by the stranger's comment.Grice's chaotic untidiness extended from his person to his immediate surroundings. His desks at home and on campus were piled high with an apparent miscellany of notes, manuscripts and correspondence. He drove a series of old cars, all bought cheaply and constantly breaking down, a particular problem for Grice who had neither ability nor inclination to fix them. His disregard for appearances may have been the result of preoccupation or absent-mindedness, but it did not represent an embracing of the laissez-faire, or 'hippy' attitude of his students' gen-eration, as has sometimes been suggested. In fact, Grice seems to have been wary of the values this represented. Very early in the 1970s he jotted down an extensive list, apparently simply for his own benefit, of opposing 'good' and 'bad' values in this new ethos. The list headed  'Good Things' includes 'doing your own thing (self-expression)', 'inde-pendence (cf. authority)', 'new (unusual) experiences (self-expansion)' and 'equality'. The 'Bad (or at least not good) Things' include '(self) dis-cipline',  loyalty (except political)', tolerance (except towards what we favour)' and 'culture (except popular)'. Some items on the list are marked with as asterisk, which Grice annotates as 'some v. bad'. These include 'discrimination', 'getting unfair advantage' and 'authority'. 3  There is no mistaking Grice's disapproval for the new ethos, which may seem strange in the light of his own affectionate reminiscences of 'pinko Oxford', with its avowed dislike of discipline and authority. In fact, the rebelliousness of Grice's Oxford contemporaries was, as he himself half admits in those reminiscences, more a pose or a show of dissent than a real revolt. It drew on a lifestyle that depended on privilege maintained by the status quo. Grice was made uneasy by the more businesslike rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, with its challenge to authorities, political, social and intellectual.  If Grice was somewhat wary of his students' values, this did not diminish his enthusiasm and success in teaching them. He was exceptionally bad at the paper work and administration accompanying his teaching duties. Repeated requests from administrative staff for course reading lists went unanswered and sometimes unopened, course descriptions in student handbooks were often brief to the point of evasion, and lists of grades were submitted late or not at all. However, he seems to have taken the business of teaching itself much more seriously. Those who have heard him generally agree that he was not a talented lecturer.* Tapes of his lectures bear this out; they are full of hesitations, false starts and labyrinthine digressions. However, the few surviving tapes of Grice's seminars suggest that his approach lent itself more naturally to this form of teaching. A tape from 1978 of a seminaron theories of truth records him patiently drawing out responses from his students, encouraging even faltering attempts to form answers.  Above all, he was interested in nurturing sensitivity to philosophical method, and in reinforcing students in the habit of forming their own judgements. In the same seminar, as he helps along the discussion of truth, he draws out the significant steps in the argument: consider what criticisms might be made of our position, then think about how we might get out of them.' In teaching, he still emphasised linguistic intui-tion. Former student Nancy Cartwright has recalled a seminar on metaphysics in the mid-1970s in which Grice encouraged his students to consider the theoretical claims of physics by determining where they would incorporate 'as if'. A note from a graduate student from the late 1970s includes the comment, 'I'd say that you've already increased my belief in paying attention to our linguistic intuitions." As a supervisor he was encouraging and attentive. Judith Baker, one of Grice's doctoral students at this time, has commented that, 'When we discussed my thesis, Grice completely entered into my research and questions. He had a great gift for looking at what another philosopher wished to understand.8  It does seem that, despite his rather cavalier attitude to some of his professional duties, Grice was genuinely concerned about the welfare of his Berkeley students. Some of his notes for the Urbana lectures are written on the back of a draft letter in which he contributes to a faculty discussion of 'Graduate Programme Revision'. Recycling a favourite piece of terminology, he suggests a series of 'desiderata' for the graduate programme. These are concerned not so much with syllabus content as with the more general student experience. They include comments about increasing student access to faculty, as well as points such as  'reduce or eliminate 3rd year doldrums' and 'foster a sense of personal adequacy, together with the idea that philosophy can be an exciting and enjoyable activity'. He makes a final and particularly impassioned point about 'financial discrimination', interesting in the light of his rather wary attitude to new notions of equality. 'A pass at QE should not be nullified by poverty', he argues 'and the added anxiety would be bad in itself, and bad for student harmony and for the flow of applications for admission to the program."  As well as a growing academic reputation, and popularity among his students, Grice enjoyed at Berkeley productive intellectual friendships of the sort he had valued at Oxford. These were largely formed with younger philosophers such as George Myro, Richard Warner and Judith Baker. He collaborated with them in teaching and in writing, but aboveall he enjoyed long, informal discussions. He seemed to find it easier to put together and explore his own ideas in conversation with others than in solitude. These discussions often took place at the house in the Berkeley hills, with Kathleen on hand to cook whatever meal was appropriate to the time of day. Grice commented:  To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.lº  Perhaps the most significant collaboration of this period was that with Judith Baker. They produced copious notes on ethics, particularly  drawing on Kant and on Aristotle. They completed a book-length manuscript called 'Reflections on morals', credited to 'Paul Grice & Judy Baker or Judy Baker & Paul Grice' and planned and partly wrote another called 'The power structure of the soul'." These were intended for publication, but have not yet appeared. I The only published work to result from their long collaboration was one article, 'Davidson on  "Weakness of the will"', in which they return to some of the themes discussed by Grice in the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. 13  Grice's chief solo interest during the 1970s was not very far removed from the themes of his collaborative work with Judith Baker. Nor, typically, did it represent a completely new direction in his thinking.  Throughout his philosophical career, Grice's choices of topic tended to follow on from and build on each other, rather than forming discreet units. In this case, he returned to ideas that had interested him at least since his early work towards the William James lectures, namely the psychological property of rationality, its status as a defining feature of human cognition, and its consequences for human behaviour. Grice suggested that he drew out, and perhaps saw, the significance of rationality to his theory of conversation more clearly in later commentary on the work than in his original formulation of it.' He did mention rationality in the William James lectures, insisting that to follow the Cooperative Principle was to do no more than behave rationally in relation to the aims of a conversation. However, looking back over his work at the end of his life, he goes further, remarking on the essentially psychological nature of his theory of conversation. It was aimed not atdescribing the exact practices and regularities of everyday conversation, but at explaining the ways in which people attribute psychological states or attitudes to each other, in conversation or in any other type of interaction. Crucially, it saw conversation, an aspect of human behav-iour, as essentially a rational activity, and sought to explain this ratio-nality. Grice defends himself against criticisms that his theory overlooks argumentative, deceitful or idle conversations: 'it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess.'5 Properties of rationality, he argues, can legitimately be abstracted away from more specific conversational details.  Some of Grice's notes from the year or so immediately preceding the William James lectures suggest that even at that time he was concerned with the analysis of reason for its own sake. The back of a letter about the 1966 AGM of the North Oxford Cricket Club, for instance, is devoted to an imaginative weighing up of the respective pros and cons of spending July teaching philosophy at the University of Wigan, and of spending it on a cricket tour. Grice is looking for an analysis of  'reasons for doing', perhaps for the type of language in which people usually express such arguments. On the same paper he tries out different uses of the modal verb 'should'. I In other notes from the same year he starts considering the distinction between 'reasons for' and 'reasons why'! There seems then to have been a break in this line of thought;  Grice did little with the idea of reason during the time of his move to America, while he was concentrating on syntax and semantics.  However, he returned to the topic in the early 1970s, somehow finding the earlier notes in his idiosyncratic filing system and annotating and extending them. Returning to the distinction between 'reasons for..' and 'reasons why..!, he adopts a distinctively  'ordinary language  philosophy' approach as he tries out different uses and occurrences of the phrases. One note is actually headed 'botanizing' and lists, under the heading 'Reasons (practical)', such phrases as 'the reason why he d'd (action) was..!', 'there was (a) reason to @', 'there was (a) reason for him to q (action, attitude: fire x, distrust x)', 'he had reason to q',  'he had a reason for q-ing', 'his reasons for @-ing'. Grice makes notes on the distinction between the reason why x... was that p' and 'x's reason for ... was that/so that/to p'. He notes that for Aristotle:  Reasons for believing, if accepted, culminate in my believing something (where what I believe is the conclusion of the argument asso-ciated with these reason). Reasons for doing, if accepted, culminate in my doing something, where what I do is the conclusion of the  'practical' aspect associated with these reasons. i.e. the conclusion of a practical argument is an action. 18  Grice presented the results of these deliberations in a series of lectures called 'Aspects of reason', as the Immanuel Kant lectures at Stanford in  1977. In 1979 he used them again as the John Locke lectures in Oxford, this time adding an extra lecture to the series. The lectures were eventually edited by Richard Warner and published in 2001. The invitation to present the John Locke lectures was the occasion of one of Grice's rare trips to England. He made conscientious and surprisingly neat packing lists, including careful reminders to himself of the notes and books he would take with him to work on when not lecturing. His list of notes includes 'Kant notes - Aristotle notes - Incontinence - Ethics (Judy) - Presupposition'. The books he was packing represent some heavy, if predictable, reading: 'Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, Russell'. Perhaps less predictably, the list starts with the anomalous and unspecified  'Zoology'. Grice's interest in the study and classification of living beings was to show itself faintly in the lectures on reason, and more clearly in the work to follow.  At the start of the John Locke lectures, Grice comments on his pleasure at being back at Oxford:  I find it a moving experience to be, within these splendid and none too ancient walls, once more engaged in my old occupation of  rendering what is clear obscure. I am, at the same time, proud of my mid-Atlantic status, and am, therefore, delighted that the Old World should have called me in, or rather recalled me, to redress, for once, the balance of my having left her for the New.!9  He was no doubt highlighting the distinction between Old and New World for rhetorical effect. But there was something genuine in his claim to 'mid-Atlantic status'; just as he was always too prominently British fully to integrate into Californian life, he was no longer comfortably at home in Oxford. Notes sent and received at the time, inevitably covered with scribbled jottings to do with reason, indicate that he stayed in his old college, St Johns, and arranged to meet many of his former colleagues for drinks and dinners.  But he had to re-  accommodate to the formalities of Oxford. The back of a programme of a match between Oxford University Cricket Club and Hampshire showshim reminding himself to order 'dress shirt, black tie'. He also needs to remember 'shoe polish/brushes OR get cleaned' and 'button, needle, thread'. He poses himself a question that would not have troubled him for some years: 'gown or not gown?' There is no doubt that Grice knew the rituals of Oxford life well enough. However, the act of readapting to them seems to have involved him in some deliberate and rather strained effort after more than a decade in the very different social milieu of Berkeley. Some of his attitudes had changed as radically as his dress, although these changes were more carefully concealed from his former colleagues. Some years previously, soon after his move to America, he had confided in Kathleen that he had discovered that very few of the students at Berkeley knew any Greek; most read Aristotle in translation. Further, and rather to Kathleen's surprise, he expressed himself quite happy with this state of affairs; there were now some very good translations available. Kathleen was well aware that he would never have admitted to such an opinion in the presence of any of his former Oxford colleagues.21  The first of the John Locke lectures is titled 'Reasons and reasoning'.  Grice describes his desire to clarify the notion of reason, a notion deemed worthy of attention by both Aristotle and Kant. Typically cir-cumspect in his proposal, he suggests that such a clarification may make some interesting philosophical conclusions possible, but that the actual conclusions are beyond the scope of these lectures. He prefaces his con-sideration of the technicalities of reasoning with a fairly lengthy dis-cussion of a rather more abbreviated notion. This is the definition of reasoning with which most ordinary people are familiar. It is tempting here to see a parallel with Grice's theory of conversation. The study of the literal meanings of words is crucially important, and shows up the striking parallels between natural language and logic, but it does not tell us everything about how people actually use words. In the same way, the logical processes of reason are of supreme philosophical impor-tance, but nevertheless need to be seen as distinct from people's everyday experience of reasoning. Introspection is of limited use in establishing the processes of reasoning because people frequently take short cuts and make inferential leaps in their thinking. To do so is often beneficial in terms of the time and energy saved, and indeed might con-stitute a definition of 'intelligence'. 22 In his treatment of reason, Grice draws on and develops the line of argument from the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. The earlier paper was circulated in mimeograph, although far less widely than 'Logic and conversation' 23 It may have been at leastin part because much of it was subsumed into these lectures that it was not itself published. Grice's method of examining and clarifying the notion of reason is one Austin would have recognised and approved He presents the results of the dusting down of the methods of linguistic botanising apparent in his notes from the previous few years. He considers different ways in which the word 'reason' is used, classifies these uses into different categories, and illustrates these categories with examples. A sentence such as 'The reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane' exemplifies what he describes as 'explanatory reasons'.2 The same type of meaning is conveyed by variants such as 'the reason for the collapse of the bridge was that..! and 'the fact that the girders were made of cellophane was the reason why the bridge collapsed'. In all such examples the fact about the girders is offered as an explanation, or a causal account, of the collapse of the bridge. They are elaborate versions of Grice's original 'reason for' cate-gory. Such examples are 'factive' with respect to both events; the speaker implies the truth of both the fact about the bridge and the fact about the girders.  Second, there are 'justificatory reasons', exemplified by 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for thinking that the bridge had collapsed' and 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for postponing the conference. There are many possible variants on these patterns, including 'he had reason to think that ... (to postpone ...) but he seemed unaware of the fact' and 'the fact that they were so late was a reason for wanting to postpone the meeting'. These are all variations of Grice's original category of 'reason why'. They offer some support, although not inevitably necessary or sufficient justification, for a psychological state ('thinking', 'wanting') or an action ('postponing').  Such examples are factive with respect to the reason given, but do not guarantee the truth of the other event (the collapse of the bridge, the postponement of the conference).  Grice labels the third type of use of 'reason' 'Justificatory-Explanatory', because of their hybrid nature; they draw on aspects of both the preceding classes. 25 Examples include 'John's reason for thinking Samantha to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog' and 'John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself against recurrent metamorphosis'. These reasons are relative to a particular person. As the examples illustrate, they may be introduced by either 'that..!' or 'to.... In the first case, the resulting sentence is doubly factive unless 'X thought that' is inserted before the reason. In the second case, the sentence is only singly factive. In each case, if therelevant individual believes that the reason gives sufficient justification for the attitude ('thinking') or action ('denouncing') then the reason can be seen as an explanation for that attitude or action. Grice in fact suggests that this type of reason is a special case of explanatory reason;  'they explain, but what they explain are actions and certain psychological attitudes' .26  Having spent considerable time and gone into some complexity in distinguishing these classes of 'reason', both in the published lectures and in his preparatory notes, Grice appears to drop them rather abruptly. He turns to a consideration of practical and non-practical, or alethic reasons: in effect the reasons to do and reasons to believe that had concerned him in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'.  Grice does little to smooth the transition between these two topics, but does mention in passing that he will be concentrating exclusively on justificatory reasons. In seems that concentrating on 'reasons to' would enable him to look at the bases for intentional actions and for psychological attitudes. These two aspects of human psychology had provided an underlying thread in his work at least since 'Meaning'.  Grice refers to Kant's theory that there is one faculty of reason, a faculty that manifests itself in a practical and a non-practical aspect. For Grice, the nature and identity of a faculty is prohibitively difficult to investigate in itself. The language used to describe reason, however, is amenable to rigorous analysis. He therefore proposes to approachKant's theory by addressing the question of whether 'reason' has the same meaning or different meanings in 'practical reason' and 'non-practical reason'. He notes that a variety of ordinary language expressions used in reasoning can apparently describe both. The word 'reason' itself is one example, but so too are 'justification', modal verbs such as 'ought' and 'should', and phrases such as 'it is to be expected'. In effect, he is seeking to apply his Modified Occam's Razor to the vocabulary of reason by avoiding systematic ambiguities between separate meanings for such a range of natural language vocabulary. In doing so, he draws on his own earlier response to Davidson's suggestion of the operators 'pr' and 'pf'. He proposes that all reasoning statements have a common component of underlying structure, as well as an indication of the semantic subtype to which they belong. He posits as the common component a 'rationality' operator, which he labels 'Acc', and for which he suggests the interpretation 'it is reasonable that'. This is then followed by one of two mood-operators, symbolised by 'I' for alethic statements and '!' for practical statements. These two operators precede, and have scope over, the 'radical' ('I'). So the structure for 'John shouldbe recovering his health now' is 'Acc + t + I', while the structure for 'John should join AA' is 'Acc +! + I'.?? Grice suggests that the mood-operators be interpreted as two different forms of acceptance, technically labelled 'J-acceptance' and 'V-acceptance', but informally equated with judging and willing, or with 'thinking (that p)' and wanting (that p)'.  The mood-operators place conditions on when it is appropriate for a speaker to use a reasoning statement, in other words when speakers feel justified in expressing acceptance of a proposition. This raises the question of what is to count as relevant justification. Alethic statements are clearly justified by evidence. We have reason for making a statement about our knowledge or belief of a certain proposition just in case we have evidence for the proposition. Ideally, we are justified in using such statements if the proposition in question is true. But truth is not a possible means of validating statements of obligation, command, or inten-tion. To use some concrete examples (which Grice does not do), 'That must be the new secretary', interpreted alethically, would be optimally legitimate in a context where its radical', namely that is the new secretary', is true. The legitimacy of 'You must not kill', interpreted practically, however, cannot be assessed in terms of the truth of 'you don't kill'. There must be some other grounds on which such statements can be judged.  Grice's suggests that, in reasoning generally, we are interested in deriving statements we perceive as having some sort of 'value'. Truth, cer-tainly, is one type of value, and alethic reasoning is aimed at deriving true statements.  But in practical reasoning we are concerned with  another type of value, which might be described as 'goodness'. Grice's own summary of this difference, in which he implicitly links the two types of reasoning to his two broad psychological categories of mood operator, runs as follows:  We have judicative sentences ('t'-sentences) which are assigned truth (or falsity) just in case their radicals qualify for radical truth (or radical falsity); and we have volitive sentences ('!'-sentences) which are assigned practical value (or disvalue) just in case their radicals qualify for radical goodness (or badness). Since the sentential forms will indicate which kind of value is involved, we can use the generic term 'satisfactory' 28  In his discussion of practical value, Grice is drawing on themes he presumably expects to be familiar to his audience from Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, although he does not make any explicit reference. Grice himself was well versed in this work, which was a particular focus for his old tutor W. F. R. Hardie, and on which he himself worked collaboratively with Austin. Aristotle identifies rationality as a defining characteristic of human beings, distinguishing them from all other life forms. The rational nature of human beings ensures that all their actions are aimed at some particular end or set of ends. Although these ends differ depending on the specific field of activity, 'if there is any one thing that is the end of all actions, this will be the practical good'. Similarly, Grice considers practical value (he says very little more about 'goodness' here) as an end for which people strive in what they wish to happen, and therefore in what they choose to do. Here, again, he returns to the type of rationality he discussed in the William James lectures. Rational beings have an expectation that actions will have certain consequences, and are therefore prepared to pursue a line of present behaviour in the expectation of certain future outcomes. They are prepared to conform to regularities of communicative behaviour in the expectation of being able to give and receive information. This, however, is just one type of a much more general pattern of human behaviour. All actions are ultimately geared towards particular ends.  The extra lecture Grice added to the series at Oxford is 'Some reflections about ends and happiness', originally delivered as a paper at the Chapel Hill colloquium in 1976. Here too he draws on Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, this time more explicitly. Aristotle suggested that the philosopher contemplating the range of different ends for different actions is confronted with the question of the nature of the ultimate end, or the 'supreme good' to which all actions aim. The answer is not hard to find, but the significance of that answer is more complex. ' "It is happiness", say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.3 For ordinary people, however, living well involves something obvious such as wealth, health or pleasure. For the philosopher the nature of happiness is much more complex, and is linked to the proper function of a man. Individual men have different specific functions, and are judged according to those specific functions; a good flautist is one who plays the flute well and a good artist one who paints well. More generally, a good man is to be defined as one who performs the proper functions of a man well. Because rationality is the distinguishing feature of mankind, the function of a man is to live the rational life, and a good man is one who lives the rational life well. Therefore the good for man, or that which results in happi-ness, is 'an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are morekinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and more perfect kind. 31  For Grice, happiness is a complex end; that is, it is constituted by the set of ends conducive to happiness. The precise set of ends in question may vary from individual to individual, but they can be seen a conducive to happiness if they offer a relatively stable system for the guidance of life. Grice finishes on a leading but inconclusive note. It seems intuitively plausible that it should be possible to distinguish between different sets of ends in respect of some external notion. Otherwise it would, uncomfortably, be impossible to choose between the routes to happiness selected 'by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentle-man' 32 Grice's cautious proposal of the basis for a notion of 'happiness-in-general', abstracted from individuals' idiosyncrasies, draws on the essential characteristics of a rational being. He concludes his lecture series with the following, highly suggestive outline:  The ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abundance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.  As Richard Warner indicates in a footnote, the original Chapel Hill lecture ends with the further comment: 'But I have now almost exactly reached the beginning of the paper which, till recently, you thought I was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of ethical princi-ples. It is a pity that I have used up my time.'  The rather enigmatic reference to a 'creature-constructor', and the link to ethics with which Grice tantalised his Chapel Hill audience, draw on ideas developed over a number of years but not discussed in these lec-tures. Grice was working on the notion of a 'creature-constructor' back in the mid-1960s. He in fact originally planned to include discussion of this topic in the William James lectures. Papers from Oxford from 1966 include a jotted note entitled 'Provisional Grand Plan for James Lectures and Seminars'. There are two bullet points:  1. Use 'God' as expository device. Imagine creature, to behaviour of which 'think', 'know', 'goal', 'want', 'purpose' can be applied. But nocommunication. Goals continuation of self (or of species). Imagine God wishing to improve on such creatures, by enabling them to enlarge their individual worlds and power over them, by equipping them for transmission of beliefs and wants (why such change  'advance'; because of decreased vulnerability to vicissitudes of nature).  2. Mechanisms for such development. Elements in behaviour must in some way 'represent' beliefs and wants (or their objects) or rather states of the world which are specially associated with them.33  Grice's private note in fact contains the germs of most of his complex  'creature-constructor'  programme, and of the topics to which he  attempted to link it throughout the rest of his life. It also explains his interest in zoology. He was studying life in terms of the structures into which it has been classified. His idea was that it might, theoretically at least, be possible to devise a ladder or hierarchy of creatures, such that each rung on the ladder represents a creature incorporating the capacities of the creature on the lower rung, and adding some extra capacity.  As a presentational convenience, Grice proposes an imaginary agent or designer of this process, the expository device 'God' of his early notes.  In later notes, and certainly in all published work, he prefers 'creature-constructor' or 'Genitor'. The Genitor's task is to decide what faculties to bestow on each successive creature so as better to equip it to fulfil its ends. The chief end of all life forms is to ensure their own continued survival, or the survival of the species to which they belong. Grice's hierarchy could be seen as an extension of Aristotle's division of living creatures in the Nicomachean Ethics into those that experience nutrition and growth (including plants), those that are sentient (including horses and cattle) and those that sustain 'practical life of the rational part' (only human beings).34 Grice does not mention this, or indeed Locke's discussion of personal identity, familiar to him from his work on the topic more than 30 years earlier. Locke posited a hierarchy of living beings, with the identity of beings at each stage depending on the fulfilment of functions necessary to the continued existence of that being. Grice would presumably have assumed that the philosophical pedigree of his ideas would be transparent to his audience. He goes much further than Locke by employing the hierarchy of beings in a mental exercise to assess the status and function of human rationality.  In order to describe, or to represent, the place of human beings on the ladder of existence, Grice recycles the 'pirots' that had appeared in the 'Lectures on language and reality'. There, pirots had branched outfrom carulising elatically in order to model the psychological processes of communication. Now, they stand in for human beings in the Genitor's deliberations. They appeared in this guise as early as 1973 when Grice was teaching a course at Berkeley called 'Problems in philosophical psychology'. One of his students took the following notes in an early seminar in this series: 'one of the goals of the pirot programme is to discover what parallels, if any, emerge between the laws governing pirots and human psychology' 35 Grice was returning to his earlier interest in psychological states. He had addressed these back in the early 1950s when he had considered the best way of describing intentions.  In 'Dispositions and intentions' he had criticised dispositional accounts that described intentions in terms of dispositions to act. In particular he saw Ryle's version of this as coming dangerously near to behav-iourism and the denial of any privileged access to our own mental states.  His attitude seems to have softened somewhat in the intervening twenty years. The student's notes describe the pirot programme as an 'offspring of dispositional analyses of metal states from Ryle C of M. But behav-iourists unable to provide conditions for someone being in particular mental state purely in terms of extensionally described behaviour.' The pirot programme was designed to offer the bridge behaviourism could not provide, by describing underlying mental states derived from, but ontologically distinct from, observable behaviour. It was a functional account, in that each posited mental state was related to a specific function it played in the creature's observable behaviour; 'in functional account, functional states specified in terms of their relation to inner states as well as to behaviour'. Further, the student noted, 'a functional theory is concerned not only with behavioral output and input of a system, but of [sic] the functional organization of inner states which result in such outputs!'  'Philosophical psychology', then, was Grice's label for the metaphysical enquiry into the mental properties and structures underlying observable human behaviour. In contrast to a purely materialist position such as that of behaviourism, Grice was arguing in favour of positing mental states in so far as they seemed essential to explaining observable behaviour. Such explanatory power was sufficient to earn a posited mental property a place in a philosophical psychology. This openness to the inclusion of mental phenomena in philosophical theories was apparent in his earlier work on intentions, and also in the William James lectures. He was later to describe such an approach as  'constructivist'. The philosopher constructs the framework of mental structure, as dictated by the behaviour in need of explanation. Thephilosopher is able to remain ambivalent as to the reality or otherwise of the posited mental state, so long as they are explanatorily successful.  In fact, the ability to play an active role in explaining behaviour is the only available measure of reality for mental states. In the pirot pro-gramme, the fiction of the Genitor provided a dramatised account of this process, with decisions about what mental faculties would promote beneficial behaviours playing directly into the endowment of those faculties.  Grice had presented some of his developing ideas along these lines in a lecture delivered and published before the John Locke lectures, but in which the place of rationality in 'creature-construction' is more fully developed. 'Method in philosophical psychology' was Grice's presidential address to the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association in March 1975. In general, the lecture is concerned with establishing a sound philosophical basis for analysing psychological states and processes. He sums up his attitude to the use of mental states in a metaphor: 'My taste is for keeping open house to all sorts of conditions and entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework' 3 In keeping with this policy of tolerance towards useful metaphysical entities, Grice proposes two psychological primitives, chosen for their potential explanatory value. These are the predicate-constants J and V which, as he was to do in the John Locke lectures, he relates loosely to the familiar notions of judging, or believing, and willing, or wanting. Concentrating on V, we can see ways in which positing such a mental state can help explain simple behaviour in a living creature. An individual may be said to belong to class T of creatures if that individual possesses certain capacities which are constitutive of membership in T, as well perhaps as other, incidental capacities.  These constitutive capacities are such that they require the supply of certain necessities N. Indeed the need for N in part defines the relevant capacity. Prolonged absence of some N will render the creature unable to fulfil some necessary capacity, and will ultimately threaten its ability to fulfil all its other necessary conditions. Such an absence will therefore threaten the creature's continued membership of T. In these cir-cumstances, we can say that the creature develops a mental attitude of V with respect to N. This mental attitude is directed at the fulfilment of a necessary capacity; its ultimate end is therefore the continued survival of the creature.  A concrete example of this process, a simplified version of the one offered by Grice, is to think of T as representing the class 'squirrel' and N as representing 'nuts'. One necessary condition for a creature to be asquirrel is, let us say, its capacity to eat nuts. This capacity is focused around its own fulfilment; it is manifested in the eating of nuts. If the creature experiences prolonged deprivation of nuts, its ability to fulfil this capacity, and indeed all other squirrel-capacities, will be threatened (it will be in danger of death by starvation). In such a situation, it is legitimate to say that the squirrel wants nuts. This posited mental state explains the squirrel's behaviour (it will eat nuts if it can find them) in relation to a certain end (survival).37  A metaphysical theory that offers a model of why a squirrel eats nuts may not seem particularly impressive, but it is a necessary first step in modelling behaviour in much more complex creatures: ultimately, in describing human psychology. In making this transition Grice draws on the notion of 'creature-construction'. The genitor is bound by one rule; every capacity, just like the squirrel's capacity to eat nuts, must be useful or beneficial to the creature, at least in terms of survival. This rule is sufficient to ensure that any mental properties introduced into the system are there for a reason, fulfilling Grice's criterion of the usefulness of metaphysical entities. It also, perhaps, allows Grice to imply that such mental capacities might be evolutionarily derived, without having to commit to this or any other biological theory. The final stage in the mental exercise is to consider what further, incidental features may arise as side-effects of these capacities for survival.  Grice argues that it is not unreasonable to suggest that, in designing some of the more complex creations, the genitor might decide to endow creatures with rationality. This capacity would qualify as having survival benefits. For creatures living in complex, changing environments, it is more beneficial to have the capacity to reason about their environment and choose a strategy for survival, than to be endowed with a series of separate, and necessarily finite, reflex responses. Just as with the more primitive capacity of eating, it is necessary for the complex creature to utilise the capacity of reason in order to retain continued use of it, and indeed of the set of all its capacities. But once the creature is reasoning, the subjects to which it applies this capacity will not be limited to basic survival. A creature with the capacity to hypothesise about the relationship between means and end will not stop at deciding whether to hide under or climb into a tree, for instance. A creature from the top of the scale of complexity will be able to consider the hypothetical processes of its own construction. That creature will assess how each capacity might be in place simply to promote survival, and might confront a bleak but inevitable question: what is the point of its own continued survival?The creature's capacity for reason is exactly the property to help it survive this question. Rather than persuading the creature to give up the struggle for survival, the capacity is utilised to produce a set of criteria for evaluating ends. These criteria will be used to attribute value to existing ends, which promote survival, and to further ends that the creature will establish. The creature will use the criteria to evaluate its own actions and, by extension, the actions of other rational creatures The justification the creature constructs for the pursuit of certain ends, dependent on the set of criteria, will provide it with justification for its continued existence. Thus the capacity of rationality both raises and answers the question 'Why go on surviving?'38 Grice hints at the possible beginnings, and status, of ethics, when he suggests that the pursuit of these ends might be prized by the collective rational creatures to such an extent that they are compiled into a 'manual' for living. The creatures' purposes in existing are no longer just survival, but following certain prescribed lines of conduct. Grice tantalisingly ends the section of his lecture on 'creature construction' with a nod at some possible further implications of this idea.  Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).39  Somewhat at odds with his more specific usage elsewhere, Grice has here been using the term 'pirot' to refer to any creature on the scale.  The 'very intelligent rational pirots' are the psychologically most complex of such creatures. In adopting this term, which is added in the margin of his preparatory notes, Grice would appear to be making a pun on Locke's 'very intelligent rational parrot', the imaginary case used to argue that bodily form must have some bearing on personal identity.40 Other than this knowing reference, Grice does not make any attempt to link his work on creature construction to Locke, or to his own earlier interest in personal identity. Richard Warner has criticised Grice for ignoring the connections between rationality, happiness and personal identity, arguing that a notion of self will determine what counts as an essential end for an individual. If, he suggests,  we are to pursue Grice's strategy - and it is a promising one - of replacing Aristotle's 'activity in conformity with virtue' with 'suit-ability for the direction of life', I would suggests that an appeal tothe notion of personal identity should play a role in the explication of suitability. 41  As Grice's reference to a list of 'rules for living' suggests, the next direction in which he explored these ideas was in the area of philosophical ethics. He did not, however, return to the implications of his pun on  'manual' and 'Immanuel'. It is possible that he was referring to Immanuel Kant, whose work on reason was central to his own thinking on this subject. But the pun may also contain a hint towards an explanation of religious morality, and perhaps even religious belief, as facts of human existence, necessary consequences of human nature. In his own notes on the subject this aspect of the 'Immanuel' figures more prominently. In general, the plausibility of explaining religion within philosophical psychology seems to loom larger in Grice's thinking than his published work of the time would suggest. For instance, on the back of an envelope from the bank, in faint, almost illegible hand he wonders: 'perhaps Moses brought other "objectives" from Sinai, besides 10 comms'. Here he may be thinking about other systems for living, suggesting that 'perhaps we might... "retune" them'. In the same notes he seems to be pondering the differences between 'God' and  'good', between 'conception' and 'reality'. Perhaps, he speculates, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be treated along these lines; 'real or pretend doesn't matter provided... does explanatory job'.42  Grice seems here to be experimenting with the idea of 'construc-tivism' as a general philosophical method, not just as an approach to philosophical psychology. An entity, state or principle is to be welcomed if it introduces an increase in explanatory power. Beyond that it is not suitable, and indeed not possible, to enquire into its 'reality'. A system of explanations is successful entirely to the extent that it is coherent, relatively simple, and explains the facts. It is not hard to discern the influence of Kant in this epistemology, and his notion that 'things in themselves' are inevitably unreachable, but that our systems of human knowledge can nevertheless seek to model reality.  In his final decade, Grice turned such a philosophical approach in the direction of his interest in metaphysics, in philosophical psychology and, derived from this, in ethics. Anthony Kenny suggests that since the Renaissance the main interest from philosophers in human conduct has been epistemological:  Moral philosophy has indeed been written in abundance: but it has not, for the most part, been based on any systematic examination ofthe concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. the concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. Grice retired from his post at Berkeley in 1980, at the age of 67. There was no question, however, that he would cease full-time philosophical activity. He continued to teach, both part-time at Berkeley and, for a few years in the early 1980s, as a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also continued to work on new ideas, to write and, increasingly, to publish. His reluctance ever to consider a piece of work finished or ready for scrutiny had meant that only 12 articles had been published during a career of over 40 years. And in almost all cases he had been either effectively obliged to include a paper in the volume of proceedings to which it belonged, or otherwise cajoled into publish-ing. It had, however, long been agreed that the William James lectures would be published in full by Harvard University Press and now finally Grice began to take an active interest in this process. He perhaps realised that it was not feasible to continue delaying the revisions and reformulations that he considered necessary. Perhaps, also, the enthusiasm with which his ideas were received in Berkeley, and the frank admiration of students and colleagues, had slowly worn away at his formidable self-doubt. Writing in Oxford, Strawson has suggested that Grice's inhibiting perfectionism was 'finally swept away by a warm tide of approbation such as is rarely experienced on these colder shores'.! Cer-tainly, he began to draw up numerous lists of papers on related themes that he would like to see published with the lectures. These included previously published articles such as 'The causal theory of perception', but also a number that still remained in manuscript form, such as  'Common sense and scepticism', and 'Postwar Oxford philosophy'.  This planned volume was focused on his philosophy of language, but Grice was also turning his attention to publishing in other areas. After a visit to Oxford in 1980, the year in which he was made an HonoraryFellow of St John's College, he received a letter from a representative of Oxford University Press. This followed up a meeting at which Grice had clearly been eager to discuss a number of different book projects. The letter refers to 'the commentary on Kant's Ethics which you have been working on with Professor Judy Baker', and suggests that this might be the project closest to being in publishable form. However, the publisher expresses the hope that work on this 'will not deflect you from also completing your John Locke lectures on Reason', and a further work on Ethics.? Grice's desire to see some of his major projects through publication coincided with his retirement, and so could not have been driven by the demands of his post. Rather, it reflected a wish for some of the strands of his life's work to reach a wider audience than the select number of students and colleagues who had attended his classes and heard his lectures.  Grice's interests in reason and in ethics increasingly absorbed him during the 1980s. They were prominent in his teaching at Seattle and at Berkeley. He himself summarised this change of emphasis as a move away from the formalism that had dominated his work for a decade or more. The main source of the retreat for formalism lay, he suggested,  'in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attention to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language'? Certainly, the discussion of reason and, particularly, of ethics in Grice's later work takes a more metaphysical and discursive tone than that of some of the linguistic work from his early years in America. However, the break with the philosophy of language was not absolute; both new topics draw on questions about the correct analysis of various sentence types. In Grice's treatment of reason, close attention to the use of certain key terms led him to posit a single faculty of rationality, yielding both practical and non-practical attitudes. From there, his discussion of expressions of practical reasoning led to the question of the appropriate type of value to serve as the end point of such reasoning, analogous to alethic value in non-practical reasoning. A simplistically defined notion of a system for the direction of life raised the awkward suggestion that it might be impossible to discriminate between a wide variety of modes of living.  People are generally in agreement that the actions of Grice's 'well-balanced, kindly country gentleman', for instance, are to be afforded greater value than those of his 'unwavering egotist', but an account of value based simply on reasoning from means to ends seems unable to account for this.  The study of ethics has long included analysis of statements of value.  Sentences such as 'stealing is wrong' appear to draw on moral concepts;it can therefore be argued that an accurate understanding of the meaning of such sentences is fundamental to any explanation of those moral concepts. Very broadly, there are two positions on this question: the objectivist and the subjectivist. One objectivist approach to ethics argues that moral values exist as ontologically distinct entities, external to any individual consciousness or opinion. Human beings by nature have access to these values, although perceptions of them may be more or less acute, observance of them more or less rigorous, and understanding of their implications more or less perceptive. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this moral objectivism was Kant, who described ethical statements as categorical imperatives; they are to be observed regardless of personal preference or individual circumstance. These he distinguishes from hypothetical imperatives, also often expressed in terms of what one 'should' do, but dependent on some desired goal or end.  A canonical subjectivist position is that there are no moral absolutes; expressions of value judgements are always particular to subject and to context. Perhaps the most extreme version of this position was that put forward by A. J. Ayer, who followed his verificationist programme through to its logical conclusion by arguing in Language, Truth and Logic that sentences such as 'stealing money is wrong' have no factual meaning. Although apparently of subject/predicate form, they do not express a proposition at all. They merely indicate a personal, emotional response on the part of the speaker, much the same as writing 'stealing money!!', where 'the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed'. A less reductionist, but equally subjectivist position, is to analyse such statements as in fact having the form of 'hypothetical imperatives'  '. That is, moral statements attempt to  impose restrictions on behaviour, but do so in relation to certain actual or potential outcomes. They stipulate means to reach certain ends.  These ends may be made explicit, as in sentences such as 'if you want to be universally popular, you should be nice to people'. Often, however, they are suppressed, but can be understood as stipulating a general condition of success or advancement. So 'stealing is wrong' is hypothetical in nature, but this is hidden by its surface form. It can be interpreted as something such as 'if you want to get on in life, you should not steal'.  In his work on this subject, Grice draws particularly on two subjectivist analyses of statements of value as hypothetical imperatives:  Philippa Foot's 1972 essay 'Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives' and J. L. Mackie's 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.These choices are not surprising; Grice knew both Foot and Mackie personally from Oxford. In discussing the view that morality consists of a system of hypothetical imperatives, not of absolute values, Foot considers its implications for freedom and responsibility. Dispensing with absolute value raises the fear that people might some day choose to abandon accepted codes of morality. Perhaps this fear would be less, she suggests, 'if people thought of themselves as volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression' rather than as being bound to conform to pre-existing moral imperatives."  Mackie concedes that objectivism seems to be reflected in ordinary language. When people use statements of moral judgements, they do so with a sense that they are referring to objective moral values. More-over, 'I do not think that it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional meanings of moral terms.' However, he argues that this in itself is not sufficient to establish the existence of objective value. The question is not linguistic but ontological. Mackie rehearses two fairly standard arguments to support the break with common sense he is proposing: the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity draws attention to the variety of moral codes and agreed values that have existed at different times in human history, and exist now in different cultures. This diversity, Mackie suggests, argues that moral values reflect ways of life within particular societies, rather than drawing on perceptions of moral absolutes external to those societies. However, he sees the argument from queerness as far more damaging to the notion of absolute value. It draws attention to both the type of entity, and the type of knowledge, this notion seems to demand. Objective values would be 'entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe', while knowledge of them 'would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'? The supporter of objective value is forced to advocate types of entity and types of knowledge of a 'queer' and highly specific kind.  Despite Mackie's concession that a commitment to objective value is apparent in ordinary language, it was far from necessary that a philosopher of ordinary language would take an objectivist stance on ethics.  Indeed, at least one of Grice's Oxford contemporaries who published on the topic presented a subjectivist argument. In 1954 P. H. Nowell-Smith published Ethics, the book in which he advanced rules of 'contextualimplication' that foreshadowed some of Grice's maxims. Grice does not refer to this book in his own writings either on conversation or on value.  Nowell-Smith defends a subjectivist account of moral value, enlisting the argument described by Mackie as 'the argument from queerness'. In the tradition of post-war Oxford philosophy, Nowell-Smith employs different uses of words, and even fragmentary conversational 'scripts' to support his arguments. The meanings of individual words, he argues, often depend on the context in which they occur. For Nowell-Smith, this observation strengthens his subjectivist position. Since words do not remain constant, but are always changing their meanings, there can be no sentences that are true simply because of the meanings of the words they contain; in effect there can be no analytic sentences. Hence statements of moral value cannot be necessarily, but only contingently  In 1983, Grice was working on another major lecture series, which he entitled 'The conception of value'. He notes in the introductory lecture that the title is ambiguous, and deliberately so. The lectures are concerned both with 'the item, whatever it may be, which one conceives, or conceives of, when one entertains the notion of value', and with  'the act, operation, or undertaking in which the entertainment of that notion consists'' In effect, they address the two areas in which Mackie argues objectivism introduces 'queerness'. Grice suggests that the nature and status of value are of fundamental philosophical importance, while the way in which people think about value, their mental relationship to it, is deeply and intrinsically linked to the very nature of personhood.  Value, as suggested in the John Locke lectures, is the ultimate end point and the measure of rationality. The value of any piece of alethic reasoning is dependent on the facts of the matter. The value of practical reasoning, however, is dependent on a notion of goodness. Grice does not state his plan for addressing this issue, or for linking it to an account of ethics. However, as the lectures progress it becomes clear that he is supporting a means-end account of practical reasons, and of assigning some motives and systems for living higher value than others. This, indeed, seems a necessary corollary of his account of reasoning in terms of goals, and of the theory of the derivability of ethical principles hinted at in the closing remark of 'Some reflections on ends and happiness'.  However, in one of his more flamboyant heresies, Grice proposes to retain the notion of absolute value. This notion, generally associated with Kant's idea that moral imperatives are categorical, is canonically seen as being in direct conflict with an account of value concerned with goals, or with reasoning from means to ends.'The conception of value' was written for the American Philosophical Association's Carus lecture series, which Grice was to deliver in the same year. Progress was slow, particularly on the third and final lecture, in which his account of objective value was to be presented and defended. Grice had always preferred interaction to solitary writing, and as he got older he relied increasingly on constructive discussion and even on dictation. Unlike in earlier years, he produced very few draft versions of his writings during the 1980s; the papers that survive from this period consist only of very rough notes and completed manuscripts.  Now, finding composition even more laborious than usual, Grice enlisted the help of Richard Warner. Warner, who was then working at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a vivid account of the process:  To work on the Carus lecture, I drove up from LA on Friday arriving at noon. We began work, drinking inexpensive white wine as the afternoon wore on; switched to sherry as we broke off to play chess before dinner; had a decent wine from Paul's wine cellar with dinner and went back to work after eating. We worked all day Saturday with copious coffee in the morning (bread fried in bacon grease for break-fast) and kept the same afternoon and evening regime as the previous day. Paul did not sleep at all on Saturday night while he kept turning the problems over in his head. After breakfast on Sunday, he dictated, without notes, an almost final draft of the entire lecture. 1º  The result of this process was the third Carus lecture, 'Metaphysics and value'. Grice addresses the properties common to the two types of value by which alethic and practical arguments are assessed, and the centrality of both types to the definition of a rational creature. In this extremely complex but also characteristically speculative discussion, he returns to the idea that every living creature possesses a set of capaci-ties, the fulfilment of each of which is a necessary condition for the continued possession of that capacity, and indeed of all others. Here, the results of Grice's interest in biology are apparent. On the plane on the way to Oxford in 1979 he had been reading books on this topic. In 1981 he made a note to himself to 'Read "Selfish Gene", "chimp" lit'."1 In other notes from this period he lists 'mandatory functions', including 'Reproduction, Ingestion, Digestion, Excretion, Repair, Breath (why?), Cognition'.12 In 'Metaphysics and value', these thoughts are given a more formal shape as Grice considers again the distinction between essential and accidental properties of creatures. Essential prop-erties establish membership of a certain class of creature: 'the essential properties of a thing are properties which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).13 He speculates that rationality is in fact an accidental, rather than an essential property for the class of human being. However, as he argued in  'Method in philosophical psychology', once endowed with rationality, the creature will use the capacity to consider questions not just about how ends are to be achieved, but about the desirability of those ends The creature in possession of rationality, the human being, is endowed with a concern that its attitudes and beliefs are well grounded, or validated. Grice speculates that, as a result of the possession of this property, the human being performs a process of 'Metaphysical Tran-substantiation' on itself. It endorses this concern for validation with the status of an end in itself, and it transforms itself into a creature for whom this is the purpose: into a person. The properties of the human being and the person are the same, but they are differently distributed.  Crucially, for this metaphysically constructed entity 'person', but not for the human being, rationality is an essential property.  There is an unacknowledged link back to the work of John Locke in this suggestion, particularly to the work Grice drew on in his early article  'Personal identity'. Locke proposed a distinction between 'man' and  'person' to take account of the fact that people, as essentially rational beings, are uniquely distinguished from other life forms by something like self-awareness or consciousness. For Locke, the identity of a person depends on the continuation of a single consciousness, while the identity of a man, like that of any living creature, depends on unity of function. Grice's suggestion is similar to Locke's in its metaphysical distinction between 'man' or 'human being' and 'person'. However, he goes beyond Locke in attributing the distinction to the operation of rational creatures themselves, and in the link he proceeds to make between the transformed creature and the nature of value.  For Grice, the rational creature is able to devise and evaluate answers to the questions about value it is raising. This will initially take the form of comparing different possible answers in terms of effectiveness and coherence. By means of raising questions about the justification of ends, and assessing possible answers to those questions, the person takes on the function of attributing value. A rational creature becomes a creature that, by metaphysical definition, has the capacity to attribute value.  Value, even the type of value known as 'goodness', can be discussed objectively, because a creature uniquely endowed with, and indeed defined by, the capacity to judge it, exists. The creature is 'a being whoseessence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value. 1 Values exist because valuers exist. By means of this status afforded to the nature of personhood, it is perhaps possible to reassess Grice's sketchy reference in 'Aspects of reason' to the devising of systems for living. People devise systems for living from the applica-tion of the capacity of reason and the resultant ability to ascribe value to certain courses of action and withhold it from others. The develop-ment and maintenance of basic moral principles can therefore be seen as a necessary product of rational human nature.  In this way, Grice constructs his account of value as being dependent on analyses from means to ends, yet at the same time having objective existence. The process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation operates pri-marily to turn human beings into people and therefore valuers, but it thereby makes value viable. The process, and therefore the existence of valuers and value, derives from the capacity, incidentally present in human beings, for rationality. Neither value itself nor the process of valuing depend on any novel or 'queer' properties or processes. The nature of value, and the apprehension of value, can both be explained in terms of rationality, a phenomenon with an acceptable philosophi-cal pedigree of its own, and one used in other areas of explanation. In Grice's terms, value is embedded in the concept of people as rational creatures; 'value does not somehow or another get in, it is there from  the start'. 15  In the years following the delivery of the Carus lectures, Grice began to justify his claim that the study of value could have illuminating and far-reaching consequences in different areas of philosophical investiga-tion. He had already considered the implications of value for his own account of meaning in the paper 'Meaning revisited'. As so often with Grice's work, the date of publication is misleading. It was published in 1982 in the proceedings of a colloquium on mutual knowledge held in England, but an earlier version of part of the paper had been delivered at a colloquium in Toronto in March 1976. Grice offers a tantalisingly brief suggestion of what might happen if the very intelligent rational creature began to speak: an outline of an account of meaning within the framework of creature-construction to which, it seems, he did not return. If the creature could talk it would be desirable, and judged so by the creature, that its utterances would correspond with its psychologi-cal states. This would enable such beneficial occurrences as being able to exchange information about the environment with other creatures;  it would be possible to transmit psychological states from one creatureto the next. Further, the creature will judge this a desirable property of the utterances of other creatures; it will assume, if possible, that the utterances of others correspond with their psychological states.  In a sentence that is at once complex, hedged and vague, Grice pro-poses to retain some version of an intentional account of meaning:  It seems to me that with regard to the possibility of using the notion of intention in a nested kind of way to explicate the notion of meaning, there are quite a variety of plausible, or at least not too implausible, analyses, which differ to a greater or lesser extent in detail, and at the moment I am not really concerned with trying to adjudicate between the various versions.16  In an addition to the 1976 paper for the later colloquium he suggests that intentional accounts of meaning, including his own, have left out an important concept. This is heralded at the start of the article as 'The Mystery Package', and later revealed to be the concept of value. Grice hints that he has firm theoretical reasons for wanting to introduce value as a philosophical concept. Many philosophers regard value with horror, yet it can answer some important philosophical problems. It makes possible a range of different expressions of value in different cases.  Grice suggests the word 'optimal' as a generalisation over these differ-ent usages. This offers solutions to some problem areas in the inten-tional account of meaning, most significantly to the supposed 'infinite regress' identified by critics such as Schiffer. Grice expresses some scep-ticism over whether any such problem can in fact be found, but allows that it could at least be argued that his account entailed that 'S want A to think "p, because S want A to think 'p, because S wants...!"'. In effect, this demands a mental state of S that is both logically impossi-ble, because it is infinite, and yet highly desirable. Grice argues that just because it cannot in practice be attained, this mental state need not be ruled out from philosophical explanation. Indeed, 'The whole idea of using expressions which are explained in terms of ideal limits would seem to me to operate in this way', a procedure Grice links to Plato's notion of universal Ideals and actual likenesses."7  The state in which a speaker has an infinite set of intentions is optimal in the case of meaning. This optimal state is unattainable; strictly speak-ing S can never in fact mean p. Nevertheless, actual mental states can approximate to it. Indeed, for communication to proceed successfully other people can and perhaps must deem the imperfect actual mentalstate to be the optimal state required for meaning. Grice uses the story of the provost's dog to illustrate the notion of 'deeming'. It is a story of which he was apparently fond; he used it again in his later paper  'Actions and events'. The incoming provost of an Oxford college owned a dog, yet college rules did not allow dogs in college. In response, the governing body of the college passed a resolution that deemed the provost's dog to be a cat. I suspect', suggests Grice, that crucially we do a lot of deeming, though perhaps not always in such an entertaining fashion.'18  In the second version of the paper the 'mystery package' seems to be the focus of Grice's interest, but commentators at the colloquium on mutual knowledge were more interested in the possible 'evolutionary' implications of his ideas: the suggestion that non-natural meaning might be a descendant of natural meaning. This is not an idea that Grice seems to have pursued further. However, Jonathan Bennett had already postulated a possible Gricean origin for language, although carefully not committing himself to it.2°  Grice revisited 'Meaning', but not 'Logic and conversation'. Others, however, have drawn connections between rationality, value and coop-eration. Judith Baker has suggested that, 'when we cooperate with other humans on the basis of trust, our activity is intelligible only if we conceive of ourselves and others as essentially rational. 2 Marina Sbisa has gone further, making a more explicit link between Grice's notions of  'person' and of 'cooperative participant' and arguing that 'we might even envisage Metaphysical Transubstantiation as an archetypal form of ascription of rationality on which all contingent ascriptions of coop-erativity are modelled. 22 Richard Grandy, tackling the question of why a hearer might conclude that a speaker is being cooperative, suggests tentatively that Grice 'would have argued that the Cooperative Principle ought to be a governing principle for rational agents' and that such agents would follow it 'on moral, not on practical or utilitarian grounds!23 However, writing long before the publication of Grice's work on rationality and value, Asa Kasher suggested that the Cooperative Principle should be replaced by a more general and basic rationality principle. He argues that the individual maxims do not display any clear connection with the Cooperative Principle, but that they follow from the principle that one should choose the action that most effectively and efficiently attains a desired end. In this way the maxims 'are based directly on conclusions of a general rationality principle, without mediation of a general principle of linguistic action'.2 Further, in interpreting an utterance, a hearer assumes that the speaker is a rational agent.It might be that the discussion of value in Grice's later work offers a new way of interpreting the rather problematic formulation of his earlier work. Rationality and mutual attribution of rationality may be better descriptions of the motivation for the maxims described in the William James lecturers than is 'cooperation'. Speakers follow the rules of conversation in pursuit of particular communicative ends. On the assumption that other speakers are also rational creatures, the maxims also offer a good basis for interpreting their utterances. As rational crea-tures, speakers attribute value to ends that are consistent and coherent.  An implicature may be accepted as the end point of interpretation if it accords with the twin views that the other speaker is a rational being, and that their utterances correspond to their psychological states.  On this view, the Cooperative Principle and maxims are not an autonomous account of conversational behaviour precisely because they follow from the essential nature of speakers as rational creatures.  Cooperation is, in effect, just one manifestation of the much more general cognitive capacity of rationality. Further, introducing the notion of 'value' into the theory of conversation offers a defence against the charge of prescriptivism. The maxims are not motivated by a duty to adhere to some imposed external ethical code concerned with 'helpful-ness' and 'considerateness'. Their imperative form belies the fact that they are a freely chosen but highly rational course of action. Like moral rules they are means towards certain ends: ends that are attributed value by creatures uniquely endowed to do so. Both the tendency to adhere to the maxims and the tendency to prize certain courses of action as  'good' follow as consequences of the same essential property of people as rational beings: the property, indeed the necessity, of attributing value. As such, the theory of conversation can be argued to be one component in Grice's overarching scheme: a description of what it is to be human.  The allocation of time and the completion of projects became a pressing concern for Grice as the 1980s wore on because his health was failing. He had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life, and tape recordings from the 1970s onwards demonstrate that his speech was frequently interrupted by paroxysms of coughing. In response he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to Kathleen that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house, but he never touched it. This drastic action was taken, as he himself was in the habit of commenting, too late. In December 1983 he gave a farewell lecture at the end of his time at the University of Washington, in which he referred to 'my recent disagreement withthe doctors'. Even before this had taken place, he explains, he had decided to offer this talk as a thank you on his and Judith Baker's behalf,  'for making the time spent by us here such fun'.? Whether or not the doctors in question were insisting that Grice finish his demanding shuttle between Berkeley and Seattle, they certainly seem to have been recommending that he slow down. It was around this time that he was first diagnosed with emphysema, the lung condition that was presenting him with breathing difficulties and was to cause increasing ill health over the following years.  If his doctors were urging him to burden himself with fewer com-mitments, they did not check his enthusiasm for work. Stephen Neale, then a graduate student at Stanford, spent a day with Grice in Berkeley in 1984. He found that Grice 'was already seriously weakened by illness, but he displayed that extraordinary intellectual energy, wit, and eye for detail for which he was so well known, and I left his house elated and exhausted' 2 Grice's response to his illness seems to have been if anything an increased impetus towards advancing the projects then in hand, and a renewed drive towards seeing his many unpublished works into print. Early in 1984 he began making lists of things to do. Some of these include private and financial business which, mixed in with academic matters, have survived with his work papers; there was, by this time at least, no real distinction between the personal and the philosophical. He planned to 'collect "best copies" of unpublished works and inform "executors" of their nature and location and of planned "editing"'?7 On the same list appears the resolution to 'go through old letters and dispose'.  In the mid-1980s, then, Grice was looking back over the work of more than four decades. This was prompted partly by his concern to tie up loose ends and partly by the demands of selecting the papers to appear along with the William James lectures in the projected book from Harvard University Press. There was also another spur to this retrospective reflection. Richard Grandy and Richard Warner were collecting and editing the essays eventually published as Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. They were themselves writing an introductory overview of Grice's work. Grice called his response to this 'Reply to Richards', fusing, as he puts it, the editors into a multiple personality. In this he develops some of the themes of his current work. But he begins with a short philosophical memoir: 'Life and opinions of Paul Grice'. The paper he offered at the end of his time in Seattle was, it seems, a preliminary sketch for this. The original, informal title was 'Prejudices and predilec-tions. Which becomes life and opinions'.One consequence of this enforced nostalgia was a renewed interest in the practices of ordinary language philosophy. Grice looked back at the influence of Austin with the amused detachment afforded by a distance of over 20 years, or perhaps more accurately with fond memories of the amused detachment with which he viewed Austin at the time. He was earnest, however, in the guarded enthusiasm with which he recounted the art of linguistic botanising'. He had never fully abandoned the practice in his own philosophy. For instance, in his notes on psychological philosophy, he had started making a list of 'lexical words' relevant to the topic. These included 'Nature, Life, Matter, Mind, Sort, End, Time'.  Perhaps catching himself in the act, next to this list he had posed the self-mocking question '"Going through Dictionary"??'28 In 'Reply to Richards', he suggests that this method has merits that might recommend it even to contemporary philosophers: 'I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing. This was a theme he repeated, often rather more forcefully, in a number of other papers, talks and informal discussions at that time. Nevertheless, Grice was well aware of how far he had moved away from Oxford philosophy in taking on metaphysical topics such as value. In 1978, in the introductory seminar to his course 'Metaphysics', he explained to his students that not very long before the word itself could be used as a term of abuse. At Oxford in the 1950s, metaphysics was viewed as 'both non-existent and disgust-ing'. Oxford philosophers, he suggests, would have said: 'All we need is tasteful and careful botanising and we'll have all any gentleman needs to know'. Twenty-five years later, Grice admitted, he was convinced that a more systematic treatment of philosophy was needed. 30  Grice's enthusiasm for the old-fashioned method of linguistic botanis-ing was accompanied, and perhaps reinforced, by a strong dislike and distrust of technology. This attitude applied to attempts to use technological tools or analogies in philosophy itself, and extended into the more personal domain. He was scathing about what he saw as attempts to 'reduce' the understanding of human beings to the understanding of computers. He may have had in mind recent debates about the possibility and nature of Artificial Intelligence, although he does not refer to them explicitly. In 1985, he wrote an overview of his earlier work on the philosophy of language, titled 'Preliminary valediction' and presumably serving as an early draft of the retrospective that appeared in Studies in the Way of Words. In this he makes an explicit link between his philosophical interest in ordinary language and his dislike oftechnological explanations in philosophy. In a single sentence, perfectly well formed, but long even for him, he tackles the need for a carefully considered argument to justify attention to ordinary language:  Indeed it seems to me that not merely is such argument required, but it is specially required in the current age of technology, when intuition and ordinary forms of speech and thought are all too often forgotten or despised, when the appearance of the vernacular serves only too often merely as a gap-sign to be replaced as soon as possible by jargon, and when many researchers not only believe that we are computers, but would be gravely disappointed should it turn out that we are, after all, not computers; is not a purely mechanical existence not only all we do have, but also all we should want to have?31  In arguing for the centrality of consciousness, that is in arguing against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Grice was again affirming his commitment to the significance of psychological concepts to rationality in general and to meaning in particular. The processes of the interpretation and production of meaning are significant for a human being in ways that are perhaps mysterious, but crucially cannot be observed in computers. Personally, too, Grice would have nothing to do with computers. When he retired from his full-time post at Berkeley he lost the secretarial support he had always relied on and was forced to get a PC at home. But it was Kathleen who learnt to use the computer and mastered word processing. Grice could never get beyond his horror of the spell checker which, he complained, rejected 'pirot' and questioned  'sticky wicket'.  Grice was not just looking back, reflecting on the philosophy of earlier decades and planning the publication of his manuscripts. He was also working on new projects. His obsession with these was such that even his interest in his own health seemed to be predicated on the desire to have time to finish them. Cancelling a lecture he had been scheduled to give in 1986, he wrote 'my doctor has just advised me that I am taking on too much and that unless I reduce my level of activity I shall be jeop ardising the enterprises which it is most important to me to complete.'32 From the notes and the work plans he was making at the time, it seems that Grice had two main enterprises in mind: producing a finished version of his lectures on value, and developing a project these had prompted. This new project was characteristic of the pattern of Grice's work in two ways. It was daringly ambitious, in that he foresaw for it a wide range of implications and applications. But it was also not entirelynew, in that the ideas from which it developed had long been present in his work. In effect, it was nothing less than the foundations of a theory to encompass the whole of philosophy, with all its apparent branches and subdivisions. Grice was working on a metaphysical methodology to explain how the theories that make up human knowledge are constructed. Or, in one of his own favourite phrases from this time, he was doing 'theory-theory'.  Grice had long been of the opinion that the division of philosophy into different fields and disciplines was an artificial and unproductive practice. This opinion was certainly reflected in the course of his own work, in which he followed what seemed to him the natural progression of his interests, without regard for the boundaries he was crossing between the philosophies of mind and of language, logic, metaphysics and ethics. In 1983, he recalled with some pride a mild rebuke he had received years earlier from Gilbert Harman, to the effect that when it came to philosophy, 'I seemed to want to do the whole thing myself' 33 To some extent, especially in the latter part of his career, Grice had actually defined his own philosophical interests in these terms. He contributed a brief self-portrait to the Berkeley Philosophy Department booklet in 1977, in which he described himself as working recently chiefly in the philosophy of language and logic; 'takes the view, however, that philosophy is a unity and that no philosophical area can, in the end, be satisfactorily treated in isolation from other philosophical areas'.34 He comments further on this attitude in his 'Reply to Richards':  When I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy' (or in 'Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.  Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in phi-losophy, namely all of them.35  Grice's distrust of subdivisions and labels extended to the classification of different schools of thought or philosophical approaches. Labelling philosophers according to the style of their subject and their approach to it was, he felt, unhelpful and even stultifying. In preparatory note for 'Reply to Richards' he lists some of the 'cons' of philosophy as being  'fads'  ', 'band wagons', 'sacred cows' (the 'pros' are simply 'fun' and 'col-laboration'). He then goes on to produce a list of '-isms' that might bear out his objections, including 'naturalism', 'phenomenalism', 'reduc-tionism', 'empiricism' and 'scepticism'. In a later note, he worked out a series of nicknames for the dedicated followers of different schools of thought. 'Constructivists' were 'Egg-heads'; 'Realists' were 'Fat-heads';  'Idealists' were 'Big-heads'; 'Subjectivists' were 'Hard-heads' or 'Nut-heads'; and 'Metaphysical Sceptics' were 'No-heads', or 'Beheads' 37 It is not clear whether Grice intended these jottings for any purpose other than his own amusement. It seems that he made public use of only one of these labels, when speaking to the American Philosophical Associa-tion, and drawing attention to his own belief in the crucial connection between value and rationality:  To reject or to ignore this thesis seems to me to be to go about as far as one can go in the direction of Intellectual Hara-Kiri; yet, I fear, it is a journey which lures increasingly many 'hard-headed' (even perhaps bone-headed) travellers.38  In 'Reply to Richards', and elsewhere, Grice is characteristically cagey about the exact consequences of his views on the entirety of philoso-phy. He is certain, however, that progress is to be made through his view of metaphysics as essentially a constructivist enterprise, in which categories and entities are added if they are explanatorily useful. In 'Method in philosophical psychology' he used the metaphor of offering houseroom to even unexplained conditions and entities if they were able to help with the housework. In the Carus Lectures, arguing that any account of value should be given metaphysical backing, he suggests that the appropriate metaphysics will be constructivist, not reductionist. In another arresting metaphor, he tells his audience that, unlike reductionist philosophers, 'I do not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware! The world is rich and complex, and the philosopher should offer an explanation that retains these qualities. The constructivist would begin with certain elements that might be seen as metaphysically primary, and would then 'build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical theory or concatenation of theories'.39 First, it would be necessary to define the suitable form for any theory to take, to engage in theory-theory. Grice does not here enter into a discussion of theory-theory itself, but it seems that his account of value is an example fitting the general constructivist approach he has in mind Th  e simple psychological attitudes of J-accepting and V-accepting areposited, together with the programme of creature construction, as primary elements in the theory. Grice's elaborate account involving rationality as a non-essential property of human beings, the process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation, the creation of people as value-givers and the derivation of absolute value, are built up from these starting points.  There is no finished written account of metaphysical constructivism and theory-theory, although they are outlined in 'Reply to Richards'.  Grice never wrote the work 'From Genesis to Revelation (and back): a new discourse on metaphysics', which he seems to have contemplated. 40  Probably the fullest record of his thoughts on this matter is a lengthy taped conversation from January 1983, in which he talks to Judith Baker and Richard Warner, setting out the ideas he hopes to have time to develop. The discipline of theory-theory, he explains, can be discussed in both general and applied terms. In general terms, it is concerned with examining the features any adequate theory would have to exhibit: with laying out the ground rules of theory construction. In its more applied aspect, it is concerned with detailing the theories formed by these rules, and with classifying them into types. Theory-theory includes in its scope, but is not restricted to, philosophical theory.  From this starting point, Grice goes on to suggest a hierarchical structure of theories, the scope and subject matter at each level being successively more restricted and specific. He offers an example of a theory from each of these levels; in effect each theory is a component of the one before. If philosophical theory is one type demarcated by theory-theory, then metaphysics is the pre-eminent form of philosophical theory. Concerned as it is with the fundamental questions of what there is, and how it is to be classified, it deserves the title of 'First Philoso-phy'. General theory-theory is concerned with specifying the appropriate subject matter and procedures of metaphysics, while applied theory-theory is concerned with the specific categories needed to delineate the subject matter, with investigating what kind of entities there are. Within metaphysics, each sub-branch has its own general and applied theory-theory. One such branch that particularly interests Grice is philosophical psychology. General theory-theory is concerned with the nature and function of psychological concepts, applied theory-theory with finding a systematic way of defining the range of psychological beings. Rational psychology is a special case. Here, general theory-theory is concerned with the essence of rational beings. Applied theory-theory widens the scope to consider features or properties other than the essential. In this way, it leads to the characterisation of a prac-tical theory of conduct, in part an ethical system. Finally, and rather briefly, Grice comments that philosophy of language is to be seen as a sub-theory of rational psychology.  Grice is even more tentative about the operation of metaphysical construction itself, in other words the procedures of metaphysics specified in general theory-theory. The relevant principles, he insists, are not fully worked out, but two ideas about the forms they might take have been with him for some time. The first idea he calls the 'bootstrap principle', in response to the realisation that a theory constructed along the lines he is describing must be able to 'pull itself up by its bootstraps', or rely on its own primitive concepts to construct potentially elaborate expla-nations. A metaphysical system contains both its primitive subject matter, and the means by which that subject matter is discussed and explained. The means are meta-systematic. In constructing the theory, it must be possible to include in the meta-system any materials that are needed. The only restriction on this, introduced in the interests of economical conduct, is that any ideas or entities used in the meta-system should later be introduced formally into the system. The legitimate routines or procedures for construction include 'Humean projection' and  'nominalisation'. First, if a particular psychological state is central to a theory, it is legitimate to use the object of those states in the meta-system. The objects of psychological states are the 'radicals' of thought described in Grice's work on rationality, Second, it is legitimate to introduce entities corresponding to certain expressions used in the relevant area of investigation.  The second general idea does not have a specific name, but can be summarised by saying that the business of metaphysics in any area of investigation is not just the production of one theory. Grice maintains that he wants to be free to introduce more than one metaphysical theory, because the production of different systems of explanation may be differently motivated. This principle, he observes, 'fits in nicely with my ecumenical tendencies'. A metaphysical system does not have to be unitary or monolithic. In fact, Grice doubts the existence of 'a theory to be revealed on The Day of Judgement which will explain everything'.  Rather than aiming at some ultimate truth, or correct version, Grice sees any theory as crucially a revision of some prior theory, or, if there is no such precedent, as building on common sense and intuition. Asked by one of his colleagues as to whether it is legitimate to reject a previous theory, or the prompting of common sense, once it has been revised, Grice expresses himself strongly opposed to the idea. The best understanding of some entity comes from an appreciation of all the guises inwhich it appears during the development of systems. The most appropriate theory on any given occasion is not always the most elaborate one available.  Grice referred to his metaphysical interests in some of the articles he wrote, or at least completed, during these final but productive years. In  'Actions and events', published in 1986, he responds to Donald Davidson's logical analysis of action sentences that included actions in the category of entities.4l The question relates, he argues, to the fundamental issue of metaphysics: the question of what the 'universe' or the  'world' contains. Grice is inclined to agree with Davidson over this act of inclusion, but to do so from a very different metaphysical position.  He suggests that Davidson, like Quine, is a 'Diagnostic Realist'; the actual nature of reality is unavailable for inspection, but the job of philosophers is to make plausible hypotheses about it. Grice's own metaphysical approach, however, is one of constructivism, of building up an account from primitives, rather than of forming theories consistent with scientific explanations. 'One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis. 42  'Actions and events' brings together many of Grice's apparently disparate philosophical interests into one article of broad scope and remarkable complexity. Still not recognising traditional philosophical boundaries, he moves from metaphysics, intention and language to rationality and the status of value. In a few concluding paragraphs, Grice turns to what he sees as the essential link between action and freedom. The link is treated briefly and cautiously in this published work, but was in fact a major concern in his thinking about value.  Grice's notes from the early 1980s show him applying the familiar techniques of 'linguistic botanising' to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as 'alcohol-free', 'free for lunch' and 'free-wheeling', and listed many possible definitions, including 'liberal', 'acting without restriction' and 'frank in conversation'43 Richard Warner has commented that their discussions in preparation for the third Carus lecture were concerned almost exclusively with freedom as a source of value, and that he himself encouraged Grice to pursue this line of enquiry rather than that of creature construction as being the more interesting and productive. * Essentially, Grice saw in the nature of action a means of justifying the problematic concept of freedom, and from this a defence of his objective conception of value. He introduces a classification of actions that is reminiscent of his hierarchy of living creatures.  Some actions are caused by influences external to a body, as is the casewith inanimate objects. Next, actions may have causes that are internal to the body but are simply the outcome of a previous stage in the same process, as in a 'freely moving' body. Then there are causes that are both internal and independently motivated. Actions provoked by these causes may be said to be based on the beliefs or desires of the creature in question and as functioning to provide for the good of the creature.  Finally, there is a stage exclusive to human creatures at which the creature's conception of something as being for its own good is sufficient to initiate the creature in performing an action. 'It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. '45  The particular nature of human action suggests the necessity of freedom. That is, humans act for reasons. These reasons may be more than mere desires and beliefs motivated by ones own survival; they may be freely adopted for their own sake. This in turn suggests that people must be creatures capable of ascribing value to certain ends, independent of external forces or internal necessity. In Grice's terms, the particular type of freedom demanded by the nature of human action  'would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are freely adopted or pursued by me'.* In this way, a consideration of action suggests the necessity of freedom, and freedom in turn offers an independent justification for people as ascribers of value. If people are inherently capable of ascribing value, then value must have an objective existence. Independent of the programme of creature construction, the concept of freedom may offer another version of the argument that value exists because valuers exist.  In 'Metaphysics, philosophical escatology and Plato's Republic' completed in 1988 and published only in Studies in the Way of Words, Grice suggests a distinction between 'categorial' and 'supracategorial' meta-physics. The first is concerned with the most basic classifications, the second with bringing together categorially different items into single classifications, and specifying the principles for these combinations.  This second type of metaphysics, closely related to his informal account of constructivism, he tentatively labels 'Philosophical Escatology'. 47 The study of escatology, or of last or final things, belonged originally to Christian theology. Grice is laying claim to an exclusively philosophical version of this discipline, and thereby linking metaphysical definitions to finality, or purpose.  The paper 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being' was published in 1988, but there is evidence that he had been working on it at least since the late 1970s. Alan Code mentions a paper 'Aristotle on being andgood' that Grice read at a conference at the University of Victoria in 1979, and that sounds in many ways similar to the published version. 48 Grice offers an explicit defence of metaphysics, contrasting it particularly with the rigid empiricism of logical positivism:  A definition of the nature and range of metaphysical enquiries is among the most formidable of philosophical tasks; we need all the help we can get, particularly at a time when metaphysicians have only recently begun to re-emerge from the closet, and to my mind are still hampered by the aftermath of decades of ridicule and vilification at the hands of the rednecks of Vienna and their adherents.49  Grice saw the 'revisionary character' of metaphysical theorising as a topic to which he would need to return. In fact, it is closely linked to another late area of interest, a topic he often described as 'the Vulgar and the Learned'. In this terminology, and indeed in the ideas it described, it seems likely that Grice was borrowing from Hume, one of the 'old boys' of philosophy he particularly admired. Hume had written about the relationship between philosophical terminology and everyday understanding in the following terms:  When I view this table and that chimney, nothing is present to me but particular perceptions, which are of a like nature with all other perceptions. This is the doctrine of philosophers. But this table, which is present to me, and that chimney, may and do exist sepa-rately. This is the doctrine of the vulgar, and implies no contradic-tion. There is no contradiction, therefore, in extending the same doctrine to all perceptions.50  Grice argued in his account of theory-theory that pre-theoretical intu-itions, or common-sense accounts, are often used as the foundations of metaphysical theories. In later notes he was particularly preoccupied by the role of such 'everyday' or 'vulgar' understanding in metaphysical construction. Very generally, he urges that theorists of metaphysics are well advised to take account of common-sense understanding. It is not that common sense is 'superior' to metaphysical accounts, or can replace them. The complex accounts offered by philosophers serve a different function from those of everyday life, and can coexist with them because they are appropriate to different purposes.  In his notes from around this time, he compares the vulgar and the learned with reference to what he calls 'Eddington's table' and 'thevulgar table'. Grice's reference here is to Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, first published in 1928. Eddington begins his book, originally delivered as a series of lectures, with the assertion that as he sat down to write he was confronted with not one table but two. There is the ordinary, familiar table: 'a commonplace object of that environ-ment which I call the world'. There is also a scientific table, an object of which he has become aware only comparatively recently. Whereas the ordinary table is substantial, the scientific table is mostly emptiness, while 'sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself'. Eddington argues that the two different descriptions of the table are discreet and serve distinct purposes. Although they might ultimately be said to describe the same object, the scientist must keep the two descriptions separate, in effect ignoring the 'ordinary table' and concentrating only on the  'scientific table'. Grice's brief notes suggest that he is happy to accept both the vulgar and the learned description of the table. There is, he notes, 'no conflict... Scientific purposes and everyday purposes are distinct'.52  Grice was advocating philosophical respect for common sense, and as such aligning himself with a philosophical tradition stretching back through Moore and Berkeley to Aristotle. Although he developed this position explicitly only towards the end of his life it is clear that, as so often in his work, he was returning to a theme, and to a philosophical outlook that had been with him for many years. It is not difficult to relate this idea to Austin's respect for ordinary language, and the indi-cation of everyday concepts and distinctions it contains. Indeed, notes from much earlier in Grice's career show that, while he was still at  Oxford, he was linking a philosophical interest in common sense to a respect for ordinary language. His jotted 'Aspects of respect for vulgar' include 'protection against sceptic', 'proper treatment of Folk Wisdom',  'protection of speech from change and impropriety' and, perhaps most tellingly 'proper position treatment of ordinary ways of speech (speech  phenomena)'.53  The same form of respect can also be detected, although more prob-lematically, in his later work on value. Subjectivists such as Mackie had suggested that they were themselves necessarily arguing against common sense, rejecting the idea apparent in ordinary language that values 'exist' as objective topics of knowledge. Grice himself rather irrev-erently sums up a position such as Mackie's in his notes from this periodas follows: 'value-predicates (e.g. "good", "ought") signify attributes which ordinary chaps ascribe to things. It is however demonstrable, on general grounds, that these attributes are vacuous. So position attribution by the vulgar are systematically false' S4 According to this account, in upholding objective value, Grice would be maintaining a straight for-wardly common-sense position. In fact Grice himself does not accept this simple identification of objectivism with common sense. He argues in the Carus lectures that 'it seems to me by no means as easy as Mackie seems to think to establish that the "vulgar valuer", in his valuations, is committed to the objectivity of value(s).5 In the taped conversation he suggests that the need to work on the status of common sense, intuition and pre-theoretical judgement is particularly acute for anyone who wants to take a constructivist approach to a topic such as value. It is not that the philosopher should simply take on board all 'vulgar' pronouncements on such a topic, but rather that a constructivist should attempt at least to use them as a starting point for any theory of value.  Grice's 'common sense' philosophy is, therefore, a more sophisticated approach than one relying simply on the understanding apparent in everyday language. Years earlier he defended common sense but attacked Moore's simplistic application of it in 'G. E. Moore and philosophers' paradoxes'. In the later work, he argues that although common sense may be the starting point, exactly how a theory is to be constructed from there is a matter for theory-theory: 'Moore-like proclamations cut no ice.'  Grice was also turning his attention to another loose end in his work: the study of perception. In particular, he returned to the area in which he had worked with Geoffrey Warnock 30 or more years before, planning a 'Grice/Warnock retrospective'. He sketched out a number of topics for this, but it does not appear to have progressed beyond note form. The first topic was to be 'The place of perception as a faculty or capacity in a sequence of living things'. Thinking about the old issue of perception in relation to his more recent interest in creature-construction, he wondered: 'at what point, if any, is further progress up the psychological ladder impossible unless some rung has previously been assigned to creatures capable of perception?'56 He dwells on the advantages of perception in terms of survival, the crucial factor for adding any capacity during creature-construction, and assesses the possible support this might offer for common sense against philosophers of sense data. If perception is to be seen as an advantage, providing knowledge to aid survival in a particular world, 'the objects revealed byperception should surely be constituents of that world'. It might be possible to say that sense data do not themselves nourish or threaten, but constitute evidence of things that do.  However, Grice notes that he is more tempted by an alternative expla-nation. 'Flows of impressions' do not so much offer evidence of what is in the world, as 'prompt, stimulate or excite certain forms of response to the possibility that such states of affairs do obtain'. These responses may be either verbal or behavioural. Both types of response suggest commitment on the part of the responding creature to the state of affairs in question. Here again, Grice seems to be offering a defence of a common sense approach to philosophical questions, but a more sophisticated one than that of simple realism. The existence of the material object is indicated not by the sense impressions themselves, but by the responses these elicit in the perceiving creature.  From the middle of the 1980s onwards, Grice was increasingly preoccupied with various publishing projects, mainly with book plans. His notes from the time suggest an explosion of energy in this area. A list from 1986 includes '"Method: the vulgar and the learned" with ?OUP.  "From Genesis to Revelations" ?HUP'. Other notes are uncompromisingly labelled 'work program', and show him carefully dividing up time by year, by month or even by day, including the injunction that he should set aside part of December 1986 to 'CATCH UP on prior topics'. 57 For most of Grice's potential audience, however, it was the William James lectures that were most eagerly awaited. With the exception of the few lectures already published, these remained as ageing manuscripts in Grice's idiosyncratic filing system. Even with his new enthusiasm for publishing, it took some persuasion from Harvard University Press, and from Kathleen, to revisit these. It is clear that he was not averse in principle to publishing the lectures; his flurry of lists from the early 1980s testify to this. But he had set himself an exacting programme of revising and adding to the them.  Grice was adamant from the start that, whatever else the book con-tained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publisher he wrote, 'the link between the two main topics of the James lectures is not loose but extremely intimate. No treatment of Saying and Implying can afford to omit a study of the notion of Meaning which plainly underlies both these ideas!58 Before the book had a name, he was planning that it should contain a Part A entitled 'Logic and conversation'. It seems that this was to include a number of postscripts to the lectures. Part B was provisionally entitled 'Other essays on language and related matters', andwas to contain a number of further postscripts and reassessments. Of all the proposed postscripts, only 'Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy', concerned mainly with revisiting the themes of 'Postwar Oxford philosophy', was ever written. The inclusion of 'In defence of a dogma' in Part B was a matter of some debate, Grice remaining resolutely in favour. When a reader for the publisher questioned this, Grice responded with a robust defence: 'the analytic/synthetic distinction is a crucially important topic about which I have said little in the past thirty years, and must sometime soon treat at some length.' In his original plan the book was also to include a transcription of a talk on this same topic between himself, George Myro, Judith Baker, George Bealer and Neil Thomason. Indeed, Grice suggested initially that Studies in the Way of Words should be published as authored by Paul Grice with others'.  Grice revisits the analytic/synthetic distinction in the 'Retrospective epilogue'. He introduces a number of inhabitants of 'philosophical Never-Never-Land', M*, A*, G* and R*, the fairy godmothers of Moore, Austin, Grice and  Ryle. These fairy godmothers are useful to philo-  sophical discussion because they hold explicitly all the views that their godchildren hold, without regard for whether these views are explicit or implicit in their actual work. R* suggests that the division of statements of human knowledge into 'analytic' and 'synthetic' categories, far from being an artificial and unnecessary complication by philoso-phers, is in fact an insightful attempt by theorists to individuate and categorise the mass of human knowledge. This view offers a particular challenge to Quine's attack on the distinction, with which Grice had taken issue in his joint article with Strawson over 30 years earlier. It is in tacit reference to this that Grice concludes his epilogue:  Such consideration as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A* and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day.59  It is tempting to read a note of wistful resignation into the manner in which Grice chose in 1987 to conclude Studies in the Way of Words.  However, letters he was writing at the time, which affirm his intention to revisit these topics at length, argue that he at least in part believed he had time to do so. Moreover, he submitted applications for Faculty Research Grant support for both the academic years 1986-7 and 1987-8,for a project on 'Metaphysical foundations of value and the nature of metaphysics'. Kathleen recalls that he was never successful in his bids for such research grants. Despite this, he does not seem to have made much effort to accommodate to the demands of the application process.  In answer to a question about the significance of his research project and the justification of the proposed expenditure, he wrote in 1986 'I hope the character of the enterprise will be sufficient evidence of its sig-nificance.' In 1987 he offered an even more terse account of his plans:  'their importance seems to me to be beyond question'. 6 He was applying for funding to cover the expenses of secretarial support in transcribing tapes on to which he had been dictating his notes and typing up manuscripts, and for duplication, supplies and mailing. His intention was to produce two books for Oxford University Press, one a revised version of the Carus lectures and one on 'Methodology in Metaphysical Theory', a study to include a consideration of 'the nature and degree of respect due from metaphysical theorists towards the intuitions and concerns of the common man'. The plan was to complete at least first drafts during 1987-8.  Whatever his official predictions, Grice was aware that his condition was worsening and that the prognosis was not good. In the summer of 1987 he underwent eye surgery in an attempt to rescue his failing sight, and by the end of the year he needed a hearing aid. In addition, his mobility became further restricted. The entrance to his house, and the balcony on which he loved to sit, were on the first floor over the garage; a further flight of stairs led to the second floor. By early in 1988, a stair lift was needed. Even so, Grice was effectively housebound, and received visits from publishers, colleagues and even students on his balcony.  From there he also continued to work on new ideas, apparently with a sense of urgency that was only increased by his condition. He jotted on the back of an envelope, Now that my tottering feet are already engulfed in the rising mist of antiquity, I must make all speed ere it reaches, and (even) enters, my head." He dealt with the business of seeing Studies in the Way of Words to completion. Lindsay Waters from Harvard University Press, who worked with Grice throughout the preparation of the book, has commented on the determination with which he did this, suggesting that 'He knew the fight with the manuscript editor was his last.'62  Paul Grice died on 28 August 1988, at the age of seventy-five. He had, perhaps, as many projects on the go as ever. Studies in the Way of Words was on the way to press; Grice had gone over the final changes with the manuscript editor just days before. His 'work in progress' was still onhis desk, and included notes on 'the vulgar and the learned' that indicate that he was turning his thoughts back to the topic of perception in relation to this idea. The causal theory of perception could, the notes suggest, be seen as a natural way of reconciling the vulgar and the sci-entific. Perceptions could be connected either with scientific features or with vulgar descriptions, as they were in his article 'The causal theory of perception'. The causal theory explains the way things appear on the basis of the way they are. It rules out the account from sense data theory, which explains the way things are on the basis of the ways things appear. Scientific theory, Grice had noted 'cuts us off from objects'.63 The proofs of 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being', an article he had at one point considered including in Studies in the Way of Words, were posted to him on August 17 and remained untouched.  Studies in the Way of Words, containing the long-awaited complete William James lectures and Grice's other most influential papers in the philosophy of language, was published by Harvard University Press in  1989. A number of reviewers took the opportunity, before engaging with the details of Grice's philosophy, to pay tribute to him. Peter Strawson described his 'substantial and enduring contribution to philosophical and linguistic theory' 6 Tyler Burge praised his 'wonderfully powerful, subtle, and philosophically profound mind'.6 Charles Travis argued that, 'H. P. Grice transformed, often deeply, the problems he touched and, thereby, the terms of philosophical discussion. Robert Fogelin suggested that 'even if Grice was one of the chief and most gifted practitioners of OLP, he was also, perhaps, its most penetrating critic. As Fogelin notes, Meaning revisited', with its enigmatic reference to The Mystery Package' cannot be fully interpreted without reference to Grice's work on values and teleology. When Grice died, the Carus lectures were still in manuscript form, and he had asked Judith Baker to see them through publication with Oxford University Press. She prepared the lectures for publication, together with part of the 'Reply to Richards' and 'Method in philosophical psychology'. The Conception of Value appeared in 1991. Reviewers were generally ambivalent, welcoming the contribution to debate, but expressing some reservations as to the details of Grice's position. For instance, Gerald Barnes describes Grice's defence of absolute value as 'unconventional, richly suggestive, often fascinating, and, by Grice's own admission, incomplete at a number of crucial points'.68 The John Locke lectures had to wait a further decade before they, too, appeared from Oxford University Press, edited and introduced by Richard Warner under the title Aspects of Reason. Again, reviewers had reservations. A. P. Martinich declaredhimself unconvinced by the appeal to the ordinary use of expressions such as 'reason', and criticised Grice's style of presentation for containing 'too many promissory and subjunctive gestures'. The body of published work, and the legacy of his teaching and collaborations, formed the basis of Peter Strawson and David Wiggin's assessment of Grice for the British Academy:  Other anglophone philosophers born, like him, in the twentieth century may well have had greater influence and done a larger quantity of work of enduring significance. Few have had the same gift for hitting on ideas that have in their intended uses the appearance of inevitability. None has been cleverer, or shown more ingenuity and persistence in the further development of such ideas.?º  Perhaps an even more succinct summary of Grice's philosophical life is the one implied by a comment he himself made as it became clear to him that he would not recover his failing health. Despite the indignities of his illness and treatment, he confided in Kathleen that he did not really mind about dying. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life, and had done everything that he wanted to do. Grice's career was charac-terised by years of self-doubt, by almost ceaseless battles with the minutiae of philosophical problems, and by a final frenzied struggle to finish an ever-multiplying list of projects. Yet it seems that, when he reviewed the effort in comparison with the results, he was content with the deal.By all the obvious measures of academic achievement, the big success story for Grice has been the response in linguistics to his theory of conversation. The 'Logic and conversation' series, particularly the individual lecture published under that title, has been cited widely and frequently from the first. Beyond frequency of reference, perhaps the greatest accolade is for a writer's name to be coined as an adjective, a process with few precedents in linguistics. There is 'Saussurian linguis-tics', the 'Chomskyan revolution' and 'Hallidayan grammar'. From the mid-1970s on, linguists could be confident that a set of assumptions about theoretical commitments could be conveyed by the phrase  'Gricean pragmatics'. The term has been used as a label for a disparate body of work. It includes relatively uncritical applications of Grice's ideas to a wide range of different genres, as well as attempts to identify flaws, omissions or full-blown errors in his theory. It also includes a variety of attempts to develop new theories of language use, based to varying degrees on Grice's insights.  These different types of work do not all agree on the efficacy of the Cooperative Principle, on the exact characterisation of the maxims, or even on the nature of conversational implicature itself. What they have in common, qualifying them for the title 'Gricean', is an impulse to distinguish between literal meaning and speaker meaning, and to identify certain general principles that mediate between the two. The latter is perhaps Grice's single greatest intellectual legacy. Stephen Neale has suggested that 'in the light of his work any theory of meaning that is to be taken at all seriously must now draw a sharp line between genuinely semantic facts and facts pertaining to the nature of human interaction." Grice's understanding that linguistic meaning and meaning in use may differ was shared with a variety of previous philosophers and indeedwith common sense. But he went much further in his claim that the differences were amenable to systematic, independently motivated explanation, and in his ambitious proposal to provide such an expla-nation. Whatever its flaws, imprecisions and even errors, the theory of conversation has provided a definite starting point for those interested in discussing the relevant layers of meaning. Stephen Levinson has gone so far as to suggest that 'Grice has provided little more than a sketch of the large area and the numerous separate issues that might be illuminated by a fully worked out theory of conversational implicature!?  The success of the theory of conversation was achieved despite its publication history. Demand was such that copies of the William James lectures were in fairly wide circulation around American and British universities soon after 1967 in the blurred blue type of a mimeograph, and many early responses to them refer directly to this unpublished version.  Some commentators did not have even this degree of access to the lec-tures. In an article published in 1971, Jonathan Cohen comments that he is responding to 'the oral publicity of the William James Lectures' 3 When the lectures began to appear in print, they were scattered and piecemeal. 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' appeared in Foundations of Language in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in The Philosophical Review in 1969. 'Logic and conversation', the second in the original lecture series, appeared in two separate col-lections, both published in 1975. Its publication was clearly the source of some confusion, with both sets of editors claiming to offer the essay in print for the first time. The Logic of Grammar, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, seems to have been Grice's preferred publication, and was the one he always cited. There, his lecture appears alongside essays by past and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Tarski and Quine. The editor's introduction places Grice in a tradition of philosophers interested in the application of traditional theories of truth to natural language. In Speech Acts, the third volume in the series Syntax and Semantics, on the other hand, 'Logic and conver-sation' is placed in the context of contemporary linguistics. Accompanying articles by, for instance, Georgia Green and Susan Schmerling discuss conversational implicature itself. The editors, Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, hail the first publication of 'the seminal work on this topic'.* It is rumoured that Grice signed the contract for his lecture to appear in this linguistics series while at a conference at Austin, Texas, and only after a long evening spent in the bar. Peter Cole included  'Further notes on logic and conversation' in Volume 9 of the same series in 1978.One catalyst for the emergence of pragmatics, and Gricean pragmat-ics in particular, was the interest in Grice's work from within generative semantics, the movement fronted by the young linguists working just across campus from Grice in the years immediately following his move to Berkeley. Attempting to integrate meaning, including contextual meaning, into their study of formal linguistics, these refugees from transformational orthodoxy discovered what they saw as a promising philosophical precedent in 'Logic and conversation'. Asa Kasher has suggested that Grice opened a 'gap in the hedge', allowing linguists to see the possibilities of 'extra-linguistic' explanations." Gilles Fauconnier has found a more startling metaphor; at a time when linguistics was largely concerned with syntax, and with meaning only in so much as it related to deep grammatical structure, 'Grice unwittingly opened Pandora's box'. 6 When linguists working within transformational grammar replied to the generative semanticists' accusation that they were artificially ignoring meaning and context, they too drew on 'Logic and conversation'.  In effect, they cited Grice's characterisation of 'what is said' and 'what is implicated' as a licence to draw a sharp distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic. In this way, they argued that it was legitimate and indeed necessary for a linguistic theory such as transformational grammar to be concerned with meaning only in terms that were insensitive to context. Features of context were to be dealt with in a separate, complementary theory, perhaps even by Grice's theory of conversation itself. Writing in the mid-1970s, transformational grammarians Jerrold Katz and Thomas Bever accuse the generative semanticists of a form of linguistic empiricism more extreme than Bloomfield. By attempting to fit every aspect of interpretation, however specific to context, into linguistic theory, the generative semanticists were failing to distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical regularities: failing to respect the distinction between competence and performance. Katz and Bever commend Grice's account of conversational implicature by way of contrast, as an example of a type of meaning properly and systematically handled outside the grammar by independently motivated cognitive principles? In the same volume, Terence Langendoen and Thomas Bever praise Grice for correctly distinguishing between grammatical acceptability and behavioural comprehensibility. Even Chomsky himself put aside his worries about behaviourism to draw on Grice's work. In a 1969 conference paper concerned with defending his version of grammar against criticisms from generative semanticists he suggests that if certain aspects of meaning  'can be explained in terms of general "maxims of discourse" (in theGricean sense), they need not be made explicit in the grammar of a particular language'!  In the 1970s, then, the theory of conversation was seen by some as a potential means of incorporating contextual factors into grammatical theory, and by others as a reason for refusing to do so. Generative semantics eventually failed, perhaps a victim of its own ambition, and of the increasingly complex syntactic explanations needed to account for contextual meaning. Former generative semanticist Robin Lakoff has attributed its eventual decline to a growing realisation that syntax was not in fact the place where meaning could best be explained; they came to understand that to deal with the phenomena we had uncovered, the relationships between form and function that our work had made manifest and unavoidable, we needed to shift the emphasis of the grammar from syntax to semantics and pragmatics.''' Generative semantics had succeeded in putting the discussion of contextual meaning on the formal linguistic map, and had paved the way for the emergence of pragmatics as a separate discipline. The sheer size of Grice's impact on this discipline makes anything approaching a comprehensive survey prohibitive, but a few key collections can provide a representative overview. By the end of the decade, pragmatics had its own international conference. In the proceedings of the 1979 conference held at Urbino Grice is cited, or at least alluded to, in 15 of the 37 papers." These papers range over topics such as language acquisition, second language comprehension, rhetoric and intonation, as well as theories of meaning, reference and relevance.  In 1975, Berkeley Linguistics Society, a student-run organisation, began hosting an annual conference, bringing together linguists from across America. At the first meeting, Grice's work formed the basis of two very different papers. Cathy Cogan and Leora Herrmann tackled colloquial uses of the phrase 'let's just say', arguing that it 'serves as an overt marker on sentences which constitute an opting out' from straightforward observance of the maxims. At the same conference, Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters presented a much more formal paper on conventional implicata, arguing that they could be used to explain various so-called presuppositional phenomena.13 Since then, meetings of the society have included an ever-increasing number of papers on Gricean topics. In 1990 a parasession at the annual meeting was devoted to papers on 'The Legacy of Grice'. In effect, the delegates all interpret this title in relation to the theory of conversation, which they applied to topics as diverse as the language of jokes, the grammaticalisation of the English perfect between Old English and Modern English, the teach-ing of literacy, and the forms of address adopted by mothers and fathers towards their children.' By the time the The Concise Encyclopedia of Prag-matics was published in 1998, Grice's work had earned mention in entries on 29 separate topics, including advertising, cognitive science, humour, metaphor and narrative. Again, the majority of these references are to 'Logic and conversation', and in her entry on 'conversa-tional maxims' Jenny Thomas comments that 'it is this work - sketchy, in many ways problematical, and frequently misunderstood - which has proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics."s The Journal of Pragmatics, which began in the mid-1970s, has included numerous articles with Gricean themes, and in  2002 published a special focus issue entitled 'To Grice or not to Grice'.  In his introductory editorial, Jacob Mey argues that the range of articles included, both supportive of and challenging to Gricean implicature, form 'a living testimony to, and fruitful elaboration of, some of the ideas that shook the world of language studies in the past century, and continue to move and inspire today's research'. 16  Nevertheless, Kenneth Lindblom suggests that the importance and implications of the theory of conversation tend to be underestimated, because it has been used by scholars in a range of fields with significant methodological differences.' Certainly, Gricean analysis has appeared in discussions of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, taking it well beyond the confines of its 'home' discipline of pragmatics. For instance, the relationship between Grice's theory and literary texts has long been a source of interest to stylisticians. As early as 1976, Teun van Dijk suggested that the maxims 'partially concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called "stylistic" , 18 He argues that a set of principles different from, but analogous to Grice's Cooperative Principle and maxims are needed to explain literature. For Mary Louise Pratt, however, the most successful theory of discourse would be one that could explain literature alongside other uses of language. In the case of literature, where the Cooperative Principle is particularly secure between author and reader, 'we can freely and joyfully jeopardize it'. l' Flouting and conversational implicatures are therefore particularly characteristic of literary texts but do not set them apart as intrinsically different from other types of language use. Other commentators have concentrated on Gricean analyses of discourse within literary texts, such as soliloquies in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello and dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Finnegans Wake.20  Conversational implicature has also proved suggestive in historical linguistics as an explanation for a variety of meaning shifts. The basicpremiss of this research is that meaning that is initially associated with a word or phrase as an implicature can, over time, become part of its semantic meaning. Peter Cole describes this process as 'the lexicaliza-tion of conversational meaning' 2 Elizabeth Traugott's work in this area has drawn on a wide range of historical data. For instance, in a 1989 paper she traces a general trend in the history of English for changes from deontic to epistemic meanings; both words and grammatical forms  ten in he ton or math 10g  that started out as weakly subjective become strongly subjective. For instance,  'you must go' changes its meaning from permission in Old  English to expectation in Present Day English. This process she describes as 'the conventionalising of conversational implicature' based on 'prag-matic strengthening' and derived ultimately from Grice's second maxim of Quantity22 Debra Ziegeler has followed up this study by suggesting that another process of conventionalisation can account for the hypothetical and counterfactual meanings associated with some modal verbs in the past tense, such as would, this time a process explained by the first maxim of Quality.23  It would be wrong to suggest that Grice's presence in linguistics has been greeted with constant, or universal, enthusiasm. The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is representative here, too. As well as the albeit modified praise from Thomas, the encyclopaedia includes an entry on  'Discourse' in which Alec McHoul accuses Grice of idealising conversa-tion. According to McHoul, Grice 'attempted to generalise from how he thought conversation operated', and ended up giving 'an ideal-rational version of socially pragmatic events so that it seems virtually irrelevant that the objects of analysis... constitute a form of social action'.24 McHoul is far from being a lone voice. The theory of conversation has frequently been accused of presenting an unrealistic picture of human interaction, and even of attempting to lay down rules of appropriate conversational etiquette. For instance, Dell Hymes suggests that Grice's account of conversational behaviour incorporates a tacit ideal image of discourse',25 and Sandra Harris identifies in it 'prescriptive and moral overtones' 26 For Rob Pope, an individual's willingness to accept the maxims as an accurate account of communication is dependent on 'the problem of how far you and I, in our respective world-historical posi-tions, find it expedient or desirable to espouse a view of human interaction based on consensus and/or conflict'? Geoffrey Sampson even claims that 'it would be ludicrous to suggest that as a general principle people's speech is governed by maxims' such as those proposed in the theory of conversation. However, he rather undermines his own argu-ment by presenting the observation that 'people often manifestly flout his maxims' as if it were a problem for Grice's theory.  A number of linguists have been quick to defend Grice from the suggestion that his maxims prescribe 'ideal' conversation. For instance, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson explain that the maxims 'define for us the basic set of assumptions underlying every talk exchange. But this does not imply that utterances in general, or even reasonably fre-quently, must meet these conditions, as critics of Grice have sometime thought'.2 Robin Lakoff argues that strict adherence to the maxims is not usual and that in many cases: 'an utterance that fails to incorporate implicature when it is culturally expected might be uncooperative and so liable to misunderstanding, hardly "ideal" 130  There are a number of features of the presentation of the theory, particularly read in isolation from the rest of the lectures, that may contribute to the accusation of idealising conversation. First, Grice never defines what he means by 'conversation'. It is clear from his earlier, unpublished writings that he adopted this term simply as a label for language in context, or as a reminder to his Oxford students that utterances do not generally occur in isolation from each other. However, in linguistics the term has acquired a much more specific and technical use. During the early 1970s, just as Grice's theory was becoming widely known, work by linguists such as Harvey Sacks was revealing the characteristics and regularities of naturally occurring casual conversation, dwelling on features such as turn taking and topic organisation." Linguists familiar with this work have perhaps been taken aback by Grice's apparently cavalier, unempirical generalisations. Second, Grice introduces the theory of conversation as an approach to specific philosophical problems, but his own enthusiasm for the particular conversational explanations to which it extends obscures this purpose. In the single lecture 'Logic and conversation' in particular, casual conversational examples appear to be the main focus. Further, Grice expresses both the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims as imperatives.  Despite his intention of generalising over the assumptions that participants bring to interactive behaviour, this grammatical choice gives his  'rules' a prescriptive appearance.  Perhaps most damagingly of all, Grice does not comment on his own methodology and purpose in 'Logic and conversation'. He does,  however, give some indication of these in the earlier, unpublished lectures on language and context, for instance when he defends his method of working with as few 'cards on the table' as possible, in theknowledge that this will result in certain deliberate simplifications. In another lecture, proposing to address some questions put to him in a previous discussion about the nature of his undertaking, he suggests how he would like his ideas to be evaluated. His theory building is dif ferent from his methodology in 'Meaning', which proceeded through the description of specific cases.  I am here considering what is (or may be) only an ideal case, one which is artificially simplified by abstracting from all considerations other than those involved in the pursuance of a certain sort of conversational cooperation. I do not claim that there actually occur any conversations of this artificially simplified kind; it might even be that these could not be (cf frictionless pulleys). My question is on the (artificial) assumption that their only concern is cooperation in the business of giving and receiving information, what subordinate maxims or rules would it be reasonable or even mandatory that participants should accept as governing their conversational practice? Since the object of this exercise is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why it is that a particular implicature is present, I would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be a) can it be used to construct explanations of the presence of such implicatures, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any  rival [I have tried to make a start on the first part of a)] b) Are the no doubt crude, pretheoretical explanations which one would be prompted to give of such implicatures consistent with, or better still favourable pointers towards, the requirements involved in the model?32  Grice's idealisations are of the scientific type, necessary to establish underlying principles of the subject matter, rather than of the type specifying that it always does, or should, conform to certain optimal standards.  Another criticism of Grice's theory that seems off-beam in the light of his unpublished justification, but registers a legitimate concern for linguists, is that it works for only one particular discourse type: roughly for conversations between social equals who are mutually interested in exchanging information on a particular topic. Some of the earliest commentaries on the theory of conversation to consider the social and institutional contexts of language were, perhaps surprisingly, from philosophers rather than from linguists. In a 1979 edition of The Philo-sophical Quarterly, David Holdcroft and Graham Bird contribute to a discussion of whether the Cooperative Principle is best seen as applying to all sequences of speech acts, or simply to informal conversations.  Holdcroft argues that the Cooperative Principle is not unproblemati-cally universal across all sequences; in cases where participants do not  'have equal discourse rights' the maxims do not straightforwardly apply.33 He offers the examples of the proceedings of a court of law and a viva exam, suggesting that different sets of maxims are accepted by participants in different cases. Bird argues that situations in which participants have unequal rights do not pose the problems to Grice that Holdcroft envisages; maxims may be suspended by mutual agreement without offering counter-examples to the theory. 34  These ideas were later addressed by linguists using actual conversational data rather than theorised 'types' of sequences. Norman Fair-clough pioneered critical discourse analysis, an approach concerned with relating the formal properties of texts to interpretation and hence to their relationship to social context. He suggests that mainstream discourse analysis 'has virtually elevated cooperative conversation between equals into an archetype of verbal interaction in general'.35 He holds Grice at least in part responsible for this because his emphasis on the exchange of information assumes equal rights to contribute for both parties. Fairclough analyses conversational extracts from police interviews of a woman making a complaint of rape and of a youth suspected of vandalism to argue that many interactions do not conform to this model. He notes that Grice's own proviso that in some types of conversation influencing others may be more important has too often been overlooked. Other critical discourse analysts offer qualified support for Grice, for instance arguing that the theory of conversation need not be limited to casual conversation, but can be generalised to explain discourse in institutional contexts only once it has been made to take account of societal factors. John Gumperz uses a variety of data to argue that interactions such as cross-examinations, political debates and job interviews demonstrate that 'conversational cooperation becomes considerably more complex than would appear on a surface reading of the Cooperative Principle.' William Hanks echoes many of the criticisms of the theory of conversation familiar to ethnolinguists, but argues that it should not be abandoned altogether within this discipline because 'some parts of Grice's approach are of telling interest to ethnog-raphy', in particular the active role assigned to the hearer in attributing conversational meaning. For Grice, as for sociolinguists, 'meaning arises out of the relation between parties to talk'.38If it is to some extent contrary to Grice's abstract, philosophical intentions that his theory should be applied to real language data, it is perhaps even more incongruous that it should be subjected to clinical testing. Nevertheless, the theory of conversation has generated much interest in the area of clinical linguistics, in particular the branch sometimes described as 'neuropragmatics'. Chomsky was interested in the theory of conversation because it suggested to him a principled way of distinguishing between centrally linguistic meaning that might be described as belonging to a speaker's competence or semantic ability, and context-dependent meaning belonging to performance or prag-matics. Clinical linguists have looked for evidence of a neurological basis for such a distinction. Many such studies have concentrated on patients with some degree of language impairment, in an attempt to discover whether semantics and pragmatics can be selectively impaired.  For instance, Neil Smith and lanthi-Maria Tsimpli, working within a broadly Chomskyan framework, have studied an institutionalised brain-damaged patient with exceptional linguistic abilities. Their findings suggest that his 'linguistic decoding' is as good as anyone else's but that he is unable to handle examples such as irony, metaphor and jokes, a distinction that they suggests points to a separation between linguistic and non-linguistic impairment.3º Such a suggestion seems to be supported by findings from researchers with a more clinical and less linguistic interest, who have suggested that core linguistic functions might be controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain while 'pragmatic', context-dependent meaning, together with emotions, is controlled by the right. 40  Other clinicians have adopted a more overtly Gricean framework. Elisabeth Ahlsén uses the Cooperative Principle as a tool for describing aphasic communication in which, she argues, 'implicatures based on the maxims of quantity and manner cannot be made in the same way as in the case of nonaphasic speakers.'* The theory of conversation has also been used as a tool for describing more general communication dis-orders. 42 Ronald Bloom and a group of fellow-experimenters argue that  'Gricean pragmatics has provided a theoretically meaningful framework for examining the discourse of individuals with communication disorders' 43 Clinicians using Gricean analyses tend to be reluctant to draw definite conclusions about the division of labour between the hemi-spheres. This is argued perhaps most explicitly by Asa Kasher and his team, who have investigated the processing of implicatures by using an 'implicature battery' for both right brain-damaged and left brain-damaged stroke patients. They use both verbal implicatures and non-verbal implicatures based on visual images, and conclude that 'both cerebral hemispheres appear to contribute to the same degree to processing implicatures.'* This scepticism about the localisation of pragmatic processing in the right hemisphere is shared by Joan Borod and others, who use a series of pragmatic features, including some based on Gricean implicature, to test language performance in right-hand brain-damaged, left-hand brain-damaged and normal control subjects. They conclude that 'deficits in pragmatic appropriateness are shared equally by both brain-damaged groups.'45 Elsewhere, Kasher has argued explicitly against the tendency to make sweeping generalisations over pragmatic phenomena that locate them all in the right hemisphere.  Implicature, he argues, is part of a larger competence, 'hence it would be implausible to assume that some domain-specific cognitive system produces conversational implicature' 46 As Kasher's position illustrates, the positing of a separate pragmatic faculty, to which implicature belongs, is not dependent on the faculty being physically autonomous.  It can be impaired selectively from language, an observation that in itself legitimises the hypothesis of a physical basis in the brain.  Another field in which the theory of conversation has been used enthusiastically is Artificial Intelligence, a striking application given Grice's personal animosity to computers. Computer programmers have realised that formal linguistic theories can go a long way towards specifying the rules that make up grammatical sentences, but have little to say about how those sentences can be used to form natural-sounding conversations. For instance, Ayse Pinar Saygina and Ilyas Ciceki are not impressed by the pragmatic skills of computers. They analyse the output of various programmes entered for the Loebner Prize, an annual competition to find the programme closest to passing the Turing Test, in which a computer is deemed to be intelligent if a human observer cannot distinguish its participation in a conversation from that of a human. Saygina and Ciceki argue that pragmatic acceptability, rather than the simple ability to generate natural language, is the biggest challenge to such programmes. Moreover, the programmes that are the most successful are those that adhere most closely to Grice's maxims, suggesting future applications for these, specifically that programmers will inevitably have to find ways of "making computers cooperate" ' 47  Various programmers have in fact made some attempts in this direc-tion. Robert Dale and Ehud Reiter consider an algorithm for natural-sounding referring expressions in computer-human interaction. They note that such an algorithm must produce expressions that successfully pick out the referent without leading 'the human hearer or reader tomake false conversational implicatures',48 Perhaps not surprisingly, they consider Grice's maxims to be 'vague' compared to the principles needed for computational implementation. Nevertheless, they base their algorithm on an interpretation of the maxims, claiming that the simpler interpretation produces a result that is 'faster in computational terms and seems to be closer to what human speakers do when they construct referring expressions'.4 Michael Young tackles the problem of intelligent systems designed to form plans to direct their own activities or those of others. 'There is a mismatch between the amount of detail in a plan for even a simple task and the amount of detail in typical plan descriptions used and understood by people' 5º In order to address this issue, Young proposes a computational model that draws on Grice's maxim of Quantity, which he labels the Cooperative Plan Identification architecture. He argues that this produces instructions that are much more successful in communicating a plan to a human subject than instructions produced by alternative methods.  Grice would have recognised discussion of irony and metaphor as more closely related to his work, although he would not necessarily have welcomed the form some of this debate has taken. The explana-tion of such 'non-literal' uses has generally been taken as a central task for the theory of conversation, and indeed Grice himself seems to encourage this view. In a rather hurried exegesis in the William James lectures, he explains irony and metaphor as floutings of the first maxim of Quality. 'X is a fine friend' said just after X has been known to betray the speaker cannot be intended to be taken as a true expression of belief.  Instead, the speaker must intend some other related proposition; 'the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward!»' Grice later restricts his definition of irony, claiming that it is 'intimately connected with the expression of a feeling, attitude or evaluation'.52 As an example of metaphor, 'You are the cream in my coffee' is also clearly false, but cannot be interpreted as meaning its simple opposite, which is a truism; 'the most likely sup-position is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance.'53  Some linguists working on such figures of speech have accepted an account along the lines suggested by Grice.5 Others, however, have taken issue with the apparent ease with which Grice's hearer in each case derives the interpretation. Their argument is that nothing within the Cooperative Principle or the maxims as they stand specifies why the hearer should reach that interpretation rather than some other. RobertHarnish wonders what tells us that the hearer in the irony example reaches the conclusion that 'X is a cad'; 'why should we suppose that the contradictory is the most obviously related proposition?' Similarly, if Grice's metaphor example is to be explained, 'we need some principles to guide our search for the correct supposition.'ss Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson argue that Grice's description of the process by which irony is interpreted 'is virtually free of rational constraints' 56 There is no reason why the negation of what is said should serve as the impli-cature, rather than some other closely related assumption. Wayne Davis worries about how a hearer is expected to identify accurately exactly what sort of interpretation is intended when, for instance, the maxim of Quality is flouted.s7  Some claim that experimental work also poses problems for Grice's account. Rachel Giora argues that the 'salient' meanings of metaphors and irony 'enjoy a privileged status: they are always accessed, and always initially, regardless of context'.58 Raymond Gibbs goes so far as to claim that 'the results of many psycholinguistic experiments have shown the traditional, Gricean view to be incorrect as a psychological theory'S His argument is that a figurative example does not require more processing time than a literal one; speakers often understand metaphorical or ironic meaning straight away without first having to analyse and reject literal meaning. Gibbs sees this as a threat to the whole distinction between the said and the implicated.  Not all experimental linguists would subscribe to Gibbs's conclusions.  Thomas Holtgraves points out that many metaphorical figures of speech such as 'he spilled the beans' have 'a conventional, nonliteral meaning that is comprehended directly' because in such cases 'the default meaning is clearly the nonliteral meaning' 6 Gerald Winer and his team compare the reactions of children and adults to a set of questions and observe that children tend to respond to literal but trivial meanings, adults to metaphorical interpretation. They argue that these findings are quite consistent with Grice's theory, which 'holds that people respond to the intended or inferred, rather than the literal, meaning of utter-ances'.61 Anne Bezuidenhout and J. Cooper Cutting suggest that experiments can never bear directly on the debate over the accuracy of Grice's theory because 'Grice was interested in giving a conceptual analysis of the concepts of saying, meaning, and so on, and not in giving a psychological theory of the stages in utterance processing. 2 They also express some concerns about the validity of results based on simple measurements of processing time, and the readiness of experimental linguists to reach generalised conclusions from these.Despite his own philosophical and analytical interests, then, Grice's theory has been debated in terms of its social application, its computational implementation and its psychological and even neurological plausibility. It has also been discussed by those whose studies extend across cultures, some of whom have criticised it as ethnocentric, as drawing unquestioningly on the mores of one society. In an echo of the accusations of elitism levelled at Austin and his 'empirical' approach to language, Grice has even been accused of concentrating on one privileged rank of that society. This particular criticism dates back to Elinor Ochs Keenan's article 'The universality of conversational postulates', first published in 1976. Keenan's basic tenet is that Grice's analysis is implicitly but inappropriately offered as applying universally. Her specific claim is that the maxims, in particular those of Quantity, do not hold among the indigenous people of the plateaus area of Madagascar.  Hence the maxims are culturally specific and the assumption that Grice's account demonstrates a pragmatic universal is flawed.  In Malagasy society, speakers regularly breach the maxim to 'be infor-mative', by failing to provide enough information to meet their interlocutor's needs. So if A asks B 'Where is your mother?', B might well reply 'She is either in the house or at the market', even when fully aware of the mother's location. Further, the reply would not generally give rise to the implicature that B is unable to provide a more specific answer because in that society 'the expectation that speakers will satisfy informational needs is not a basic norm' 63 Keenan suggests some reasons for this specific to Malagasy society. New information is such a rare commodity that it confers prestige on the knower, and is therefore not parted with lightly. Further, speakers are reluctant to commit themselves explicitly to particular claims, and therefore to take on responsibility for the reliability of the information. For these reasons, the expectations about conversational practice and the implicatures following from particular utterances are different from those assumed by Grice to be universal norms.  Keenan complains that 'the conversational maxims are not presented as working hypotheses but as social facts' and argues that much more empirical work on conversation must be conducted before true paradigms of conversational practice can be drawn up. Her criticism, then, is chiefly the familiar one that Grice has attempted to describe 'con-versation' without having considered the mechanics of any actual con-versation, with the added claim that such a consideration would reveal some significant variations between cultures. However, she welcomes Grice's attempt to posit universal conversational principles, because ofthe possibility it suggests for those engaged in fieldwork to move away from specific empirical observations 'and to propose stronger hypotheses related to general principles of conversation'. She suggests that the particular maxims may apply in different domains and to different degrees in different societies. In Malagasy society, determining factors include the importance of the information in question, the degree of intimacy between the participants, and the sex of the speaker. A number of linguists have defended Grice against Keenan's accusation. Georgia Green has suggested that even the discovery that a particular maxim did not apply at all in one society would not invalidate Grice's general enterprise. Since the maxims are individual 'special cases' of coopera-tion, 'discovering that one of the maxims was not universal would not invalidate claims that the Co-operative Principle was universal'. Robert Harnish argues that Grice nowhere claims that all conversations are governed by all the maxims; in many types of conversation, as in Keenan's examples, one or more of the maxims 'are not in effect and are known not to be in effect by the participants'. Geoffrey Leech points out that  'no claim has been made that the CP applies in an identical manner to all societies. '68  Keenan's criticisms of Grice, and indeed these responses to those crit-icisms, consider meaning as a social and interactive, rather than a purely formal phenomenon. This is a project shared to varying degrees by works that have attracted the title 'politeness theory'. Such works date back to the mimeograph days of 'Logic and conversation',  ', and indeed  can be seen as one area in which the newly emerging discipline of prag-matics took its inspiration and basic premisses from Grice. Looking back to the early 1970s, politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson comment that at that time the division of meaning into semantics and pragmatics was motivated chiefly by 'the basic Gricean observation that what is "said" is typically only part of what is "meant" the proposition expressed by the former providing a basis for the calculation of the latter. In studying politeness phenomena, linguists such as Brown and Levinson were seeking an explanation not so much of the mechanics of this calculation as of its motivation. John Gumperz observes in the foreword to Brown and Levinson's study that politeness theory concentrated on the social functions of language, thereby bringing Grice's work into the field of sociolinguistics for the first time.  Theorised conversational politeness, like cooperation, is neither a description of ideal behaviour nor a guide to etiquette. Indeed, politeness theorists are eager to stress that they are positing hypotheses about conventionalised and meaningful patterns of behaviour, rather thandescribing a general tendency in people to be 'considerate' or 'nice' to each other. The conventions of politeness are not accounted for in the maxims, and some have seen this as a weakness in Grice's account.  However, the tendency towards cooperation and that towards politeness are means towards different sets of ends: the former to informing and influencing and the latter to the maintenance of harmonious social relationships. Norms of politeness are therefore appropriate complements to, not subcategories of, norms of cooperation. This certainly seems to have been the view Grice himself took in his only reference to politeness in 'Logic and conversation':  There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as 'Be polite', that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve.?°  Those who have taken a closer interest than Grice in politeness have generally done so for one of two reasons. Some have given what for Grice are secondary purposes of conversation a more central impor-tance, arguing either explicitly or by implication that the maintenance of social relationships is at least as important a function of conversation as the 'rational' goals of informing and influencing. Others have seen in the phenomenon of politeness a possible answer to a question Grice has been criticised for never fully addressing: the question of why speakers convey meaning through implicatures at all, rather than through straightforward assertion. In other words, they have seen politeness not as a supplementary norm of conversation, but as a potential key to the operation of the Cooperative Principle itself.  Some of the earliest work in politeness theory came from Robin Lakoff. In common with other generative semanticists, she was dissatisfied with the tenet that judgements of grammaticality were autonomous and sufficient: that a fully successful transformational grammar would be able to legislate absolutely between 'good' and 'bad' strings. Rather, she argued, phenomena entirely dependent on context, and on aspects of context as specific as the relationship between two people, could effect such judgements and should be taken into account.  She has since argued that the notion of 'continuousness', the idea thatjudgements of acceptability must be arranged along a continuous scale rather than being binary and polar, is the single greatest contribution of generative semantics to the understanding of human language." In articles published in the early 1970s, Lakoff defended the importance of pragmatic explanations. In 'Language in context', for instance, she argues that transformational grammar had 'explicitly rejected' contextual aspects from consideration.?? Her particular claim is that certain features of English sentences can be explained only in terms of the relationship between the speaker and hearer. In this sense they are no different from, for instance, honorifics in Japanese; it is just that their context-bound nature is not immediately apparent because they are expressed using linguistic devices that have other, more centrally semantic, functions as well. So Lakoff discusses the use of modal verbs in offers and requests, considering why, for instance, 'You must have some of this cake' counts as a politer form than 'You should have some of this cake'. Their social meaning is often dependent not just on the form used but the implications this triggers. The verb 'must' implies, generally contrary to the facts of the case, that the hearer has no choice but to eat the cake, hence that the cake is not in itself desirable, and that the speaker is politely modest about the goods she is offering.  Lakoff draws an analogy between these politeness phenomena and some other conversational features 'not tied to concepts of politeness', such as those discussed in Grice's mimeograph. Like politeness phe-nomena, these features are not part of the grammar but can nevertheless have an effect on the form of utterances. Lakoff notes that expressions such as 'well' and 'why' may sometimes be labelled 'mean-ingless', but that they in fact have specific conditions for use. Because they can be used either appropriately or inappropriately, a linguistic theory needs to be able to account for them, yet the conditions governing their appropriateness are often dependent on a purely context-bound phenomenon such as the breaking of a conversational maxim.  They signal, respectively, that the utterance to follow is in some way incomplete, breaking the maxims of Quantity, and that a preceding utterance was in some way surprising, and so considered a possible breaking of the maxims of Quality. The attitudes of speakers to the information conveyed, just like their awareness of their relationships to each other, is sometimes communicated by the actual form of words used.  Therefore, any sufficient account of language must pay attention to contextual as well as syntactic factors.  In 'The logic of politeness', published the following year, Lakoff reiterates her belief in the necessity of contextual explanations to comple-ment syntactic ones, but this time goes further in arguing that prag-matics should be afforded a status equal to syntax or semantics. Ulti-mately, she would like to see pragmatic rules 'made as rigorous as the syntactic rules in the transformational literature (and hopefully a lot less ad hoc)'? The basic types of rules to be accounted for fall under two headings: 'Be clear' and 'Be polite'. These sometimes produce the same effect in a particular context and therefore reinforce each other, but more often place conflicting demands on the speaker, meaning that one must be sacrificed in the interests of the other. Grice's theory of conversation provides an account of the rules subsumed under 'Be clear'. It remains to be explained why speakers so often depart from these norms in their conversations and here, Lakoff implies, the second type of pragmatic rule comes into play. In cases when the interests of clarity are in conflict with those of politeness, politeness generally wins through. This is perhaps because: 'in most informal conversations, actual communication of important ideas is secondary to merely reaffirming and strengthening relationships.'75  Lakoff tentatively suggests three 'rules of politeness', analogous to the rules of conversation: 'don't impose', 'give options' and 'make A feel good - be friendly'? The first rule explains why people choose lengthy or syntactically complex expressions in apparent breach of clarity, such as 'May I ask how much you paid for that vase, Mr Hoving?' and 'Dinner is served'. The second rule explains the use of hedges ('Nixon is sort of conservative') and euphemisms (I hear that the butler found Freddy and Marion making it in the pantry'), expressions leaving hearers the superficial option of not interpreting an expression in a way they may find offensive. The third rule explains nicknames and particles expressing feeling and involving the hearer, particles such as like', 'y'know', '1 mean'. All these conversational features might appear to be in breach of one or more maxim; in effect the more powerful rules of politeness explain why and when the conversational maxims are breached. Lakoff even suggests that Grice's rules of conversation are perhaps best seen as  'subcases' of Rule 1; in other words that the tendency towards clarity is just part of a more general tendency not to impose on your addressee.  The other two types of politeness, particularly 'be friendly', take precedence over clarity when they come into conflict with it. For Lakoff politeness, perhaps including Grice's maxims, is a subsection of the more general category of 'cooperation'.  Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness is perhaps the most fully articulated and successful of the attempts to integrate sociolinguisticnotions of politeness with Grice's account of cooperation. The theory itself dates from just after the time when Lakoff was publishing on the need for linguistics to take account of contextual factors. Brown and Levinson first wrote up their ideas in the summer of 1974; these were eventually published as a long essay late in the 1970s, and in book form almost a decade later." They claim that their account is based on just the same basic premiss as Grice's: 'there is a working assumption by conversationalists of the rational and efficient nature of talk.'78 Brown and Levinson draw on sociology by introducing Erving Goffman's notion of 'face' into the discussion of politeness. In the 1950s, Goffman defined face as the positive social value a person claims, and argued that  'a person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participant'" Brown and Levinson refine Goffman's idea by distinguishing between 'positive' and 'negative' face. Participants in social situations are aware, both in themselves and in others, of the needs of both positive and negative face. Positive face is, generally, the desire to be liked, to be held in high regard by others. Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, to retain freedom of choice. Certain types of act can be classified as inherently impolite because they are threatening to one or other type of face for the addressee. Criticisms are inherently impolite because they threaten hearers' positive face by showing that they are in some way not held in high regard. Orders or requests are inherently impolite because they threaten negative face by seeking to impose the speaker's will on others and to restrict freedom of choice. In such circumstances the speaker has the option of producing the impolite act 'bald on-record'.80 That is, of producing it without any attempt to disguise it: to say 'You look fat in that dress', or 'Give me a lift to the station'. Brown and Levinson observe that in doing this, the speaker adheres precisely to Grice's maxims; 'You look fat in that dress' is clear, informative and truthful.  The speakers may be adhering to the maxims of conversation in these examples, but they are in breach of the rules of politeness prescribing maintenance of the other's face. Utterances such as 'That isn't the most flattering of your dresses' and 'I wonder if I could trouble you for a lift to the station' are less clear and less efficient than their 'on-record' coun-terparts. However, the very fact that speakers are putting more effort into producing these longer and more complex utterances ensures that they are seen to be striving to satisfy the hearers' face wants. Such ways of conveying meaning are very common in conversation, Brown andLevinson note. Successive commentators have been simply wrong in assuming that Grice specifies that utterances must meet the conditions of cooperation. Their purpose here, in fact, is 'to suggest a motive for not talking in this way' 81 Like Lakoff, they note that hedges are generally concerned with the operation of the maxims. They emphasise that cooperation is met, indicate that it may not be met, or question whether it has been met.82 Further, 'off-record' strategies are often accompanied by a 'trigger' indicating that an indirect meaning is to be sought. The individual conversational maxims determine the appropriate type of trigger.  Work on politeness in naturally occurring conversation has produced both supportive and more pessimistic responses to the Gricean frame-work. Susan Swan Mura draws on the transcriptions of 24 dyadic interactions to consider factors that might license deviation from the maxims. She concludes that for all the maxims the relevant factors provide for problem-free interaction in contexts where there is a threat of some sort to the coherence of the interaction. She concludes enthusiastically that 'this study also provides preliminary evidence that the Cooperative Principle represents a psychologically real construct, modeling the behavioural (in a non-Skinnerian sense of the term) basis for conversational formulation and interpretation.'83 Yoshiko Matsumoto, on the other hand, considers politeness phenomena in Japanese and notes that 'a socially and situationally adequate level of politeness and adequate honorifics must obligatorily be encoded in every utterance even in the absence of any potential face threatening act', arguing that this is a serious challenge to the universality of both Grice's and Brown and Levinson's theories.8  In his contribution to the literature on politeness, Geoffrey Leech draws together concepts from contemporary pragmatics and adds some of his own, to present what he describes as an 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' 85 He claims that the Cooperative Principle, although an important  account of what goes on in conversation, is not in itself sufficient to explain interpersonal rhetoric. Principles of politeness and also of irony must be added on an equal footing with cooperation; indeed, they can sometimes 'rescue' it from apparently false predictions. The result is a vastly more complex account of conversation than Grice had envisaged, as well as a more complex pragmatics in general. For example, Leech suggests that if, in response to 'We'll all miss Bill and Agatha, won't we?', a speaker were to say 'Well, we'll all miss BILL', thereby implicating that she will not miss Agatha, the speaker has apparently failed to observe the needs of Quantity. The speaker 'could have been moreinformative, but only at the cost of being more impolite to a third party: [the speaker] therefore suppressed the desired information in order to uphold the P[oliteness] P[rinciple]'.86  Leech's PP itself contains an elaborate list of additional conversational maxims. He initially describes these as comprising Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy, but later suggests that further maxims of politeness may prove necessary, including the Phatic maxim, the Banter maxim and the Pollyanna maxim.8 He seems, in fact to be prepared to add maxims in response to individual examples as they present themselves. This stance is open to the criticism that the choice of maxims becomes ad hoc, and the number arbitrary, significantly weakening the explanatory power of the theory. Indeed Brown and Levinson suggest that Leech is in danger of arguing for an 'infinite number of maxims', making his addition of the politeness principle in effect an elaborate description, rather than an explanatory account, of pragmatic communication.88  Leech's 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' is unusual among theories of politeness for advocating such a plethora of principles in addition to Grice's maxims of cooperation. It is certainly unusual in the more general framework of Gricean pragmatics. Here, the tendency in responses to the theory of conversation has been to attempt to reduce the number of maxims, to streamline the theory and therefore make it more powerfully explanatory and psychologically plausible. In their overview of the place of pragmatics in linguistics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Hartmut Haberlard and Jacob Mey criticise Leech for multiplying pragmatic principles and types, while most responses to Grice have been reductive in tendency. The general feeling that Grice's maxims need tidying up and clarifying is, they suggest, not particularly surprising 'if one considers the strong a priori character of Grice's maxims'. His main motivation in their choice and titles was to echo Kant's table of categories. Perhaps the most extreme of such theories was Relevance Theory (RT), developed by a number of linguists, but principally by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. It offered an account of communication and cognition drawing on Grice's theories of meaning and of conversation, especially on his distinction between what is said and what is meant, while at the same time departing from Grice sig-nificantly. From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, RT was perhaps the most influential school of thought in pragmatics and spawned a large number of articles, conference papers and doctoral theses, especially at its 'home' at University College, London. It was used as a framework for the analysis of various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in a varietyof languages, as well as an approach to texts as diverse as poetry, jokes and political manifestos.  In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson argue that Grice's account is too cumbersome and too ad hoc, consisting in a series of maxims each intended to account for some particular, more or less intuitive response.  Gricean pragmatics had for too long been bound by the outline provided by 'Grice's original hunches'? The dangers of this are apparent:  'It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for.'' Rather, the various maxims and submaxims can be subsumed into a suitably rich notion of relevance. This does not consist of a maxim, such as Grice's 'Be relevant', which speakers may adhere to or not, and which in the later case may lead to implicature. There is no place in Sperber and Wilson's theory for the notion of 'flouting' a rule of conversation. Rather, they posit a 'Principle of Relevance', a statement about communication; 'communicators do not "follow" the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to'. The principle applies 'without exception'. It is a fact of human behaviour explaining how people produce, and how they respond to, communicative acts. The principle states that every act of ostensive communication is geared to the maximisation of its own relevance; people produce utterances, whether verbal or otherwise, in accordance with the human tendency to be relevant, and respond to others' utterances with this expectation. Relevance is defined as the production of the maximum number of contextual effects for the least amount of processing effort. These notions are all entirely dependent on context; just as there is no place for flouting in Sperber and Wilson's theory, so there is no place for any notion of generalised implicature. Every implicature is entirely dependent on and unique to the context in which it occurs.  Sperber and Wilson take issue with Grice over what they see as his simplistic division of the semantic and the pragmatic, or the encoded and the inferenced. It is simply not possible, they argue, to arrive at a unique, fully articulated meaning from decoding alone: to produce a semantic form on which separate, pragmatic principles can then work.  In assuming that this was possible, Grice took an unwarranted step back towards the code model he so tellingly critiqued in his earlier article  'Meaning', returning to an outmoded reliance on the linguistic code to deliver a fully formed thought. He abandoned a 'common-sense' approach with psychological plausibility: the attempt to formalise and explain the notion that 'communication involves the publication and recognition of intentions'.' Cognitive principles such as relevance will be involved even at the stage of producing a Gricean 'what is said',determining features such as reference assignment and disambiguation.  Unlike  the Gricean maxims, the Principle of Relevance is not an autonomous rule applying after decoding has issued a unique linguistic meaning. Rather, both 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning rely on the Principle of Relevance. Sperber and Wilson argue, contra Grice, for the need to consider explicitness as a matter of degree.  Unlike the ethnologists and politeness theorists who claim common ground with Grice through an interest in social interaction, relevance theorists see their approach, and also Grice's maxims, as essentially cognitive in nature. For instance, Diane Blakemore has argued that RT responds to Grice's own dismissal of 'the idea that the maxims had their origin in the nature of society or culture on the grounds that this did not provide a sufficiently general explanation' and his warning that 'the key to a general, psychological explanation lay in the notion of relevance'.'4  There is some evidence that Grice was reluctant to be drawn on his views on RT. His only published comment is very brief and rather damning. In the retrospective overview of his own work in Studies in the Way of Words, he comments on the possible problem of the interdependence of his maxims, especially Quantity and Relation. However, he argues that Sperber and Wilson's account, far from clarifying this matter, in fact loses the significance of the link between relevance and quantity of information by considering relevance without specification of direction. The amount of information appropriate in any given context is determined by the particular aim of the conversation, or of what is deemed relevant to that aim. So success in conversation is not simply a matter of accumulating the highest possible number of contextual effects. Further, Grice argues that as well as direction of rele-vance, information is necessary concerning the degree of a concern for a topic, and the extent of opportunity for remedial action. In sum, the principle of relevance may well be an important one in conversation, but when it comes to implicature it might be said 'to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity'.9S This last suggestion seems to align Grice more with another branch of pragmatics, again one attempting to refine the notion of implicature and reduce the number of conversational maxims: the work of the so-called 'neo-Griceans'.  The term 'neo-Gricean' has been applied to a number of linguists, both American and British, and to a body of work produced since the early 1980s. Across the range of their published work, these linguists have revised their ideas many times, and used a sometimes bewildering array of terminology. Nevertheless, the work all remains located firmlywithin the tradition of Gricean pragmatics, seeking to elaborate a theory of meaning based on levels of interpretation. Neo-Griceans have tended towards two types of revision of Grice's theory of conversation, one much more radical than the other. First, very much in keeping with Grice's own speculations about the interdependence of Quantity and Relation, they have questioned the need for as many separate maxims as Grice originally postulated, and investigated ways of reducing these.  Second, and rather more at odds with Grice's own original conception, they have questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the levels of meaning. They have been concerned with what Laurence Horn has described as a problem raised by the Cooperative Principle, 'one we encounter whenever we cruise the transitional neighbourhood of the semantics/pragmatics border: how do we draw the line between what is said and what is implicated?'96  The neo-Griceans have upheld the importance of making some such distinction, but they have in various ways and with different terminologies challenged the viability of separating off entirely the 'literal' from the 'implied'. In this, they share the anxiety expressed by Sperber and Wilson in terms of the appropriate division between 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning. Sperber and Wilson argue that purely explicit meaning is generally not enough to render a full propositional form; implicit aspects of meaning must be admitted at various stages, leading to 'levels' of explicitness. Neo-Griceans have made similar claims,  leading them not actually to abandon the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, but to question the autonomy of the two, and the possibility of their applying to interpretation in series. The chief ways in which the neo-Griceans differ from relevance theorists, and stay closer to Grice, is in their maintenance of separate maxims of conversation that can be exploited and flouted, and the use they make of gen-eralised conversational implicatures (GCIs). These latter, rejected by RT because they take minimal account of context, are crucial to the devel-opment, and presentation, of much of the neo-Gricean literature.  In his 1989 book A Natural History of Negation, Laurence Horn comments that 'much of neo- and post-Gricean pragmatics has been devoted to a variety of reductionist efforts'!' He suggests that a premiss for him, and perhaps for many of the neo-Griceans, setting them apart from relevance theorists, is that 'Quality ... is primary and essentially unreducible.' What needs further to be said about conversation can be summarised in two separate, sometimes conflicting, driving forces within communication. These are, in general terms, the drive towards clarity, putting the onus on speakers to do all that is necessary to makethemselves understood, and the drive towards economy, putting the onus on hearers to interpret utterances as fully as necessary. Horn labels the principles resulting from these drives Q and R respectively (stand-ing for 'quantity' and 'relation', but with no straightforward correlation to Grice's maxims). He traces the development of this reductive model to early work by Jay Atlas and Stephen Levinson, and by Levinson on his own. But an important part of the account of 'Q-based implicatures' draws on work almost a decade earlier by Horn himself on the notion of 'scalar implicatures'.  Horn's development of the Gricean notion of Quantity to account for the interpretation of a range of vocabulary in terms of 'scalar implica-ture' is arguably one of the most productive and interesting of the expansions of 'Logic and conversation'. It is in many ways true to Grice's original conception of implicature, not least because it divides the  'meaning' of a range of terms into 'said' and 'implicated' components, removing the need to posit endless ambiguities in the language, and offering a systematic explanation of a wide range of examples. It is perhaps in keeping that such a thoroughly Gricean enterprise should remain in manuscript for many years, and then be published only partially (in A Natural History of Negation). The main source for Horn's account of scalar implicature remains his doctoral thesis, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, presented to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972.  In his later commentary on scalar implicatures, Horn describes them as the 'locus classicus' of GCIs based on his own notion of Quantity.98 Indeed, Grice himself seems to have seen examples of this type as particularly important, although he does not use the term 'scalar', or identify them as a separate category. In 'Logic and conversation', he introduces the notion of GCI as follows:  Anyone who uses a sentence of the form X is meeting a woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend. ... Sometimes, however, there would be no such implicature (T have been sitting in a car all morning') and sometimes a reverse implicature (I broke a finger yesterday'). I am inclined to think that one would not lend a sympathetic ear to a philosopher who suggested that there are three senses of the form of expression an X. ... [Rather] when someone, by using the form of expression an X, implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is presentbecause the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be assumed that he is no in a position to be specific.  This is a familiar implicature and is classifiable as a failure, for one reason or another, to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity."  The most easily identifiable type of GCI is based on the first maxim of Quantity, which calls for as much information as is necessary. In other words, it draws on Grice's earliest observation about the regularities of conversation: that one should not make a weaker statement when a stronger one is possible. Horn observes that there are many areas of vocabulary where similar apparent problems can be resolved by just such an analysis. A more general term often implicates that a more specific alternative does not apply, by means of the assumption that the speaker is not in a position to provide the extra information. Horn discusses this informativeness in terms of the 'semantic strength' of a lexical item. Such items can be understood as ranged on 'scales' of infor-mativeness, each scale consisting of two or more items.  In all cases, it is possible to describe the different meanings associated with a particular item in terms not of a semantic ambiguity, but of a basic semantic meaning and of an additional implicated meaning that arises by default, but can be cancelled in context. The first scale Horn discusses is that of the cardinal numbers. The numbers can be seen as situated on a scale, ranging from one to infinity: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...). Each item semantically entails all items to its left, and pragmatically implicates the negation of all items to its right. As Horn describes it:  Numbers, or rather sentences containing them, assert lower-  boundedness - at least n - and given tokens of utterances containing cardinal numbers may, depending on the context, implicate upper-boundedness - at most n - so that the number may be interpreted as denoting an exact quantity, 100  This explains the apparent ambiguity of a cardinal number in use.  'John has three children', for example, will generally be interpreted as meaning 'John has exactly three children', but is not logically incompatible with John's having four or more. Horn points to the fact that  'John has three children, and possibly even more' is acceptable, suggesting that 'no more than three' cannot be part of the semantic meaning of 'three'. If it were, this example should be simply logically contradictory. Rather than forcing the intolerable conclusion that allcardinal numbers are semantically multiply ambiguous, Horn's account allows that their semantic meaning is 'at least. but that they implicate 'at most..'. This is because, if the speaker were able to use an item further to the right on the scale, it would be more informative, hence more cooperative, to do so. Taken together, these two meanings give he interpretation 'exactly... Horn proposes similar scales fo vocabulary items from across the range of the lexicon, including adjec tives, (warm, hot), (good, excellent); verbs, (like, love), (dislike, hate); and quantifiers, (all, some). As Horn observes in his own later com-mentary, in all these examples 'since the implicature relation is context-dependent, we systematically obtain two understandings for each scalar value p ('at least p', 'exactly p') without needing to posit a semantic ambiguity for each operator'. 101  In this later work, Horn describes scalar implicatures as examples of Q-based implicatures, dependent on our expectations that speakers will seek to be as clear as possible. However, Q-based implicatures need to be balanced against R-based ones, drawing on the notion of economy.  The tension between these can offer a clear account of the issue to do with articles Grice originally identified:  Maxim clash, for example, arises notoriously readily in indefinite contexts; thus, an utterance of I slept in a car yesterday licenses the Q-based inference that it was not my car I slept in (or I should have said so), while an utterance of I broke a finger yesterday licenses the R-based inference that it was my finger I broke (unless I know that you know that I am an enforcer for the mob, in which case the opposite, R-based implicatum is derived). 102  There is some experimental support for the psychological plausibility of Horn's scalar implicatures, and hence for the Gricean framework on which they are based. Ira Noveck concludes from a number of experiments that although adults react to the enriched pragmatic meaning of scalars, young but linguistically competent children respond chiefly to their logical meaning. 'The experiments succeeded in demonstrating not only that these Gricean implicatures are present in adult inference-making but that in cognitive development these occur only after logical interpretations have been well established.'103  There have been some attempts to extend the range of Horn's notion of scalar implicature. Horn himself has offered a scalar analysis of the  'strengthening' of 'if' to mean 'if and only if', 104 Earlier, Jerrold Sadock sought to explain the meaning of 'almost' in terms of a semantic scale(almost p, p). Sadock observes that the argument for a relationship of implicature between the use of 'almost p' and the meaning 'not p' is considerably weakened by the difficulty of finding contexts in which it would be cancellable. His explanation is that this is because 'the context-free implicature in the case of almost is so strong'.10s In discussing the one example he does see as cancellable, he introduces a qualification that is again to do with the 'strength' of an implicature. Surely, Sadock argues, if a seed company ran a competition to breed an almost black marigold', and a contestant turns up with an entirely black marigold, it would be in the interests not just of fair play but of correct semantic interpretation to award him the prize. However, he cautions:  In the statement of the contest's rules, the word almost should not be read with extra stress. Stressing a word that is instrumental in conveying a conversational implicature can have the effect of emphasizing the implicature and elevating it to something close to semantic content. 106  Sadock does not go so far as claiming that an implicature can actually become part of semantic content, but his rather equivocal statement certainly suggests a blurring of what for Grice is a clearly defined boundary.  This blurring of the boundaries is more apparent, or more explicitly advocated, in other neo-Gricean work, initially from Gazdar and later from Atlas and Levinson. Gerald Gazdar is perhaps the least clearly  'Gricean' of the neo-Griceans, in that he departs most radically from Grice's bipartite conception of meaning. Nevertheless, he bases his pragmatic account at least in part on a conception of implicature drawing on 'Logic and conversation'. He proposes a 'partial formulization' of GCIs, drawing on Horn's original account, which he describes as 'basi-cally correct'.107 For Gazdar, the semantic representation of certain expressions carry 'im-plicatures', potential implicatures that will later become actual if not cancelled by context. The relationship between context, implicature and eventual interpretation is a formal process.  Stephen Levinson, sometimes in collaboration with other linguists, has developed a revised account of GCIs. Levinson's conception of the processes of interpretation is summarised in his exegesis of 'Logic and conversation' in his 1983 Pragmatics. He describes how the assumptions about conversation expressed in the maxims 'arise, it seems, from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language'. 10 These goals in conversation areclosely related to Horn's 'economy' and 'clarity', respectively, and in Levinson's work too they prompt the search for a reductive reformulation of the maxims. He is also concerned with developing an 'inter-leaved' account of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.  Along with RT, but differing overtly from it, Levinson's account offers perhaps the most developed alternative to the view of semantics and pragmatics operating serially over separate inputs.  In a joint article published in 1981, Atlas and Levinson lay claim to an explicitly Gricean heritage, but argue that 'Gricean theories need not and do not restrict their resources to Grice's formulations. 109 They argue that it is necessary to pay attention to semantic structure that exists above and beyond truth-conditions, and that in turn interacts with pragmatic principles to produce 'informative, defeasible implicata'. 110  This concern with layers of meaning not found in Grice's formulation has remained in Levinson's work. His 2000 book Presumptive Meanings is a sustained defence of the notion of GCI, based on Grice's original conception but reformulating and elaborating it. As in the defence from 20 years earlier, GCIs are seen as informative and defeasible. Their essential purpose is to add information to what is offered by literal meaning; as Levinson explains, they help overcome the problem of the 'bottle-neck' created by the slowness of phonetic articulation relative to the possibilities of interpretation. The solution, he suggests, takes the following form: let not only the content but also the metalinguistic properties of the utterance (e.g., its form) carry the message. Or, find a way to piggyback meaning on top of the meaning. "11  As part of this programme, Levinson offers a detailed characterisation of three separate levels of meaning in utterance interpretation. As well as 'sentence meaning' and 'speaker meaning', he argues the need for  'statement-meaning' or 'utterance-type meaning', intermediate between the two. It is at this level, he suggests, that 'we can expect the system-aticity of inference that might be deeply interconnected to linguistic structure and meaning, to the extent that it can become problematical to decide which phenomena should be rendered unto semantic theory and which unto pragmatics. 12 He places GCIs at this intermediate level; for him they are ambiguously located between semantics and pragmat-ics. Part of his argument here hinges on the idea, not dissimilar from that put forward by Sperber and Wilson, that the very first level is often not enough to give a starting point of meaning at all. Various factors in what Grice calls 'what is said' need to be determined with reference to precisely those inferential features described as GCIs. Levinson describes this process as 'pragmatic intrusion into truth conditions'. 113 Pragmaticinference plays a part in determining even basic sentence meaning, suggesting that pragmatics cannot be simply a 'layer' of interpretation applying after semantics. 114  Neo-Griceans have sometimes been described as engaging in 'radical pragmatics' because, as Levinson's model illustrates, they claim much richer explanatory powers for their pragmatic principles than is the case in traditional Gricean pragmatics. In 'Logic and conversation',  ', the layers  of meaning before the Cooperative Principle becomes effective are somewhat shady. Conventional meaning, always a problem area for Grice, is added to by various uninterrogated processes of disambigua-tion and reference assignment, to give 'what is said'. This may be enriched by conventional implicature, depending on the individual words chosen. It is only then that Grice's elaborate mechanism for deriving conversational implicatures is brought into play. For neo-Griceans such as Levinson, conventional meaning is a highly restrictive, although perhaps no less shady, phenomenon. It needs assistance from pragmatic principles before it can even offer a basis from which interpretation can proceed. In John Richardson and Alan Richardson's instructive extended metaphor:  Grice allowed himself considerable pragmatic machinery with which to try to bridge the gap between intuitive and posited meanings, whereas radical pragmaticians have been eagerly scrapping much of Grice's machinery while frequently allowing gaps between intuitive and posited meanings greater than anything Grice proposed - a geometrically more ambitious program. l1s  A number of recent articles reassess the claims that implicature must play a part in determining literal content. These generally take issue with linguists such as the relevance theorists and Levinson, and show a renewed interest in Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated, although they are by no means unanimously uncritical of his original characterisation of these. Kent Bach argues that 'what is said in uttering a sentence need not be a complete proposition'; if we observe what Bach sees as Grice's stipulation that 'what is said' must correspond directly to the linguistic form of the sentence uttered, it may be that what is said is not informationally complete. 16 However, this need not be a problem, because in the Gricean framework what is communicated is not entirely dependent on what is said but is derived from it by a process of implicature. Bach accuses some of Grice's commentators of confusing their intuitions about what is communicated, in whichimplicatures play a part, with judgements about semantic fact. Directly taking issue with RT, he argues that 'I have had breakfast' might be literally true even if the speaker had not had breakfast on the day of utter-ance; it is simply that intuitive judgements focus on a more limited interpretation. These intuitive judgements are not a good guide to the theoretical question of the constitution of 'what is said': 'the most natural interpretation of an utterance need not be what is strictly and literally said. 117  Mira Ariel has also dwelt on intuitive responses in her discussion of  'privileged interactional interpretation'. l18 What people respond to as the speaker's chief commitment does not always correspond either to Grice's 'what is said' or to some enriched form such as the relevance theorists' 'explicatures'. Jennifer Saul suggests that Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has been dismissed too hurriedly by his critics. To argue against Grice on the grounds of how people generally react to utterances is seriously to misrepresent his intention.  Further, within Grice's original formulation there is no reason why what is said needs to be a cooperative contribution recognised by either speaker or hearer: 'a speaker can perfectly well be cooperative by saying something trivial and implicating something non-trivial. 119  Grice's work was often characterised by the speculative and open-ended approaches he took to his chosen topics. At times the result can be frustratingly tentative discussions of crucial issues that display a knowing disregard for detail or for definitions of key terms. Ideas and theories are offered as sketches of how an appropriate account might succeed, or how a philosopher - by implication either Grice or some unnamed successor - might eventually formulate an answer. In the case of the theory of conversation, these characteristics are perhaps at least in part responsible for its success. Certainly, Grice offered enough for his description of interactive meaning to be applied fruitfully in a number of different fields across a vast range of data. But the sketchiness of some aspects of the theory, and the failure fully to define terms as central as 'what is said', have also indicated possibilities for theoretical adjustments and reformulations. There is something of an air of  'work in progress' about even the published version of 'Logic and con-versation' that indicates problems to be solved rather than simply ideas to be applied. Grice himself mounted a spirited defence of problems at the end of his own philosophical memoir:  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same oldproblems it would still not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up. 120  ready supply of problems is as valued by linguists as it is by philosc hers. The original, highly suggestive, but somehow unfinished natur of the lectures on logic and conversation is a telling example of a Gricean heresy, and one that may explain much of the story of their success.  Baker (1986: 277). Festschrift etc. H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Wittgenstein (1958: 43). See Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. In Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 516-17). E.g. Brown and Yule (1983: 31-3), Coulthard (1985: 30-2), Graddol et al. (1994: 124-5), Wardhaugh (1986: 281-4).  7. Respectively, Rundquist (1992), Perner and Leekam (1986), Gumperz (1982:  94-5), Penman (1987), Schiffrin (1994: 203-26), Raskin (1985), Yamaguchi  (1988), and Warnes (1990).  See, for instance, Grice (1987b: 339). Grandy and Warner (1986a: 1). Grice (1986a: 65, original emphasis). Grice (1986b: 10). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Misc. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47). Grice (1986a: 61). See, for instance, Burge (1992: 619). Grice (1986a: 61-2). See, for instance, Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Richard Warner, personal communication. Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Grice (1967b) in Grice (1989: 64). Handwritten version of Kant lectures, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Miscellaneous "Group" notes 84-85', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  25. 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  2 Philosophical influences  1. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1986a: 46). Quotation courtesy of the Old Cliftonian Society. Grice (1991: 57-8, n1). Grice (1986a: 46-7). Ibid. Quotations in this paragraph from Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Information from The Rossall Register, Rossall School, Lancashire. Martin and Highfield (1997: 337). Ayer (1971: 48). Rogers (2000: 144). 'Preliminary Valediction, 1985', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 48). 'Negation and Privation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Rogers (2000: 255). Rogers (2000: 146). Locke (1694: 37) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 38) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 39) in Perry (1975b). Ibid. Locke (1694: 47) in Perry (1975b). Reid (1785: 115) In Perry (1975b). Gallie (1936: 28). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 74). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 88). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 90). Perry (1975a: 155n). Perry (1975a: 136). Williamson (1990: 122). 3 Post-war Oxford  Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 10), Strawson in Magee (1986: 149). Grice (1986a: 48). Ryle (1949: 19). Rée (1993: 8). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 20). Pitcher (1973: 20). Grice (1986a: 58). Rogers (2000: 255). Manuscript: 'Philosophy and ordinary language', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 50). Frege (1892: 57). Russell (1905: 479). For instance, Magee (1986: 10). For instance in the introduction to Gellner (1979), written and first published in 1959. For instance Grice (1987b: 345). Moore (1925) reprinted in Moore (1959: 36). Grice (1986a: 51). Gellner (1979: 17, and elsewhere). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Rogers (2000: 254). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Williams and Montefiore (eds) (1966: 11). Wittgenstein (1922: 4.024). Wittgenstein (1958: 120). Ayer (1964). Austin (1962a: 3). Austin (1950) in Austin (1961: 99). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 130). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 137). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 138, original emphasis). Forguson (2001: 333 and n16). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 51), Grice (1987a: 181). Grice (1986a: 49). Quine (1985: 249). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 14). Notes for Ox Phil 1948-1970, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice (personal communication). Warnock (1973: 36). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 129, original emphasis). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Urmson et al. (1965: 79-80). 'Philosophers in high argument', The Times Saturday 17 May 1958. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Strawson in Magee (1986: 149), and Gellner (1979, passim) as examples of these two points of view. Russell (1956: 141). Gellner (1979: 23). Gellner (1979: 264). Mundle (1979: 82). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Grice (1986a: 51). Manuscript draft of 'Reply to Richards', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Ackrill (1963: vi). Strawson (1950: 326). Strawson (1998: 5). For instance, in Strawson (1952: 175ff). Strawson (1950: 344). Quine (1985: 247-8). Grice (1986a: 47). Grice (1986a: 49). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes for Categories with Strawson, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Quine (1953: 43). Grice and Strawson (1956) in Grice (1989: 205). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. 'The Way of Words', Studies in: Notes, offprints and draft material, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 54). Quinton (1963) in Strawson (1967: 126). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 37). Warnock (1973: 39). Perception Papers, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 30-1). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'More about Visa', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1955: 201). Grice (1961) and Grice (1962). Grice (1966). Warnock (1973: 39, original emphasis). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Quine (1985: 248). Grice (1958).   4 Meaning  Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Warnock (1973: 40). Grice (1957: 379). Stevenson (1944: 66). Stevenson (1944: 38). Stevenson (1944: 69). Stevenson (1944: 74, original emphasis). Grice (1957: 380). Stout (1896: 356). Notes on intention and dispositions - HPG and others in Oxford, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Dispositions and intentions', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ryle (1949: 103). Ryle (1949: 183). Stout (1896: 359). Hampshire and Hart (1958: 7). Grice (1957: 379). Peirce (1867: 1). Peirce (1867: 7). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1957: 382). Grice (1957: 385). Grice (1957: 386). Grice (1957: 387). Bennett (1976: 11). Schiffer (1972: 7). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962b: 149). Austin (1962b: 108). Austin (1962b: 114). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 155). Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 163). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 171-2). Searle (1986: 210). Searle (1969: 45). A similar point is made by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 25). Schiffer (1987: xiii). Schiffer (1972: 13). Schiffer (1972: 18-19). Cosenza (2001a: 15). Avramides (1989), Avramides (1997). Schiffer (1972: 3). Ziff (1967: 1, 2). Ziff (1967: 2-3). Malcolm (1942: 349). Malcolm (1942: 357, original emphasis). Grice (c. 1946-1950: 150). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 167). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 168). 5 Logic and conversation  See Quine (1985: 235). Grice (1986a: 59-60). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1973: 36). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chomsky (1957: 5). See Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 21). 'Lectures on negation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 12, 14a, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 13, 14b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 5, 2b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 10, 12a, in Ackrill (1963). Mill (1868:188). Mill's work in this area is discussed by Horn (1989), who refers to a number of other nineteenth and twentieth century logicians who made similar observations. Mill (1868: 210, original emphasis). Ibid.   16. 'PG's incomplete Phil and Ordinary Language paper'  ', H. P. Grice Papers,  BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California,    Berkeley.  17. Grice (1975a: 45-6).    18. Moore (1942: 541, original emphasis).    19. Bar-Hillel (1946: 334).    20. Bar-Hillel (1946: 338, original emphasis).    21. O'Connor (1948: 359).    22. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 224).    23. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 229).    24. Nowell-Smith (1954: 81-2).    25. Edwards (1955: 21).    26. Grant (1958: 320).    27. Hungerland (1960: 212).    28. Hungerland (1960: 224).    29. Strawson (1952: 178-9).    30. Grice (1961: 121).    31. Grice (1961: 152).    32. Grice (1961: 124).    33. Grice (1961: 125).    34. Grice (1961: 126).    35. Grice (1961: 132).    36. Warnock (1967: 5).    37. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    38. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 4, 1b, in Ackrill (1963).  39. Kant (1998: 212).    40. Kant (1998: 213).    41. Grice (1967a: 4).    42. Grice (1967a: 21).    43. Grice (1975a: 45).    44. Grice (1975a: 48).    45. Grice (1975a: 49).    46. Many of my students have pointed out to me that A could equally well  understand B as implicating that Smith is just too busy, with all the visits  he has to make to New York, for a social life at the moment. Green (1989:  91) argues that many different particularised conversational implicatures    are possible in this example.  Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47).  Ryle (1971: vol. II: vii).. Benjamin (1956: 318)0. Horn (1989), ch. 4. See also Levinson (1983), ch. 3 and McCawley (1981), ch. 8. This issue will be discussed in the final chapt 51. Martinich (1996: 1 52. Strawson (1952:   53. Strawson (1952:.    54. Strawson (1952: 83, 86, 891).  55. Strawson (1952: 36, 37, 85). 56. Grice (1967b: 58).  Grice (1967b: 60). Grice (1967b: 59). Grice (1967b: 77). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 88). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 93, 94, 95). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 99). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 117) Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 123, original emphasis). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 127). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 136, original emphasis). Grice (1967c: 139, original emphasis). Black (1973: 268). Grice (1987b: 349). Avramides (1989: 39). See also Avramides (1997). Loar (2001: 104). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 178). Chomsky (1976: 75). 6 American formalism  Grice (1986a: 60). All details from Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Strawson (1956: 110, original emphasis). Grice (1969b: 118). 'Reference and presupposition', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 119). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 143). Grice (1969b: 142). Later published in Chomsky (1972a). Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1989: 955). See, for instance, Sadock (1974). See, for instance, Gordon and Lakoff (1975). 'Notes for syntax and semantics', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Robin Lakoff for a very valuable discussion of the ideas in this paragraph. 'Urbana seminars', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1995: 194-5). Simpson (1997: 151). Carnap (1937: 2). Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The spelling 'carulize' may be Grice's own, a result of his not referring directly to Carnap, or may be simply an error of transcription; the typescript from which this quotation was taken was made from a recording of the lectures . Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Urbana seminars', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft  Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1981: 189). Ibid. Grice (1981: 190). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Harman (1986: 368). Grice (1971: 265). Grice (1971: 273). Kenny (1963: 207). Kenny (1963: 224). Kenny (1963: 229). Davidson (1970) in Davidson (1980: 37-8). 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Davidson (1980: vii). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 83). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 95). 'Reply to Davidson on "Intending"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cohen (1971: 66). 7 Philosophical psychology  Grice (1975a) and Grice (1978). For instance, although perhaps only semi-seriously, by Quine (1985: 248). 'Odd notes: Urbana and non Urbana', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For instance, the writer of Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Also Robin Lakoff and Kathleen Grice (personal communication). 'Tapes', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cartwright (1986: 442). 'Knowledge and belief', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker, personal communication. 'Urbana Lectures', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 62). 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Mackie (1977: 35). Mackie (1977: 38). For example, Nowell-Smith (1954: 79). Grice (1991: 23). Warner in Grice (2001: xxxvii, n). 'Odd notes Spring 1981', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Ban-  croft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 79). Grice (1991: 90). Grice (1991: 67, original emphasis). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 283). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 301). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 302). See Isard (1982), Cormack (1982). Bennett (1976: 206-10). Baker (1989: 510). Sbisa (2001: 204). Grandy (1989: 524). Kasher (1976: 210). 'Prejudices and predilections', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Neale (2001: 139). 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 58). Tape, 'PG seminar I Metaphysics S '78', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Preliminary valediction', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Course descriptions and faculty information, fall quarter 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 64). 'Festschrift notes (miscellaneous)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Recent work', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'PG's incomplete "Phil and ordinary language" paper', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 70).  'Miscellaneous notes '84-'85', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Davidson (1967). Grice (1986b: 3, original emphasis.). 'Notes with Judy', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Richard Warner (personal communication). Grice (1986b: 34). Ibid. Grice (1988b: 304). Code (1986: 413). Grice (1988a: 176). Hume (1740) in Perry (1975b: 174). Eddington (1935: 5-6). 'Notes on "vulgar" and "learned"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'To be sorted', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 41). Notes for Grice/Warnock retrospective' ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'The Way of Words, Studies In: Notes, offprints and draft material', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1987b: 384-5). 'Copy of Faculty Research Grant application 1987-8', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Folder', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lindsay Waters quoted in The Times Higher Education Supplement, June 19, 1998. 'Notes dictated to Richard Warner on perception', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1990: 153). Burge (1992: 621). Travis (1991: 237). Fogelin (1991: 213). Barnes (1993: 366). Martinich (2002: 273). Saygina and Ciceki (2002: 252). Dale and Reiter (1995: 234). Dale and Reiter (1995: 262). Young (1999: 216). Grice (1975a: 53). Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 53). Grice (1975a: 53). For example, Martinich (1984). Harnish (1976: 346, 347). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 201). Davis (1998: 65). Giora (1999: 919). Gibbs (1999: 468). Holtgraves (1998: 21), Holtgraves (1999: 520). Winer et al. (2001: 486). Bezuidenhout and Cooper Cutting (2002: 443). Keenan (1976: 70). Keenan (1976: 79). Ibid. Green (1989: 95n). Harnish (1976: 340n). Leech (1983: 80). Brown and Levinson (1987: 49). Grice (1975a: 47). Lakoff (1989: 960). Lakoff (1972: 926n). Lakoff (1972: 916). Lakoff (1973: 296). Lakoff (1973: 298). Ibid. Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). Brown and Levinson (1987: 4). Goffman (1955) reprinted in Laver and Hutcheson (1972: 323). Brown and Levinson (1987: 94). Brown and Levinson (1987: 95). Brown and Levinson (1987:164). Mura (1983: 115). Matsumoto (1989: 207). Leech (1983: xi). Leech (1983: 81). Leech (1983: 141, 144, 147). Brown and Levinson (1987: 4). Haberlard and Mey (2002: 1674). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 38). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 36). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 162). Sperber and Wilson (1995: 24). Blakemore (1990: 364). Grice (1987b: 372). Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527-8).   1. Neale (1992: 509).    2. Levinson (1983: 118).    3. Cohen (1971: 68n).    4. Cole and Morgan (eds) (1975: xii).    5. Kasher, cited in Mey (1989: 825).    6. Fauconnier (1990: 391).    7. Katz and Bever (1976: 49).    8. Langedoen and Bever (1976: 253).    9. Chomsky (1972b: 113).    10. Lakoff (1989: 981).    11. Parrett et al. (eds) (1981).    12. Cogan and Herrmann (1975: 60).    13. Karttunen and Peters (1975).    14. Attardo (1990), Carey (1990), Elster (1990) and Rundquist (1990).    15. Thomas in Mey (ed.) (1998: 170).    16. Mey (2001: 911).    17. Lindblom (2001: 1602).    18. van Dijk (1976: 44).    19. Pratt (1977: 215).    20. Gilbert (1995), Gautam and Sharma (1986), Herman (1994).    21. Cole (1975: 273).    22. Traugott (1989: 50).    23. Ziegeler (2000).    24. McHoul in Mey (ed.) (1998: 227-8).    25. Hymes (1986: 49).    26. Harris (1995: 118).    27. Pope (1995: 129, original emphasis).    28. Sampson (1982: 203, original emphasis).  29. Brown and Levinson (1987: 95).    30. Lakoff (1995: 191).    31. See, for instance, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Sacks (1992).    32. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H.P.Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135    c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    33. Holdcroft (1979: 131).    34. Bird (1979).    35. Fairclough (1985: 757).    36. Sarangi and Slembrouck (1992).    37. Gumperz (1990: 439).    38. Hanks (2001: 208).    39. Smith and Tsimpli (1995: 69, 74).    40. Moscovitch (1983), Gardner et al. (1983: 173), Caplan (1987: 358).    41. Ahlsén (1993: 61).    42. For instance, Prutting and Kirchner (1987).    43. Bloom et al. (1999: 554).    44. Kasher et al. (1999: 586).    45. Borod et al. (2000: 118).    46. Kasher (1991: 139).  Horn (2000: 321). Horn (1989: 194). Horn (1989: 204). Grice (1975a: 56-7). Horn (1972: (41). Horn (1989: 266-7). Horn (1989: 196). Noveck (2001: 183). Horn (2000). Sadock (1981: 265). Sadock (1981: 265n). 07. Gazdar (1979: xi, 55).  Levinson (1983: 101). Atlas and Levinson (1981: 11). Atlas and Levinson (1981: 56). Levinson (2000: 6). Levinson (2000: 23). 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I might, perhaps, at this point voice my suspicion that some of my reservations about Davidson's proposals stem from divergences from him, or uncertainties about his precise position, with respect to some larger issues, mostly methodological. I had, indeed, thought of tabulating some of these issues in a brief final section until I reflected that such a prolongation would, if it were sufficiently brief to be tolerable, be too brief to be illuminating.  A. Overview  A(1). METHODOLOGY  I think that it would be fair to say that Davidson's discussion of action-sentences falls within the boundaries of a larger idea about metaphysics. It is a widely (if not universally) held view, that at least one part of the business of metaphysics is to determine an ontology; or, if you prefer it, to settle on an answer to the question what, in general or particular terms, the  "universe" or the "world" contains. It is obvious that very many widely different answers have at one time or another been put forward; some of them have been wildly generous like Richard Robinson's "You name it", since anything you can mention will win its share of the prize; some of them have been remarkably niggardly, like what Broad once reported to be Hegel's solitary selection, namely, the Kingdom of Prussia; most of them have fallen somewhere between these two extremes. In recent times there has been a strong tendency to restrict recognition to individual entities, excluding of course, all abstract entities except sets, and excluding above all "intensional" entities like universals and propositions. So (thus far) people, tables and chairs, atoms, electrons and quarks have escaped exclu-sion, though for many philosophers further acts of exclusion would be on the way. It is an important thesis of Davidson's, toward which I am, in broad terms, very sympathetic, that a little more inclusion is called for; notably, room has to be found for events of various sorts, among which a prominent and honored place must be kept for actions. Given that this is so we must, as metaphysicians, turn our attention to items of this kind too; it, for example, we admit Julius Caesar to membership of the universe, then we should also admit a class of entities which will include the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and a special subclass of these which will include Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.  It is my suspicion (which I should find it very hard to support with evidence) that Davidson's basic metaphysical outlook, like that of Quine, is that of what I might call a "Diagnostic Realist". Crudely put, such a position would concede, in line with the contentions of a number of classical Skeptics and Idealists, that Reality hides forever behind an impenetrable curtain; it is relentlessly too modest to allow anyone to strip away its protective covering and take a look at it, to see what it is really like. But, contrary to the opinions of classical Skeptics, that fact does not condemn us to perpetual metaphysical silence; for though we cannot inspect Reality, we can form hypotheses about it, each of which (from case to case) may be more, or again less, judicious. Metaphysical hypotheses will be judicious to the extent to which, if true, they would provide backing or justification for the content and methodology of scientific theory.  This metaphysical outlook is unlike that which, at present at least, appeals most to me. My favored outlook would be one or another form of Con-structivism. I waver between two options; a version of Limited Construc-tivism, according to which Reality would be divided into two segments, an original or unconstructed segment, and a constructed segment (or sequence of segments) in which constructed items are added as legitimate metaphysical extensions of what is present before the extension is made; and a version of Unlimited Constructivism, which would, more radically, seck to exhibit all categories of items as constructed rather than original; the escape from the invocation of an unconstructed segment would be (it is hoped) achieved by the supposition of a plurality of metaphysical schemes such that items which are primitive in one scheme would be non-primitive in another. Both forms will need to characterize legitimate construction-procedures by which metaphysical extensions are made. One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis.  Both approaches face formidable difficulties of principle. For the present occasion I shall restrict myself to the troubles of Diagnostic Realism. The Diagnostic Realist wishes to regard the optimal metaphysical posture as being the one which accepts that gencral account of Reality which maximally justifies and supports the deliverances of science. But what science?  Palmistry? And what deliverances? Phlogiston theory? It seems that we need at least a restriction to reputable deliverances of reputable sciences.  And how are these to be selected except on the basis of likelihood of truth, and how is that to be optimized in advance of any clue about the nature of Reality? It seems that there is an initial need for some grounds of acceptability of the findings of science which are independent of those which, it is hoped, will be provided by a correct and adequate account of Reality.  Now it is entirely possible that I am quite mistaken in supposing Davidson to be, at best, a Diagnostic Realist; indeed conversations which I have had with students indicate that he may regard a distinction between 'original' and 'constructed' Reality (like other once popular dichotomies) as non-viable. If so, I will freely admit to error, but not to guilt. For it seems clear to me that Davidson's treatment of ontological questions requires some metaphysical Weltanschauung to support it; and if Diagnostic Realism is not to fill this role, I have no idea what is to fill it.  A(2). PROBLEMS  What considerations can we point to which would encourage us, perhaps even force us, into this metaphysical direction, that of admitting events and actions to the ontology? Davidson, I think, recognizes four such consid-erations, the first of which was the one which primarily influenced Kenny, to whom Davidson gives credit for the introduction, or the revival, of this topic.  (1) The phenomenon of (so-called) *variable polyadicity". If we pick on what looks like a relational verb, for example "to butter," we find that it can be used on different occasions in the formation of predicates of varying measures of polyadicity. Sentences containing it can be constructed which exhibit two, three or more terms; there appears to be no upper limit imposed by grammar, a fact which tells against one possible account of this phenomenon, viz., that varying numbers of indefinite pronouns (like 'someone' or 'something') have elliptically dropped out of the surface forms; just how many are we to suppose to have been there to drop out? This phenomenon begins to lose its air of mystery if we suppose that there may be a central entity (an action), which from occasion to occasion may be described with greater or not less specificity. The phenomenon of 'variable polyad-icity' now begins to look precisely parallel to the situation with regard to sentences used to describe things; there we may take our choice between describing Socrates as a man, as a fat man, as a fat greedy man, and so on.  Sometimes, in one's progress through the maze of 'polyadicity', one moves between sentences which are not logically independent of one another; one moves, say, from the '3 term' sentence, *Bill buttered the toast in the bathroom" to the '2 term' sentence, "Bill buttered the toast," which is entailed by the '3 term' sentence from which it originated. This is often but not invariably the case: it is not the case, for example that *H.M.S. Rodney sank the Bismarck" entails "H.M.S. Rodney sank". We need some theoretical characterization of the occasions when such inferences are in order, and the idea of treating actions as entities in their own right, and so as subjects of attribution, may help us to obtain it. Actions are on occasion in demand to serve as objects of reference for neuter pronouns, such as *it". Consider the sentence "The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". What is "it"? Obviously not the Moonrakers or their manager, and it is hardly being suggested Ann Landers made a joke about last week. If, however, one treats the resignation of the manager as an entity which could be referred to, it will fill the gap quite comfortably. Some of our explanatory talk about what we do, like the provision of excuses, seems to require the possibility of describing things we do in different ways. If actions are describable entities, this may happen to them; and if it may happen to them, we need criteria of identity for actions which will tell us when it is and when it is not taking place. I shall return to the first three items later in this paper; but since the fourth item is about to disappear beyond the horizon forever, I shall say a word or two about it while it is still visible. It does not seem to me to be put forward as a reason of the same degree of cogency as its three prede-cessors; for it assures us only that if, for other reasons, we have decided to admit actions to the ontology, they need not be merely a technically required category; they can be put to work in the service of certain parts of our discourse. The stronger claim that the admissibility of that sort of discourse requires the admission of actions to the ontology is not, and, as far as I can see, could not be justifiably made. B. Davidson's Criticism of Prior Theorists  B(1). REICHENBACH ("LOGICAL FORM AND LOGICAL  EQUIVALENCE")  Davidson takes Reichenbach mildly to task for holding that "(3x) (x consists in the fact that Amundsen flew to the North Pole)* is logically equivalent to, but does not give the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole"; according to Reichenbach the first sentence is about an event, while the second is not; so the first sentence cannot give the logical form of the second. If we considered instead of the second sentence, the sentence  "A flight by Amundsen to the North Pole took place" we would be introducing a sentence which is short an event, and so a sentence the logical form of which could be given by the first sentence, to which (presumably) the new sentence would also be logically equivalent. Davidson proposes to amend Reichenbach's position, so that the first sentence is taken as giving the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole", and not merely as being logically equivalent to that sentence; this change is advocated mainly on the grounds that it is, or would be a step on the way to, a pattern of analysis which will account for the entailments considered with variable polyadicity.  If, as Reichenbach thought, there are in our language pairs of logical equivalent sentences one of which is about events, while the other is not, that difference might justly be held to be a reason for denying that the event-mentioning sentence gives the logical form of the other member of the pair; and if one were a constructivist (as maybe Reichenbach was not) one might suggest that the reason for this richness in our vocabulary is that events are constructs belonging to an extension of a more primitive ontology which does not contain them and which is mirrored only in sentences which do not mention them. If one held that position, one would properly reject Davidson's emendation of Reichenbach.  B(2). REICHENBACH (THE "HIDEOUS CONSEQUENCE")  Davidson's main criticism of Reichenbach's position is that, once he has admitted two principles which are needed to legitimize patently valid inferences turning on the intersubstitutibility of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sentences in appropriately embedded contextual positions, Reichenbach cannot escape the hideous consequence that all events are identical with one another. Davidson's ingenious argument may be summarized as follows. Let 'a' abbreviate Reichenbach's operator 'con-sists in the fact that', which when prefixes to a sentence produces a predicate (epithet); let 'C" abbreviate 'Caesar was murdered', and let 'N' abbreviate  'Napoleon became Emperor of France': Then: (a) sentence (1), 'x a C, is true just in case sentence (2), 'x a (9(y= y & C) = 9(y = y)' is true, since  the parts of the subsentences which follow the operator 'c' in the two main sentences are logically equivalent. (b) Sentence (2) is true just in case sentence (3), 'xa(ý(y= y & N) = 9(y= y)' is true, since '9(y= y & C)' and '9(y=y & N)' are singular terms, which, if 'C' and 'N' are both true,  both refer to P(y = y), and are therefore coreferential and intersubstitutable.  (c) Sentence (3) above is true just in case 'xoN' is true, since "N' and the sub-sentence which follows 'o' in (3) are logically equivalent. So provided that 'C' and 'N' are both true, regardless of what they say, any event which consists of the fact that C also consists of the fact that N, and vice versa; that is to say, any pair of randomly chosen events are identical.  To this argument I think it might be replied that the principles licensing intersubstitution of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sub-sentences are officially demanded because they are needed to license certain patently valid inferences; if in addition to providing this benefit, they also saddle us with a commitment to the 'hideous consequence', then the rational course is to endeavor to find a way of retaining the benefit while eliminating its disastrous accompaniment, much as it has seemed rational to seck in set-theory, as generous a comprehension axiom as the need to escape paradoxes will permit. Such a way seems to be available; we might, for example, while retaining the two added principles, prohibit the use of the 'co-referentiality principle' after the 'logical equivalence principle' has been used. Such a measure would indeed have some intuitive appeal, since in the cited argument its initial deployment of the 'logical equivalence principle' seems to be tailored to the production of a sentence which will provide opportunity for trouble-raising application of the other principle; and if that is what the game is, why not stop it?  B(3). VON WRIGHT (INVOCATION OF INITIAL AND TERMINAL  STATES)  It is Davidson's view that von Wright wishes to characterize events as being, in effect, ordered pairs of an initial state and a terminal state, and (no doubt) actions as being the bringing about of events. One of Davidson's criticisms of this approach is that my walking from San Francisco to New York and my flying from San Francisco to New York would not be distinguished from one another by the pairs of states involved (which would be the same); and that if reference to the mode of travel be brought in (in a distinction between walking to New York and flying to New York) reference to the initial state has now been rendered otiose.  It seems to me that this response does not do justice to von Wright who is plainly working on the twin idea that (a) the notion of change is fundamental to the notion of event, and (b) that change can be represented as a succession of states. In my view this proposal has great merit, even if some modification be required. I shall, however, postpone more detailed consid-cration of it until the next section of these comments.  C. Further Consideration of Davidson's Problem List  C(/). VARIABLE POLYADICITY  Let us now redirect our attention to the considerations which were listed as calling for a philosophical study of action-sentences, The surviving members of this list are the phenomenon of variable polyadicity, the need for a satisfactory systematic account of a certain range of entailments relating to actions, and the demand for the provision of objects of reference for certain occurrences of pronouns. So far, I have spoken as if the first two considerations are independent of each other, each pointing to a distinct problem for which a solution is needed. I am in fact far from sure that this is a correct representation of Davidson. There is considerable support in ordinary language for the idea that verbs and other relational predicate expressions carry concealed within themselves (so to speak) a specification of a given degree of polyadicity (or "n-adicity"); "between", for example, seems to express a three-term relation (x being between y and z), while the relation signified by "above" is a merely two-term relation; and specification of the number of terms which a relational expression involves seems to be essential rather than accidental to the nature of the relation. Certainly many logicians have taken this vicw. But it is by no means certain that this view is correct, nor that it is unequivocally supported by ordinary parlance.  If we ask whom John met in Vienna, we may get the answer *Bill", or  "Bill and Harry", or "Bill, Harry, and Bob" without any suggestion that some restrictive condition or n-adicity is being violated. Moreover, so far as the construction of logical systems is concerned, it has been shown that restrictions or n-adicity are not required for predicate logic.  So perhaps what the first two considerations call for is not just the solution of two distinct problems, but the provision of an account of action-sentences which will jointly account for two problems, that of variable polyadicity and that of the systematization of a certain range of inferences.  This thought leads at once to the question why it should be supposed, or desired, that these two demands should be met by a single maneuver; what would be wrong about giving separate answers to them? Let us look more closely at the two strands; I begin with variable polyadicity.  To talk, let us say, of variable politeness would perhaps be appropriate if one were discussing the manner in which some central item (a person) exhibited, on different occasions, varying degrees of politeness; or, per-haps, exhibited on different occasions varying degrees and forms of impoliteness (sometimes he is malicious, sometimes just plain rude). By parity of reasoning, to exhibit variable polyadicity, an item would have to be (say) on occasion dyadic, on occasion triadic, on occasion tetradic; and this boring ascent could presumably be continued ad infinitum. But what item might we be talking about? To my mind, it would have to be a non-linguistic item, like a relation (a classification which might include some actions); the meeting might be a single item (relation or action) which holds, variably, between two, three, or more persons, depending on how many people met or were met. This way of talking, would, however, raise serious questions about why the focal item (the relation or action) should be regarded as single questions, moreover, which seem a long way from Davidson's text.  If, on the other hand, we turn from the non-linguistic to the linguistic world, we find clearly single items, viz., predicates and verb-phrases, which exemplify determinate forms of n-adicity; this gain, however, is balanced by the fact that it seems that the embodiment of (say) dyadicity and triadicity are distinct from one another. "—met—" and "—met—and—" are structures which do not have common instances; so are:  "—buttered—";  "—buttered—in—";  "—buttered-in—in the presence of—".  To gather the threads together, in the linguistic world one may discern three different kinds of entity:  Verbs (or predicate letters) which are the bricks out of which predicates are made, and which may or may not have assignable n-adicity; Predicates (open sentences) formed from the bricks, like "—but-tered—in—"; these must have assignable n-adicity; Instances (individuals or sets) to which predicates can be truly applied; these must contain just as many elements as the number n in the n-adicity of the predicate; but the number of distinct clements may be variable; recurrences may or may not be permitted by the rules governing the predicates. It seems to be the business of a systematic theory of a language to make provision for the presence of each of these types of item. When it comes to attempting to satisfy the demands for a systematic account of the validity of such inferences as that from "Smith buttered the toast in the bathroom" to "Smith buttered the toast", it seems clear that some appeal to structure is called for; the question is whether the structures now invoked are or are not the same as (or included in) those which are required for a systematic account of a language. It is my suspicion that Davidson holds (or held) that the same structures are involved in both cases;  I am not sure that this answer is right, and the question will assume greater prominence as our discussion develops. Whatever its final answer, one can see the appeal of treating actions as subjects or foci of predicates; once the quantifiers have been dropped, the validity of such inferences might turn out to parallel (indeed to be a special case that of) inferences from 'Fx & Gx' to 'Fx' or indeed from 'A & B' to 'A. But for me the suspicion remains that the proposed identification of structures is illegitimate.  C(2). PRONOMINAL REFERENCES  My uneasiness is not decreased by attention to the third consideration, which relates to the provision of an object of reference for the pronoun "it" in such a sentence as *The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". Who or what was the subject of Ann Landers' joke? Neither the Minneapolis Moon-rakers nor their manager could properly be referred to by the neuter pro-noun, as distinct from a masculine pronoun "he' or a plural 'they'; the reference is plainly to the manager's resignation. Now this event (action) could certainly be the object of a pronominal reference if that reference were demonstrative rather than anaphoric; anyone present at the meeting at which the manager tendered his resignation could certainly say, "That, at last, is what the directors have been hoping for", or, *Now, at last, they have got it". But my sentence seems to make an anaphoric reference, and yet there is no previous reference which is being picked up. The situation might, however, be regarded as being eased if (1) a covert reference to the manager's act of resignation were made in the first clause of my exemplary sentence, and (2) it is sufficient for the supposition that a covert reference is made that a designation of that act should be present in the underlying structure of the sentence.  I suspect that we need to consider two questions with regard to references which are "felt" as anaphoric. (1) Is the mode of reference, in such a case, formally or strictly correct as judged by the official standards of gram-marians? (2) Is the reference, while not formally or strictly in conformity with official standards of grammarians, nevertheless intelligible and so at least informally admissible? It would not surprise me to discover that the matter of a covert underlying structural reference is irrelevant to the answer to these questions. It might well be that for a grammatically strictly correct anaphoric reference to be made, a prior explicit is required; a covert reference will be insufficient. However if the demand is not for impeccable grammar but for intelligibility, then a covert reference is not needed; what is needed is that the identification of the object of reference should rely on prior discourse, not necessarily on prior reference. For example:  *I spent last summer in Persia; they are very dissatisfied with the present regime*. (They are of course the Persians.) "A car went whizzing by me and scraped my fender; but he didn't stop". (The driver, of course.) "Jones's views on the immortality of the soul filled many pages in Mind; but it was the Oxford University Press which in the end published it". (It = Jones's presentation of his views.) (4) "His leg was cancerous; he contracted it in Africa". (It = the disease  cancer.)  One might, as a tailpiece, remark that the accessibility to reference of such items, as the above, depends on their existence or reality in some humdrum sense, not on so scholarly a matter as their presence in or absence from The Ontology.  D. Outline of Davidson's Proposal  We turn now to Davidson's own well-known proposal for handling the three questions which we have just been discussing. It possesses a surface simplicity which may or may not turn out to be misleading. It involves the introduction, into a candid representation of the structure of action-sentences, of a 'slot' which may be occupied by variables ranging over actions, and which may legitimately be bound by quantifiers. The sentence  "Shem kicked Shaun" is now thought of not as a combination of two names and a two-place predicate, but as involving a three-place predicate 'Kicked' and as being (really) of the form (Ex) (Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x)), a structure within which, as Davidson points out, the sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears. As a reading in English of Davidson's structure, we are offered somewhat tentatively, 'There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem'.  E. Pre-Theoretical Demarcation of Actions and Events  E(1). ACTIONS  Before continuing our examination of Davidson's proposals, let us first turn our attention to the matter of identifying the material to which the proposals relate. Mere reference to actions, or in a more updated idiom, to action-sentences, seems to me to tell us less than I should like to know.  The word 'action' does not, I think, make frequent appearances in our carefree chatter. I am not surprised if I hear it said that so-and-so is a man of action, or that actions speak louder than words, or that Botswana is where the action is, or even (before he retired from the scene) that Howard Cosell would describe for us third-round action in the current heavyweight contest; but such occurrences of the word as these do not help us much when it comes to applying the word to concrete situations. The word 'action' has a portentous and theatrical flavor, and the related verb 'act' is obviously theatrical in a further sense, in view of the connection with this or that kind of pretending. The more homely word "do" is plainly a much happier denizen of common talk; indeed, the trouble here is that it is too happy; almost any circumstance will qualify as something which some person or thing, in one way or another, does or has done. The question, "What did the prisoner do then?" may be quite idiomatically answered in any of the following ways: *He hit me on the nose", "He fainted", "He burst out laughing*, "He just sat there", "Nothing at all, he just sat there", "He left his sandwiches untouched". The noun "deed", on the other hand, is by comparison exceedingly bashful, tending to turn up only in connection with such deeds of derring-do as the rescuing of captive maidens by gallant knights. The grossly promiscuous behavior of the verb "do", I think, has in fact a grammatical explanation. We are all familiar with the range of interrogatives in English whose function is to inquire, with respect to a given category, which item within the category could lend its name to achieve the conversion of an open sentence into the expression of a truth.  "When?" (at what time?), "where?" (at what place?), "why?" (for what reason?) are each examples of such interrogatives; and some languages, such as Greek and Latin, are even better equipped than English. All, or most of these interrogative pronouns have indefinite counterparts; corresponding to "where" is "somewhere", to "what?", "something"  ", and so on.  Now there might have been (though in fact there is not) a class of expres-sions, parallel to the kinds of pronouns (interrogative and indefinite) which I have been considering, called "pro-verbs"; these would serve to make inquiries about indefinite references to the category of items which predicates (or epithets) ascribe to subjects, in a way exactly parallel to the familiar ranges of pronouns. "Socrates whatted in 399 B.C.?"  ", might be  answered by "Drank the hemlock"  ", just as "Where did Socrates drink the  hemlock?" is answered by "In Athens"; and given that Socrates did drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., we might have been able to say "There, I knew he somewhatted in 399 B.C.". In fact we cannot grammatically talk in that way—but we can come close to it by using the verb "do", and asking (for example) "What did Socrates do in 399 B.C.?". In its capacity as part of a makeshift pro-verb, *do" can stand in for (be replaceable by) any verb or verb phrase whatsoever; in which case, it is hardly surprising that it will do little to specify a narrowed-down range of actions, or of "action-verbs".  Frustrated in these directions, we might think of turning to a longstanding tradition in Ethics from the Greeks onwards, of connecting the concept of action with that of the Will; a tradition which reached its peak in Prichard, who not merely believed that action is distinguished by a special connection with the will, but maintained that acting is to be identified with willing. It is clear from Davidson's comments on Chisholm, that, at least when his article was written, he would have none of such ideas, perhaps because the suggestion that actions are distinguished by a connection with the will may be expected to lead at once to the idea that particular actions are distinguished by their connection with acts of will; and the position that there are such things as acts of will is not merely false but disreputable. An alternative strategy more in tune with some recent philosophy (and perhaps with Davidson's own style), would be to look at the particular verbs or verb phrases which are used to specify or describe what philosophers at least are inclined to think of as actions; we will examine not generic words like  'act' and 'do', but an indefinite range of particular words and phrases, such as "milk the cow", "cook the meat", and "butter the toast". The trouble which we now encounter is that while some verbs or verb phrases, like  "melt" or "turn pale", look as if they cannot be used to refer to actions, and while others, like "donate a hospital to the city of New York", cannot but be used to refer to what philosophers would call actions— an enormous number of verb phrases occupy an indeterminate position; they can, it seems, be used either way, and therefore are useless as pointers. To offer just one example, "fell on his sword"; one Roman soldier fell on his sword because he lost his legion and could not face the disgrace which, to his mind, attended his responsibility for the deaths of so many people; another Roman soldier lost his legion because he fell on his sword, tripping on it in the dark and as a result knocking himself out, so that when he regained consciousness, the legion had moved on and he was unable to find it.  In my view, there is no escape from a recognition that a characterization of actions (or of action-sentences) has not been provided; in order to proceed then, we have to assume that for the present inquiry such a characterization is not needed. The interpretation of such an idea is not unproblematic. For example, if we do not need to know what actions are (or what are actions) how can we be sure that the current inquiry is properly described as an inquiry about actions or action-sentences? Might it not be, for example, really an inquiry about events (a not implausible suggestion). If it replied that this, if true, would be no great matter, since actions are one kind or subclass of events, I would respond with the comment that some philoso-phers, including Davidson himself, regard actions as a subelass of events, but many do not; this is not a closed question; and may be one which is of vital importance. In any case, other trouble might lie in wait for us if we theorize about actions without a proper identification of what we are theorizing about.  E(2). EVENTS  Parallel to these questions about actions, there are questions which arise about events; if Davidson is offering us an analysis of event-predicates, or event-sentences, just what range of locutions is being analyzed? Two modes of procedures would to my mind be natural; one would be, by an exercise in 'linguistic botany', to further an intuitive recognition of the class of event-descriptions by identifying likenesses and differences between vernacular expressions of this sort and those of different but more or less closely related kinds, like expressions for states of affairs, facts, circumstances, condi-tions, and so forth; the other would be to give a general characterization, which might or might not seek to reflect the vernacular, of a class of event-descriptions with which we are to be concerned, it being understood that any such general characterization might well need to be replaced, for philosophical purposes, by an account which would be theoretically more satisfying and illuminating. Davidson, however, seems to be interested in neither of these procedures. On pages 119-120 he tells us, first that "part of what we must learn when we learn the meaning of any predicate is how many places it has, and what sorts of entities the variables that hold their places range over. Some predicates have an event-place, some do not"; and second that "our ordinary talk of events, of causes and effects, requires constant use of the idea of different descriptions of the same event", with the apparent implication that the range of items to be counted as events is just that range of items with respect to which such inferential problems arise as those of 'variable polyadicity', problems which the proposed analysis would enable us to solve.  I find myself puzzled by two distinet aspects of the foregoing account.  One is the combination of the idea that ability to recognize the number of places which a predicate has, including recognition of the presence or absence of an event-place, is a part of what is involved in learning the meaning of the predicate, and so (presumably) a part of what is involved in learning the language to which the predicate belongs, with the further idea that people (or philosophers) may be expected to be surprised, indeed even skeptical, about Davidson's proposed 'importation' of an extra pred-icate-place for events. Are we to be, like those who in Moore's view go against common sense, persistently engaged in sincere denials of what we know for certain to be true? I do not find such a diagnosis very appealing. Unless I have misread what 1 described as Davidson's implication, surely the idea that events are to be treated as being those items which raise problems which an application of Davidson's analysis is capable of solving is a very different suggestion from the suggestion that the ability to recognize event-places (and so events) is part of having learned the language. E Difficulties With Davidson's Proposal F(I). INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE 'EXTRA SLOT Let us now address the question whether Davidson's proposal, with regard to the logical form of action-sentences, might not be deceptively simple.  The proposal is that contrary (perhaps) to our natural instincts and incli-nations, we should regard 'Kicked' (for example) not as a two-place predicate where the vacancies are filled by designation of the kicker and the kicked, but as a three-place predicate with an extra vacancy for reference to the event or action in which that kicking consists. I find this puzzling as it stands, and I am inclined to inquire how the extra place fits into an understanding of kicking (or of any comparable relational feature). There was, not so long ago, in Oxford, a professor of the philosophy of religion who (so he said) espoused what might be called a form of *Neo-Berkelei-anism"; he maintained that such sentences as "There is a table in the corner of the room" or "Snow is white" were incompletely formulated; the proper forms of expression would be "There is a table in the corner of the room;  God!" and "Snow is white; God!" We can imagine more elaborate variations on the same theme. Suppose that in the later 1930's, it had become de rigueur in colloquial German to terminate sentences with the phrase  "Heil Hitler". We might next suppose that, as the months wore on, this practice became fragmented; it was permissible to substitute for the name of Hitler any of the names of his more notorious henchmen (of course omitting the word 'Heil'); so the vernacular was flooded with German versions of such sentences as "The toast is burned; Bormann!", "Those pictures are very valuable; Goering!", "She was as gentle as a young child;  Himmler!". One can even imagine the practice extended so as to provide for the appearance of quantifiers; "(3x) (Western democracies are corrupt; x!)*.  What is wrong with these idiocies seems, primarily, to be that no account at all has been provided of the purpose which the newly made slots serve: they are just paraded for implementation without indication of what seman-tie gain could come from the implementation. On the face of it, Davidson's presentation suffers from a similar lacuna; he does not tell us the function of the places, he merely gives us an English "paraphrase". But closer attention does something to fill the gap. It seems clear that Davidson regarded the appearance of such extra slots as being just the manifestation of the variable polyadicity of such predicates as "Kicked", and as a phenomenon whose mystery is removed once its logical form is revealed and it is seen how it decomposes into a cluster of relational predicates which covers, in formal garb, the inferences for which justification is required. (We should here attend particularly to Davidson's remarks about verbs and preposi-tions.) Once we distinguish between predicate-verbs and predicates, we can regard the role of the extra slot as specified by its place in the predicate (open sentences) into which the predicate-verb enters (the role, for example, of the slot filled by 'x' is supplied by the fact that it is the first slot in the predicate 'a kicked b in the action (event) x'; and we can regard the characterization of this role as provided by our ability to decompose complex predicates like 'a kicked b on the e [left shin] in the d [bathroom] in x (action)' into such a conjunctive predicate (of actions or events) as ta kicked b in x, and x was done upon c, and x was done in d'. That provision is made for the problematic entailments is clear in light of the formal fact that if a conjunctive predicate P applies to an item, so does a predicate P' which results from P by the omission on one conjunct. F(2). SAYING/DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENS  There is one matter which, I think, deserves initially a little attention.  My linguistic intuition tells me if I say to you that I am 93, I am (standardly) telling you my age (telling you how old 1 am), and not talking about my age; and that similarly if I say to you that two cars collided on the bridge, 1 am (standardly) saying (telling you) what happened, not describing or talking about or saying something about what happened. Indeed saying what happened seems to be not merely to be distinct from talking about what happened, but to be, in a sense, presupposed by it; saying what happened seems, intuitively, to be specially central; it is something one needs to do in order to inform a hearer what one is talking about when one talks about what happened. It was, perhaps, considerations like those which led Reichenbach to distinguish between logically equivalent sentences one of which does, and the other of which does not, refer to or talk about an event. Davidson's analysis, I think, has no place for the distinction which I am defending; on his view anything one says about what happened is (in effect) a case of saying that something happened which —. As I have already indicated, as a would-be constructivist about events I am inclined to side with Reichenbach.  F(3). THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZED FORMULATION  As a preliminary, let me state that in this and immediately subsequent sections I shall treat Davidson's proposal concerning the logical form of action-sentences as applying generally to event-sentences of which (accord-ing to Davidson) action-sentences are a subclass. It seems clear then in Davidson's view an action-sentence derives the logical form which he attributes to it from its status as one kind of event-sentence; what differentiates action from other events is less clear, but perhaps need not trouble us just at this point [cf. p. 120].  Davidson presents his proposal in a relaxed manner and with the aid of an example. "The basic idea is that verbs of action—verbs that say 'what someone did'-should be construed as containing a place for singular terms or variables that they do not appear to. For example, we should normally suppose that 'Shem kicked Shaun' consisted in two names and a two-place predicate. I suggest, though, that we think of 'kicked' as a three-place predicate, and that the sentence to be given in this form: (x) (kicks (Shem, Shaun, x). If we try for an English sentence that directly reflects this form, we now note difficulties. "There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem' is about the best I can do, but we must remember 'a kicking' is not a singular term. Given this English reading, my proposal may sound very like Reichenbach's, but of course it has quite different logical properties. The sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears inside my analytic sentence, and this makes it differ from all the theories we have considered."  Troubles begin when we look for a rigorously presented general formulation of this proposal; "action-verbs [event-verbs] are to be construed as predicates involving one more place than you think they do" seems hardly satisfactory, and to substitute for "you" the phrase "the man-in-the-street", or the phrase "the philosopher-in-the-library", does not seem a large improvement. Apart from anything eise, what would account for the extreme gullibility of people, or philosophers, with respect to conceptions of logical form in this region? We seem to need to lay our hands on some less sub-jectively-tinged material, if we are to achieve a satisfactory general for-mulation; and we should perhaps also bear in mind that at least one would-be philosophical theory (a near ancestor of Convention T, viz., the "Dis-appearance Analysis of Truth") has (or is widely thought to have) foundered on the shoals of non-formulability.  We may be able to make some progress if we survey the range of positions which might be taken with regard to events. Those who wish to admit events as entities will have to consider the question of the relation between events and event-predicates, predicates employed to describe or report events.  Such a predicate (or its deep structure) will have as its denotation, a set of instances, each of which will be a sequence of instance-elements. It is plainly Davidson's view that one element in the sequence that satisfies an event-predicate, which will invariably be an event; contrary to my suggestion in (6) above, reference to events will not be eliminable from any true account of what happens. But though events may not be eliminable as instance-elements, they may well be elements of a special kind; while one who kicks, or one who is kicked, will, for Davidson, in one way or another, be involved in or participate in something other than himself, namely a kick, the kick will not be a participant in any item othey than itself. We are now within sight of a possible general formulation of Davidson's contention: any applicable event-predicate will be satisfied by a set of sequences, each of which will contain a non-participant element in which, in one way or another, the remaining elements in the sequence participate. Davidson, has, indeed, in discussion, shown himself to be favorably disposed towards a treatment of the logical form of event-sentences along these lines. A correct standard representation of the sentence Shem kicks Shaun" might run somewhat as follows: (3x) (x is a kick and (x is by Shem and (x is of Shaun and (x —)))). A format of this sort might turn out not just to be an elegance but to be indispensable for generalized formulability.  The range of relevant questions about events may not yet, however, have been exhausted; some, not necessarily independent of one another, may be still unanswered. Are events independent, whether with respect to their existence or to their specifiability, of items which participate in them? Are they original entities, or constructs? Are they non-composite rather than composite, in relation to participant items? It is my impression that Davidson would wish to answer Yes" to each of these questions; that he would regard events as 'original' rather than as 'constructed' entities partly because he would not find the distinction clearly intelligible and partly because if events are to be thought of as constructs reference to them might become undesirably eliminable; and that he would think of them as non-composite rather than composite, since if they were composite with respect to participating items the participation in an event of certain items would seemingly be essential to the identity of the event in question (that event would not be differently compounded); and I suspect that Davidson would not favor essential connections of that sort. But I suspect that not everyone would incline towards the same set of answers; and I would certainly want to ask whether, if events are non-composite there is any guarantee that one and the same event could not be both a kick administered by Shem to Shaun and a buttering of toast by Jones.  F(4). PREPOSITIONS AND VERB-DEPENDENCE  Unfortunately we are not yet in the clear, since to my mind, new trouble starts with Davidson's claim with regard to the beneficial results of treating prepositions as having, so to speak, a life of their own which does not just consist in being an appendage to a verb. This idea has two interpretations, one innocuous and one far from innocuous. The innocuous interpretation would tell us that such a sentence as "James flew to Jerusalem" may be variously parsed; it may be parsed as "James [subject] flew to Jerusalem [predicate]", or as "James [subject) flew to [verb-phrase] Jerusalem [object]*, or again as "James [subject] flew [verb] to Jerusalem [adverb]". We not only can but must avail ourselves of such varieties of parsing, if we are to provide ourselves with the inferences we need. If, however, it is being suggested that the preposition 'to' is not merely grammatically separable from the verb 'fly', but is semantically independent of it, then we should hesitate; for the appearance of a preposition signifying direction may well presuppose the presence of a directional verb in some dress or other. Such phrases as "was done to Jerusalem" or "did it to Jerusalem" would not be intelligible unless a directional verb is thought of as covertly present.  I think it can be seen that what I am now taking to be a Davidsonian analysis of action commits us, either invariably or all too frequently, to just such unwanted unintelligibilities. The simplest and most natural version of such an analysis (not quite Davidson's version) for the sentence, *Shem kicked Shaun violently on the left shin in the bathroom", would, to my mind, run as follows. "There is an x such that x is a kicking, and x is done by Shem, and x is done to Shaun, and x is done on Shaun's left shin, and x is done violently, and x is done in the bathroom". It seems to me that many, if not all, of the adverbial prepositional phrases contained in his analysis are verb-dependent; their intelligibility depends on the idea that they attach to x quả kicking, in which case reference to 'kicking' is not eliminable. The recurrent participle 'done' is not an inflection of an action-verb; it is, or would be, but for stylistic considerations, an inflection of a pro-verb; only stylistic barriers prevent our replacing it by the word "some-whatted", which plainly is not a word which invokes a restriction on an attendant adverb; "violent qua somewhatting' is not the name of a special dimension of violence. Similarly kicking of Shaun, kicking on Shaun's shin, are modes of kicking, but not modes of somewhatting. So 'kicking vio-lently' or 'kicking on the shin' cannot be treated as expressing a conjunction of kicking and doing something -ly (ф-wise); a concealed reference to kicking will be contained in the interpretation of -ly (ф-wise).  The drift of my argument could perhaps be summarized as follows: (1)  'Violence' is not the name of a common feature of (say) sneezes and be-ratings of one's wife; sncezes are violent qui sneezes, beratings are violent qua beratings; and only in riddle-mongering are these to be taken as com-parable. (2) So 'sneezing violently' does not signify a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently', only at best a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently quâ sneezing'. (3) So 'conjune-tive analysis', of, 'sneezing violently' fails; but nevertheless 'sneezes vio-lently' entails 'sneezes'. (4) So the problematic entailments are not in gen-cral accounted for by a Davidsonian analysis of action-sentences; if a general account of them is to be given, it must be one of a different sort.  The point can, perhaps, be made even more strongly. Let us imagine that at dawn on New Year's Day, 1886, an event e took place in which:  (I) The notorious pirate Black Jack perished  The Governor of Malta hanged Black Jack, and thereby Rid the Mediterranean of its most dangerous seafarer, Black Jack, and Humiliated the Sultan (Black Jack's master). Let us now recast this motion into the proposed canonical form (with some omissions):  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is of Black Jack, and x is a hanging and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack, and x is a ridding and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of Black Jack, and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Sultan).  Rearranging the conjunctive clauses a little we arrive at:  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is a hanging and x is a ridding and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of the Sultan).  Or should recurrences of phrases involving 'by' and 'of' be omitted? Or retained with differentiating subscripts worn by 'by' and 'of" (e.g., "by,,  'byz', 'by'; 'off, 'ofz, and so on)? And if so, on what principle should the subscripts be distributed? There are several attendant problems and discomforts.  The occurrences of 'by', and some of the occurrences of 'of", seem to signalize a projection into the real world of certain grammatical features, those of being subject or objcet of some verb, which would primarily attach not to things but to words. Then, once the objectifying transference is achieved, the things or people referred to (e.g., Black Jack, the Sultan) become detached from the operation and occurrences signified by the originally associated verbs; so that now it becomes impossible to decide whether it is Black Jack or the Sultan who has been hanged, or who has been humiliated. There are no visible principles for the 'disambiguation' of preposi-tions, a feature which may perhaps arise from an extensional conception of asymmetrical relations as ordered couples without any connotational relation to fix the membership of each couple. G. Towards an Alternative Account of Events  G(I). EVENTS AND 'HAPPENSTANCES': VON WRIGHT'S IDEAS  RESUMED  We might now, perhaps, profitably take a closer look at the views of von Wright. As Davidson remarked, von Wright sees events as transitions between (ordered couples of) an initial state and a terminal state; and, in view of the uncertainty attending the identification of the class of events, it may be worth our while to expand this idea a little. My strategy will be first to display, with illustrative comments, some apparatus which might be useful in presenting a viewpoint akin to that of von Wright; second, to endeavor to put a finger on some weak spots in Davidson's position; and third to consider the possibility of putting the aforementioned apparatus to work in the formulation of a constructivist account of events.  First the apparatus. Let 't' [*t,', 'tz'] represent times (moments, instants).  Let 'ф' [*Ф,', 'ф' represent an attribute which falls under a determinable admitting of variations in degree or magnitude: provision for general attributes other than such determinables, like color, the specifications of which do not differ in degree but rather in kind or sort, could easily be made. A.  (1)  (2)  represents "up to t'  represents ' into t'.  (3)  中  小  represents ' out of t' [from t onwards).  ¢  (4)  (5) →1  ¢  В. (6) '<ф',  '=ф', " >ф' represents '& from t' [@ after t).  represents '$ through t'.  represent  "below  'within  the limits of '  above respectively.  C. (9)  (10)  (11)  (12)  D. (13)  (14)  →t  <ф  →t  り♪  →t  ＜中  t  t  1  d  t  1  中  中  t→  中＞  t-  中ン  >ф  中2  12  ф2  represents 'rising through $ at t  represents 'falling through & at t'.  represents 'peaking through @ at t represents 'bottoming with d at t'.  represents 'rising from d, to 2 within determinable A, from ty to t'-  represents 'falling from d, to z within determinable A, from t, to 1'-  E. (15) A represents a determinable (e.g., velocity).  (16) A-  m+ Acn, A»n represent a sub-determinable of A [e.g., 'a speed of from 40 to 50 mph', 'a speed of less than 50 mph', 'a speed of more than 50 mph'].  (17) A, represents a precise determinate of A.  COMMENTS  We are now, it seems in possession of an apparatus which is capable of representing a certain subelass of what I shall call 'basic events', one which consists of transitions of a subject item between contradictorily opposed states, like being fat and not being fat, or not being 6 feet tall and being 6 feet tall. Let us say that such events as these are 'metabolically expressible'. Metabolically expressible transitions, however, will include not only instantaneous contradictory changes, but also persistent states, like sitting on a bench at noon; the apparatus is equipped to express such absences of change in the notation of A (5). Let us press a linguistic barbarism "hap-penstance" into service to cover not only basic events which are changes but also those which are persistences. It is not clear to me whether Davidson's category of events is supposed to include happenstances which are not changes. The class of basic events could be, and I think should be, thought of as including not only instantancous transition between contradictorily opposed states, but also time-spanning (periodic) transitions between contrarily opposed states (e.g., being 4 feet tall and being 5 feet tall), for the representation of which the patterns listed under (D) will be brought into play. Only thus can we hope to accommodate such events as journeys from San Francisco to New York. [Perhaps one might think of such transactions as being a compact infinite sequence of instantaneous transitions.]  In the case of periodie changes between contraries @, and dz, there will frequently be an indefinitely large plurality of alternative paths which such a change might follow. It will be necessary to make provision in the characterization of some such changes fro the expression of conditions which restrict admissible paths to a subclass of, or even to an individual instance of, the paths which are initially available (as flights are restricted to paths which are aerial). It will, I think, have to be allowed that not all events are basic, some events will not be metabolically expressible as consisting of transitions through a sequence of opposed states. But this admission need not lead us to abandon the idea that basic events are the primitive model for the class of events as a whole, nor even the idea that events which are non-basic derive their status as events from their connection, in one way or another, with events which are basic. One way, for example, in which a non-basic event a might be connected with basic events B,, Bz,.. . might be via causal connection; a consists in a causal connection between its subject-item S and one or more basic events, Bi, B2,... which confer both event-status and temporal position upon a. Obviously, an examination of possible modes of dependence of non-basic events on basic events would be a pressing task for a metaphysician. (6) Should objection be raised to my shift from talking about predicates to talking about attributes, my immediate reply would be twofold. First, that unless there are insuperable objections to the shift, it is extremely desirable to make it. Second, that if the primary objection to the change is that criteria of individuation for attributes are problematical, this objection may well not be insuperable. For example, one might hold (a) that attributes are signified by theoretical predicates in the relevant branch of theory, (b) that there is in general no difficulty in distinguishing one theoretical predicate from another, and (c) that several 'vulgar epithets', which intuitively, are not perfectly synonymous with one another, may be legitimately mapped onto a single theoretical predicate, since the theorist will attempt to capture not all but only some aspects of the intuitive meaning of the epithets which in ordinary speech correspond to the predicates of his theory.  As a tailpiece, it may be remarked that, in many cases, what are to be counted as actions are realized not in events or happenings, but in nonevents or non-happenings. What I do is often a matter of what I do not prevent, what I allow to happen, what I refrain from or abstain from bringing about-what, when it comes about, I ignore or disregard. I do not interrupt my children's chatter; I ignore the conversational intrusions of my neighbor; I omit the first paragraph of the letter I read aloud; I hold my fire when the rabbit emerges from the burrow, and so on. In many cases, my abstentions and refrainings are at least as energy-consuming as the positive actions in which I engage; and their consequences (as for example, when I do not sign exemptions from penalties) may be equally momentous. Often when my actions do involve physical behavior, that behavior is distinguished more by what it does not include than by what it does include; those who preceded the Good Samaritan on the road certainly passed by the injured traveler. So a movement may go equally with not doing things and with doing them.  Such omissions and forbearances might prove an embarrassment to Davidson if the thesis that actions are a subclass of events is to be taken seriously. For he might be forced into the admission of negative events, or negative happenstances, with one entity filling the 'event slot' if on a particular occasion I go to Hawaii (or wear a hat) and another entity filling that slot if on that occasion I do not go to Hawaii (or do not wear a hat).  G(2). THE POSSIBLE AVOIDABILITY OF CITED DRAWBACKS AND GLIMPSES OF A CONSTRUCTIVIST TREATMENT  I come now to the question whether the complications generated by Davidson's proposal are avoidable. It is my view that they are, indeed, that there was never a need to introduce them. One of the avowed purposes, though not the only such purpose, of Davidson's analysis was to provide an explanation of certain patterns of valid inference relating to events, in particular of those inferences connected with *variable polyadicity". I doubt if the analysis does provide an explanation of these inferences, though it may well provide a general classification of some or all of them; that, to my mind, is not the same thing. My doubts may be illustrated by a pair of examples: (a) the statement Martha fell into a ditch, from which it follows that Martha fell, and (b) the statement Martha fell into a trance, from which this conclusion does not follow. It seems to me that the question whether the logical form of one or other of these initial statements is such as to conform to Davidson's pattern of analysis turns on the question whether the initial statement does or does not entail Martha fell, and that, this being so, an exposure of the logical form cannot explain, though it may help to classify, the inference should it in fact hold. To explain the inference, it will be necessary to show why it holds; and this has not so far been done.  I think one might come nearer to an explanation of the inference from Martha fell into a ditch to Martha fell if one observed that Martha fell into a ditch does, while Martha fell into a trance does not, offer us what I might call a "specificatory modification" of Martha fell; it purports to tell us how, in what circumstances, in what context (or such-like) Martha fell, and in virtue of that fact it presupposes, or involves a commitment to, the truth of the statement that Martha fell. Since, in my view, there is no uniquely correct way of specifying the logical form of a statement (the logical form of one and the same statement may be characterized with equal propriety, in different ways for different purposes) it may even be that one characterization of logical form of a conjunctive statement is that of providing a specificatory modification of one of the conjuncts; John arrived and Mary departed might be seen as embodying the attachment of an adverbial modifier ("and Mary departed") to the initial conjunct. It also seems to me that deployment of the idea of specificatory modification would dispel the embarrassments which were noted as arising from the verb-dependence of certain adverbs; whether or not violence in sneezes is the same feature as violence in swearing, 'sneezes violently' or 'swears violently' will offer specificatory modifications, respectively, of sneezing and swearing.  On the assumption that the problems which originally prompted Davidson's analysis are at least on their way towards independent solution, we may now perhaps turn out attention to the possibility of providing a constructivist treatment of events which might perhaps have, for some, more intuitive appeal than the realist approach which I have been attributing to Davidson. We begin with a class H of happenstance-attributions, which will be divided into basic happenstance-attributions, that is, ascriptions to a subject-item of an attribute which is metabolically expressible, and non-basic happenstance-attributions, in which the attributes ascribed, though not themselves metabolically expressible, are such that their possession by a subject-item is suitably related, in one or another of a number of ways yet to be determined, to the possession by that or by some other subject-items, of attributes which are metabolically expressible. The members of class H may be used to say what happens (or happens to be the case) without mentioning or talking about any special entities belonging to a class of happenings or happenstances. The next stage will involve the introduction of a Reichenbach-type operator (like "consists in the fact that") which, when prefixed to a sentence S which makes a happenstance-attribution to a subject-item, yields a predicate which will be satisfied by an entity which is a happenstance, provided that S is true, and provided that some further metaphysical condition (not yet identified) obtains which ensures the metaphysical necessity of the introduction into reality of the category of hap-penstances, thereby ensuring that the 'new' category is not just a class of convenient fictions. In the light of my defense of Reichenbach against Davidson's attack, I can perhaps be reasonably confident that this metaphysical extension of reality will not saddle us with any intolerable paradox.  What the condition would be which would justify the metaphysical extension would remain to be determined; it is tempting to think that it would be connected with a theoretical need to have events (or happenstances) as items in causal relations, or as bearers of other causal properties; while 1 would be disinclined to oppose this idea, I could wish to sound a note of caution. Events do not seem to me to be the prime bearers of causal prop-erties; that I think belongs to enduring, non-episodic things such as sub-stances. To assign a cause is primarily to hold something accountable or responsible for something; and the primary account-holders are substances, not events, which are (rather) relevant items which appear in the accounts.  I suspect that a great deal of the current myopia about causes has arisen from a very un-Aristotelian inattention to the place of Substance in the conception of Cause.  G(3). ESSENTIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF EVENTS  If the suggestions which I have just been outlining should find favor, and events are admitted to reality as constructed entities, it it to my mind tempting to go one step further; this step would involve treating the attributes formed with the aid of a Reichenbachian operator not merely as attributes which happen to be used in the metaphysical construction of events, but as attributes which are constitutive of and so belong essentially to the events in the construction of which they are deployed. The death of Julius Caesar will be an entity whose essential nature consists in, or at least contains, the attribute being an event in which Julius Caesar died; in which case that particular event could not conceivably have lacked that attribute, even though there may be many other attributes which it in fact possesses but might have failed to possess, like the attribute of being the cause of the rise of Augustus. A decision with regard to the suitability of this further step is, I think, connected with the view one takes with regard to the acceptability of one or both of two further ideas. First, the idea that for an item x to be a genuine particular there must be a distinction between (i) what x is in itself (intrinsically) and (ii) how x is related to other things, and also a distinction within what it is itself between what it is essentially and what it is accidentally or non-essentially. Without satisfying these dis-tinctions, x will be characterless, and any features attributed to it will be no more than pale and delusive reflections of verbal descriptions which, in a nominalistic fashion, are thought of as applying to it. Second, the idea that the possession of an essential attribute is achieved only as an aspect of the metaphysical construction of the item which possesses it (or of the category to which that item belongs); or perhaps (less drastically) that only in the case of constructs are essential characteristics unmistakably evident (waiting, so to speak, to be read off), whereas, in the case of non-con-structs, though such characteristics may, or must, exist, their identification involves the solution of a theoretical problem. A combination of the strongest affirmative answers to these questions would yield the possibly wel-come, possibly unwelcome, doctrine that particulars as such are necessarily constructs; other combinations of answers would lead to milder positions.  H. Actions and Events  H(I). THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF ACTIONS  I begin with two preliminary observations. First, I am inclined to extend to actions the kind of treatment which in the previous section I was, somewhat tentatively, advocating with respect to events or happenstances, namely that one should not merely accord to them an internal as well as an external or relational character, but that within their internal character (what they are like in themselves), we should distinguish what they are like essentially from what they are like accidentally. As I have indicated, I suspect that this move may be required both by the invocation of a distinction between internal and external character, and by the supposition (if we make it as 1 am inclined to do) that actions, no less than events, are metaphysically constructed entities. But even if my theoretical suspicions are unfounded, I think my essentialist inclinations with regard to actions would survive. I also regard them as independent of the yet undecided identity question about actions and events. I do not, of course, expect Davidson to look with a favorable eye on such inclinations.  Second, when Davidson addresses the question of the nature of agency, he suggests that two ingredients are discernible; the first of these is the notion of activity; in action the agent is active what comes about is something which is made by him to come about, of which he is the cause; the second ingredient is that of purpose or design or intention; what comes about comes about as he meant or intended it to come about. This seems to me to be substantially correct, though I am inclined to think that there is a somewhat more illuminating way of presenting it which I shall later attempt to provide. In the meantime, what these ingredients seem to me to indicate is an intimate connection between agency and the will, which I am inclined to explore directly. Again, I suspect that Davidson and I might here part company, on account of his hostility to so-called 'acts of will'.  How then should we see application to the nature of agency of the idea that its essence consists in the exercise of will, at least so far as paradigmatic examples are concerned? Non-paradigmatic cases will be briefly considered later. I am, and what 1 do is, in paradigmatic cases, subject to my will. I impose my will on myself, and my actions are acting only insofar as they are the product of this imposition. This imposition may take various forms, and may relate to various aspects of or elements in the deliberation process.  In many cases explicit exercise of will is confined to the finding of means to the fulfillment of some already selected end. Such cases are relatively undramatic, and are also well-handled in some of the philosophical litera-ture, as for example by Aristotle in the carly chapters of Eth. Nic. If. But sometimes what goes on is more dramatic, as when one needs to select an end from one's established stock of ends, or when the stock or ends itself has to be in some way altered, or (perhaps most dramatically) when an agent is faced with the possibility of backsliding and following the lure of inclination rather than the voice of reason or principle. Particularly in such cases as the last, what takes place in action (paradigmatically) is essentially part of a transaction between a person and a person; I, as a person, treat myself as a person and communicate with myself as a person. The seemingly problematic character of the kind of relation to myself which is evident in action has led some philosophers to separate the participants in such dialogue, as Plato distinguished the rational, appetitive, and spirited elements as distinct parts of the soul; and, again, as Aristotle distinguished the rational parts, one which is rational in the sense of being capable of listening to and following reason, and one which is rational as having the capacity to give reasons and determine rational behavior. But Aristotle hedged on this point, and it seems to me that we do not want a divided self here. Our self-direction is the direction of a whole self by a whole self.  Our internal dialogue contains different sorts of elements; we may counsel ourselves, as when my Oxford tutor, called on the telephone by someone who was plainly a woman, said aloud, "Now keep your head, Meiggs" We may impute responsibility to ourselves for actions or situations, sometimes laudatorily, sometimes chidingly, sometimes in a neutral tone. Primarily the language of our self-direction is forensic; the way in which I impose my will on myself is by self-addressed commands. I lay down what is required of me, by requiring it of myself; I am, so to speak, issuing edicts to someone who in standard circumstances has no choice but to obey. I say "in standard circumstances", which are those in which I have authority over myself, and am responsible for myself. It seems to me arguable that the conception of myself as directing myself is comprehensible only against a background of situations in which I am in a position to direct others.  Analogues of relationships with others, which will entitle me to direct others, have to hold in my relations with myself for me to have authority over myself. Failure of trust in myself, for example, either because I regard myself as incompetent to look after myself, or alternatively as unwilling, because of self-hatred, so to do, will undermine this authority. So self-love and self-concern would be indispensable foundations for self-direction; only the assumption of these elements will enable me to justify to myself the refusal to allow myself indulgences which, in my view, would be bad for me.  I may in conclusion remark that I do not see any prospect of thinking of the story of internal dialogue, self-addressed commands, and authority and commitment as being a picturesque representation of the kinds of causal sequence of desires, beliefs, and intentions of which I think Davidson would suppose agency to consist. The forensic language seems to get no foothold.  However, when we come to non-paradigmatic cases of action, the situation is different. Provided that the cases of action in which will is recognizably present are taken as paradigmatic, it is possible by a procedure which I shall in a moment outline, to regard a multitude of performances in which will is not recognizably present as having a license to be counted as actions.  H(2). ARE ACTIONS A SUBCLASS OF EVENTS?  The foregoing discussion of the essential character of action exerts, I hope, some force towards loosening the grip of the idea that actions are to be thought of as a special subclass of events (or happenstances), but I do not think that it provides an argument which would settle whether or not this idea is correct, its force seems to be to a considerable degree rhetorical.  Such an argument, however, seems at least at first sight to be available.  Consider Nero's activities when Rome burned. One of the things which he could certainly be said to have done was to produce a sequence of bodily movements which, given that he was wielding a bow and fiddle, resulted in the passing of the bow across the strings of the fiddle and in a consequent flow of sounds. But there were at least two further things which Nero could be said to have done on this occasion: one is to have given a performance of the formidably difficult Seneca Chaconne, and the other is to have displayed his contempt for the people of Rome. Now it may be that we are free to regard the passage of the bow across the strings and the sounds thereby generated, or even perhaps Nero's production of these phenomena, as a sequence of events, but it does not look as if we are free to identify these events either with Nero's performance or with Nero's display of con-tempt, or to identify one of these last things with the other. Nero's playing of the Chaconne was (for all we know) masterly and profoundly sensitive, while his behavior vis-à-vis the people of Rome was callous, squalid, and hideous in the extreme; these items are therefore distinct from each other, and also distinct from the physical events involving Nero's body, bow and fiddle, which can hardly be said to have been either masterly and sensitive or callous, squalid, and hideous.  I fear the question at issue is not quite so easily settled, as the following response perhaps demonstrates. First, the epithets ('masterly', 'sensitive",  'callous', 'hideous', etc.) which are, in the example given, applied to what Nero did (however that may be variously described) are all resultant or supervenient, and the features upon which they depend are the specific characteristics of what Nero did, viewed as a fragment of conduct or as a performance. Second, description of what Nero did may simultaneously fulfill two roles, a referential role and a descriptive role. Such combinations are commonplace in ordinary discourse. To say, for example, "Robert's mother would not denounce him to the police" both refers to a particular lady, and at the same time gives a description of her which explains or is otherwise relevant to the presence or absence of the phenomenon mentioned in the predicate. Similarly, specifications of Nero's activity as a fiddler or as a moral agent may serve both to pick out that activity and to do so in a way which is relevant to what is being said about it. Third, where we find occurrences in a single sentence of more than one description fulfilling such a duality of roles, there is in general nothing to prevent the plurality of descriptions from being co-referential; "The composer of the San Francisco Sonata would hardly have forgotten how it goes, and the winner of the Pacific Piano Prize would hardly be unable to play the work" may involve a reference to a single person, Joe Doakes. Finally, the evaluative epithets which are applied to Nero's productions are not inconsistent with one another, and so might truly attach to a single item; sensitivity (and so aesthetic beauty) may be combined with moral hideousness. Nothing then prevents a single item, namely a certain sequence of bodily movements, from being also a certain sort of performance and a certain sort of conduct; nor from being, in each of these capacities (quâ each of these things) differently describable. Such an item may be, quâ performance sensitive and, quâ conduct, hideous; qua bodily movement, however, it is neither of these. It is in such a fashion that the example should be interpreted.  I can, however, think of a line of argument that might be invoked, with possibly better prospects of success, to establish the non-identity of actions with events, in particular with bodily movements. This argument begins with the suggestion that if we wish to identify the central, or essential, character of some kind of item, we should attend to the question why we are interested in items of that sort, and in particular what kind of theory or system we envisage items of that sort as belonging to, and what purpose we consider such a theory or system to serve. In the case of actions, a plausible answer seems to lie in the idea that we are concerned with particular (individual) actions as being crucial to a no doubt complex array of procedures for evaluating people as agents— attention to human actions is the product of a concern to determine in a systematic way what people (including myself are like on the basis of what they do. The notion of action, therefore, will be what is required for actions to provide within the framework of a theory of conduct, a basis for the assessment of the agents to whom they are imputable. But for that purpose the all-important elements are the presence of will directed towards the realization of a state of affairs specially associated with the action, accompanied perhaps by belief or conviction that that state of affairs has been, or is being realized; whether the realization is actually forthcoming seems to be, in comparison, relatively unimportant as far as moral assessment is concerned, though it may be of greater consequence in other related forms of assessment, such as legal assessment. As Kant wrote in the Grundlegung, *Even if it should happen that owing to the special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if in its greatest efforts it should yet achieve noth-ing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself"  ", (Abbott edition, p. 11). And, no doubt mutatis mutandis something  comparable could be said about the bad will.  If then, the theoretical interest of actions is detached from the execution or achievement of actual events, it will be reasonable to determine the conception of action in such a way that performing an action is distinct from, and does not require, the actuality of the events or states of affairs which an agent wills or believes himself to have realized; in which case particular actions will be distinct from and will not require, bodily movements or event-sequences.  Indeed we should regard the determination of the categorial features of action as belonging to where Kant would have placed it; belonging, that is, not to the Philosophy of Language but to the Metaphysics of Morals. It is not clear to me that this mode of conception of action is accommodated by Davidson's treatment of action.  H(3). THE POSSIBILITY OF A COHERENTLY FORMULATED  DISTINCTION BETWEEN ACTIONS AND EVENTS  Rather than pursue the question whether such arguments as the one which I have just outlined are successful in establishing the distinctness of actions from events, I shall attend, instead, to the question whether one who accepts this distinctness has a fully coherent story to tell. I shall consider this topic in a series of stages:  (a) If we are to commit ourselves to the idea of distinguishing actions from events, I think that we should state more precisely than has so far been done just what it is to which we are referring when we speak of actions.  One possibility is that we should be talking about action-types, or (as 1 should say) agenda (*things to do"); it will be agenda which, in deliber-ation, we consider adopting, and one or more which, when a decision comes, we actually do adopt. It is conceivable, though not perhaps man-datory, that we license the possibility that different persons may deliberate upon, and in this end adopt, one and the same agendum (e.g., to vote for the re-election of the President, or to compete in the Indianapolis 500). But there are two further possibilities, both of which might justifiably be regarded as particular actions (actions-instances) incapable of being shared by more than one agent. One of these would be examples of the adoption, by a particular person on a particular occasion, of an agendum, whether or not such adoption is completed, or realized, in the realm of events; such action-instances might be called "open" action-instances. The other possible kind of action-instance would be completed action-instances, where realization in the realm of events is demanded. In neither case, however, will it be legitimate to regard the action-instance as identical with an event (hap-penstance) which realizes it.  (b) A further extremely important possibility is visible when we turn our attention to what 1 am treating as non-paradigmatic cases of action. These cases involve the very large class of action-surrogates, which are bodily movements or (alternatively) the making by us of bodily movements, such items being properly deemed to be, or countable as, actions even though (strictly speaking) they are not, at least if they are bodily movements, actions at all. (I shall revert in a moment to the question whether such items are movements, or are makings of movements.) I presume that, in designing the Universe or at least the living segment of it, the imaginary Genitor would be governed by a principle of providing for the highest possible degree of Economy of Effort; such a procedure would not only make his work more elegant, but would be beneficial to the creatures under construction, on the assumption that calculation and concentration of attention involve effort, and that there are to be limitations on the quantity of effort of which a creature is capable at any one time, with the result that the less the effort which is expended, the greater the reserve which is available for emergencies. At least three varieties of unreflective performance might be available in sufficiently advanced creatures as substitutes for paradigmatic reflection and calculated activity: (1) What were once natural (instinctual) performances which then later came to be understood, the reasons for their presence having become apparent and, perhaps, the performances themselves having been in consequence modified. It is on this model that Aristotle, I think, interpreted the relation between natural virtue and virtue proper. (2) Examples when certain forms of behavior have become "Second Nature", without the knowledge on the part of the exhibiting creature of the justification for that behavior. It was in this kind of way that English Public Schools used to foster morality, by beating the boys who broke the rules. (3) Examples in which the behavior which has become Second Nature has become so after, and normally because, the justification for such behavior is understood, and close attention to such justification can in many cases be relaxed; habit will do what is needed.  Perhaps Aristotle's suggestion that we study Ethics in order to be good is based on the idea that type (2) Second Nature, should be if possible replaced by type (3) Second Nature, since only if the underlying justifications of decent behavior are fully recognized by the agent can he earn full credit for the behavior in question. Items which are action-surrogates no doubt owe their status to the fact, or presumed fact, that should an agent encounter difficulties or complications a further reflection machincry may be usually counted on to be called into operation; indeed part of treating people as responsible persons consists in presuming this to be the case; and unless an agent is thought to be under special stress, or to be temporarily or permanently mentally infirm, a failure of this recall to occur tends to be treated as a case of unconscious bad motivation. It is, I hope, also clear that though movements or movement-makings may be properly counted as, or deemed to be, actions of a certain sort, they are not, strictly speaking and in fact, actions of that sort. A certain Oxford college was once embarrassed by a situation in which its newly elected Provost wished to house in his lodgings his old and dearly beloved dog, but in the way of this natural step stood a College statute forbidding the keeping of dogs within the College. The Governing Body ingeniously solved this problem by passing a resolution deeming the Provost's dog a cat. It could only be deemed a cat if it were in fact not a cat. So with actions and action-surrogates.  (c) If an agent does an action, either paradigmatically or via an action surrogate, what he does is something of which he is the cause; that this is so lies at the heart of the concept of agency. But we need to exercise care in the interpretation of the word 'cause'. We need to get away from the kind of employment of the word 'cause' which has become, these days, virtually de rigueur in philosophy [viz., one exemplifying an event-relating, mechanistic, Hume-like conception] into a direction which might well have been congenial to Aristotle. Actions which we perform have ends, which may or may not involve further ends, and which, as Aristotle was aware, may be the expected results or outcomes of actions of which they are the ends, or, again, may themselves be actions, either the same as or different from those whose ends they are. When someone has a preferential concern for some end which would be served by a given agendum, he has cause to perform, or realize, that agendum; and if the agendum is performed by him because he has cause to perform it, then the action is something of which he is the cause, and is explained (though non-predictively explained) by the fact that he had cause to perform it. States which have as their  'intentional' objects propositional contents, or states of affairs more or less closely related to propositional contents, may be divided into (i) those which are factive (those like knowledge, whose instantiation requires the truth, or actuality, of their intentional objects), (ii) those which are counterfactive, like being under the delusion that, which requires the falsity, or non-actual-ity, of their intentional objects, and (iti) those, like belief and hope, where instantiation of the state leaves it an open question whether the intentional object is true or actual, or not. Hume-type causation is factive, having cause to is non-factive, and being the cause of one's own action is factive, but factive in a special way which is divorced from full predictability. We might then say that the uses of 'cause' which are most germane to action are either non-factive ('cause to') or only in a special non-predictive way factive (like 'x was the cause of x's A-ing'). We might also say that, in our preferred mode of conception, actions (like giving Jones a job) are non-factive, in that the performance of this action does not guarantee that Jones actually gets a job. We might also say that, when a particular sequence of movements issues from, or flows from (in a typically unreflective way), an action which an agent has performed, and so realizes that action, the agent has caused,, or is the cause, of, the movements in question. (The numerical subscript will shortly be explained.)  There may indeed be more than one kind of factivity. The kind of factivity which 1 have been discussing might be renamed 'inflexible factivity'; if state s is inflexibly factive, every instantiation of it will require the truth or actuality of , its intentional-object. But there may be states which though not inflexibly factive, are flexibly factive, that is to say, states whose instantiation on any occasion require the general, or normal, or standard truth or actuality of intentional objects of states of that'sort; in such cases, though, truth or actuality of an intentional object of an individual instantiated state is not guaranteed; it may be presumed as something which should be there in the absence of known interference-factors. It is likely, I think, that the items with which we are here specially concerned, like actions and causes (to), though not inflexibly factive are flexibly factive; actions with individual non-realization are possible only against a background of general realization. If this were not so, the 'automatic' bodily realizations which typically supervene upon adopted agenda might not be forthcoming, to the ruin of the concept of action.  (d) I have not yet addressed question whether the items which provide the final realization of actions, and so on occasion function as action-surrogates, are to be supposed to be bodily movements (or sequences thereof) or, alternatively, the makings of such bodily movements (items which we might call 'geometrical' as distinct from 'vulgar' actions). It is my view that this will turn out not to be a question of the highest importance. As we have noted, the sequences of movements involved in the realizations of vulgarly specified actions tend, on the vast majority of occasions other than those in which an agent is learning how to perform some vulgar action, to appear 'automatically' and unreflectively, without attention to the geometric pattern of the movements being made; indeed the acquisition of such unreflective capacities lies at the core of learning how to live in the world. On such occasions, therefore, geometrical actions would be performed through their own action-surrogates, namely the associated bodily movements. This fact has an important bearing on the classical problem of distinguishing or refusing to distinguish my raising my arm from my arm's going up. Various philosophers have looked for the presence, in my raising my arm, of a distinct occurrence, or at least of a distinct observable and introspectable element or feature; and in the case of Prichard this idea formed part of his reason for identifying action with willing. But an example shows this idea to be misguided. A gymnastic instructor is drilling a squad, and gives the order "Raise your right arm"; all the right arms are dutifully elevated. He then says "How many of you actually raised your right arm, and for how many of you was it simply the case that your arm went up?" The oddity of this question indicates that raising the right arm involves no distinguishing observable or introspectible element; all the squad-members were (so to speak) in the same boat, and they all, in fact, raised their arms. What, then, is special about raising one's arm or about making any bodily move-ment? The answer is, I think, that the movement is caused by the agent in the sense that its occurrence is monitored by him; he is aware of what takes place and should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise, he is ready to intervene in order to correct the situation. He sees to it that the appropriate moment is forthcoming. We have then a further interpretation of 'cause' ('cause",  2), namely that of their being monitored by us, in which  we are the cause, of the movement which we make.  (e) It is, finally, essential to give proper attention to the place occupied by the notion of Freedom in any satisfactory account of action. The features noted by Davidson as characteristic of agency, namely activity and purpose (or intention) are perhaps best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development of the concept of freedom. We can distinguish such succession of stages as the following: (1) External, or 'transeunt", causation in inanimate objects, when an object is affected by processes in other objects, (2) Inter-nal, or 'immanent, causation in inanimate objects, where a process in an object is the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body, (3) Internal causation in living things, in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are not earlier stages of the same change, but independent items like beliefs, desires, and emotions, the function (or finality) of which is, in general, to provide for the good of the creature in question, (4) A culminating stage at which the conception in a certain mode by a human creature of something as being for that creature's good is sufficient to initiate in the creature the doing of that thing. At this stage, it is (or at least appears to be) the case that the creature is liberated not merely from external causes, but from all factive causes, being governed instead by reasons, or non-factive causes. It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. Attention to the idea of freedom will also call for formidably difficult yet indispensable undertakings, such as the search for rational justification for the adoption or abandonment of ultimate ends; whatever the difficulties involved in such enterprises, if they are not fulfilled, our freedom threatens to dissolve into compulsion or chance.  It may be worthwhile to present the issues involved here in a slightly more detailed way, and in doing so to relate them to the question of the adequacy of a "desire/belief" characterization of action, to which many philosophers (including Davidson) are sympathetic. Two initially distinct lines of argument seem to me to be discernible; they may in the end coa-lesce, but perhaps they should initially be kept separate.  Line (A) runs roughly as follows:  Action (full human action) calls for freedom in a specially 'strong' sense of 'freedom'. At least at first sight, the offerings of the desire/belief analysis of action are insufficient to provide for 'strong' freedom; the most they can give us is a notion of freedom which consists in the determination of my actions by their recognized conduciveness to my own ends, rather than by an imposed conduciveness to the ends of others (com-pulsion), or by the operation of undirected natural necessity. 'Strong' freedom would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also freely adopted or pursued by me. (3) Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of chance or causal indetermination will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher.  (4) The precise nature of 'strong' freedom remains to be determined; but it might perhaps turn out to consist in, or at least to involve the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation, which would include the rational selection of ultimate ends and would, therefore, be beyond the reach of the desire/belief analysis of action.  Line (B) proceeds thus:  (1) Action (full human action) calls for the presence, in at least some cases, of reasons, and these in turn require that the actions for which they account should be the outcome of 'strong' rational valuation which, in the case of ends, will not be restricted to valuation by reference to some ulterior end. (2) This last demand the desire/belief theory is unable to meet, since the ends which it deploys are treated as pre-given ends of the agent.  This feature is not eliminable within the theory, since the account of rationality offered by the theory depends on its presence.  Taken together, lines (A) and (B) suggest first that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation, second that the desire/belief theory is in no position to provide either member of this pair, and third that each member of the pair involves the other.  A possible attempt to reduce the desire/belief theory from such attacks should be briefly mentioned, which might take approximately the following form.  In the case of ultimate ends, justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their fulfillment but rather of their presence as ends. My having such-and-such an end, or such-and-such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having this end, or combination of ends, will exhibit some desirable feature or features (for example, in the case of a combination of ends, that the combination is one which, unlike some combinations, would be harmonious). This will put the desire/belief theory back in business at a higher level, since the suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to higher-order ends which would be realized by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends would lie within reach of the desire/ belief theory. Whether such an attempt to defend the desire/belief theory would in the end prove successful i shall not here attempt to determine. I shall confinc myself to observing that the road is by no means yet clear; for seemingly the higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress thus started might well turn out to be vicious.  So, attention to the idea of freedom may lead us to the need to resolve or dissolve the most important unsolved problem in philosophy, namely how we can be at one and the same time members both of the phenomenal and of the noumenal world; or, to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the scientific part which calls (or seems to call) for the universal reign of deterministic law, and that other part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but every varicty of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign.  ACTIONS AND EVENTS Is this paper, I devote a good deal of attention  to the views of Donald Davidson on this topic, primarily as presented in his well-known and influential essay "The Logical Form of Action Sen-tences", reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, pp. 105-148). Though I examine Davidson's position in detail, I do not confine myself to discussion of that position; I seck also to sketch, I hope sympathetically though without commitment, a possible alternative account. I might, perhaps, at this point voice my suspicion that some of my reservations about Davidson's proposals stem from divergences from him, or uncertainties about his precise position, with respect to some larger issues, mostly methodological. I had, indeed, thought of tabulating some of these issues in a brief final section until I reflected that such a prolongation would, if it were sufficiently brief to be tolerable, be too brief to be illuminating.  A. Overview  A(1). METHODOLOGY  I think that it would be fair to say that Davidson's discussion of action-sentences falls within the boundaries of a larger idea about metaphysics. It is a widely (if not universally) held view, that at least one part of the business of metaphysics is to determine an ontology; or, if you prefer it, to settle on an answer to the question what, in general or particular terms, the  "universe" or the "world" contains. It is obvious that very many widely different answers have at one time or another been put forward; some of them have been wildly generous like Richard Robinson's "You name it", since anything you can mention will win its share of the prize; some of them have been remarkably niggardly, like what Broad once reported to be Hegel's solitary selection, namely, the Kingdom of Prussia; most of them have fallen somewhere between these two extremes. In recent times there has been a strong tendency to restrict recognition to individual entities, excluding of course, all abstract entities except sets, and excluding above all "intensional" entities like universals and propositions. So (thus far) people, tables and chairs, atoms, electrons and quarks have escaped exclu-sion, though for many philosophers further acts of exclusion would be on the way. It is an important thesis of Davidson's, toward which I am, in broad terms, very sympathetic, that a little more inclusion is called for; notably, room has to be found for events of various sorts, among which a prominent and honored place must be kept for actions. Given that this is so we must, as metaphysicians, turn our attention to items of this kind too; it, for example, we admit Julius Caesar to membership of the universe, then we should also admit a class of entities which will include the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and a special subclass of these which will include Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.  It is my suspicion (which I should find it very hard to support with evidence) that Davidson's basic metaphysical outlook, like that of Quine, is that of what I might call a "Diagnostic Realist". Crudely put, such a position would concede, in line with the contentions of a number of classical Skeptics and Idealists, that Reality hides forever behind an impenetrable curtain; it is relentlessly too modest to allow anyone to strip away its protective covering and take a look at it, to see what it is really like. But, contrary to the opinions of classical Skeptics, that fact does not condemn us to perpetual metaphysical silence; for though we cannot inspect Reality, we can form hypotheses about it, each of which (from case to case) may be more, or again less, judicious. Metaphysical hypotheses will be judicious to the extent to which, if true, they would provide backing or justification for the content and methodology of scientific theory.  This metaphysical outlook is unlike that which, at present at least, appeals most to me. My favored outlook would be one or another form of Con-structivism. I waver between two options; a version of Limited Construc-tivism, according to which Reality would be divided into two segments, an original or unconstructed segment, and a constructed segment (or sequence of segments) in which constructed items are added as legitimate metaphysical extensions of what is present before the extension is made; and a version of Unlimited Constructivism, which would, more radically, seck to exhibit all categories of items as constructed rather than original; the escape from the invocation of an unconstructed segment would be (it is hoped) achieved by the supposition of a plurality of metaphysical schemes such that items which are primitive in one scheme would be non-primitive in another. Both forms will need to characterize legitimate construction-procedures by which metaphysical extensions are made. One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis.  Both approaches face formidable difficulties of principle. For the present occasion I shall restrict myself to the troubles of Diagnostic Realism. The Diagnostic Realist wishes to regard the optimal metaphysical posture as being the one which accepts that gencral account of Reality which maximally justifies and supports the deliverances of science. But what science?  Palmistry? And what deliverances? Phlogiston theory? It seems that we need at least a restriction to reputable deliverances of reputable sciences.  And how are these to be selected except on the basis of likelihood of truth, and how is that to be optimized in advance of any clue about the nature of Reality? It seems that there is an initial need for some grounds of acceptability of the findings of science which are independent of those which, it is hoped, will be provided by a correct and adequate account of Reality.  Now it is entirely possible that I am quite mistaken in supposing Davidson to be, at best, a Diagnostic Realist; indeed conversations which I have had with students indicate that he may regard a distinction between 'original' and 'constructed' Reality (like other once popular dichotomies) as non-viable. If so, I will freely admit to error, but not to guilt. For it seems clear to me that Davidson's treatment of ontological questions requires some metaphysical Weltanschauung to support it; and if Diagnostic Realism is not to fill this role, I have no idea what is to fill it.  A(2). PROBLEMS  What considerations can we point to which would encourage us, perhaps even force us, into this metaphysical direction, that of admitting events and actions to the ontology? Davidson, I think, recognizes four such consid-erations, the first of which was the one which primarily influenced Kenny, to whom Davidson gives credit for the introduction, or the revival, of this topic.  (1) The phenomenon of (so-called) *variable polyadicity". If we pick on what looks like a relational verb, for example "to butter," we find that it can be used on different occasions in the formation of predicates of varying measures of polyadicity. Sentences containing it can be constructed which exhibit two, three or more terms; there appears to be no upper limit imposed by grammar, a fact which tells against one possible account of this phenomenon, viz., that varying numbers of indefinite pronouns (like 'someone' or 'something') have elliptically dropped out of the surface forms; just how many are we to suppose to have been there to drop out? This phenomenon begins to lose its air of mystery if we suppose that there may be a central entity (an action), which from occasion to occasion may be described with greater or not less specificity. The phenomenon of 'variable polyad-icity' now begins to look precisely parallel to the situation with regard to sentences used to describe things; there we may take our choice between describing Socrates as a man, as a fat man, as a fat greedy man, and so on.  Sometimes, in one's progress through the maze of 'polyadicity', one moves between sentences which are not logically independent of one another; one moves, say, from the '3 term' sentence, *Bill buttered the toast in the bathroom" to the '2 term' sentence, "Bill buttered the toast," which is entailed by the '3 term' sentence from which it originated. This is often but not invariably the case: it is not the case, for example that *H.M.S. Rodney sank the Bismarck" entails "H.M.S. Rodney sank". We need some theoretical characterization of the occasions when such inferences are in order, and the idea of treating actions as entities in their own right, and so as subjects of attribution, may help us to obtain it. Actions are on occasion in demand to serve as objects of reference for neuter pronouns, such as *it". Consider the sentence "The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". What is "it"? Obviously not the Moonrakers or their manager, and it is hardly being suggested Ann Landers made a joke about last week. If, however, one treats the resignation of the manager as an entity which could be referred to, it will fill the gap quite comfortably. Some of our explanatory talk about what we do, like the provision of excuses, seems to require the possibility of describing things we do in different ways. If actions are describable entities, this may happen to them; and if it may happen to them, we need criteria of identity for actions which will tell us when it is and when it is not taking place. I shall return to the first three items later in this paper; but since the fourth item is about to disappear beyond the horizon forever, I shall say a word or two about it while it is still visible. It does not seem to me to be put forward as a reason of the same degree of cogency as its three prede-cessors; for it assures us only that if, for other reasons, we have decided to admit actions to the ontology, they need not be merely a technically required category; they can be put to work in the service of certain parts of our discourse. The stronger claim that the admissibility of that sort of discourse requires the admission of actions to the ontology is not, and, as far as I can see, could not be justifiably made. B. Davidson's Criticism of Prior Theorists  B(1). REICHENBACH ("LOGICAL FORM AND LOGICAL  EQUIVALENCE")  Davidson takes Reichenbach mildly to task for holding that "(3x) (x consists in the fact that Amundsen flew to the North Pole)* is logically equivalent to, but does not give the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole"; according to Reichenbach the first sentence is about an event, while the second is not; so the first sentence cannot give the logical form of the second. If we considered instead of the second sentence, the sentence  "A flight by Amundsen to the North Pole took place" we would be introducing a sentence which is short an event, and so a sentence the logical form of which could be given by the first sentence, to which (presumably) the new sentence would also be logically equivalent. Davidson proposes to amend Reichenbach's position, so that the first sentence is taken as giving the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole", and not merely as being logically equivalent to that sentence; this change is advocated mainly on the grounds that it is, or would be a step on the way to, a pattern of analysis which will account for the entailments considered with variable polyadicity.  If, as Reichenbach thought, there are in our language pairs of logical equivalent sentences one of which is about events, while the other is not, that difference might justly be held to be a reason for denying that the event-mentioning sentence gives the logical form of the other member of the pair; and if one were a constructivist (as maybe Reichenbach was not) one might suggest that the reason for this richness in our vocabulary is that events are constructs belonging to an extension of a more primitive ontology which does not contain them and which is mirrored only in sentences which do not mention them. If one held that position, one would properly reject Davidson's emendation of Reichenbach.  B(2). REICHENBACH (THE "HIDEOUS CONSEQUENCE")  Davidson's main criticism of Reichenbach's position is that, once he has admitted two principles which are needed to legitimize patently valid inferences turning on the intersubstitutibility of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sentences in appropriately embedded contextual positions, Reichenbach cannot escape the hideous consequence that all events are identical with one another. Davidson's ingenious argument may be summarized as follows. Let 'a' abbreviate Reichenbach's operator 'con-sists in the fact that', which when prefixes to a sentence produces a predicate (epithet); let 'C" abbreviate 'Caesar was murdered', and let 'N' abbreviate  'Napoleon became Emperor of France': Then: (a) sentence (1), 'x a C, is true just in case sentence (2), 'x a (9(y= y & C) = 9(y = y)' is true, since  the parts of the subsentences which follow the operator 'c' in the two main sentences are logically equivalent. (b) Sentence (2) is true just in case sentence (3), 'xa(ý(y= y & N) = 9(y= y)' is true, since '9(y= y & C)' and '9(y=y & N)' are singular terms, which, if 'C' and 'N' are both true,  both refer to P(y = y), and are therefore coreferential and intersubstitutable.  (c) Sentence (3) above is true just in case 'xoN' is true, since "N' and the sub-sentence which follows 'o' in (3) are logically equivalent. So provided that 'C' and 'N' are both true, regardless of what they say, any event which consists of the fact that C also consists of the fact that N, and vice versa; that is to say, any pair of randomly chosen events are identical.  To this argument I think it might be replied that the principles licensing intersubstitution of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sub-sentences are officially demanded because they are needed to license certain patently valid inferences; if in addition to providing this benefit, they also saddle us with a commitment to the 'hideous consequence', then the rational course is to endeavor to find a way of retaining the benefit while eliminating its disastrous accompaniment, much as it has seemed rational to seck in set-theory, as generous a comprehension axiom as the need to escape paradoxes will permit. Such a way seems to be available; we might, for example, while retaining the two added principles, prohibit the use of the 'co-referentiality principle' after the 'logical equivalence principle' has been used. Such a measure would indeed have some intuitive appeal, since in the cited argument its initial deployment of the 'logical equivalence principle' seems to be tailored to the production of a sentence which will provide opportunity for trouble-raising application of the other principle; and if that is what the game is, why not stop it?  B(3). VON WRIGHT (INVOCATION OF INITIAL AND TERMINAL  STATES)  It is Davidson's view that von Wright wishes to characterize events as being, in effect, ordered pairs of an initial state and a terminal state, and (no doubt) actions as being the bringing about of events. One of Davidson's criticisms of this approach is that my walking from San Francisco to New York and my flying from San Francisco to New York would not be distinguished from one another by the pairs of states involved (which would be the same); and that if reference to the mode of travel be brought in (in a distinction between walking to New York and flying to New York) reference to the initial state has now been rendered otiose.  It seems to me that this response does not do justice to von Wright who is plainly working on the twin idea that (a) the notion of change is fundamental to the notion of event, and (b) that change can be represented as a succession of states. In my view this proposal has great merit, even if some modification be required. I shall, however, postpone more detailed consid-cration of it until the next section of these comments.  C. Further Consideration of Davidson's Problem List  C(/). VARIABLE POLYADICITY  Let us now redirect our attention to the considerations which were listed as calling for a philosophical study of action-sentences, The surviving members of this list are the phenomenon of variable polyadicity, the need for a satisfactory systematic account of a certain range of entailments relating to actions, and the demand for the provision of objects of reference for certain occurrences of pronouns. So far, I have spoken as if the first two considerations are independent of each other, each pointing to a distinct problem for which a solution is needed. I am in fact far from sure that this is a correct representation of Davidson. There is considerable support in ordinary language for the idea that verbs and other relational predicate expressions carry concealed within themselves (so to speak) a specification of a given degree of polyadicity (or "n-adicity"); "between", for example, seems to express a three-term relation (x being between y and z), while the relation signified by "above" is a merely two-term relation; and specification of the number of terms which a relational expression involves seems to be essential rather than accidental to the nature of the relation. Certainly many logicians have taken this vicw. But it is by no means certain that this view is correct, nor that it is unequivocally supported by ordinary parlance.  If we ask whom John met in Vienna, we may get the answer *Bill", or  "Bill and Harry", or "Bill, Harry, and Bob" without any suggestion that some restrictive condition or n-adicity is being violated. Moreover, so far as the construction of logical systems is concerned, it has been shown that restrictions or n-adicity are not required for predicate logic.  So perhaps what the first two considerations call for is not just the solution of two distinct problems, but the provision of an account of action-sentences which will jointly account for two problems, that of variable polyadicity and that of the systematization of a certain range of inferences.  This thought leads at once to the question why it should be supposed, or desired, that these two demands should be met by a single maneuver; what would be wrong about giving separate answers to them? Let us look more closely at the two strands; I begin with variable polyadicity.  To talk, let us say, of variable politeness would perhaps be appropriate if one were discussing the manner in which some central item (a person) exhibited, on different occasions, varying degrees of politeness; or, per-haps, exhibited on different occasions varying degrees and forms of impoliteness (sometimes he is malicious, sometimes just plain rude). By parity of reasoning, to exhibit variable polyadicity, an item would have to be (say) on occasion dyadic, on occasion triadic, on occasion tetradic; and this boring ascent could presumably be continued ad infinitum. But what item might we be talking about? To my mind, it would have to be a non-linguistic item, like a relation (a classification which might include some actions); the meeting might be a single item (relation or action) which holds, variably, between two, three, or more persons, depending on how many people met or were met. This way of talking, would, however, raise serious questions about why the focal item (the relation or action) should be regarded as single questions, moreover, which seem a long way from Davidson's text.  If, on the other hand, we turn from the non-linguistic to the linguistic world, we find clearly single items, viz., predicates and verb-phrases, which exemplify determinate forms of n-adicity; this gain, however, is balanced by the fact that it seems that the embodiment of (say) dyadicity and triadicity are distinct from one another. "—met—" and "—met—and—" are structures which do not have common instances; so are:  "—buttered—";  "—buttered—in—";  "—buttered-in—in the presence of—".  To gather the threads together, in the linguistic world one may discern three different kinds of entity:  Verbs (or predicate letters) which are the bricks out of which predicates are made, and which may or may not have assignable n-adicity; Predicates (open sentences) formed from the bricks, like "—but-tered—in—"; these must have assignable n-adicity; Instances (individuals or sets) to which predicates can be truly applied; these must contain just as many elements as the number n in the n-adicity of the predicate; but the number of distinct clements may be variable; recurrences may or may not be permitted by the rules governing the predicates. It seems to be the business of a systematic theory of a language to make provision for the presence of each of these types of item. When it comes to attempting to satisfy the demands for a systematic account of the validity of such inferences as that from "Smith buttered the toast in the bathroom" to "Smith buttered the toast", it seems clear that some appeal to structure is called for; the question is whether the structures now invoked are or are not the same as (or included in) those which are required for a systematic account of a language. It is my suspicion that Davidson holds (or held) that the same structures are involved in both cases;  I am not sure that this answer is right, and the question will assume greater prominence as our discussion develops. Whatever its final answer, one can see the appeal of treating actions as subjects or foci of predicates; once the quantifiers have been dropped, the validity of such inferences might turn out to parallel (indeed to be a special case that of) inferences from 'Fx & Gx' to 'Fx' or indeed from 'A & B' to 'A. But for me the suspicion remains that the proposed identification of structures is illegitimate.  C(2). PRONOMINAL REFERENCES  My uneasiness is not decreased by attention to the third consideration, which relates to the provision of an object of reference for the pronoun "it" in such a sentence as *The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". Who or what was the subject of Ann Landers' joke? Neither the Minneapolis Moon-rakers nor their manager could properly be referred to by the neuter pro-noun, as distinct from a masculine pronoun "he' or a plural 'they'; the reference is plainly to the manager's resignation. Now this event (action) could certainly be the object of a pronominal reference if that reference were demonstrative rather than anaphoric; anyone present at the meeting at which the manager tendered his resignation could certainly say, "That, at last, is what the directors have been hoping for", or, *Now, at last, they have got it". But my sentence seems to make an anaphoric reference, and yet there is no previous reference which is being picked up. The situation might, however, be regarded as being eased if (1) a covert reference to the manager's act of resignation were made in the first clause of my exemplary sentence, and (2) it is sufficient for the supposition that a covert reference is made that a designation of that act should be present in the underlying structure of the sentence.  I suspect that we need to consider two questions with regard to references which are "felt" as anaphoric. (1) Is the mode of reference, in such a case, formally or strictly correct as judged by the official standards of gram-marians? (2) Is the reference, while not formally or strictly in conformity with official standards of grammarians, nevertheless intelligible and so at least informally admissible? It would not surprise me to discover that the matter of a covert underlying structural reference is irrelevant to the answer to these questions. It might well be that for a grammatically strictly correct anaphoric reference to be made, a prior explicit is required; a covert reference will be insufficient. However if the demand is not for impeccable grammar but for intelligibility, then a covert reference is not needed; what is needed is that the identification of the object of reference should rely on prior discourse, not necessarily on prior reference. For example:  *I spent last summer in Persia; they are very dissatisfied with the present regime*. (They are of course the Persians.) "A car went whizzing by me and scraped my fender; but he didn't stop". (The driver, of course.) "Jones's views on the immortality of the soul filled many pages in Mind; but it was the Oxford University Press which in the end published it". (It = Jones's presentation of his views.) (4) "His leg was cancerous; he contracted it in Africa". (It = the disease  cancer.)  One might, as a tailpiece, remark that the accessibility to reference of such items, as the above, depends on their existence or reality in some humdrum sense, not on so scholarly a matter as their presence in or absence from The Ontology.  D. Outline of Davidson's Proposal  We turn now to Davidson's own well-known proposal for handling the three questions which we have just been discussing. It possesses a surface simplicity which may or may not turn out to be misleading. It involves the introduction, into a candid representation of the structure of action-sentences, of a 'slot' which may be occupied by variables ranging over actions, and which may legitimately be bound by quantifiers. The sentence  "Shem kicked Shaun" is now thought of not as a combination of two names and a two-place predicate, but as involving a three-place predicate 'Kicked' and as being (really) of the form (Ex) (Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x)), a structure within which, as Davidson points out, the sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears. As a reading in English of Davidson's structure, we are offered somewhat tentatively, 'There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem'.  E. Pre-Theoretical Demarcation of Actions and Events  E(1). ACTIONS  Before continuing our examination of Davidson's proposals, let us first turn our attention to the matter of identifying the material to which the proposals relate. Mere reference to actions, or in a more updated idiom, to action-sentences, seems to me to tell us less than I should like to know.  The word 'action' does not, I think, make frequent appearances in our carefree chatter. I am not surprised if I hear it said that so-and-so is a man of action, or that actions speak louder than words, or that Botswana is where the action is, or even (before he retired from the scene) that Howard Cosell would describe for us third-round action in the current heavyweight contest; but such occurrences of the word as these do not help us much when it comes to applying the word to concrete situations. The word 'action' has a portentous and theatrical flavor, and the related verb 'act' is obviously theatrical in a further sense, in view of the connection with this or that kind of pretending. The more homely word "do" is plainly a much happier denizen of common talk; indeed, the trouble here is that it is too happy; almost any circumstance will qualify as something which some person or thing, in one way or another, does or has done. The question, "What did the prisoner do then?" may be quite idiomatically answered in any of the following ways: *He hit me on the nose", "He fainted", "He burst out laughing*, "He just sat there", "Nothing at all, he just sat there", "He left his sandwiches untouched". The noun "deed", on the other hand, is by comparison exceedingly bashful, tending to turn up only in connection with such deeds of derring-do as the rescuing of captive maidens by gallant knights. The grossly promiscuous behavior of the verb "do", I think, has in fact a grammatical explanation. We are all familiar with the range of interrogatives in English whose function is to inquire, with respect to a given category, which item within the category could lend its name to achieve the conversion of an open sentence into the expression of a truth.  "When?" (at what time?), "where?" (at what place?), "why?" (for what reason?) are each examples of such interrogatives; and some languages, such as Greek and Latin, are even better equipped than English. All, or most of these interrogative pronouns have indefinite counterparts; corresponding to "where" is "somewhere", to "what?", "something"  ", and so on.  Now there might have been (though in fact there is not) a class of expres-sions, parallel to the kinds of pronouns (interrogative and indefinite) which I have been considering, called "pro-verbs"; these would serve to make inquiries about indefinite references to the category of items which predicates (or epithets) ascribe to subjects, in a way exactly parallel to the familiar ranges of pronouns. "Socrates whatted in 399 B.C.?"  ", might be  answered by "Drank the hemlock"  ", just as "Where did Socrates drink the  hemlock?" is answered by "In Athens"; and given that Socrates did drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., we might have been able to say "There, I knew he somewhatted in 399 B.C.". In fact we cannot grammatically talk in that way—but we can come close to it by using the verb "do", and asking (for example) "What did Socrates do in 399 B.C.?". In its capacity as part of a makeshift pro-verb, *do" can stand in for (be replaceable by) any verb or verb phrase whatsoever; in which case, it is hardly surprising that it will do little to specify a narrowed-down range of actions, or of "action-verbs".  Frustrated in these directions, we might think of turning to a longstanding tradition in Ethics from the Greeks onwards, of connecting the concept of action with that of the Will; a tradition which reached its peak in Prichard, who not merely believed that action is distinguished by a special connection with the will, but maintained that acting is to be identified with willing. It is clear from Davidson's comments on Chisholm, that, at least when his article was written, he would have none of such ideas, perhaps because the suggestion that actions are distinguished by a connection with the will may be expected to lead at once to the idea that particular actions are distinguished by their connection with acts of will; and the position that there are such things as acts of will is not merely false but disreputable. An alternative strategy more in tune with some recent philosophy (and perhaps with Davidson's own style), would be to look at the particular verbs or verb phrases which are used to specify or describe what philosophers at least are inclined to think of as actions; we will examine not generic words like  'act' and 'do', but an indefinite range of particular words and phrases, such as "milk the cow", "cook the meat", and "butter the toast". The trouble which we now encounter is that while some verbs or verb phrases, like  "melt" or "turn pale", look as if they cannot be used to refer to actions, and while others, like "donate a hospital to the city of New York", cannot but be used to refer to what philosophers would call actions— an enormous number of verb phrases occupy an indeterminate position; they can, it seems, be used either way, and therefore are useless as pointers. To offer just one example, "fell on his sword"; one Roman soldier fell on his sword because he lost his legion and could not face the disgrace which, to his mind, attended his responsibility for the deaths of so many people; another Roman soldier lost his legion because he fell on his sword, tripping on it in the dark and as a result knocking himself out, so that when he regained consciousness, the legion had moved on and he was unable to find it.  In my view, there is no escape from a recognition that a characterization of actions (or of action-sentences) has not been provided; in order to proceed then, we have to assume that for the present inquiry such a characterization is not needed. The interpretation of such an idea is not unproblematic. For example, if we do not need to know what actions are (or what are actions) how can we be sure that the current inquiry is properly described as an inquiry about actions or action-sentences? Might it not be, for example, really an inquiry about events (a not implausible suggestion). If it replied that this, if true, would be no great matter, since actions are one kind or subclass of events, I would respond with the comment that some philoso-phers, including Davidson himself, regard actions as a subelass of events, but many do not; this is not a closed question; and may be one which is of vital importance. In any case, other trouble might lie in wait for us if we theorize about actions without a proper identification of what we are theorizing about.  E(2). EVENTS  Parallel to these questions about actions, there are questions which arise about events; if Davidson is offering us an analysis of event-predicates, or event-sentences, just what range of locutions is being analyzed? Two modes of procedures would to my mind be natural; one would be, by an exercise in 'linguistic botany', to further an intuitive recognition of the class of event-descriptions by identifying likenesses and differences between vernacular expressions of this sort and those of different but more or less closely related kinds, like expressions for states of affairs, facts, circumstances, condi-tions, and so forth; the other would be to give a general characterization, which might or might not seek to reflect the vernacular, of a class of event-descriptions with which we are to be concerned, it being understood that any such general characterization might well need to be replaced, for philosophical purposes, by an account which would be theoretically more satisfying and illuminating. Davidson, however, seems to be interested in neither of these procedures. On pages 119-120 he tells us, first that "part of what we must learn when we learn the meaning of any predicate is how many places it has, and what sorts of entities the variables that hold their places range over. Some predicates have an event-place, some do not"; and second that "our ordinary talk of events, of causes and effects, requires constant use of the idea of different descriptions of the same event", with the apparent implication that the range of items to be counted as events is just that range of items with respect to which such inferential problems arise as those of 'variable polyadicity', problems which the proposed analysis would enable us to solve.  I find myself puzzled by two distinet aspects of the foregoing account.  One is the combination of the idea that ability to recognize the number of places which a predicate has, including recognition of the presence or absence of an event-place, is a part of what is involved in learning the meaning of the predicate, and so (presumably) a part of what is involved in learning the language to which the predicate belongs, with the further idea that people (or philosophers) may be expected to be surprised, indeed even skeptical, about Davidson's proposed 'importation' of an extra pred-icate-place for events. Are we to be, like those who in Moore's view go against common sense, persistently engaged in sincere denials of what we know for certain to be true? I do not find such a diagnosis very appealing. Unless I have misread what 1 described as Davidson's implication, surely the idea that events are to be treated as being those items which raise problems which an application of Davidson's analysis is capable of solving is a very different suggestion from the suggestion that the ability to recognize event-places (and so events) is part of having learned the language. E Difficulties With Davidson's Proposal F(I). INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE 'EXTRA SLOT Let us now address the question whether Davidson's proposal, with regard to the logical form of action-sentences, might not be deceptively simple.  The proposal is that contrary (perhaps) to our natural instincts and incli-nations, we should regard 'Kicked' (for example) not as a two-place predicate where the vacancies are filled by designation of the kicker and the kicked, but as a three-place predicate with an extra vacancy for reference to the event or action in which that kicking consists. I find this puzzling as it stands, and I am inclined to inquire how the extra place fits into an understanding of kicking (or of any comparable relational feature). There was, not so long ago, in Oxford, a professor of the philosophy of religion who (so he said) espoused what might be called a form of *Neo-Berkelei-anism"; he maintained that such sentences as "There is a table in the corner of the room" or "Snow is white" were incompletely formulated; the proper forms of expression would be "There is a table in the corner of the room;  God!" and "Snow is white; God!" We can imagine more elaborate variations on the same theme. Suppose that in the later 1930's, it had become de rigueur in colloquial German to terminate sentences with the phrase  "Heil Hitler". We might next suppose that, as the months wore on, this practice became fragmented; it was permissible to substitute for the name of Hitler any of the names of his more notorious henchmen (of course omitting the word 'Heil'); so the vernacular was flooded with German versions of such sentences as "The toast is burned; Bormann!", "Those pictures are very valuable; Goering!", "She was as gentle as a young child;  Himmler!". One can even imagine the practice extended so as to provide for the appearance of quantifiers; "(3x) (Western democracies are corrupt; x!)*.  What is wrong with these idiocies seems, primarily, to be that no account at all has been provided of the purpose which the newly made slots serve: they are just paraded for implementation without indication of what seman-tie gain could come from the implementation. On the face of it, Davidson's presentation suffers from a similar lacuna; he does not tell us the function of the places, he merely gives us an English "paraphrase". But closer attention does something to fill the gap. It seems clear that Davidson regarded the appearance of such extra slots as being just the manifestation of the variable polyadicity of such predicates as "Kicked", and as a phenomenon whose mystery is removed once its logical form is revealed and it is seen how it decomposes into a cluster of relational predicates which covers, in formal garb, the inferences for which justification is required. (We should here attend particularly to Davidson's remarks about verbs and preposi-tions.) Once we distinguish between predicate-verbs and predicates, we can regard the role of the extra slot as specified by its place in the predicate (open sentences) into which the predicate-verb enters (the role, for example, of the slot filled by 'x' is supplied by the fact that it is the first slot in the predicate 'a kicked b in the action (event) x'; and we can regard the characterization of this role as provided by our ability to decompose complex predicates like 'a kicked b on the e [left shin] in the d [bathroom] in x (action)' into such a conjunctive predicate (of actions or events) as ta kicked b in x, and x was done upon c, and x was done in d'. That provision is made for the problematic entailments is clear in light of the formal fact that if a conjunctive predicate P applies to an item, so does a predicate P' which results from P by the omission on one conjunct. F(2). SAYING/DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENS  There is one matter which, I think, deserves initially a little attention.  My linguistic intuition tells me if I say to you that I am 93, I am (standardly) telling you my age (telling you how old 1 am), and not talking about my age; and that similarly if I say to you that two cars collided on the bridge, 1 am (standardly) saying (telling you) what happened, not describing or talking about or saying something about what happened. Indeed saying what happened seems to be not merely to be distinct from talking about what happened, but to be, in a sense, presupposed by it; saying what happened seems, intuitively, to be specially central; it is something one needs to do in order to inform a hearer what one is talking about when one talks about what happened. It was, perhaps, considerations like those which led Reichenbach to distinguish between logically equivalent sentences one of which does, and the other of which does not, refer to or talk about an event. Davidson's analysis, I think, has no place for the distinction which I am defending; on his view anything one says about what happened is (in effect) a case of saying that something happened which —. As I have already indicated, as a would-be constructivist about events I am inclined to side with Reichenbach.  F(3). THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZED FORMULATION  As a preliminary, let me state that in this and immediately subsequent sections I shall treat Davidson's proposal concerning the logical form of action-sentences as applying generally to event-sentences of which (accord-ing to Davidson) action-sentences are a subclass. It seems clear then in Davidson's view an action-sentence derives the logical form which he attributes to it from its status as one kind of event-sentence; what differentiates action from other events is less clear, but perhaps need not trouble us just at this point [cf. p. 120].  Davidson presents his proposal in a relaxed manner and with the aid of an example. "The basic idea is that verbs of action—verbs that say 'what someone did'-should be construed as containing a place for singular terms or variables that they do not appear to. For example, we should normally suppose that 'Shem kicked Shaun' consisted in two names and a two-place predicate. I suggest, though, that we think of 'kicked' as a three-place predicate, and that the sentence to be given in this form: (x) (kicks (Shem, Shaun, x). If we try for an English sentence that directly reflects this form, we now note difficulties. "There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem' is about the best I can do, but we must remember 'a kicking' is not a singular term. Given this English reading, my proposal may sound very like Reichenbach's, but of course it has quite different logical properties. The sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears inside my analytic sentence, and this makes it differ from all the theories we have considered."  Troubles begin when we look for a rigorously presented general formulation of this proposal; "action-verbs [event-verbs] are to be construed as predicates involving one more place than you think they do" seems hardly satisfactory, and to substitute for "you" the phrase "the man-in-the-street", or the phrase "the philosopher-in-the-library", does not seem a large improvement. Apart from anything eise, what would account for the extreme gullibility of people, or philosophers, with respect to conceptions of logical form in this region? We seem to need to lay our hands on some less sub-jectively-tinged material, if we are to achieve a satisfactory general for-mulation; and we should perhaps also bear in mind that at least one would-be philosophical theory (a near ancestor of Convention T, viz., the "Dis-appearance Analysis of Truth") has (or is widely thought to have) foundered on the shoals of non-formulability.  We may be able to make some progress if we survey the range of positions which might be taken with regard to events. Those who wish to admit events as entities will have to consider the question of the relation between events and event-predicates, predicates employed to describe or report events.  Such a predicate (or its deep structure) will have as its denotation, a set of instances, each of which will be a sequence of instance-elements. It is plainly Davidson's view that one element in the sequence that satisfies an event-predicate, which will invariably be an event; contrary to my suggestion in (6) above, reference to events will not be eliminable from any true account of what happens. But though events may not be eliminable as instance-elements, they may well be elements of a special kind; while one who kicks, or one who is kicked, will, for Davidson, in one way or another, be involved in or participate in something other than himself, namely a kick, the kick will not be a participant in any item othey than itself. We are now within sight of a possible general formulation of Davidson's contention: any applicable event-predicate will be satisfied by a set of sequences, each of which will contain a non-participant element in which, in one way or another, the remaining elements in the sequence participate. Davidson, has, indeed, in discussion, shown himself to be favorably disposed towards a treatment of the logical form of event-sentences along these lines. A correct standard representation of the sentence Shem kicks Shaun" might run somewhat as follows: (3x) (x is a kick and (x is by Shem and (x is of Shaun and (x —)))). A format of this sort might turn out not just to be an elegance but to be indispensable for generalized formulability.  The range of relevant questions about events may not yet, however, have been exhausted; some, not necessarily independent of one another, may be still unanswered. Are events independent, whether with respect to their existence or to their specifiability, of items which participate in them? Are they original entities, or constructs? Are they non-composite rather than composite, in relation to participant items? It is my impression that Davidson would wish to answer Yes" to each of these questions; that he would regard events as 'original' rather than as 'constructed' entities partly because he would not find the distinction clearly intelligible and partly because if events are to be thought of as constructs reference to them might become undesirably eliminable; and that he would think of them as non-composite rather than composite, since if they were composite with respect to participating items the participation in an event of certain items would seemingly be essential to the identity of the event in question (that event would not be differently compounded); and I suspect that Davidson would not favor essential connections of that sort. But I suspect that not everyone would incline towards the same set of answers; and I would certainly want to ask whether, if events are non-composite there is any guarantee that one and the same event could not be both a kick administered by Shem to Shaun and a buttering of toast by Jones.  F(4). PREPOSITIONS AND VERB-DEPENDENCE  Unfortunately we are not yet in the clear, since to my mind, new trouble starts with Davidson's claim with regard to the beneficial results of treating prepositions as having, so to speak, a life of their own which does not just consist in being an appendage to a verb. This idea has two interpretations, one innocuous and one far from innocuous. The innocuous interpretation would tell us that such a sentence as "James flew to Jerusalem" may be variously parsed; it may be parsed as "James [subject] flew to Jerusalem [predicate]", or as "James [subject) flew to [verb-phrase] Jerusalem [object]*, or again as "James [subject] flew [verb] to Jerusalem [adverb]". We not only can but must avail ourselves of such varieties of parsing, if we are to provide ourselves with the inferences we need. If, however, it is being suggested that the preposition 'to' is not merely grammatically separable from the verb 'fly', but is semantically independent of it, then we should hesitate; for the appearance of a preposition signifying direction may well presuppose the presence of a directional verb in some dress or other. Such phrases as "was done to Jerusalem" or "did it to Jerusalem" would not be intelligible unless a directional verb is thought of as covertly present.  I think it can be seen that what I am now taking to be a Davidsonian analysis of action commits us, either invariably or all too frequently, to just such unwanted unintelligibilities. The simplest and most natural version of such an analysis (not quite Davidson's version) for the sentence, *Shem kicked Shaun violently on the left shin in the bathroom", would, to my mind, run as follows. "There is an x such that x is a kicking, and x is done by Shem, and x is done to Shaun, and x is done on Shaun's left shin, and x is done violently, and x is done in the bathroom". It seems to me that many, if not all, of the adverbial prepositional phrases contained in his analysis are verb-dependent; their intelligibility depends on the idea that they attach to x quả kicking, in which case reference to 'kicking' is not eliminable. The recurrent participle 'done' is not an inflection of an action-verb; it is, or would be, but for stylistic considerations, an inflection of a pro-verb; only stylistic barriers prevent our replacing it by the word "some-whatted", which plainly is not a word which invokes a restriction on an attendant adverb; "violent qua somewhatting' is not the name of a special dimension of violence. Similarly kicking of Shaun, kicking on Shaun's shin, are modes of kicking, but not modes of somewhatting. So 'kicking vio-lently' or 'kicking on the shin' cannot be treated as expressing a conjunction of kicking and doing something -ly (ф-wise); a concealed reference to kicking will be contained in the interpretation of -ly (ф-wise).  The drift of my argument could perhaps be summarized as follows: (1)  'Violence' is not the name of a common feature of (say) sneezes and be-ratings of one's wife; sncezes are violent qui sneezes, beratings are violent qua beratings; and only in riddle-mongering are these to be taken as com-parable. (2) So 'sneezing violently' does not signify a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently', only at best a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently quâ sneezing'. (3) So 'conjune-tive analysis', of, 'sneezing violently' fails; but nevertheless 'sneezes vio-lently' entails 'sneezes'. (4) So the problematic entailments are not in gen-cral accounted for by a Davidsonian analysis of action-sentences; if a general account of them is to be given, it must be one of a different sort.  The point can, perhaps, be made even more strongly. Let us imagine that at dawn on New Year's Day, 1886, an event e took place in which:  (I) The notorious pirate Black Jack perished  The Governor of Malta hanged Black Jack, and thereby Rid the Mediterranean of its most dangerous seafarer, Black Jack, and Humiliated the Sultan (Black Jack's master). Let us now recast this motion into the proposed canonical form (with some omissions):  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is of Black Jack, and x is a hanging and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack, and x is a ridding and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of Black Jack, and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Sultan).  Rearranging the conjunctive clauses a little we arrive at:  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is a hanging and x is a ridding and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of the Sultan).  Or should recurrences of phrases involving 'by' and 'of' be omitted? Or retained with differentiating subscripts worn by 'by' and 'of" (e.g., "by,,  'byz', 'by'; 'off, 'ofz, and so on)? And if so, on what principle should the subscripts be distributed? There are several attendant problems and discomforts.  The occurrences of 'by', and some of the occurrences of 'of", seem to signalize a projection into the real world of certain grammatical features, those of being subject or objcet of some verb, which would primarily attach not to things but to words. Then, once the objectifying transference is achieved, the things or people referred to (e.g., Black Jack, the Sultan) become detached from the operation and occurrences signified by the originally associated verbs; so that now it becomes impossible to decide whether it is Black Jack or the Sultan who has been hanged, or who has been humiliated. There are no visible principles for the 'disambiguation' of preposi-tions, a feature which may perhaps arise from an extensional conception of asymmetrical relations as ordered couples without any connotational relation to fix the membership of each couple. G. Towards an Alternative Account of Events  G(I). EVENTS AND 'HAPPENSTANCES': VON WRIGHT'S IDEAS  RESUMED  We might now, perhaps, profitably take a closer look at the views of von Wright. As Davidson remarked, von Wright sees events as transitions between (ordered couples of) an initial state and a terminal state; and, in view of the uncertainty attending the identification of the class of events, it may be worth our while to expand this idea a little. My strategy will be first to display, with illustrative comments, some apparatus which might be useful in presenting a viewpoint akin to that of von Wright; second, to endeavor to put a finger on some weak spots in Davidson's position; and third to consider the possibility of putting the aforementioned apparatus to work in the formulation of a constructivist account of events.  First the apparatus. Let 't' [*t,', 'tz'] represent times (moments, instants).  Let 'ф' [*Ф,', 'ф' represent an attribute which falls under a determinable admitting of variations in degree or magnitude: provision for general attributes other than such determinables, like color, the specifications of which do not differ in degree but rather in kind or sort, could easily be made. A.  (1)  (2)  represents "up to t'  represents ' into t'.  (3)  中  小  represents ' out of t' [from t onwards).  ¢  (4)  (5) →1  ¢  В. (6) '<ф',  '=ф', " >ф' represents '& from t' [@ after t).  represents '$ through t'.  represent  "below  'within  the limits of '  above respectively.  C. (9)  (10)  (11)  (12)  D. (13)  (14)  →t  <ф  →t  り♪  →t  ＜中  t  t  1  d  t  1  中  中  t→  中＞  t-  中ン  >ф  中2  12  ф2  represents 'rising through $ at t  represents 'falling through & at t'.  represents 'peaking through @ at t represents 'bottoming with d at t'.  represents 'rising from d, to 2 within determinable A, from ty to t'-  represents 'falling from d, to z within determinable A, from t, to 1'-  E. (15) A represents a determinable (e.g., velocity).  (16) A-  m+ Acn, A»n represent a sub-determinable of A [e.g., 'a speed of from 40 to 50 mph', 'a speed of less than 50 mph', 'a speed of more than 50 mph'].  (17) A, represents a precise determinate of A.  COMMENTS  We are now, it seems in possession of an apparatus which is capable of representing a certain subelass of what I shall call 'basic events', one which consists of transitions of a subject item between contradictorily opposed states, like being fat and not being fat, or not being 6 feet tall and being 6 feet tall. Let us say that such events as these are 'metabolically expressible'. Metabolically expressible transitions, however, will include not only instantaneous contradictory changes, but also persistent states, like sitting on a bench at noon; the apparatus is equipped to express such absences of change in the notation of A (5). Let us press a linguistic barbarism "hap-penstance" into service to cover not only basic events which are changes but also those which are persistences. It is not clear to me whether Davidson's category of events is supposed to include happenstances which are not changes. The class of basic events could be, and I think should be, thought of as including not only instantancous transition between contradictorily opposed states, but also time-spanning (periodic) transitions between contrarily opposed states (e.g., being 4 feet tall and being 5 feet tall), for the representation of which the patterns listed under (D) will be brought into play. Only thus can we hope to accommodate such events as journeys from San Francisco to New York. [Perhaps one might think of such transactions as being a compact infinite sequence of instantaneous transitions.]  In the case of periodie changes between contraries @, and dz, there will frequently be an indefinitely large plurality of alternative paths which such a change might follow. It will be necessary to make provision in the characterization of some such changes fro the expression of conditions which restrict admissible paths to a subclass of, or even to an individual instance of, the paths which are initially available (as flights are restricted to paths which are aerial). It will, I think, have to be allowed that not all events are basic, some events will not be metabolically expressible as consisting of transitions through a sequence of opposed states. But this admission need not lead us to abandon the idea that basic events are the primitive model for the class of events as a whole, nor even the idea that events which are non-basic derive their status as events from their connection, in one way or another, with events which are basic. One way, for example, in which a non-basic event a might be connected with basic events B,, Bz,.. . might be via causal connection; a consists in a causal connection between its subject-item S and one or more basic events, Bi, B2,... which confer both event-status and temporal position upon a. Obviously, an examination of possible modes of dependence of non-basic events on basic events would be a pressing task for a metaphysician. (6) Should objection be raised to my shift from talking about predicates to talking about attributes, my immediate reply would be twofold. First, that unless there are insuperable objections to the shift, it is extremely desirable to make it. Second, that if the primary objection to the change is that criteria of individuation for attributes are problematical, this objection may well not be insuperable. For example, one might hold (a) that attributes are signified by theoretical predicates in the relevant branch of theory, (b) that there is in general no difficulty in distinguishing one theoretical predicate from another, and (c) that several 'vulgar epithets', which intuitively, are not perfectly synonymous with one another, may be legitimately mapped onto a single theoretical predicate, since the theorist will attempt to capture not all but only some aspects of the intuitive meaning of the epithets which in ordinary speech correspond to the predicates of his theory.  As a tailpiece, it may be remarked that, in many cases, what are to be counted as actions are realized not in events or happenings, but in nonevents or non-happenings. What I do is often a matter of what I do not prevent, what I allow to happen, what I refrain from or abstain from bringing about-what, when it comes about, I ignore or disregard. I do not interrupt my children's chatter; I ignore the conversational intrusions of my neighbor; I omit the first paragraph of the letter I read aloud; I hold my fire when the rabbit emerges from the burrow, and so on. In many cases, my abstentions and refrainings are at least as energy-consuming as the positive actions in which I engage; and their consequences (as for example, when I do not sign exemptions from penalties) may be equally momentous. Often when my actions do involve physical behavior, that behavior is distinguished more by what it does not include than by what it does include; those who preceded the Good Samaritan on the road certainly passed by the injured traveler. So a movement may go equally with not doing things and with doing them.  Such omissions and forbearances might prove an embarrassment to Davidson if the thesis that actions are a subclass of events is to be taken seriously. For he might be forced into the admission of negative events, or negative happenstances, with one entity filling the 'event slot' if on a particular occasion I go to Hawaii (or wear a hat) and another entity filling that slot if on that occasion I do not go to Hawaii (or do not wear a hat).  G(2). THE POSSIBLE AVOIDABILITY OF CITED DRAWBACKS AND GLIMPSES OF A CONSTRUCTIVIST TREATMENT  I come now to the question whether the complications generated by Davidson's proposal are avoidable. It is my view that they are, indeed, that there was never a need to introduce them. One of the avowed purposes, though not the only such purpose, of Davidson's analysis was to provide an explanation of certain patterns of valid inference relating to events, in particular of those inferences connected with *variable polyadicity". I doubt if the analysis does provide an explanation of these inferences, though it may well provide a general classification of some or all of them; that, to my mind, is not the same thing. My doubts may be illustrated by a pair of examples: (a) the statement Martha fell into a ditch, from which it follows that Martha fell, and (b) the statement Martha fell into a trance, from which this conclusion does not follow. It seems to me that the question whether the logical form of one or other of these initial statements is such as to conform to Davidson's pattern of analysis turns on the question whether the initial statement does or does not entail Martha fell, and that, this being so, an exposure of the logical form cannot explain, though it may help to classify, the inference should it in fact hold. To explain the inference, it will be necessary to show why it holds; and this has not so far been done.  I think one might come nearer to an explanation of the inference from Martha fell into a ditch to Martha fell if one observed that Martha fell into a ditch does, while Martha fell into a trance does not, offer us what I might call a "specificatory modification" of Martha fell; it purports to tell us how, in what circumstances, in what context (or such-like) Martha fell, and in virtue of that fact it presupposes, or involves a commitment to, the truth of the statement that Martha fell. Since, in my view, there is no uniquely correct way of specifying the logical form of a statement (the logical form of one and the same statement may be characterized with equal propriety, in different ways for different purposes) it may even be that one characterization of logical form of a conjunctive statement is that of providing a specificatory modification of one of the conjuncts; John arrived and Mary departed might be seen as embodying the attachment of an adverbial modifier ("and Mary departed") to the initial conjunct. It also seems to me that deployment of the idea of specificatory modification would dispel the embarrassments which were noted as arising from the verb-dependence of certain adverbs; whether or not violence in sneezes is the same feature as violence in swearing, 'sneezes violently' or 'swears violently' will offer specificatory modifications, respectively, of sneezing and swearing.  On the assumption that the problems which originally prompted Davidson's analysis are at least on their way towards independent solution, we may now perhaps turn out attention to the possibility of providing a constructivist treatment of events which might perhaps have, for some, more intuitive appeal than the realist approach which I have been attributing to Davidson. We begin with a class H of happenstance-attributions, which will be divided into basic happenstance-attributions, that is, ascriptions to a subject-item of an attribute which is metabolically expressible, and non-basic happenstance-attributions, in which the attributes ascribed, though not themselves metabolically expressible, are such that their possession by a subject-item is suitably related, in one or another of a number of ways yet to be determined, to the possession by that or by some other subject-items, of attributes which are metabolically expressible. The members of class H may be used to say what happens (or happens to be the case) without mentioning or talking about any special entities belonging to a class of happenings or happenstances. The next stage will involve the introduction of a Reichenbach-type operator (like "consists in the fact that") which, when prefixed to a sentence S which makes a happenstance-attribution to a subject-item, yields a predicate which will be satisfied by an entity which is a happenstance, provided that S is true, and provided that some further metaphysical condition (not yet identified) obtains which ensures the metaphysical necessity of the introduction into reality of the category of hap-penstances, thereby ensuring that the 'new' category is not just a class of convenient fictions. In the light of my defense of Reichenbach against Davidson's attack, I can perhaps be reasonably confident that this metaphysical extension of reality will not saddle us with any intolerable paradox.  What the condition would be which would justify the metaphysical extension would remain to be determined; it is tempting to think that it would be connected with a theoretical need to have events (or happenstances) as items in causal relations, or as bearers of other causal properties; while 1 would be disinclined to oppose this idea, I could wish to sound a note of caution. Events do not seem to me to be the prime bearers of causal prop-erties; that I think belongs to enduring, non-episodic things such as sub-stances. To assign a cause is primarily to hold something accountable or responsible for something; and the primary account-holders are substances, not events, which are (rather) relevant items which appear in the accounts.  I suspect that a great deal of the current myopia about causes has arisen from a very un-Aristotelian inattention to the place of Substance in the conception of Cause.  G(3). ESSENTIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF EVENTS  If the suggestions which I have just been outlining should find favor, and events are admitted to reality as constructed entities, it it to my mind tempting to go one step further; this step would involve treating the attributes formed with the aid of a Reichenbachian operator not merely as attributes which happen to be used in the metaphysical construction of events, but as attributes which are constitutive of and so belong essentially to the events in the construction of which they are deployed. The death of Julius Caesar will be an entity whose essential nature consists in, or at least contains, the attribute being an event in which Julius Caesar died; in which case that particular event could not conceivably have lacked that attribute, even though there may be many other attributes which it in fact possesses but might have failed to possess, like the attribute of being the cause of the rise of Augustus. A decision with regard to the suitability of this further step is, I think, connected with the view one takes with regard to the acceptability of one or both of two further ideas. First, the idea that for an item x to be a genuine particular there must be a distinction between (i) what x is in itself (intrinsically) and (ii) how x is related to other things, and also a distinction within what it is itself between what it is essentially and what it is accidentally or non-essentially. Without satisfying these dis-tinctions, x will be characterless, and any features attributed to it will be no more than pale and delusive reflections of verbal descriptions which, in a nominalistic fashion, are thought of as applying to it. Second, the idea that the possession of an essential attribute is achieved only as an aspect of the metaphysical construction of the item which possesses it (or of the category to which that item belongs); or perhaps (less drastically) that only in the case of constructs are essential characteristics unmistakably evident (waiting, so to speak, to be read off), whereas, in the case of non-con-structs, though such characteristics may, or must, exist, their identification involves the solution of a theoretical problem. A combination of the strongest affirmative answers to these questions would yield the possibly wel-come, possibly unwelcome, doctrine that particulars as such are necessarily constructs; other combinations of answers would lead to milder positions.  H. Actions and Events  H(I). THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF ACTIONS  I begin with two preliminary observations. First, I am inclined to extend to actions the kind of treatment which in the previous section I was, somewhat tentatively, advocating with respect to events or happenstances, namely that one should not merely accord to them an internal as well as an external or relational character, but that within their internal character (what they are like in themselves), we should distinguish what they are like essentially from what they are like accidentally. As I have indicated, I suspect that this move may be required both by the invocation of a distinction between internal and external character, and by the supposition (if we make it as 1 am inclined to do) that actions, no less than events, are metaphysically constructed entities. But even if my theoretical suspicions are unfounded, I think my essentialist inclinations with regard to actions would survive. I also regard them as independent of the yet undecided identity question about actions and events. I do not, of course, expect Davidson to look with a favorable eye on such inclinations.  Second, when Davidson addresses the question of the nature of agency, he suggests that two ingredients are discernible; the first of these is the notion of activity; in action the agent is active what comes about is something which is made by him to come about, of which he is the cause; the second ingredient is that of purpose or design or intention; what comes about comes about as he meant or intended it to come about. This seems to me to be substantially correct, though I am inclined to think that there is a somewhat more illuminating way of presenting it which I shall later attempt to provide. In the meantime, what these ingredients seem to me to indicate is an intimate connection between agency and the will, which I am inclined to explore directly. Again, I suspect that Davidson and I might here part company, on account of his hostility to so-called 'acts of will'.  How then should we see application to the nature of agency of the idea that its essence consists in the exercise of will, at least so far as paradigmatic examples are concerned? Non-paradigmatic cases will be briefly considered later. I am, and what 1 do is, in paradigmatic cases, subject to my will. I impose my will on myself, and my actions are acting only insofar as they are the product of this imposition. This imposition may take various forms, and may relate to various aspects of or elements in the deliberation process.  In many cases explicit exercise of will is confined to the finding of means to the fulfillment of some already selected end. Such cases are relatively undramatic, and are also well-handled in some of the philosophical litera-ture, as for example by Aristotle in the carly chapters of Eth. Nic. If. But sometimes what goes on is more dramatic, as when one needs to select an end from one's established stock of ends, or when the stock or ends itself has to be in some way altered, or (perhaps most dramatically) when an agent is faced with the possibility of backsliding and following the lure of inclination rather than the voice of reason or principle. Particularly in such cases as the last, what takes place in action (paradigmatically) is essentially part of a transaction between a person and a person; I, as a person, treat myself as a person and communicate with myself as a person. The seemingly problematic character of the kind of relation to myself which is evident in action has led some philosophers to separate the participants in such dialogue, as Plato distinguished the rational, appetitive, and spirited elements as distinct parts of the soul; and, again, as Aristotle distinguished the rational parts, one which is rational in the sense of being capable of listening to and following reason, and one which is rational as having the capacity to give reasons and determine rational behavior. But Aristotle hedged on this point, and it seems to me that we do not want a divided self here. Our self-direction is the direction of a whole self by a whole self.  Our internal dialogue contains different sorts of elements; we may counsel ourselves, as when my Oxford tutor, called on the telephone by someone who was plainly a woman, said aloud, "Now keep your head, Meiggs" We may impute responsibility to ourselves for actions or situations, sometimes laudatorily, sometimes chidingly, sometimes in a neutral tone. Primarily the language of our self-direction is forensic; the way in which I impose my will on myself is by self-addressed commands. I lay down what is required of me, by requiring it of myself; I am, so to speak, issuing edicts to someone who in standard circumstances has no choice but to obey. I say "in standard circumstances", which are those in which I have authority over myself, and am responsible for myself. It seems to me arguable that the conception of myself as directing myself is comprehensible only against a background of situations in which I am in a position to direct others.  Analogues of relationships with others, which will entitle me to direct others, have to hold in my relations with myself for me to have authority over myself. Failure of trust in myself, for example, either because I regard myself as incompetent to look after myself, or alternatively as unwilling, because of self-hatred, so to do, will undermine this authority. So self-love and self-concern would be indispensable foundations for self-direction; only the assumption of these elements will enable me to justify to myself the refusal to allow myself indulgences which, in my view, would be bad for me.  I may in conclusion remark that I do not see any prospect of thinking of the story of internal dialogue, self-addressed commands, and authority and commitment as being a picturesque representation of the kinds of causal sequence of desires, beliefs, and intentions of which I think Davidson would suppose agency to consist. The forensic language seems to get no foothold.  However, when we come to non-paradigmatic cases of action, the situation is different. Provided that the cases of action in which will is recognizably present are taken as paradigmatic, it is possible by a procedure which I shall in a moment outline, to regard a multitude of performances in which will is not recognizably present as having a license to be counted as actions.  H(2). ARE ACTIONS A SUBCLASS OF EVENTS?  The foregoing discussion of the essential character of action exerts, I hope, some force towards loosening the grip of the idea that actions are to be thought of as a special subclass of events (or happenstances), but I do not think that it provides an argument which would settle whether or not this idea is correct, its force seems to be to a considerable degree rhetorical.  Such an argument, however, seems at least at first sight to be available.  Consider Nero's activities when Rome burned. One of the things which he could certainly be said to have done was to produce a sequence of bodily movements which, given that he was wielding a bow and fiddle, resulted in the passing of the bow across the strings of the fiddle and in a consequent flow of sounds. But there were at least two further things which Nero could be said to have done on this occasion: one is to have given a performance of the formidably difficult Seneca Chaconne, and the other is to have displayed his contempt for the people of Rome. Now it may be that we are free to regard the passage of the bow across the strings and the sounds thereby generated, or even perhaps Nero's production of these phenomena, as a sequence of events, but it does not look as if we are free to identify these events either with Nero's performance or with Nero's display of con-tempt, or to identify one of these last things with the other. Nero's playing of the Chaconne was (for all we know) masterly and profoundly sensitive, while his behavior vis-à-vis the people of Rome was callous, squalid, and hideous in the extreme; these items are therefore distinct from each other, and also distinct from the physical events involving Nero's body, bow and fiddle, which can hardly be said to have been either masterly and sensitive or callous, squalid, and hideous.  I fear the question at issue is not quite so easily settled, as the following response perhaps demonstrates. First, the epithets ('masterly', 'sensitive",  'callous', 'hideous', etc.) which are, in the example given, applied to what Nero did (however that may be variously described) are all resultant or supervenient, and the features upon which they depend are the specific characteristics of what Nero did, viewed as a fragment of conduct or as a performance. Second, description of what Nero did may simultaneously fulfill two roles, a referential role and a descriptive role. Such combinations are commonplace in ordinary discourse. To say, for example, "Robert's mother would not denounce him to the police" both refers to a particular lady, and at the same time gives a description of her which explains or is otherwise relevant to the presence or absence of the phenomenon mentioned in the predicate. Similarly, specifications of Nero's activity as a fiddler or as a moral agent may serve both to pick out that activity and to do so in a way which is relevant to what is being said about it. Third, where we find occurrences in a single sentence of more than one description fulfilling such a duality of roles, there is in general nothing to prevent the plurality of descriptions from being co-referential; "The composer of the San Francisco Sonata would hardly have forgotten how it goes, and the winner of the Pacific Piano Prize would hardly be unable to play the work" may involve a reference to a single person, Joe Doakes. Finally, the evaluative epithets which are applied to Nero's productions are not inconsistent with one another, and so might truly attach to a single item; sensitivity (and so aesthetic beauty) may be combined with moral hideousness. Nothing then prevents a single item, namely a certain sequence of bodily movements, from being also a certain sort of performance and a certain sort of conduct; nor from being, in each of these capacities (quâ each of these things) differently describable. Such an item may be, quâ performance sensitive and, quâ conduct, hideous; qua bodily movement, however, it is neither of these. It is in such a fashion that the example should be interpreted.  I can, however, think of a line of argument that might be invoked, with possibly better prospects of success, to establish the non-identity of actions with events, in particular with bodily movements. This argument begins with the suggestion that if we wish to identify the central, or essential, character of some kind of item, we should attend to the question why we are interested in items of that sort, and in particular what kind of theory or system we envisage items of that sort as belonging to, and what purpose we consider such a theory or system to serve. In the case of actions, a plausible answer seems to lie in the idea that we are concerned with particular (individual) actions as being crucial to a no doubt complex array of procedures for evaluating people as agents— attention to human actions is the product of a concern to determine in a systematic way what people (including myself are like on the basis of what they do. The notion of action, therefore, will be what is required for actions to provide within the framework of a theory of conduct, a basis for the assessment of the agents to whom they are imputable. But for that purpose the all-important elements are the presence of will directed towards the realization of a state of affairs specially associated with the action, accompanied perhaps by belief or conviction that that state of affairs has been, or is being realized; whether the realization is actually forthcoming seems to be, in comparison, relatively unimportant as far as moral assessment is concerned, though it may be of greater consequence in other related forms of assessment, such as legal assessment. As Kant wrote in the Grundlegung, *Even if it should happen that owing to the special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if in its greatest efforts it should yet achieve noth-ing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself"  ", (Abbott edition, p. 11). And, no doubt mutatis mutandis something  comparable could be said about the bad will.  If then, the theoretical interest of actions is detached from the execution or achievement of actual events, it will be reasonable to determine the conception of action in such a way that performing an action is distinct from, and does not require, the actuality of the events or states of affairs which an agent wills or believes himself to have realized; in which case particular actions will be distinct from and will not require, bodily movements or event-sequences.  Indeed we should regard the determination of the categorial features of action as belonging to where Kant would have placed it; belonging, that is, not to the Philosophy of Language but to the Metaphysics of Morals. It is not clear to me that this mode of conception of action is accommodated by Davidson's treatment of action.  H(3). THE POSSIBILITY OF A COHERENTLY FORMULATED  DISTINCTION BETWEEN ACTIONS AND EVENTS  Rather than pursue the question whether such arguments as the one which I have just outlined are successful in establishing the distinctness of actions from events, I shall attend, instead, to the question whether one who accepts this distinctness has a fully coherent story to tell. I shall consider this topic in a series of stages:  (a) If we are to commit ourselves to the idea of distinguishing actions from events, I think that we should state more precisely than has so far been done just what it is to which we are referring when we speak of actions.  One possibility is that we should be talking about action-types, or (as 1 should say) agenda (*things to do"); it will be agenda which, in deliber-ation, we consider adopting, and one or more which, when a decision comes, we actually do adopt. It is conceivable, though not perhaps man-datory, that we license the possibility that different persons may deliberate upon, and in this end adopt, one and the same agendum (e.g., to vote for the re-election of the President, or to compete in the Indianapolis 500). But there are two further possibilities, both of which might justifiably be regarded as particular actions (actions-instances) incapable of being shared by more than one agent. One of these would be examples of the adoption, by a particular person on a particular occasion, of an agendum, whether or not such adoption is completed, or realized, in the realm of events; such action-instances might be called "open" action-instances. The other possible kind of action-instance would be completed action-instances, where realization in the realm of events is demanded. In neither case, however, will it be legitimate to regard the action-instance as identical with an event (hap-penstance) which realizes it.  (b) A further extremely important possibility is visible when we turn our attention to what 1 am treating as non-paradigmatic cases of action. These cases involve the very large class of action-surrogates, which are bodily movements or (alternatively) the making by us of bodily movements, such items being properly deemed to be, or countable as, actions even though (strictly speaking) they are not, at least if they are bodily movements, actions at all. (I shall revert in a moment to the question whether such items are movements, or are makings of movements.) I presume that, in designing the Universe or at least the living segment of it, the imaginary Genitor would be governed by a principle of providing for the highest possible degree of Economy of Effort; such a procedure would not only make his work more elegant, but would be beneficial to the creatures under construction, on the assumption that calculation and concentration of attention involve effort, and that there are to be limitations on the quantity of effort of which a creature is capable at any one time, with the result that the less the effort which is expended, the greater the reserve which is available for emergencies. At least three varieties of unreflective performance might be available in sufficiently advanced creatures as substitutes for paradigmatic reflection and calculated activity: (1) What were once natural (instinctual) performances which then later came to be understood, the reasons for their presence having become apparent and, perhaps, the performances themselves having been in consequence modified. It is on this model that Aristotle, I think, interpreted the relation between natural virtue and virtue proper. (2) Examples when certain forms of behavior have become "Second Nature", without the knowledge on the part of the exhibiting creature of the justification for that behavior. It was in this kind of way that English Public Schools used to foster morality, by beating the boys who broke the rules. (3) Examples in which the behavior which has become Second Nature has become so after, and normally because, the justification for such behavior is understood, and close attention to such justification can in many cases be relaxed; habit will do what is needed.  Perhaps Aristotle's suggestion that we study Ethics in order to be good is based on the idea that type (2) Second Nature, should be if possible replaced by type (3) Second Nature, since only if the underlying justifications of decent behavior are fully recognized by the agent can he earn full credit for the behavior in question. Items which are action-surrogates no doubt owe their status to the fact, or presumed fact, that should an agent encounter difficulties or complications a further reflection machincry may be usually counted on to be called into operation; indeed part of treating people as responsible persons consists in presuming this to be the case; and unless an agent is thought to be under special stress, or to be temporarily or permanently mentally infirm, a failure of this recall to occur tends to be treated as a case of unconscious bad motivation. It is, I hope, also clear that though movements or movement-makings may be properly counted as, or deemed to be, actions of a certain sort, they are not, strictly speaking and in fact, actions of that sort. A certain Oxford college was once embarrassed by a situation in which its newly elected Provost wished to house in his lodgings his old and dearly beloved dog, but in the way of this natural step stood a College statute forbidding the keeping of dogs within the College. The Governing Body ingeniously solved this problem by passing a resolution deeming the Provost's dog a cat. It could only be deemed a cat if it were in fact not a cat. So with actions and action-surrogates.  (c) If an agent does an action, either paradigmatically or via an action surrogate, what he does is something of which he is the cause; that this is so lies at the heart of the concept of agency. But we need to exercise care in the interpretation of the word 'cause'. We need to get away from the kind of employment of the word 'cause' which has become, these days, virtually de rigueur in philosophy [viz., one exemplifying an event-relating, mechanistic, Hume-like conception] into a direction which might well have been congenial to Aristotle. Actions which we perform have ends, which may or may not involve further ends, and which, as Aristotle was aware, may be the expected results or outcomes of actions of which they are the ends, or, again, may themselves be actions, either the same as or different from those whose ends they are. When someone has a preferential concern for some end which would be served by a given agendum, he has cause to perform, or realize, that agendum; and if the agendum is performed by him because he has cause to perform it, then the action is something of which he is the cause, and is explained (though non-predictively explained) by the fact that he had cause to perform it. States which have as their  'intentional' objects propositional contents, or states of affairs more or less closely related to propositional contents, may be divided into (i) those which are factive (those like knowledge, whose instantiation requires the truth, or actuality, of their intentional objects), (ii) those which are counterfactive, like being under the delusion that, which requires the falsity, or non-actual-ity, of their intentional objects, and (iti) those, like belief and hope, where instantiation of the state leaves it an open question whether the intentional object is true or actual, or not. Hume-type causation is factive, having cause to is non-factive, and being the cause of one's own action is factive, but factive in a special way which is divorced from full predictability. We might then say that the uses of 'cause' which are most germane to action are either non-factive ('cause to') or only in a special non-predictive way factive (like 'x was the cause of x's A-ing'). We might also say that, in our preferred mode of conception, actions (like giving Jones a job) are non-factive, in that the performance of this action does not guarantee that Jones actually gets a job. We might also say that, when a particular sequence of movements issues from, or flows from (in a typically unreflective way), an action which an agent has performed, and so realizes that action, the agent has caused,, or is the cause, of, the movements in question. (The numerical subscript will shortly be explained.)  There may indeed be more than one kind of factivity. The kind of factivity which 1 have been discussing might be renamed 'inflexible factivity'; if state s is inflexibly factive, every instantiation of it will require the truth or actuality of , its intentional-object. But there may be states which though not inflexibly factive, are flexibly factive, that is to say, states whose instantiation on any occasion require the general, or normal, or standard truth or actuality of intentional objects of states of that'sort; in such cases, though, truth or actuality of an intentional object of an individual instantiated state is not guaranteed; it may be presumed as something which should be there in the absence of known interference-factors. It is likely, I think, that the items with which we are here specially concerned, like actions and causes (to), though not inflexibly factive are flexibly factive; actions with individual non-realization are possible only against a background of general realization. If this were not so, the 'automatic' bodily realizations which typically supervene upon adopted agenda might not be forthcoming, to the ruin of the concept of action.  (d) I have not yet addressed question whether the items which provide the final realization of actions, and so on occasion function as action-surrogates, are to be supposed to be bodily movements (or sequences thereof) or, alternatively, the makings of such bodily movements (items which we might call 'geometrical' as distinct from 'vulgar' actions). It is my view that this will turn out not to be a question of the highest importance. As we have noted, the sequences of movements involved in the realizations of vulgarly specified actions tend, on the vast majority of occasions other than those in which an agent is learning how to perform some vulgar action, to appear 'automatically' and unreflectively, without attention to the geometric pattern of the movements being made; indeed the acquisition of such unreflective capacities lies at the core of learning how to live in the world. On such occasions, therefore, geometrical actions would be performed through their own action-surrogates, namely the associated bodily movements. This fact has an important bearing on the classical problem of distinguishing or refusing to distinguish my raising my arm from my arm's going up. Various philosophers have looked for the presence, in my raising my arm, of a distinct occurrence, or at least of a distinct observable and introspectable element or feature; and in the case of Prichard this idea formed part of his reason for identifying action with willing. But an example shows this idea to be misguided. A gymnastic instructor is drilling a squad, and gives the order "Raise your right arm"; all the right arms are dutifully elevated. He then says "How many of you actually raised your right arm, and for how many of you was it simply the case that your arm went up?" The oddity of this question indicates that raising the right arm involves no distinguishing observable or introspectible element; all the squad-members were (so to speak) in the same boat, and they all, in fact, raised their arms. What, then, is special about raising one's arm or about making any bodily move-ment? The answer is, I think, that the movement is caused by the agent in the sense that its occurrence is monitored by him; he is aware of what takes place and should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise, he is ready to intervene in order to correct the situation. He sees to it that the appropriate moment is forthcoming. We have then a further interpretation of 'cause' ('cause",  2), namely that of their being monitored by us, in which  we are the cause, of the movement which we make.  (e) It is, finally, essential to give proper attention to the place occupied by the notion of Freedom in any satisfactory account of action. The features noted by Davidson as characteristic of agency, namely activity and purpose (or intention) are perhaps best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development of the concept of freedom. We can distinguish such succession of stages as the following: (1) External, or 'transeunt", causation in inanimate objects, when an object is affected by processes in other objects, (2) Inter-nal, or 'immanent, causation in inanimate objects, where a process in an object is the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body, (3) Internal causation in living things, in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are not earlier stages of the same change, but independent items like beliefs, desires, and emotions, the function (or finality) of which is, in general, to provide for the good of the creature in question, (4) A culminating stage at which the conception in a certain mode by a human creature of something as being for that creature's good is sufficient to initiate in the creature the doing of that thing. At this stage, it is (or at least appears to be) the case that the creature is liberated not merely from external causes, but from all factive causes, being governed instead by reasons, or non-factive causes. It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. Attention to the idea of freedom will also call for formidably difficult yet indispensable undertakings, such as the search for rational justification for the adoption or abandonment of ultimate ends; whatever the difficulties involved in such enterprises, if they are not fulfilled, our freedom threatens to dissolve into compulsion or chance.  It may be worthwhile to present the issues involved here in a slightly more detailed way, and in doing so to relate them to the question of the adequacy of a "desire/belief" characterization of action, to which many philosophers (including Davidson) are sympathetic. Two initially distinct lines of argument seem to me to be discernible; they may in the end coa-lesce, but perhaps they should initially be kept separate.  Line (A) runs roughly as follows:  Action (full human action) calls for freedom in a specially 'strong' sense of 'freedom'. At least at first sight, the offerings of the desire/belief analysis of action are insufficient to provide for 'strong' freedom; the most they can give us is a notion of freedom which consists in the determination of my actions by their recognized conduciveness to my own ends, rather than by an imposed conduciveness to the ends of others (com-pulsion), or by the operation of undirected natural necessity. 'Strong' freedom would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also freely adopted or pursued by me. (3) Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of chance or causal indetermination will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher.  (4) The precise nature of 'strong' freedom remains to be determined; but it might perhaps turn out to consist in, or at least to involve the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation, which would include the rational selection of ultimate ends and would, therefore, be beyond the reach of the desire/belief analysis of action.  Line (B) proceeds thus:  (1) Action (full human action) calls for the presence, in at least some cases, of reasons, and these in turn require that the actions for which they account should be the outcome of 'strong' rational valuation which, in the case of ends, will not be restricted to valuation by reference to some ulterior end. (2) This last demand the desire/belief theory is unable to meet, since the ends which it deploys are treated as pre-given ends of the agent.  This feature is not eliminable within the theory, since the account of rationality offered by the theory depends on its presence.  Taken together, lines (A) and (B) suggest first that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation, second that the desire/belief theory is in no position to provide either member of this pair, and third that each member of the pair involves the other.  A possible attempt to reduce the desire/belief theory from such attacks should be briefly mentioned, which might take approximately the following form.  In the case of ultimate ends, justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their fulfillment but rather of their presence as ends. My having such-and-such an end, or such-and-such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having this end, or combination of ends, will exhibit some desirable feature or features (for example, in the case of a combination of ends, that the combination is one which, unlike some combinations, would be harmonious). This will put the desire/belief theory back in business at a higher level, since the suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to higher-order ends which would be realized by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends would lie within reach of the desire/ belief theory. Whether such an attempt to defend the desire/belief theory would in the end prove successful i shall not here attempt to determine. I shall confinc myself to observing that the road is by no means yet clear; for seemingly the higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress thus started might well turn out to be vicious.  So, attention to the idea of freedom may lead us to the need to resolve or dissolve the most important unsolved problem in philosophy, namely how we can be at one and the same time members both of the phenomenal and of the noumenal world; or, to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the scientific part which calls (or seems to call) for the universal reign of deterministic law, and that other part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but every varicty of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign. We are to enquire what metaphysics is, what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that the question is one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, dispassionately. Many people think that the essential task of philosophers is to provide metaphysical doctrines; some even say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers.  But many people,  including many philosophers,  think that all metaphysical doctrines are spurious; some have even called them meaningless. Metaphysics has a unique power to attract or repel, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand, an impatient condemnation on the other.  All the  more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and dispassionate account.  The name of the subject is the name given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle described the subject of his treatise as the science of Being as such, a supremely general study of existence or reality,  distinct from any of the special sciences and more fundamental than they. He argued that there must be such a science; since each of the special sciences, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, made use in common with all the others of certain quite general notions, such as those of identity and difference,    unity and plurality. Such common notions as these would provide the topics of the general science of being, while various different kinds of existence or reality, each with its own peculiar features provided the subject matter of the more departmental studies.  The conception of metaphysics as a supremely general study which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one. We find it, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. But some metaphysicians could have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject without sharing Kant's or Descartes' concern with the foundations of science. Bradley is an example.  He says: 'We may agree, perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a whole'. This agrees with Aristotle in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley would say, fragmentary studies. The  'attempt to know reality' sounds something like 'the study of being as such'. And both would agree on the task of discovering 'first principles'. But Bradley would have ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at the presuppositions or foundations of science.  Some contemporary accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. He says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a pointed paradox,which uses language in a disturbing and even shocking way in order to make us aware of hidden differences and resemblances in things - differences and resemblances hidden by our ordinary ways of talk-ing. Of course Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one. Perhaps it should itself be seen as an illuminating paradox. In any case, its relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter is not obvious.  But perhaps  a relation can be established.  Certainly not all metaphysical statements are paradoxes serving to call attention to usually unnoticed differences and resemblances. For many metaphysical statements are so obscure that it takes long training before their meaning can be grasped, whereas a paradox must operate with familiar con-cepts; for the essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock people when they are standing on such unfamiliar ground that they have no particular expectations. Nevertheless there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise the differences between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by argument to the effect that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since themind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, then indeed it is clearly a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly seen as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics -  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appear-ance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of their enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical.  But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive in so far as there were no elements of reality to which the theory did not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory were interdependent; that is to say, if the proposi-tions of the theory were not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system in which from a limited number of axioms one could derive, as logical consequences, the remaining propositions of the theory; and it is notable that some seventeenth-century rationalist metaphysicians thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It might be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, then science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics, which is certainly systematic enough, might be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though physics might be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. Physical laws may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way organisms develop, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the biologist. So we can still regard physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless particular sciences are too independent of one another for science as a whole to count as a single system.  Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a dis-  tinction between metaphysics and science.  It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences mightadvance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent biological phenomena as obeying laws which were only special cases of physical laws. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brought certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of gases as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about gases. Such a unification and systematization of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be logically im-possible, though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it were to occur; one would still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a metaphysical system.  This refusal would not be the result of mere pre-judice. Just because the universal systematized science was science, it would not be metaphysics.  For even the most general and basic laws it contained would ultimately depend for their acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of a metaphysical system. The methods of science, the tests for acceptability of scientific laws, remain quitedifferent from the methods of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of metaphysical principles. So we have here a further question. For even though it is true that the most general laws or axioms of a unified science would not count as metaphysics, it is also true that many metaphysicians have thought it at least a part of their task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how they conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundations and scientific superstructure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general laws of nature.  Many metaphysicians did not explicitly ask themselves this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if they had. But there are ex-ceptions. One of them is Kant. He thought there were certain principles which had a quite special place in knowledge, in that they stated the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, was possible.  These principles were not themselves a part of science.  Rather, they embodied the conditions of the possibility of science, and of ordinary everyday knowledge too, for that matter. It was an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental ideas these principles involved, and what the principles themselves were; and also to prove that they had this peculiar character. For this was the only kind of proof of which they were sus-ceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doc-trine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositionsof science, and not merely its most general part.  Yet the shortcomings were important. Kant's fundamental principles varied greatly in character ; and very few would now agree that they embodied general presuppositions of the possibility of scientific knowledge. And most would now be very sceptical of the possibility of establishing any rival set of principles with just this status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principles which were, in something like Kant's sense, the pre-suppositions, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. And this was in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics: the metaphysician exposed the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. He might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering new directions in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Col-lingwood. There is at least some analogy between his views and those, for example, of Carnap, who was once a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between questions which arise within a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and questions which are sometimes raised about that framework or system. Questions of the first sort belong to the field of some science or of everyday life, and areanswered by the methods appropriate to those fields.  Questions of the latter sort have traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of questions about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus philosophers have asked whether there really existed such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics were real, and so on. But such questions can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as metaphysical assertions, as opposed to metaphysical decisions. The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding metaphysicians as engaged in a kind of propaganda on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things.  At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenthcentury, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Berkeley, it was minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume was inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was individual sense-impressions and images.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God or Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. He, unlike Berkeley and Hume, was a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathe-matics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science was the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceived of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thought that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possessed were spatial char-acteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world were also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general was a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is de-ductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ontology, in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognized just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world were their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real char-acteristics.  Second, Descartes recognized minds, or  mental substances, of which the essential characteristic was thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, was conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive con-sequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant,as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such prefer-ence. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types and not between them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, was declared by him to be ultimately only appear-ance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not and cannot know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality was perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality was of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant was a very ambitious metaphysician, who sought to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a con-  cern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. In thenineteenth century, for example, when history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers as science had done in the seventeenth century, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies.  Thus the historically minded metaphysician searches for the true nature of historical explanation and con-cludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same con-cept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoured one type of historical explanation by making it the foundation of his system; and it was this system that Marx turned upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel had, and were intended to have, implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: moral conclusions about how we ought to behave are to follow from metaphysical premises about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinozaprovides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and heightens its prestige.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but commands, moral  imperatives. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if pre-carious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence were peculiarly his own. He thought he could demonstrate that reality mustexhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of pheno-mena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality trans-cendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of  quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philo-sophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that material object exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in whichit is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, there-  fore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the material world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which material things present to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there were milk bottles on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really are milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptive-ness as the sense-impressions with which we started ; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the material world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the material world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of material object, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to material objects, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that all claims to knowledge of the material world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the material world, for example, would be to maintain that material objects may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experi-ence. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between realityand appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of material objects. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up.  A very different type of response to the problem was Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about material objects incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted ; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Tran-scendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduc-tion.* For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and material objects by maintaining that material objects are just collections or families of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they havesuggested that sentences about material objects are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about material objects; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is  pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of transcendental hypotheses, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but if he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as beingthe only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, then he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures.  The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such em-phasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is im-possible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It will be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject in the essays that follow. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganize the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual revision which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such revisions are often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity,reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localized disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map. H. P. Grice I am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy.   It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the essential task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine.  Some even go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy!   But *other* philosophers think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious.    Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification.     Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other.    All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account.    As it happens, the name of the subject is the name given to a treatise by Aristotle.     And Aristotle described the subject of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from— and more fundamental than— any such *special* — and thus less generic — science..     With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science.    Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use in common with all the others of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality.     Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being  or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts  of, say, existence or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject matter of the more departmental studies.    This conception of metaphysics as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.     We find this conception of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    But, whereas some metaphysicians could have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such.    Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says:     “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to know reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truths, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.”    Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study.    Bradley’s attempt to know reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse.    And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel  if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle.    But, as a trueblooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at the presuppositions or foundations of science!    Some contemporary accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these.    Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement.     Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood.    A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox,which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way in order to make us aware of hidden differences and resemblances in things - differences and resemblances hidden by our ordinary ways of talking, as we do at Oxford.    Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.     Indeed it’s been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox.     In any case, Wisdkm’s characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter is far from obvious.    But perhaps a relation can be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradoxe serving to call attention to usually unnoticed differences and resemblances.     For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure that it takes long training before their meaning can be grasped.    By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts.    The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations!    Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox.     Suppose we consider the paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise the differences between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by argument to the effect that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since themind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, then indeed it is clearly a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly seen as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics -  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appear-ance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of their enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical.  But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive in so far as there were no elements of reality to which the theory did not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory were interdependent; that is to say, if the proposi-tions of the theory were not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system in which from a limited number of axioms one could derive, as logical consequences, the remaining propositions of the theory; and it is notable that some seventeenth-century rationalist metaphysicians thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It might be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, then science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics, which is certainly systematic enough, might be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though physics might be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. Physical laws may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way organisms develop, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the biologist. So we can still regard physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless particular sciences are too independent of one another for science as a whole to count as a single system.  Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a dis-  tinction between metaphysics and science.  It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences mightadvance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent biological phenomena as obeying laws which were only special cases of physical laws. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brought certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of gases as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about gases. Such a unification and systematization of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be logically im-possible, though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it were to occur; one would still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a metaphysical system.  This refusal would not be the result of mere pre-judice. Just because the universal systematized science was science, it would not be metaphysics.  For even the most general and basic laws it contained would ultimately depend for their acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of a metaphysical system. The methods of science, the tests for acceptability of scientific laws, remain quitedifferent from the methods of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of metaphysical principles. So we have here a further question. For even though it is true that the most general laws or axioms of a unified science would not count as metaphysics, it is also true that many metaphysicians have thought it at least a part of their task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how they conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundations and scientific superstructure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general laws of nature.  Many metaphysicians did not explicitly ask themselves this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if they had. But there are ex-ceptions. One of them is Kant. He thought there were certain principles which had a quite special place in knowledge, in that they stated the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, was possible.  These principles were not themselves a part of science.  Rather, they embodied the conditions of the possibility of science, and of ordinary everyday knowledge too, for that matter. It was an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental ideas these principles involved, and what the principles themselves were; and also to prove that they had this peculiar character. For this was the only kind of proof of which they were sus-ceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doc-trine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositionsof science, and not merely its most general part.  Yet the shortcomings were important. Kant's fundamental principles varied greatly in character ; and very few would now agree that they embodied general presuppositions of the possibility of scientific knowledge. And most would now be very sceptical of the possibility of establishing any rival set of principles with just this status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principles which were, in something like Kant's sense, the pre-suppositions, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. And this was in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics: the metaphysician exposed the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. He might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering new directions in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Col-lingwood. There is at least some analogy between his views and those, for example, of Carnap, who was once a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between questions which arise within a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and questions which are sometimes raised about that framework or system. Questions of the first sort belong to the field of some science or of everyday life, and areanswered by the methods appropriate to those fields.  Questions of the latter sort have traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of questions about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus philosophers have asked whether there really existed such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics were real, and so on. But such questions can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as metaphysical assertions, as opposed to metaphysical decisions. The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding metaphysicians as engaged in a kind of propaganda on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things.  At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenthcentury, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Berkeley, it was minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume was inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was individual sense-impressions and images.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God or Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. He, unlike Berkeley and Hume, was a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathe-matics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science was the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceived of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thought that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possessed were spatial char-acteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world were also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general was a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is de-ductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ontology, in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognized just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world were their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real char-acteristics.  Second, Descartes recognized minds, or  mental substances, of which the essential characteristic was thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, was conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive con-sequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant,as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such prefer-ence. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types and not between them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, was declared by him to be ultimately only appear-ance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not and cannot know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality was perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality was of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant was a very ambitious metaphysician, who sought to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a con-  cern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. In thenineteenth century, for example, when history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers as science had done in the seventeenth century, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies.  Thus the historically minded metaphysician searches for the true nature of historical explanation and con-cludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same con-cept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoured one type of historical explanation by making it the foundation of his system; and it was this system that Marx turned upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel had, and were intended to have, implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: moral conclusions about how we ought to behave are to follow from metaphysical premises about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinozaprovides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and heightens its prestige.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but commands, moral  imperatives. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if pre-carious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence were peculiarly his own. He thought he could demonstrate that reality mustexhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of pheno-mena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality trans-cendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of  quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philo-sophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that material object exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in whichit is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, there-  fore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the material world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which material things present to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there were milk bottles on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really are milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptive-ness as the sense-impressions with which we started ; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the material world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the material world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of material object, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to material objects, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that all claims to knowledge of the material world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the material world, for example, would be to maintain that material objects may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experi-ence. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between realityand appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of material objects. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up.  A very different type of response to the problem was Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about material objects incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted ; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Tran-scendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduc-tion.* For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and material objects by maintaining that material objects are just collections or families of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they havesuggested that sentences about material objects are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about material objects; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is  pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of transcendental hypotheses, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but if he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as beingthe only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, then he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures.  The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such em-phasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is im-possible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It will be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject in the essays that follow. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganize the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual revision which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such revisions are often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity,reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localized disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map. H. P. GriceI am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the *essential* task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine. Some even would go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy! But then *other* philosophers go and think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious. Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification. Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm, on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other. All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account. As it happens, the rather odd *name* of the subject is the ‘tote’ given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle describes the *subject* or topic of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from — and more fundamental than —  any such *special* — and thus less generic — science. With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science. Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use, in common with all the others, of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality. Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being, or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts of, say, existence, or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject-matter of the more departmental studies. This conception of metaphysics, as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf. ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.  We find this conception of theme of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    Granted, some metaphysicians may have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s, concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such. Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says: “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to *know* reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truth, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.” Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study. Bradley’s attempt ‘to *know* reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse. And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle. But, as a true-blooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at this or that presupposition or foundation of science! Some other accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it, at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood. A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox, which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way — in order to make us aware of some hidden difference or some hidden resemblance in this or that thing - a differences or a resemblance hidden by our ordinary way of talking, as we do at Oxford. Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.  Indeed it has been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox. In any case, Wisdom's characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter, is far from obvious. But perhaps a relation *can* be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradox serving to call attention to some usually unnoticed difference or resemblance. For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure to take quite some ‘training’ in Philosophese, before its meaning can be grasped. By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts. The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations! Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the Philosopher’s Paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise any difference between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by an argument to the effect, say, that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since the mind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, indeed it is *clearly* a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly interpreted as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, or of talking about things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics —  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appearance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of the metaphysical enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in the Philosopher’s Paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical. But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive, in so far as there is no element of reality to which the theory does not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory are inter-dependent; that is to say, if the propositions of the theory are not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system, in which, from a limited number of axioms, one derives, as a logical consequence, any remaining proposition of the theory; and it is notable that some rationalist metaphysicians indeed thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It may be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics —- if not Stone-Age Physics — which is certainly systematic enough, may be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though Stone-Age Physics may be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. A Physical law may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way an organism develops, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the physiologist — or the biologist, or even the physician. So we can still regard Stone-Age physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless any particular science is too independent of any other for science as a whole to count as a single system.  But cf. scientism, or the devil of it. Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a distinction between metaphysics and stone-age science. It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences may advance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of physiology or biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent this of that physiological or biological phenomena as obeying this of that law which is only a special case of a law of  physics. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brings certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of a gas as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about a gas. Such a unification and systematisation of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be *logically*, or as I prefer, conceptually impossible, — — cf. the devil of ANTI-scientism — though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it is to occur. Some metaphysician might still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a ‘metaphysical’ system.  This refusal would not be the result of a purist’s mere prejudice. Just because the universal systematised science is stone-age science, it would not be stone-age metaphysics. For even the most general and basic law stone-age physics contains would ultimately depend for its acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment, in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of  say, Bradley’s metaphysical system — who would rather be seen dead than at at a lab — such as a lab doesn’t exist at Oxford! The methods of stone-age physics and a fortiori science, the tests for acceptability of this or that stone-scientific or physical law, remains quite different from the method of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of this or that metaphysical first principle. So we have here a further question. For even though it *is* true that the most general law or axioms of a unified stone-age physics or science would _not_ — never!? Hardly ever — count as metaphysics, it is also true that many a metaphysician has thought it at least a part of his task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of stone-age ohysics or science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how such a meta-physician conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundation and the stone-physical or scientific super-structure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general law of nature. Not every metaphysician explicitly asks himself this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if he has. But there are exceptions. One of them is Kant. Kat thinks that there is a certain principle which has a quite special place in knowledge, in that the principle states the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, is possible.  This principles is not itself a part of stone-age physics or science.  Rather, the principle embodies the conditions of the possibility of stone-age physics of science, and of ordinary every-day knowledge as expressed in ordinary language  too, for that matter. It is an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental idea this principle involves, and what the principle itself is; and also to prove that it has this peculiar character. For this is the only kind of proof of which if was susceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doctrine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositions of stone-age physics or science, and not merely its most general part. And the shortcomings *are* important. Kant's fundamental principle varies greatly in character; and very few metaphysician would agree to-day that it embodies the general presupposition of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Most metaphysician would be today pretty sceptical about the very possibility of establishing any rival principle with just that status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principle which is, in something like Kant's sense, the presupposition, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. This is in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics. The metaphysician exposes the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood or Foucault, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. The metaphysician might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering this or that direction in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Collingwood. There is at least some analogy between Collingwood’s views and those, for example, of Carnap, a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between a question which arises *within* a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and a question which may be on occasion raised about that framework or system. A question of the first sort belongs to the field of some science or of everyday life, and is answered by the methods appropriate to this or that field. A question of the latter sort has traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of a question about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus a meta-physician may have asked whether there really existe such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics are real, and so on. But such a question can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as a metaphysical assertion, as opposed to a metaphysical *decision* — a different, practical  buletic — not alethic — mood! The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding the metaphysician as engaged in a kind of propaganda —- typically at Cambridge  where they take stone-age physics more seriously than we do af Oxford — on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things. At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenth century, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Bishop Berkeley, it is minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume is inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was the individual sense-impression and the image.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God *or* Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, Descartes is a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathematics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science is the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceives of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thinks that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possess are spatial characteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world are also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general is a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is deductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ‘ontology,’ in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognizes just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world are their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real characteristics.  Second, Descartes recognised the mind, at least his own, or a mental substance, of which the essential characteristic is thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, is conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive consequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant, as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such preference. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types, and not *between* them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, is declared by Kant to be ultimately only appearance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not — and cannot — know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality is perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality is of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant is a very ambitious metaphysician, who seeks to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a concern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. When history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers such as Croce, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies. Think Collingwood! Thus the historically-minded metaphysician would search for the true nature of historical explanation and concludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same concept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoures one type of historical explanation, by making it the foundation of his system; and it is this system that Marx turns upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel ard intended to have implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many other different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: a moral conclusion about how we ought to behave is to follow from a metaphysical premise about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinoza provides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and *heightens its prestige*.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but a command, a moral imperative. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if precarious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence are peculiarly his own. He thinks he can demonstrate that reality must exhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of phenomena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality transcendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philosophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that thing exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in which it is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, therefore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which this or that thing presents to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there is a milk bottle on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really is a milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptiveness as the sense-impressions with which we started; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of thing, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to this of that thing, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that any claim to knowledge of the world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the world, for example, would be to maintain that a thing may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experience. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between reality and appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of this or that thing. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up. A very different type of response to the problem is Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about this or that thing incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Transcendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduction. For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and the thing by maintaining that a thing is just a collection or family of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they have suggested that sentences about a thing are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about a thing; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of a transcendental hypothesis, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but IF he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as being the only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures. The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such emphasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is impossible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It may be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganise the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual *revision* which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such a revision is often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity, reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localised disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map — unless he describes it, by analysing with systematic botanic skills  the ways we, at Oxford, talk!  H. P. GriceI am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the *essential* task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine. Some even would go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy! But then *other* philosophers go and think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious. Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification. Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm, on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other. All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account. As it happens, the rather odd *name* of the subject is the ‘tote’ given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle describes the *subject* or topic of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from — and more fundamental than —  any such *special* — and thus less generic — science. With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science. Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use, in common with all the others, of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality. Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being, or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts of, say, existence, or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject-matter of the more departmental studies. This conception of metaphysics, as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf. ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.  We find this conception of theme of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    Granted, some metaphysicians may have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s, concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such. Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says: “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to *know* reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truth, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.” Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study. Bradley’s attempt ‘to *know* reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse. And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle. But, as a true-blooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at this or that presupposition or foundation of science! Some other accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it, at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood. A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox, which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way — in order to make us aware of some hidden difference or some hidden resemblance in this or that thing - a differences or a resemblance hidden by our ordinary way of talking, as we do at Oxford. Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.  Indeed it has been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox. In any case, Wisdom's characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter, is far from obvious. But perhaps a relation *can* be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradox serving to call attention to some usually unnoticed difference or resemblance. For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure to take quite some ‘training’ in Philosophese, before its meaning can be grasped. By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts. The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations! Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the Philosopher’s Paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise any difference between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by an argument to the effect, say, that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since the mind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, indeed it is *clearly* a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly interpreted as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, or of talking about things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics —  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appearance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of the metaphysical enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in the Philosopher’s Paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical. But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive, in so far as there is no element of reality to which the theory does not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory are inter-dependent; that is to say, if the propositions of the theory are not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system, in which, from a limited number of axioms, one derives, as a logical consequence, any remaining proposition of the theory; and it is notable that some rationalist metaphysicians indeed thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It may be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics —- if not Stone-Age Physics — which is certainly systematic enough, may be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though Stone-Age Physics may be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. A Physical law may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way an organism develops, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the physiologist — or the biologist, or even the physician. So we can still regard Stone-Age physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless any particular science is too independent of any other for science as a whole to count as a single system.  But cf. scientism, or the devil of it. Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a distinction between metaphysics and stone-age science. It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences may advance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of physiology or biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent this of that physiological or biological phenomena as obeying this of that law which is only a special case of a law of  physics. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brings certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of a gas as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about a gas. Such a unification and systematisation of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be *logically*, or as I prefer, conceptually impossible, — — cf. the devil of ANTI-scientism — though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it is to occur. Some metaphysician might still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a ‘metaphysical’ system.  This refusal would not be the result of a purist’s mere prejudice. Just because the universal systematised science is stone-age science, it would not be stone-age metaphysics. For even the most general and basic law stone-age physics contains would ultimately depend for its acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment, in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of  say, Bradley’s metaphysical system — who would rather be seen dead than at at a lab — such as a lab doesn’t exist at Oxford! The methods of stone-age physics and a fortiori science, the tests for acceptability of this or that stone-scientific or physical law, remains quite different from the method of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of this or that metaphysical first principle. So we have here a further question. For even though it *is* true that the most general law or axioms of a unified stone-age physics or science would _not_ — never!? Hardly ever — count as metaphysics, it is also true that many a metaphysician has thought it at least a part of his task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of stone-age ohysics or science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how such a meta-physician conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundation and the stone-physical or scientific super-structure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general law of nature. Not every metaphysician explicitly asks himself this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if he has. But there are exceptions. One of them is Kant. Kat thinks that there is a certain principle which has a quite special place in knowledge, in that the principle states the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, is possible.  This principles is not itself a part of stone-age physics or science.  Rather, the principle embodies the conditions of the possibility of stone-age physics of science, and of ordinary every-day knowledge as expressed in ordinary language  too, for that matter. It is an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental idea this principle involves, and what the principle itself is; and also to prove that it has this peculiar character. For this is the only kind of proof of which if was susceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doctrine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositions of stone-age physics or science, and not merely its most general part. And the shortcomings *are* important. Kant's fundamental principle varies greatly in character; and very few metaphysician would agree to-day that it embodies the general presupposition of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Most metaphysician would be today pretty sceptical about the very possibility of establishing any rival principle with just that status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principle which is, in something like Kant's sense, the presupposition, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. This is in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics. The metaphysician exposes the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood or Foucault, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. The metaphysician might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering this or that direction in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Collingwood. There is at least some analogy between Collingwood’s views and those, for example, of Carnap, a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between a question which arises *within* a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and a question which may be on occasion raised about that framework or system. A question of the first sort belongs to the field of some science or of everyday life, and is answered by the methods appropriate to this or that field. A question of the latter sort has traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of a question about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus a meta-physician may have asked whether there really existe such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics are real, and so on. But such a question can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as a metaphysical assertion, as opposed to a metaphysical *decision* — a different, practical  buletic — not alethic — mood! The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding the metaphysician as engaged in a kind of propaganda —- typically at Cambridge  where they take stone-age physics more seriously than we do af Oxford — on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things. At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenth century, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Bishop Berkeley, it is minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume is inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was the individual sense-impression and the image.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God *or* Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, Descartes is a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathematics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science is the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceives of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thinks that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possess are spatial characteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world are also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general is a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is deductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ‘ontology,’ in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognizes just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world are their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real characteristics.  Second, Descartes recognised the mind, at least his own, or a mental substance, of which the essential characteristic is thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, is conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive consequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant, as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such preference. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types, and not *between* them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, is declared by Kant to be ultimately only appearance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not — and cannot — know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality is perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality is of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant is a very ambitious metaphysician, who seeks to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a concern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. When history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers such as Croce, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies. Think Collingwood! Thus the historically-minded metaphysician would search for the true nature of historical explanation and concludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same concept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoures one type of historical explanation, by making it the foundation of his system; and it is this system that Marx turns upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel ard intended to have implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many other different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: a moral conclusion about how we ought to behave is to follow from a metaphysical premise about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinoza provides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and *heightens its prestige*.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but a command, a moral imperative. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if precarious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence are peculiarly his own. He thinks he can demonstrate that reality must exhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of phenomena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality transcendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philosophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that thing exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in which it is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, therefore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which this or that thing presents to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there is a milk bottle on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really is a milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptiveness as the sense-impressions with which we started; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of thing, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to this of that thing, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that any claim to knowledge of the world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the world, for example, would be to maintain that a thing may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experience. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between reality and appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of this or that thing. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up. A very different type of response to the problem is Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about this or that thing incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Transcendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduction. For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and the thing by maintaining that a thing is just a collection or family of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they have suggested that sentences about a thing are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about a thing; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of a transcendental hypothesis, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but IF he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as being the only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures. The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such emphasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is impossible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It may be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganise the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual *revision* which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such a revision is often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity, reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localised disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map — unless he describes it, by analysing with systematic botanic skills  the ways we, at Oxford, talk!  H. P. Grice
Series 1 Correspondence Carton 1 (folders 1-15). Arranged alphabetically according to surname; followed by general correspondence. Series includes correspondence with Baker, Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Folder 1 Bennett  Folder 2 Baker, Folder 3 Bealer Folder 4 Code Folders 5-6 Suppes Folders 7-8 Warner Folder 9 Wyatt 10-12 General to H. P. Grice Folders 13-14 General Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice Series 2 Publications Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates. Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing  Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" Folders 21-23 “Logic and Conversation” Folders 24-26 William James Lectures Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning"  Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" Folders 22-23 "Incontinence" Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" Folders 29-30 “Aspects of Reason” Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" Folder 5 Reprints Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good"  Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Folder 10 “Negation” Folder 11 “Negation” Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Materials Folder 1 Seminar at Cornell Folder 2 Seminar Folder 3 Philosophy Folder 4 Philosophy Folders 5-6 Kant's Ethical Theory Folder 7 Aristotle Ethics Folder 8 Kant Seminar Folder 9 Kant's Ethics Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures Folders 14-15 Philosophy 16-17 “Kant's Ethics” Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Folders 19-21 Kant's Ethics Folder 22 Philosophy Folder 23 Kant Folder Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy Folder 25 Freedom Folder 26 Lectures Undated Folders 27-28 Kant's Ethics Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Folder 30 Modest Mentalism Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Folder 3 "That" Clause Series 4 Associations Carton 6, Folder 4 Entailment Folders 5-6 "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant Folder 7 Causality Folder 8 Transcription of Tape Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes Folder 11 Universals Folder 12 Universals - Partial Working Copy Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences Series 5 Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship  Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Folder 20 Notes Folder 21 Notes 1983 Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Folder 23 Categories Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Folder 26 "On Saying That" Folders 27-28 Descartes Folder 29 Denials of Indicative Conditionals" Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Folders 34-35 Ethics Folder 36 Ethics Folder 37 Festschrift and Notes Folder 38 "Finality" Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Folder 3"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" Folder 4 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated Folder 7 Hume Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity  Folder 10 Identity Folders 11-12 Ifs and Cans Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Folders 14-16 Kant Folder 17 Kant's Ethics Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Folder 19 Language and Reference Folder 20 Language Semantics Folders 21-22 Locke Lectures Folder 23 LogicalForm and Action Sentences Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Folders 26-27 Metaphysics Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Folder 30 Method and Myth Folder 31 Mill’s Induction Folder 32 Actions and Events Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous Folder 2 Metaphysics Folder 3 Oxford Philosophy Folders 4-8 Philosophy Folders 9-13 Philosophy Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Folders 16-17Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Folder 23 Perception Folder 24 Perception Folder 25 Perception Folder 26 “Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Folder 27 “A Pint of Philosophy” Folder 28 “A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Folder 29 Pierce Folder Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Folder 2 Preliminary Valediction Folder  Presupposition and Implicative Folder 4Probability and Life Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Folder 6 Reasons Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Folder 9 Schiffer Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Folder 13 Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics Folder 14 Social Justice Folder 15 “Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Folder 16 Super-Relatives Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Folder 20 Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc Folder 21 Universals Folder 22 Universals Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Folders 25-27 Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated Folder 29 Virtues and Vices Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs H. P. Grice Series 1 Correspondence Carton 1 (folders 1-15). Arranged alphabetically according to surname; followed by general correspondence. Series includes correspondence with Baker, Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Folder 1 Bennett  Folder 2 Baker, Folder 3 Bealer Folder 4 Code Folders 5-6 Suppes Folders 7-8 Warner Folder 9 Wyatt 10-12 General to H. P. Grice Folders 13-14 General Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice Series 2 Publications Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates. Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing  Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" Folders 21-23 “Logic and Conversation” Folders 24-26 William James Lectures Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning"  Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" Folders 22-23 "Incontinence" Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" Folders 29-30 “Aspects of Reason” Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" Folder 5 Reprints Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good"  Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Folder 10 “Negation” Folder 11 “Negation” Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Materials Folder 1 Seminar at Cornell Folder 2 Seminar Folder 3 Philosophy Folder 4 Philosophy Folders 5-6 Kant's Ethical Theory Folder 7 Aristotle Ethics Folder 8 Kant Seminar Folder 9 Kant's Ethics Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures Folders 14-15 Philosophy 16-17 “Kant's Ethics” Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Folders 19-21 Kant's Ethics Folder 22 Philosophy Folder 23 Kant Folder Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy Folder 25 Freedom Folder 26 Lectures Undated Folders 27-28 Kant's Ethics Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Folder 30 Modest Mentalism Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Folder 3 "That" Clause Series 4 Associations Carton 6, Folder 4 Entailment Folders 5-6 "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant Folder 7 Causality Folder 8 Transcription of Tape Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes Folder 11 Universals Folder 12 Universals - Partial Working Copy Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences Series 5 Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship  Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Folder 20 Notes Folder 21 Notes 1983 Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Folder 23 Categories Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Folder 26 "On Saying That" Folders 27-28 Descartes Folder 29 Denials of Indicative Conditionals" Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Folders 34-35 Ethics Folder 36 Ethics Folder 37 Festschrift and Notes Folder 38 "Finality" Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Folder 3"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" Folder 4 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated Folder 7 Hume Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity  Folder 10 Identity Folders 11-12 Ifs and Cans Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Folders 14-16 Kant Folder 17 Kant's Ethics Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Folder 19 Language and Reference Folder 20 Language Semantics Folders 21-22 Locke Lectures Folder 23 LogicalForm and Action Sentences Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Folders 26-27 Metaphysics Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Folder 30 Method and Myth Folder 31 Mill’s Induction Folder 32 Actions and Events Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous Folder 2 Metaphysics Folder 3 Oxford Philosophy Folders 4-8 Philosophy Folders 9-13 Philosophy Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Folders 16-17Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Folder 23 Perception Folder 24 Perception Folder 25 Perception Folder 26 “Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Folder 27 “A Pint of Philosophy” Folder 28 “A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Folder 29 Pierce Folder Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Folder 2 Preliminary Valediction Folder  Presupposition and Implicative Folder 4Probability and Life Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Folder 6 Reasons Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Folder 9 Schiffer Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Folder 13 Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics Folder 14 Social Justice Folder 15 “Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Folder 16 Super-Relatives Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Folder 20 Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc Folder 21 Universals Folder 22 Universals Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Folders 25-27 Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated Folder 29 Virtues and Vices Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs H. P. Grice  TEMPERANZA  I shall approach the topic of incontinence via consideration of Donald Davidson's recent admirable paper, 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' (EAE, pp. 21-42), and we begin by rather baldly summarizing what are for our purposes the salient points of that paper. An incontinent act is, in effect, initially defined as an act done intentionally, an alternative to which is both open to the agent and judged by the agent to be, all things considered, better than the act in question. A primary conceptual difficulty about incontinence is seen as being the inconsistency of a triad consisting of the statement (P3) that there are incontinent acts together with two further principles which state, in effect, (PI) given that a man does either x or y intentionally, preference in wanting (wanting x more than y) is always reflected in preference in intention (intentionally doing x rather than y) and (P2) that preference in wanting always follows preference in evaluative judgement judging x to be better than y) if such preference in evaluative judgement obtains. We have a suspicion that, though he does not say so, Davidson is committed by what seems to be the rationale for accepting these principles, as he does, to accepting also the converses at least of P1, and possibly also of P2; that is to say, to holding not only that if there is preference in wanting there is also preference in intention (if either act is done intentionally) but also that if x is preferred in intention to y then x is also preferred in wanting to y. And similarly, perhaps, not only if there is preference in evaluative judgement there is preference in wanting, but if there is preference in wanting there is preference in evaluative judgement. This suspicion however obviously will need further elaboration and substantiation.  Davidson's solution to this paradox utilizes a suggested analogy between evaluative statements and probability statements to reachand deploy a distinction between conditional and unconditional judgements which, it is contended, makes possible an interpretation of the members of the apparently inconsistent triad on which they are no longer inconsistent; suitably interpreted, all three principles can and should be accepted. More specifically, the man who incon-tinently does y rather than x does indeed judge that x is better than y, but the judgement is the conditional judgement that all things considered, x is better than y; but only an unconditional judgement that x is better than y would require to be reflected first in preference in wanting and second in preference in intention. The incontinent man does not judge unconditionally that x is better than y; indeed, if we interpret Davidson aright, the incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that, all things considered, x is better than y, with the unconditional judgement in line with his preference in intention, namely that y is better than x.  The attachment to the idea of preserving both Pl and P2 is, it seems, rooted in a view about the analysis of the notion of intentional action. The proper analysis of this notion is seen as requiring, in a way to be more fully discussed in a moment, that there should be some interpretation of the expression 'judges x to be better than y' such that such a preferential evaluative judgement should be reflected in an intention formed with respect to doing x or doing y.  Davidson's view of action seems to lead him to maintaining also, though the basis of this contention is less obvious, that if an action is done intentionally then it is done for a reason.  It emerges from Davidson's survey of previous discussion of the subject of incontinence that he considers there to be two themes which are liable to be confused, both of which, if we interpret him aright, are at least to some degree mistaken. To quote him: 'One is, that desire distracts us from the good, or forces us to the bad; the other is that incontinent action always favours the beastly, selfish passion over the call of duty and morality."' As presented, an exem-plification of the second theme would entail an exemplification of the first theme. This logical connection seems to us inessential; the statement of the themes can be recast in such a way as to make them logically distinct. The first theme would be that in incontinence it is always the case that desire or passion makes us act against our better judgement: desire or passion is always the victor over better  • 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?'  *, p. 29.judgement. The second theme would be that in incontinence what our better judgement calls for is always action in line with duty or morality; it is always duty or morality which is the loser. Davidson's example of the man who allegedly acts incontinently by getting out of his comfortable bed in order to remedy his forgetful failure to brush his teeth may be envisaged as a counter to these themes in certainly two, and possibly three, ways.  (1) It is not always the passion which wins, if we can take the reluctance to get out of bed as falling under the heading of desire or passion, because this is the element which loses in this case, thereby invalidating theme one. (2) If duty or morality is involved at all, that is, if we think brushing one's teeth to be a duty, duty or morality is involved not as a loser but as victor. This example may also be used to make the even stronger point that since the call upon me to brush my teeth is not a call of duty or morality but only the call of self-interest, in this case as in Davidson's reference to the man who acts incontinently when concerned to maximize his own pleasure (the allusion to Mill) duty or morality is not involved at all, on either side.  And we might say he might have produced (though he does not), as his example suggests, some cases in which desire or passion are not involved at all. We can imagine a case in which a man is diverted from what he knows to be his duty by what he judges to be in his self-interest. While someone who wished to distinguish wickedness from incontinence might wish to classify such cases as wickedness rather than as incontinence, it is clear that they would fall within the characterization of incontinence given by Davidson himself.  11  The conditional/unconditional distinction stems, as we have already remarked, from an attempt to provide for the logical possibility of incontinence while retaining the two principles Pl and P2, and to do so via a distinction of content between those evaluative judgements which carry with them intention or decision and those which do not. Crucial to this distinction is the analogy which Davidson finds between, on the one hand, probability judgements and those non-practical arguments within which they figure, and, on the other hand, evaluative judgements and the practical arguments in which they figure. The relevant type of probability judgement, for example, 'given that the skies are red this evening, it will probablyrain tomorrow', is seen by Davidson as exemplifying the canonical form pr(m,, p) where 'pr' represents a sentential connective, 'm;' represents a sentence specifying an evidentially relevant considera-tion, and 'p' represents a sentence specifying a state of affairs to which m, is claimed to be relevant. While a procedure is needed to enable us sometimes to infer by detachment from such a probability judgement, together with the premiss that my, to the conclusion that p, unrestricted detachment cannot be allowed since (1) pr(m,, p) and (2) pr(m, and mar -p) may both be true. As Hempel and others have noted, inferences of this type have, therefore, to be subject to a 'principle of total evidence', the proper formulation of which we do not at this point have to discuss, but which would prevent an inference by detachment from (1) when (2) is available. Analog-ously, some evaluative judgements are considered by Davidson as representable by the structure pf(my, a better than b) where  'pf' (pronounced 'prima facie') is a sentential connective which parallels 'pr'  ', and 'a' and 'b' represent possible actions. Inferences  from such conditional value judgements to the corresponding unconditional value judgement that a is better than b are, like their counterparts in the area of probability, and for the same reasons, subject to a principle of total evidence. A special case of a conditional value judgement is, according to Davidson, a judgement of the type 'all things considered, a is better than b', representable by the structure pfe, a better than b) where e represents the total available evidence. Davidson's solution to the problem of incontinence consists in the thesis that the typical incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that pfle, a better than b) with the unconditional judgement that b is better than a. The latter judgement is the one on which the incontinent man acts, and since the type of evaluative judgement which supposedly is in line both with preference in wanting and with intention to act is taken to be the unconditional value judgement, the phenomenon of incontinence is compatible with the principles Pl and P2. We may note here for future reference that on Davidson's account the unconditional judgement, which in the case of the incontinent man is in quasi-  2 Our notation for probability judgements reverses the standard form utilized by Davidson, in that we make the representation of the evidential base precede rather than follow the representation of that to which probability is ostensibly assigned.  We make this change in order to hint at, though not to affirm, the idea that probability and its practical analogue might be treated as attributes of conditional propositions (statements), on some suitable analysis of non-material conditionals.conflict with the 'all things considered' judgement, stems from a consideration which is an element in the set of considerations covered by the phrase 'all things considered', for example, from the thought that to do b would be more pleasant than to do a. Such a consideration is treated as being the incontinent man's reason for doing b and as being the cause of, though not his reason for, the unconditional judgement from which his act proceeds (EAE, p. 41).  While we agree with Davidson about the existence and importance of the analogy between probabilistic and evaluative statements and arguments, we are dubious about certain aspects of Davidson's characterization of it. A discussion of this question however, will not be undertaken on this occasion.3 This issue apart, two modifications of the Davidsonian scheme seem to us to be initially demanded if it is to be advanced as a model for practical reasoning.  The first of these does not seem in any way damaging to the essence of Davidson's treatment of the problem of incontinence, but the second leads us on to some serious objections. There seem to us to be cogent grounds for providing room for evaluative judgements to the effect not just that (1) relative to certain considerations a is better than b, but that (2) relative to certain considerations, a is best.  Given Davidson's conditional/unconditional distinction it looks as if for many, if not all, cases the final conditional evaluative judgement in practical argument should be thought of as being of formrather than form (1), and the same may be true of some of the non-final evaluative judgements contained in such an argument. It is true that in some cases the judgement that a is best is tantamount to the judgement that a is better than b, where b is the most promising alternative to a: but this is not always so. Sometimes we seem to decide that relative to certain evidence a is better than any of a range of alternatives without deciding on any evaluative ordering of the remainder of the range and sometimes even without identifying any of the elements in that remainder. If we are right in supposing that an 'all things considered' judgement would characteristically be of form (2), then clearly the incontinent man must be supposed to reach this type of judgement. It is tempting, but we suspect wrong, to suggest that a judgement to the effect that, relative to ma, a is best is to be represented as a special case of form (L), namely, that given by the schema recognized by Davidson, pf(m j, a is better thanDiscussed in Paul Grice, 'Probability, Desirability, and Modal Operators' (unpublished).-a) (for example, EAE, p. 38). The latter schema unfortunately can be read in either of two ways; as a way of saying that, relative to my, a is good, and as a way of saying that relative to my, a is better than any alternative. These readings are clearly distinct and examples of each of them may occur in practical argument.  Our second modification may have more awkward consequences  for Davidson's account. Davidson wishes 'pf", like 'pr'  • to be  treated as a special sentential connective. While this proposal may be adequate for dealing with many examples of conditional judge-ment, there are some important candidates which raise difficulties.  If judgements expressed by the sentence forms 'all things con-sidered, a is better than b' or 'relative to the available evidence, a is better than b' are to be regarded as instances of conditional judge-ment, as Davidson seems to demand, the proposal will have to be modified. For in the expression of these judgements the relevant considerations are not sententially specified but are referred to by a noun phrase, and in such cases characterization of 'pf", and for that matter of 'pr', as sentential connectives would seemingly flout syntax.  It would be no more legitimate to treat the phrases 'the available evidence' or 'all things considered' (or 'all things') as substituends for a sentential place marker (as 'e' should be to parallel 'm,') in one of Davidson's canonical forms than it would be to treat 'the premisses of your argument' (as distinet from 'The premisses of your argument are true') as a substituend for 'p' in the form 'if p then q'. So if the account of conditional judgement is to be both uniform and capable of accommodating 'all things considered' judgements (interpreted in the manner just suggested), 'pr' and 'pf" will have to be thought of as representing not connectives but relational expressions signitying relations between such entities as sentences, statements, propositions, or judgements, according to philosophical predilection.  These reflections, however, raise a doubt whether we have, after all, correctly interpreted Davidson's notion of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement. Such a judgement might, as we have suggested, be a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, relative to the available evidence, a is better than b', but, alterna-tively, it might be thought of as a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, given that p, and P2... and Pn, a is better than b', where the conjunctive schema 'P2... and Pn,represents a specification of what is, in fact, the available evidence.  If this alternative interpretation should prove sufficient for a Davidsonian solution to the problem of incontinence, its adoption would enable us to preserve the characterization of 'pr' and 'pf" as representing connectives. But is it sufficient for this purpose? The question whether, to discharge its role in Davidson's scheme, an  'all things considered' judgement can be regarded as specifying a set of propositions which in fact constitute the body of evidence, or whether it has to be regarded as referring to such a set of propositions as constituting the body of evidence, is, to our minds, bound up with the further question about the meaning of the expressions 'all things considered' and 'available evidence'. 'All things considered' might mean either 'relative to everything which has so far been considered' or 'relative to everything which should be con-sidered'. Similarly 'the available evidence' might mean 'the evidence of which I have so far availed myself' or 'all the evidence of which I should avail myself'. In each case the natural interpretation seems to us to be the second, but there is some indication (albeit in passages not altogether unambiguous) that Davidson intends the first.  It might be helpful, before we examine possible interpretations of 'all things considered' judgements, to consider what might be the maximal set of stages through which a man might pass in practical deliberation. We offer an expanded sequence of stages which we hope Davidson would not individually reject, although he might wish to claim that not all of them are distinct. As we note below, Davidson might himself argue that stage (7) is not distinct from stage (6), and we will later present as our first interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement one that corresponds to stage (3) (hence, on this interpretation stages (3), (4), and (5) would not be distinct) and as our second interpretation one that corresponds to stage (4) (hence on this interpretation stages (4) and (5) would not be distinct). These stages can be seen as occurring in non-practical deliberation as well, and we have included the non-practical analogues of the evaluative judgements. We may note that the labels are those of philosophical reflection and not the agent's and, most important, that the schema is of a provisional nature and, we think, will be seriously affected by criticisms offered later in this paper.(1) Single specificatory prima-facie (pf) (conditional) judge-ments:  [pf(4,z better than not-z)]  [prob(A,z)]  (2) Non-final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judge-ments:  (pf((A,B), z better than not-z)l  [prob((4, B), z)l  Final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((A,B, C,D), z better than not-z)] (prob((A, B,C, D), z)I when (A,B,C,D) = set of relevant factors before me Summative non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((all things before me), z better than not-z) l [prob((all things before me), z)] Final non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: Ipf(all things considered), z better than not-z)] (prob(all things considered), z)] Unconditional judgement: (z better than not-z) Intention to do z Beliet that z (Note that Davidson might say that (7) is not distinct from (6).)  111  Let us now revert to the actual text of Davidson's paper. There seem to be four interpretations, or varieties of interpretation, of one or other of the phrases 'all things considered' and 'relative to the available evidence' which, in one way or another, need to be considered in connection with Davidson's account of incontinence. We shall argue that the first three both give unnatural accounts of an  'all things considered' judgement and, when incorporated into Davidson's framework, yield unsatisfactory accounts of inconti-nence; while the fourth, though it seems to represent correctly the nature of an 'all things considered' judgement, cannot be fittedinto Davidson's framework without modification to that framework which, we suspect, he would find unwelcome.  1. One possible interpretation, which has already been mentioned, is to take the 'all things considered' judgement as being of the form  'pf, given P,... Po, a is better than b', where Pr... Po are in fact the totality of the propositions which the agent believes to be both true and relevant. While this interpretation preserves Davidson's stipulation that 'pf' be treated as a connective, it fails to represent the incontinent man as thinking of his judgement in favour of a as being relativized to the totality of available evidence. For all that has been said, he might think this only a partial survey of the pieces of evidence which, severally, he has considered, in which case he would not have achieved the kind of judgement that a is better than b which, intuitively, we want to attribute to him.To avoid this difficulty, we might abandon the idea that 'pf' is a connective rather than a relational expression and, in line with what Davidson seems to suggest himself, interpret the 'all things con-sidered' judgement as being of the form 'pf, relative to the totality of propositions, each of which is believed by me to be true and rele-vant, a is better than b', or, to put it more succinctly, 'pf, relative to all that is now before me, a is better than b'. This seems to give one legitimate reading of the expression 'available evidence' (= 'everything I have at present under consideration) but ignores what seems to be a genuine distinction between 'relative to the available evidence' (so understood) and 'all things considered'. It ignores, that is, the possibility that a man, in his deliberation, might regard the evidence at present available to him as inadequate, in which case it would seem inappropriate to suppose him to be ready to make the judgement that 'all things considered, a is better than b' (as 'all things considered' is normally understood), Surely a general account of incontinence should provide for the possibility of this measure of scrupulousness in the deliberations of the man who subsequently acts incontinently.Our third candidate for the interpretation of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement is one which it is pretty evident that Davidson would, quite rightly, reject, but it is worth mentioning in order that it should be clear just why it should be rejected. In pursuit of the proper goal of accommodating a distinction between an *all things considered' judgement and a conditional probability judgement orevaluative judgement which is relativized to the totality of the evidence present before the judger (an 'all things before me' judge-ment), one might seek to understand the idea of an 'all things considered judgement as being the idea of a judgement to the effect that something is probable, or prima facie better than something else, relative to some totality of supporting facts, many of which would in a normal case be unavailable to the judger, at least at the time of judging, and possibly at any time. On this view, a standard piece of fully explicit practical reasoning might be supposed to contain two distinct steps: (a) a step from a (conditional) *all things before me' judgement (together with the reflective judgement that certain qualificatory conditions obtain which license this step) to a (conditional) 'all things considered' judgement, which is relativized to an ideal totality of evidence; and (b) a step from a (conditional)  'all things considered' judgement, so interpreted, to an unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Such a view would be open to two grave objections. First, as Davidson himself points out, if we stock this ideal totality of evidence too generously it will not merely support but will entail the content of the unconditional judgement. If I am investigating prob-abilistically the possibility that it is now raining in Timbuctoo, the relevant ideal totality of evidence should not include either the fact that it is raining in Timbuctoo or the fact that the residents of Tim-buctoo can now see that it is raining. Such a totality of evidence would have to occupy an intermediate position between the evidence before the judger and the totality of all relevant facts of any sort, and it is far from clear that there is any satisfactory characterization of such an intermediate totality. Second, even if the idea of such a totality could be defined, it seems plausible to suppose that at any given stage in the reasoning, a reasoner's best estimate at that stage of what conclusion such an ideal totality of evidence would support wouid have to coincide with the conclusion supported by the evidence, so far as it goes, which is before him at that stage. In so far as the evidence before me supports p, 1 am naturally at this point inclined to believe rather than disbelieve that the totality of evidence will support p. On the view considered, the crucial stage in probabilistic or practical reasoning will not be that at which we become entitled to attach some degree or other of credence to the content of some 'all things considered' judgement, as so interpreted (if we have any evidence at all we are always in that position); it would rather be the stage at which we are entitled,in the light of the judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, actually to judge, as opposed to, say, merely conjecture, that an ideal totality would support a certain conclusion. But now it is not clear what useful function the 'all things considered' judge-ment, so understood, can be supposed to fulfill. For if, as seems to be the case, a rational man will automatically make the second of our two steps once he has made the first, would it not be more economical, and therefore better, to suppose that the combination of an 'all things before me' judgement, together with a judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, directly entities a reasoner to make the appropriate unconditional judgement rather than to suppose it to entitle him to make an 'all things considered' judgement from which he is to be supposed, if rational, to make a further move to an unconditional judgement?  4. The argument of the last paragraph has led us directly to the final possibility to be here considered, namely, that for x to make an'all things considered' judgement that a is better than b is for * to judge that, since he has a certain body of evidence, e, in favour of the supposition that a is better than b, and since certain qualifi-catory conditions are satisfied, it is best for x to (* should, x ought to) make the unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Whether or not this interpretation will succeed in preserving the idea than an 'all things considered' judgement is a special sort of conditional, or prima-facie, judgement is a question which we will discuss in a moment.  The only remaining alternative interpretation, so far as we can see, is one which although it might perhaps be thought to give a better representation of the meaning of the phrase 'all things considered' would certainly not preserve the conditional, or prima-facie, character of the 'all things considered' judgement. One might treat the statement that, all things considered, a is better than b, as expressing the judgement that a is better than b, with the gloss that this judgement is justified in the light of one's possession of a favourable body of evidence with respect to which the qualificatory conditions obtain; but since on this interpretation an 'all things considered' judgement would plainly involve the unconditional judgement that a is better than b, just as part of what would be expressed by saying  'Demonstrably, p' would be the judgement that p, no room would be left for the idea that an 'all things considered' judgement is a conditional judgement.  The crucial question to be considered is whether, if we interpret an'all things considered' judgement in what seems to us the most plausible way which does not represent it as patently involving a commitment to an unconditional evaluative judgement, we are still entitled to classify it as a conditional, or prima-facie, judgement.  Let us assume that we can facilitate exposition without introducing any relevant change in substance if we express a standard prima-facie evaluative judgement by the sentence form 'given that p. x should (ought to) do A'; the shift from 'a is better than b' to 'x should do A' seems for present purposes immaterial, and it is to be understood that the form we propose is not to be taken as entailing that p. To incorporate a commitment to the truth of p, the pattern might be varied to 'given the fact that p. x should do A'. In an attempt to assimilate an 'all things considered' judgement as closely as possible to this standard pattern, we might suppose its expansion to be of the general form 'given the fact that p. certain things are the case such that, given that they are the case, x should do A, and given the fact that certain qualificatory conditions are met, x should judge that x should do A'. The qualificatory conditions in question need not here be accurately specified; their effect would be to stipulate that 'the principle of total evidence' was satisfied, that, for example, x's judgement that, given certain facts, x should do A, had taken into account all the relevant facts in x's possession and that x had fulfilled whatever call there was upon him at the time in question to maximize his possession of relevant facts. Let us summarily express the idea that these qualificatory ,conditions are fulfilled by using the form 'x's judgement that, given the facts in question, & should do A, is optimal for x at the time in question'. Our question, then, is whether a judgement on the part of x expressible in the form, 'given the fact that  given certain facts, x should do A, and x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x, then & should judge that & should do A' is properly classifiable as a conditional or prima-facie judgement.  To put the matter more shortly, but less precisely, the kind of judgement whose status is in question is one such as 'given the fact that on my evidence I should do A, and that my judgement that this is so is optimal, I should judge that I should do A'. (Let us call a specially interpreted 'all things considered' judgement of this form ATC*.)The question we have to ask, then, is whether ATC* is properly classified as a conditional, rather than an unconditional, judge-ment. On one possible interpretation of conditional judgement it clearly has strong claims, inasmuch as it would be possible to replace, in its standard expression, the opening phrase given the fact that' by the word 'if' without any violence to the normal usage of 'if', and the resulting conditional sentence would express one part of the sense of the ATC* judgement, the other part being what would be expressed by the antecedent of this conditional sentence.  The ATC* judgement would then seem to be conditional in very much the same way as one might regard a judgement of the form  'since p, q' our conditional, on the grounds that its sense includes the sense of 'if p, g'. This sense of 'conditional' is plainly not that which we need in the present context. The sense which we need is one which carries with it the idea of being prima-facie in character, of being connected in some way with defeasibility. In an attempt to show that ATC* is not conditional in this further sense, let us characterize the sense more precisely.  Let 'p,' abbreviate 'x has told y that x will consider lending y $100  towards the purchase of a new car':  Let 'P,' abbreviate 'y is hard up and needs a car for work';  Let'p,' abbreviate 'y's spouse only too often gets hold of y's money';  Let 'q' abbreviate 'x should lend y $100'; and Let 'q" abbreviate 'x should not lend y $100'.  The judgement that 'given p, & Pz, @' is clearly prima facie in that the related argument form  Given p,& p2,9  P1&p2  q  is plainly defeasible, insofar as the addition of the premisses that p and that, given P1, Pr & Pa, q' to the premisses above gives us, without falsifying thereby p, or pz, a set of premisses from which it would be illegitimate to conclude that q. All of this is, of course, familiar. For purposes of comparison with ATC*, it is important to note that the argument just characterized as defeasible could have been expressed in a telescoped form, viz.  • The relevant interpretation of 'if' may, of course, not be any of those standardly selected by logicians or philosophers of logic.Given the fact that p, & pa, 9  q  Here too the inferential step will be upset without falsification of its premiss if we suppose x also to have judged that, given the fact that Pa, Pa, & Pa, Q. Let us as a first stage in examining the status of ATC make use of the notion of a specification of an ATC* judge-ment, that is, a judgement which differs from ATC* in that the relevant considerations are identified and not merely alluded to (Spec (ATC*)). The Spec (ATC*) appropriate for the present example will be X's judgement at / that given the fact that  given the fact that p, & Pz, 9; and that at t, x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x; then x should judge at t that q. That a step by x from this judgement to the detached conclusion that q would not be a step which is defeasible in the required sense is shown by the fact that if, at t, x had made the additional judgement  'given the fact that p, & p,& pa, q"', his making this judgement would have entailed that his judgement 'given the fact that p, & Pa, q' was not optimal for x at t. In this case he would not have been in a position to make the step from Spec (ATC*) to q, but this would be because a judgement by him in favour of Spec (ATC*) would, given the supposed additional judgement, be falsified. We do not, then, have the characteristic case of a defeasible inference in which the inference may be upset without falsification of any of its pre-misses. Since the truth or falsity of the claim that x's judgement about a certain body of evidence is optimal cannot depend on whether, in the claim in question, the body of evidence is itemized or merely referred to, if the step from Spec (ATC*) to q is not of the defeasible kind, then the step from ATCe to q is not of the defeasible kind either. It in fact seems to us that, though there is an. important difference between the two cases residing in the fact that in the first case, but not in the second, the legitimacy of the inference is relative to a particular subject at a particular time, the irrationality of refusing to move from the appropriate ATC* judgement to q will be the same in kind as the irrationality involved in refusing to move (as, perhaps, Lewis Carroll's tortoise did) from 'given the fact that pand that if p, q'to 'q'; and furthermore, that the irrationality inquestion is not of a kind that either we or Davidson would wish to attribute to the typical incontinent man.  If the above argument is correct, to preserve as much as possible of Davidson's theses we should have to suppose that the typical incontinent man judges (unconditionally) that he should judge that he should do A, but does not actually judge that he should do A. If we try to take this position, we are at once faced with the following awkward questions: the position, like what we may call the 'naïve' view of incontinence, involves the supposition that for a certain substituend for @ it is true of a typical incontinent man that he judges that he should o but does not ; it differs from the 'naive' view in taking as the favoured substituend for o 'x judges that x should do a', rather than 'x does a'. Why should this departure from the 'naive' view be thought to give a better account of incon-tinence? On the face of it, the 'naïve' view scems superior. It seems casier to attribute to people a failure to act as they fully believe they ought to act than to attribute to them a failure to believe what they fully believe they ought to believe. What is there to prevent a man from judging that he should do a, when he judges that he should judge that he should do a, except his disinclination to do a, and would it not be more natural to suppose that this disinclination prevents his judgement that he should do a from being followed by his doing a than to suppose that it prevents his judgement that he should judge that he should do a from being followed by his judgement that he should do a?  So far as we can see, the only motivation for disallowing the possibility of incontinence with respect to action, as most straightforwardly conceived, while allowing the possibility of the realization of a similarly straightforward conception of incontinence of belief or judgement, lies in the supposed theoretical attractiveness of the equation of a decision or intention on the part of x to do a with a judgement on the part of x that x should do a or that it is best for x to do a. To examine the case for this theoretical idea would take us beyond the limits of the paper. But before concluding our discussion we shall mention one or two considerations which seem to tell against the account of incontinence which has just been formulated.  The actual logical situation is even more complex than we have represented it is being; but present complexities are perhaps sufficient for present purposes.For the purposes of this discussion, we should think of the incontinent man as being just a special case of someone who  is faced with a practical problem about what to do; envisages himself as settling the problem by settling what it is best for him to do (what he should do); and envisages himself as settling what it is best for him to do by deliberation. He is a special case in that his deliberation is defective in one or other of a number of special ways. There may be occasions in which one decides, or forms the intention, to do something without reference to the question what it is best to do, though some philo-sophers, who may include Davidson, have been disposed to deny this possibility. There may also be occasions in which one settles on something being the best thing to do, without any recourse to delib-eration, by an immediate or snap judgement. Both of these possible routes to the resolution of a practical problem may, perhaps, in certain circumstances involve incontinence, but it would not be the variety with which we and Davidson are primarily concerned. Any one who, in consequence of satisfying the three conditions speci-fied, has recourse to deliberation in the settlement of a practical problem, whether or not he ends up by exhibiting incontinence, engages in an undertaking which is generically similar to other kinds of undertaking in that there is a specifiable outcome or completion towards which the undertaking is directed. One who is engaged in fixing the supper, whether or not as a result of prior decision, completes his operations when he reaches his objective of having the supper ready, and if he breaks off his opcrations before completing it, some explanation is required. Similarly, one who deliberates in the face of a practical problem completes his operations when he reaches the objective of having settled what is unconditionally the best thing for him to do, and again, if he fails to complete the operation some explanation is required.  We must first distinguish a failure to complete deliberation from a miscompletion; for the present discussion a failure to complete due to interruption seems irrelevant. What we need to consider are the various ways in which a man may miscomplete deliberation; and here, it seems, attraction or revulsion, rather than externalsources which interrupt deliberation, are in play. Now there are forms of miscompletion which will present us with cases of incontinence which are net of the type with which we, and Davidson, are concerned; a man may see a number of initial considerations, all or some of which are favourabie to a, and because of the attractions of a or his reluctance to deliberate, seize on one of these considerations and jump to the unconditional conclusion that he ought to  a. This is not Davidson's case. Again, a man might deliberate and reach an 'all things before me' judgement which represents the totality of his evidence at that stage, though it is inadequate since more considerations are demanded. He jumps to a judgement that he ought to a, in line with the latest 'all things before me' judgement; this is not Davidson's case either, since here the relevant conditional judgement and the unconditional judgement are both favourable to doing a. This leaves us with the possibility of a man jumping to an unconditional judgement in favour of a at a point at which the relevant 'all things before him' judgement is in favour of something other than a. We shall discuss this possibility with some care since, in spite of the fact that if taken as a characterization of typical incontinence it is open to an objection which we briefly advanced earlier (pp. 34-5), we are not absolutely certain that it does not represent Davidson's view of the incontinent man.  Obviously, there is in general no conceptual difficulty attaching to the idea of someone who is in the midst of some undertaking and who, as a result of revulsion, tedium, or the appeal of some alter-native, breaks off what he is doing and instead embarks on some other undertaking or action. The miscompletion of deliberation which concerns us will, however, constitute a special case of this kind of phenomenon, in that the substituted performance has to be regarded as one with the same objective as the original undertaking, namely, finding the best thing to do. Again, there is no lack of examples which satisfy this more restrictive condition; one may break off one's own efforts to get one's car running and, instead, send for a mechanic to get the job done. But even this restriction is not restrictive enough in view of the special character of the objective involved in deliberation. While there are alternative routes to realizing the objective of getting one's car going besides working on it oneself, it is not clear that there are alternative routes to settling what is the best thing to do besides deliberating; or that if there are (for example, asking some one else's advice), they are at all germaneto the phenomenon of incontinence. One who arrives at a holiday resort and embarks on the undertaking of finding the best hotel to stay in may tire of his search and decide to register at the next presentable hotel that he encounters, but in doing so he can hardly regard himself as having adopted an alternative method of finding the best hotel to stay in. In fact, to provide a full parallel for cases of incontinence, if these are conceived of as cases of making an unconditional evaluation in a direction opposed to that of a current  'all things before me' judgement, the examples would have to be even more bizarre than that just offered. One would rather have to imagine someone who, with a view to winning a prize at a party later in the day, sets out to find and to buy the largest pumpkin on sale in any store in his neighbourhood. After inspecting the pumpkins at three of the local stores, he tires of his enterprise and decides to buy the largest pumpkin in the fourth store, which he is now inves-tigating, even though he knows that the evidence so far before him gives preference to the largest pumpkin at store number two, which is, of course, larger than the one he proposes to buy. It is obvious that such a man cannot regard himself as having adopted an alternative way to finding the largest pumpkin on sale. This elaboration is required since, on the scheme presently being considered, the incontinent man may typically substitute, for the continuation of deliberation, the formation of an intention to do b, to which he is prompted by its prospective pleasantness, in spite of the fact, of which he is aware, that the considerations so far taken into account (which include the prospective pleasantness of b) so far as they go favour a. The outcome of these attempts to find parallels suggests forcibly that it is logically impossible that one should without extreme logical incoherence make an unconditional judgement favour-ing b when one is fully conscious of the thought that the totality of evidence so far considered favours a, unless one thinks (reasonably or unreasonably) that the addition of further evidence, so far un-identified, would tilt the balance in favour of b. This last possibility must be regarded as irrelevant to our discussion of incontinence, since it is not a feature of the kind of incontinence with which we are concerned, if indeed of any kind of incontinence, that the incontinent man should think that further investigation and reflection would, or would have, justified the action which the incontinent man performs. We are then left with the conclusion that to suppose someone to make an unconditional judgement in a direction op-  posed to an 'all things before me' judgement, we must also suppose the latter jugdement not to be 'fully present' to the judger, on some suitable interpretation of that phrase. We can support this point directly without having to rely on analogies with other forms of undertaking. Mr and Mrs John Q. Citizen have decided they want a dog and are engaged in trying to settle what would be the best breed of dog for them to acquire. This enterprise involves them in such activities as perusing books about dogs, consulting friends, and reminding themselves of pertinent aspects of their own experience of dogs. At a certain point, not one at which they regard their deliberations as concluded, it looks to them as if the data they have so far collected favour the selection of a short-haired terrier, though there is something also to be said for a spaniel or a dachshund. At this point, Mrs Citizen says, 'My aunt's spaniel, Rusty, was such a lovely dog. Let's get a spaniel', and her husband says, 'All right.' This story arouses no conceptual stir. But suppose that (1) Mrs Citizen, instead of saying 'Let's get a spaniel' had said 'A spaniel's the best dog to get'  ', and that (2) previously in their deliberation  they had noted the endearing qualities of Rusty, but in spite of that had come to lean towards a short-haired terrier. The story, thus altered, will conform to the alleged course of the incontinent man's reflections; at a certain point it appears to him that the claims of prospective pleasure are, or are being, outweighed, but nevertheless he judges that the pleasant thing is the best thing for him to do and acts on the judgement. But in the altered story the judgement of Mr and Mrs Citizen that a spaniel is the best dog for them to buy, to which they are prompted by a consideration which has already been discounted in their deliberations, scems to us quite incredible, unless we suppose that they have somehow lost sight of the previous course of their deliberations. (The further possibility that they suddenly and irrationally changed their assessment of the evidence so far before them, even if allowable, will not exemplify the idea that there is some sense in which the incontinent man thinks that what he is doing is something which he should not be doing.)  The conceptual difficulty is hardly lessened if we suppose the example of Rusty to be a new consideration instead of one already discounted. The couple could not move from it to the judgement that a spaniel is best without weighing it in the balance together with the body of data which, so far as it goes, they have deemed to point towards a short-haired terrier in preference to a spaniel,unless again they had somehow lost sight of the course of their deliberation.  If, as we have been arguing, an unconditional judgement against a can be combined with an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a only if the latter judgement is not fully present to the judger, a precisely parallel conclusion will hold with respect to an  'all things considered' judgement (ATC*), since an ATC* judgement consists of an 'all things before me' judgement together with an 'optimality" judgement about it. Unless it should turn out to be otherwise logically indefensible, it would be preferable, as being more in accord with common sence, to attribute to the typical incontinent man (as we have been supposing Davidson to do) not merely an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a but also an ATC judgement in favour of a, with the additional proviso that the ATC* judgement is not fully present. On the face of it, this would not involve the attribution to the incontinent man of an unconditional judgement in favour of a, and so we leave room for an unconditional judgement, and so for an intention, against a.  Unfortunately, as has been partially foreshadowed by our discussion of the question whether an ATC* judgement is a conditional judgement, the position just outlined is, in our view, logically inde-fensible, as we shall now attempt to show.  We attach different numerical subscripts to particular occurences of the word 'justify' in order to leave open the possibility, without committing ourselves to its realization, that the sense of 'justify" varies in these occurrences; and we attach subscripts to the word  'optimality' in order to refer to some formulation (or reformula-tion) of the optimality condition previously sketched by us on page 38 which would be appropriate to whatever sense of 'justified' is distinguished by the subscript.  Let us suppose that:  (I) * judges at / that  (1) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimality,, justifies, x's doing a.  Unless we attribute to x extreme logical confusion or blindness, the supposition (I) seems tantamount to the supposition that:  (1l) x judges at / that  (2) x should do a.It seems, however, that we are merely reformulating the supposition already expressed by (I) if we suppose that:  (IlI) * judges at r that  (3) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimalitya, justifies, x's judging at t that x should do a.  Again, as in the case of supposition (Il), supposition (III) seems tantamount to supposition (IV):  (IV) x judges at !  (4) x should judge at t that x should do a.  This argument seems to us to establish the conclusion that, extreme logical confusion apart, one judges on what seems to one an adequate basis that one should judge that one should do a if and only if one judges on the same basis that one should do a. That is to say, any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as also a case of believing that one's belief that one should do a is a belief which one should hold: and any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should believe that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as a case of believing that one should do a. If this conclusion is correct it seems that we have excluded the possibility of finding a reasonable interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement that one should do a which would be distinct from, and would not involve, an unconditional judgement that one should do a.  We are left then with the conclusion that to attribute to the incontinent man an ATC* judgement in favour of a is, in effect, to attribute to him an unconditional judgement in favour of a; and so, presumably, to attribute to him a not fully present ATC® judgement in favour of a is to attribute to him a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a. If this is so, then there seem to be initially the following options:  1. To hold that an incontinent act, though voluntary, is not inten-tional: on this assumption we are free to hold, if we wish, both (i) that forming an intention to do a is identifiable with making a fullypresent unconditional judgement in favour of a, and (ii) that a not fully present judgement in favour of a is incompatible with a fully present unconditional judgement against a (more generally, patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible, even if one or both are not fully present to the judger). To adopt this option would seem heroic.  2. To allow that the incontinent man, at least sometimes, acts with an intention; in which case it must be allowed either that (i) patently conflicting unconditional value judgements are compossible, provided that at least one of them is not fully present to the judger; or that (ii) an intention to do a is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a; the most that could be maintained would be that making a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a entails forming an intention to do a or, altenatively and less strongly, is incompatible with having an intention to do b, where b patently conflicts with a.  The upshot of these considerations with respect to the search for an adequate theory of incontinence seems to be that the following contending theses remain in the field, though some of them, particularly the first, may not appear very strong contenders:  The typical incontinent man (who does not do a though in some sense he thinks that he should) reaches only a not fully present 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement against a, and (conse-quentially) with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that intention is identifiable with fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances. The typical incontinent man reaches a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement, and an intention, against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that an intention is identifi. able with a fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are compossible provided that at least one of them is not fully present.  3. The typical incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a, but not with a fully present unconditional judgementagainst a. Together with this thesis go the theses that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances and that an intention is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement, though it is perhaps true that a fully present unconditional judgement entails the presence of an intention (or at least excludes the presence of a contrary intention).  4. The 'naïve' view: the incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that the existence of a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a carries no implications with regard to the presence or absence of an intention to do a or, again, to do something which patently conflicts with a. The 'naive' view is uncommitted at this point with respect to the compossibility of patently conflicting unconditional value judgements.  A proper decision between these contending theses will clearly depend on the provision of a proper interpretation of the expression 'fully present', used by us a dummy, an undertaking which in turn will require a detailed examination of the phenomena of incontinence. These are matters which lie beyond the scope of this paper. H. P. Grice TEMPERANZA  I shall approach the topic of incontinence via consideration of Donald Davidson's recent admirable paper, 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' (EAE, pp. 21-42), and we begin by rather baldly summarizing what are for our purposes the salient points of that paper. An incontinent act is, in effect, initially defined as an act done intentionally, an alternative to which is both open to the agent and judged by the agent to be, all things considered, better than the act in question. A primary conceptual difficulty about incontinence is seen as being the inconsistency of a triad consisting of the statement (P3) that there are incontinent acts together with two further principles which state, in effect, (PI) given that a man does either x or y intentionally, preference in wanting (wanting x more than y) is always reflected in preference in intention (intentionally doing x rather than y) and (P2) that preference in wanting always follows preference in evaluative judgement judging x to be better than y) if such preference in evaluative judgement obtains. We have a suspicion that, though he does not say so, Davidson is committed by what seems to be the rationale for accepting these principles, as he does, to accepting also the converses at least of P1, and possibly also of P2; that is to say, to holding not only that if there is preference in wanting there is also preference in intention (if either act is done intentionally) but also that if x is preferred in intention to y then x is also preferred in wanting to y. And similarly, perhaps, not only if there is preference in evaluative judgement there is preference in wanting, but if there is preference in wanting there is preference in evaluative judgement. This suspicion however obviously will need further elaboration and substantiation.  Davidson's solution to this paradox utilizes a suggested analogy between evaluative statements and probability statements to reachand deploy a distinction between conditional and unconditional judgements which, it is contended, makes possible an interpretation of the members of the apparently inconsistent triad on which they are no longer inconsistent; suitably interpreted, all three principles can and should be accepted. More specifically, the man who incon-tinently does y rather than x does indeed judge that x is better than y, but the judgement is the conditional judgement that all things considered, x is better than y; but only an unconditional judgement that x is better than y would require to be reflected first in preference in wanting and second in preference in intention. The incontinent man does not judge unconditionally that x is better than y; indeed, if we interpret Davidson aright, the incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that, all things considered, x is better than y, with the unconditional judgement in line with his preference in intention, namely that y is better than x.  The attachment to the idea of preserving both Pl and P2 is, it seems, rooted in a view about the analysis of the notion of intentional action. The proper analysis of this notion is seen as requiring, in a way to be more fully discussed in a moment, that there should be some interpretation of the expression 'judges x to be better than y' such that such a preferential evaluative judgement should be reflected in an intention formed with respect to doing x or doing y.  Davidson's view of action seems to lead him to maintaining also, though the basis of this contention is less obvious, that if an action is done intentionally then it is done for a reason.  It emerges from Davidson's survey of previous discussion of the subject of incontinence that he considers there to be two themes which are liable to be confused, both of which, if we interpret him aright, are at least to some degree mistaken. To quote him: 'One is, that desire distracts us from the good, or forces us to the bad; the other is that incontinent action always favours the beastly, selfish passion over the call of duty and morality."' As presented, an exem-plification of the second theme would entail an exemplification of the first theme. This logical connection seems to us inessential; the statement of the themes can be recast in such a way as to make them logically distinct. The first theme would be that in incontinence it is always the case that desire or passion makes us act against our better judgement: desire or passion is always the victor over better  • 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?'  *, p. 29.judgement. The second theme would be that in incontinence what our better judgement calls for is always action in line with duty or morality; it is always duty or morality which is the loser. Davidson's example of the man who allegedly acts incontinently by getting out of his comfortable bed in order to remedy his forgetful failure to brush his teeth may be envisaged as a counter to these themes in certainly two, and possibly three, ways.  (1) It is not always the passion which wins, if we can take the reluctance to get out of bed as falling under the heading of desire or passion, because this is the element which loses in this case, thereby invalidating theme one. (2) If duty or morality is involved at all, that is, if we think brushing one's teeth to be a duty, duty or morality is involved not as a loser but as victor. This example may also be used to make the even stronger point that since the call upon me to brush my teeth is not a call of duty or morality but only the call of self-interest, in this case as in Davidson's reference to the man who acts incontinently when concerned to maximize his own pleasure (the allusion to Mill) duty or morality is not involved at all, on either side.  And we might say he might have produced (though he does not), as his example suggests, some cases in which desire or passion are not involved at all. We can imagine a case in which a man is diverted from what he knows to be his duty by what he judges to be in his self-interest. While someone who wished to distinguish wickedness from incontinence might wish to classify such cases as wickedness rather than as incontinence, it is clear that they would fall within the characterization of incontinence given by Davidson himself.  11  The conditional/unconditional distinction stems, as we have already remarked, from an attempt to provide for the logical possibility of incontinence while retaining the two principles Pl and P2, and to do so via a distinction of content between those evaluative judgements which carry with them intention or decision and those which do not. Crucial to this distinction is the analogy which Davidson finds between, on the one hand, probability judgements and those non-practical arguments within which they figure, and, on the other hand, evaluative judgements and the practical arguments in which they figure. The relevant type of probability judgement, for example, 'given that the skies are red this evening, it will probablyrain tomorrow', is seen by Davidson as exemplifying the canonical form pr(m,, p) where 'pr' represents a sentential connective, 'm;' represents a sentence specifying an evidentially relevant considera-tion, and 'p' represents a sentence specifying a state of affairs to which m, is claimed to be relevant. While a procedure is needed to enable us sometimes to infer by detachment from such a probability judgement, together with the premiss that my, to the conclusion that p, unrestricted detachment cannot be allowed since (1) pr(m,, p) and (2) pr(m, and mar -p) may both be true. As Hempel and others have noted, inferences of this type have, therefore, to be subject to a 'principle of total evidence', the proper formulation of which we do not at this point have to discuss, but which would prevent an inference by detachment from (1) when (2) is available. Analog-ously, some evaluative judgements are considered by Davidson as representable by the structure pf(my, a better than b) where  'pf' (pronounced 'prima facie') is a sentential connective which parallels 'pr'  ', and 'a' and 'b' represent possible actions. Inferences  from such conditional value judgements to the corresponding unconditional value judgement that a is better than b are, like their counterparts in the area of probability, and for the same reasons, subject to a principle of total evidence. A special case of a conditional value judgement is, according to Davidson, a judgement of the type 'all things considered, a is better than b', representable by the structure pfe, a better than b) where e represents the total available evidence. Davidson's solution to the problem of incontinence consists in the thesis that the typical incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that pfle, a better than b) with the unconditional judgement that b is better than a. The latter judgement is the one on which the incontinent man acts, and since the type of evaluative judgement which supposedly is in line both with preference in wanting and with intention to act is taken to be the unconditional value judgement, the phenomenon of incontinence is compatible with the principles Pl and P2. We may note here for future reference that on Davidson's account the unconditional judgement, which in the case of the incontinent man is in quasi-  2 Our notation for probability judgements reverses the standard form utilized by Davidson, in that we make the representation of the evidential base precede rather than follow the representation of that to which probability is ostensibly assigned.  We make this change in order to hint at, though not to affirm, the idea that probability and its practical analogue might be treated as attributes of conditional propositions (statements), on some suitable analysis of non-material conditionals.conflict with the 'all things considered' judgement, stems from a consideration which is an element in the set of considerations covered by the phrase 'all things considered', for example, from the thought that to do b would be more pleasant than to do a. Such a consideration is treated as being the incontinent man's reason for doing b and as being the cause of, though not his reason for, the unconditional judgement from which his act proceeds (EAE, p. 41).  While we agree with Davidson about the existence and importance of the analogy between probabilistic and evaluative statements and arguments, we are dubious about certain aspects of Davidson's characterization of it. A discussion of this question however, will not be undertaken on this occasion.3 This issue apart, two modifications of the Davidsonian scheme seem to us to be initially demanded if it is to be advanced as a model for practical reasoning.  The first of these does not seem in any way damaging to the essence of Davidson's treatment of the problem of incontinence, but the second leads us on to some serious objections. There seem to us to be cogent grounds for providing room for evaluative judgements to the effect not just that (1) relative to certain considerations a is better than b, but that (2) relative to certain considerations, a is best.  Given Davidson's conditional/unconditional distinction it looks as if for many, if not all, cases the final conditional evaluative judgement in practical argument should be thought of as being of formrather than form (1), and the same may be true of some of the non-final evaluative judgements contained in such an argument. It is true that in some cases the judgement that a is best is tantamount to the judgement that a is better than b, where b is the most promising alternative to a: but this is not always so. Sometimes we seem to decide that relative to certain evidence a is better than any of a range of alternatives without deciding on any evaluative ordering of the remainder of the range and sometimes even without identifying any of the elements in that remainder. If we are right in supposing that an 'all things considered' judgement would characteristically be of form (2), then clearly the incontinent man must be supposed to reach this type of judgement. It is tempting, but we suspect wrong, to suggest that a judgement to the effect that, relative to ma, a is best is to be represented as a special case of form (L), namely, that given by the schema recognized by Davidson, pf(m j, a is better thanDiscussed in Paul Grice, 'Probability, Desirability, and Modal Operators' (unpublished).-a) (for example, EAE, p. 38). The latter schema unfortunately can be read in either of two ways; as a way of saying that, relative to my, a is good, and as a way of saying that relative to my, a is better than any alternative. These readings are clearly distinct and examples of each of them may occur in practical argument.  Our second modification may have more awkward consequences  for Davidson's account. Davidson wishes 'pf", like 'pr'  • to be  treated as a special sentential connective. While this proposal may be adequate for dealing with many examples of conditional judge-ment, there are some important candidates which raise difficulties.  If judgements expressed by the sentence forms 'all things con-sidered, a is better than b' or 'relative to the available evidence, a is better than b' are to be regarded as instances of conditional judge-ment, as Davidson seems to demand, the proposal will have to be modified. For in the expression of these judgements the relevant considerations are not sententially specified but are referred to by a noun phrase, and in such cases characterization of 'pf", and for that matter of 'pr', as sentential connectives would seemingly flout syntax.  It would be no more legitimate to treat the phrases 'the available evidence' or 'all things considered' (or 'all things') as substituends for a sentential place marker (as 'e' should be to parallel 'm,') in one of Davidson's canonical forms than it would be to treat 'the premisses of your argument' (as distinet from 'The premisses of your argument are true') as a substituend for 'p' in the form 'if p then q'. So if the account of conditional judgement is to be both uniform and capable of accommodating 'all things considered' judgements (interpreted in the manner just suggested), 'pr' and 'pf" will have to be thought of as representing not connectives but relational expressions signitying relations between such entities as sentences, statements, propositions, or judgements, according to philosophical predilection.  These reflections, however, raise a doubt whether we have, after all, correctly interpreted Davidson's notion of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement. Such a judgement might, as we have suggested, be a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, relative to the available evidence, a is better than b', but, alterna-tively, it might be thought of as a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, given that p, and P2... and Pn, a is better than b', where the conjunctive schema 'P2... and Pn,represents a specification of what is, in fact, the available evidence.  If this alternative interpretation should prove sufficient for a Davidsonian solution to the problem of incontinence, its adoption would enable us to preserve the characterization of 'pr' and 'pf" as representing connectives. But is it sufficient for this purpose? The question whether, to discharge its role in Davidson's scheme, an  'all things considered' judgement can be regarded as specifying a set of propositions which in fact constitute the body of evidence, or whether it has to be regarded as referring to such a set of propositions as constituting the body of evidence, is, to our minds, bound up with the further question about the meaning of the expressions 'all things considered' and 'available evidence'. 'All things considered' might mean either 'relative to everything which has so far been considered' or 'relative to everything which should be con-sidered'. Similarly 'the available evidence' might mean 'the evidence of which I have so far availed myself' or 'all the evidence of which I should avail myself'. In each case the natural interpretation seems to us to be the second, but there is some indication (albeit in passages not altogether unambiguous) that Davidson intends the first.  It might be helpful, before we examine possible interpretations of 'all things considered' judgements, to consider what might be the maximal set of stages through which a man might pass in practical deliberation. We offer an expanded sequence of stages which we hope Davidson would not individually reject, although he might wish to claim that not all of them are distinct. As we note below, Davidson might himself argue that stage (7) is not distinct from stage (6), and we will later present as our first interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement one that corresponds to stage (3) (hence, on this interpretation stages (3), (4), and (5) would not be distinct) and as our second interpretation one that corresponds to stage (4) (hence on this interpretation stages (4) and (5) would not be distinct). These stages can be seen as occurring in non-practical deliberation as well, and we have included the non-practical analogues of the evaluative judgements. We may note that the labels are those of philosophical reflection and not the agent's and, most important, that the schema is of a provisional nature and, we think, will be seriously affected by criticisms offered later in this paper.(1) Single specificatory prima-facie (pf) (conditional) judge-ments:  [pf(4,z better than not-z)]  [prob(A,z)]  (2) Non-final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judge-ments:  (pf((A,B), z better than not-z)l  [prob((4, B), z)l  Final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((A,B, C,D), z better than not-z)] (prob((A, B,C, D), z)I when (A,B,C,D) = set of relevant factors before me Summative non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((all things before me), z better than not-z) l [prob((all things before me), z)] Final non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: Ipf(all things considered), z better than not-z)] (prob(all things considered), z)] Unconditional judgement: (z better than not-z) Intention to do z Beliet that z (Note that Davidson might say that (7) is not distinct from (6).)  111  Let us now revert to the actual text of Davidson's paper. There seem to be four interpretations, or varieties of interpretation, of one or other of the phrases 'all things considered' and 'relative to the available evidence' which, in one way or another, need to be considered in connection with Davidson's account of incontinence. We shall argue that the first three both give unnatural accounts of an  'all things considered' judgement and, when incorporated into Davidson's framework, yield unsatisfactory accounts of inconti-nence; while the fourth, though it seems to represent correctly the nature of an 'all things considered' judgement, cannot be fittedinto Davidson's framework without modification to that framework which, we suspect, he would find unwelcome.  1. One possible interpretation, which has already been mentioned, is to take the 'all things considered' judgement as being of the form  'pf, given P,... Po, a is better than b', where Pr... Po are in fact the totality of the propositions which the agent believes to be both true and relevant. While this interpretation preserves Davidson's stipulation that 'pf' be treated as a connective, it fails to represent the incontinent man as thinking of his judgement in favour of a as being relativized to the totality of available evidence. For all that has been said, he might think this only a partial survey of the pieces of evidence which, severally, he has considered, in which case he would not have achieved the kind of judgement that a is better than b which, intuitively, we want to attribute to him.To avoid this difficulty, we might abandon the idea that 'pf' is a connective rather than a relational expression and, in line with what Davidson seems to suggest himself, interpret the 'all things con-sidered' judgement as being of the form 'pf, relative to the totality of propositions, each of which is believed by me to be true and rele-vant, a is better than b', or, to put it more succinctly, 'pf, relative to all that is now before me, a is better than b'. This seems to give one legitimate reading of the expression 'available evidence' (= 'everything I have at present under consideration) but ignores what seems to be a genuine distinction between 'relative to the available evidence' (so understood) and 'all things considered'. It ignores, that is, the possibility that a man, in his deliberation, might regard the evidence at present available to him as inadequate, in which case it would seem inappropriate to suppose him to be ready to make the judgement that 'all things considered, a is better than b' (as 'all things considered' is normally understood), Surely a general account of incontinence should provide for the possibility of this measure of scrupulousness in the deliberations of the man who subsequently acts incontinently.Our third candidate for the interpretation of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement is one which it is pretty evident that Davidson would, quite rightly, reject, but it is worth mentioning in order that it should be clear just why it should be rejected. In pursuit of the proper goal of accommodating a distinction between an *all things considered' judgement and a conditional probability judgement orevaluative judgement which is relativized to the totality of the evidence present before the judger (an 'all things before me' judge-ment), one might seek to understand the idea of an 'all things considered judgement as being the idea of a judgement to the effect that something is probable, or prima facie better than something else, relative to some totality of supporting facts, many of which would in a normal case be unavailable to the judger, at least at the time of judging, and possibly at any time. On this view, a standard piece of fully explicit practical reasoning might be supposed to contain two distinct steps: (a) a step from a (conditional) *all things before me' judgement (together with the reflective judgement that certain qualificatory conditions obtain which license this step) to a (conditional) 'all things considered' judgement, which is relativized to an ideal totality of evidence; and (b) a step from a (conditional)  'all things considered' judgement, so interpreted, to an unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Such a view would be open to two grave objections. First, as Davidson himself points out, if we stock this ideal totality of evidence too generously it will not merely support but will entail the content of the unconditional judgement. If I am investigating prob-abilistically the possibility that it is now raining in Timbuctoo, the relevant ideal totality of evidence should not include either the fact that it is raining in Timbuctoo or the fact that the residents of Tim-buctoo can now see that it is raining. Such a totality of evidence would have to occupy an intermediate position between the evidence before the judger and the totality of all relevant facts of any sort, and it is far from clear that there is any satisfactory characterization of such an intermediate totality. Second, even if the idea of such a totality could be defined, it seems plausible to suppose that at any given stage in the reasoning, a reasoner's best estimate at that stage of what conclusion such an ideal totality of evidence would support wouid have to coincide with the conclusion supported by the evidence, so far as it goes, which is before him at that stage. In so far as the evidence before me supports p, 1 am naturally at this point inclined to believe rather than disbelieve that the totality of evidence will support p. On the view considered, the crucial stage in probabilistic or practical reasoning will not be that at which we become entitled to attach some degree or other of credence to the content of some 'all things considered' judgement, as so interpreted (if we have any evidence at all we are always in that position); it would rather be the stage at which we are entitled,in the light of the judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, actually to judge, as opposed to, say, merely conjecture, that an ideal totality would support a certain conclusion. But now it is not clear what useful function the 'all things considered' judge-ment, so understood, can be supposed to fulfill. For if, as seems to be the case, a rational man will automatically make the second of our two steps once he has made the first, would it not be more economical, and therefore better, to suppose that the combination of an 'all things before me' judgement, together with a judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, directly entities a reasoner to make the appropriate unconditional judgement rather than to suppose it to entitle him to make an 'all things considered' judgement from which he is to be supposed, if rational, to make a further move to an unconditional judgement?  4. The argument of the last paragraph has led us directly to the final possibility to be here considered, namely, that for x to make an'all things considered' judgement that a is better than b is for * to judge that, since he has a certain body of evidence, e, in favour of the supposition that a is better than b, and since certain qualifi-catory conditions are satisfied, it is best for x to (* should, x ought to) make the unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Whether or not this interpretation will succeed in preserving the idea than an 'all things considered' judgement is a special sort of conditional, or prima-facie, judgement is a question which we will discuss in a moment.  The only remaining alternative interpretation, so far as we can see, is one which although it might perhaps be thought to give a better representation of the meaning of the phrase 'all things considered' would certainly not preserve the conditional, or prima-facie, character of the 'all things considered' judgement. One might treat the statement that, all things considered, a is better than b, as expressing the judgement that a is better than b, with the gloss that this judgement is justified in the light of one's possession of a favourable body of evidence with respect to which the qualificatory conditions obtain; but since on this interpretation an 'all things considered' judgement would plainly involve the unconditional judgement that a is better than b, just as part of what would be expressed by saying  'Demonstrably, p' would be the judgement that p, no room would be left for the idea that an 'all things considered' judgement is a conditional judgement.  The crucial question to be considered is whether, if we interpret an'all things considered' judgement in what seems to us the most plausible way which does not represent it as patently involving a commitment to an unconditional evaluative judgement, we are still entitled to classify it as a conditional, or prima-facie, judgement.  Let us assume that we can facilitate exposition without introducing any relevant change in substance if we express a standard prima-facie evaluative judgement by the sentence form 'given that p. x should (ought to) do A'; the shift from 'a is better than b' to 'x should do A' seems for present purposes immaterial, and it is to be understood that the form we propose is not to be taken as entailing that p. To incorporate a commitment to the truth of p, the pattern might be varied to 'given the fact that p. x should do A'. In an attempt to assimilate an 'all things considered' judgement as closely as possible to this standard pattern, we might suppose its expansion to be of the general form 'given the fact that p. certain things are the case such that, given that they are the case, x should do A, and given the fact that certain qualificatory conditions are met, x should judge that x should do A'. The qualificatory conditions in question need not here be accurately specified; their effect would be to stipulate that 'the principle of total evidence' was satisfied, that, for example, x's judgement that, given certain facts, x should do A, had taken into account all the relevant facts in x's possession and that x had fulfilled whatever call there was upon him at the time in question to maximize his possession of relevant facts. Let us summarily express the idea that these qualificatory ,conditions are fulfilled by using the form 'x's judgement that, given the facts in question, & should do A, is optimal for x at the time in question'. Our question, then, is whether a judgement on the part of x expressible in the form, 'given the fact that  given certain facts, x should do A, and x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x, then & should judge that & should do A' is properly classifiable as a conditional or prima-facie judgement.  To put the matter more shortly, but less precisely, the kind of judgement whose status is in question is one such as 'given the fact that on my evidence I should do A, and that my judgement that this is so is optimal, I should judge that I should do A'. (Let us call a specially interpreted 'all things considered' judgement of this form ATC*.)The question we have to ask, then, is whether ATC* is properly classified as a conditional, rather than an unconditional, judge-ment. On one possible interpretation of conditional judgement it clearly has strong claims, inasmuch as it would be possible to replace, in its standard expression, the opening phrase given the fact that' by the word 'if' without any violence to the normal usage of 'if', and the resulting conditional sentence would express one part of the sense of the ATC* judgement, the other part being what would be expressed by the antecedent of this conditional sentence.  The ATC* judgement would then seem to be conditional in very much the same way as one might regard a judgement of the form  'since p, q' our conditional, on the grounds that its sense includes the sense of 'if p, g'. This sense of 'conditional' is plainly not that which we need in the present context. The sense which we need is one which carries with it the idea of being prima-facie in character, of being connected in some way with defeasibility. In an attempt to show that ATC* is not conditional in this further sense, let us characterize the sense more precisely.  Let 'p,' abbreviate 'x has told y that x will consider lending y $100  towards the purchase of a new car':  Let 'P,' abbreviate 'y is hard up and needs a car for work';  Let'p,' abbreviate 'y's spouse only too often gets hold of y's money';  Let 'q' abbreviate 'x should lend y $100'; and Let 'q" abbreviate 'x should not lend y $100'.  The judgement that 'given p, & Pz, @' is clearly prima facie in that the related argument form  Given p,& p2,9  P1&p2  q  is plainly defeasible, insofar as the addition of the premisses that p and that, given P1, Pr & Pa, q' to the premisses above gives us, without falsifying thereby p, or pz, a set of premisses from which it would be illegitimate to conclude that q. All of this is, of course, familiar. For purposes of comparison with ATC*, it is important to note that the argument just characterized as defeasible could have been expressed in a telescoped form, viz.  • The relevant interpretation of 'if' may, of course, not be any of those standardly selected by logicians or philosophers of logic.Given the fact that p, & pa, 9  q  Here too the inferential step will be upset without falsification of its premiss if we suppose x also to have judged that, given the fact that Pa, Pa, & Pa, Q. Let us as a first stage in examining the status of ATC make use of the notion of a specification of an ATC* judge-ment, that is, a judgement which differs from ATC* in that the relevant considerations are identified and not merely alluded to (Spec (ATC*)). The Spec (ATC*) appropriate for the present example will be X's judgement at / that given the fact that  given the fact that p, & Pz, 9; and that at t, x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x; then x should judge at t that q. That a step by x from this judgement to the detached conclusion that q would not be a step which is defeasible in the required sense is shown by the fact that if, at t, x had made the additional judgement  'given the fact that p, & p,& pa, q"', his making this judgement would have entailed that his judgement 'given the fact that p, & Pa, q' was not optimal for x at t. In this case he would not have been in a position to make the step from Spec (ATC*) to q, but this would be because a judgement by him in favour of Spec (ATC*) would, given the supposed additional judgement, be falsified. We do not, then, have the characteristic case of a defeasible inference in which the inference may be upset without falsification of any of its pre-misses. Since the truth or falsity of the claim that x's judgement about a certain body of evidence is optimal cannot depend on whether, in the claim in question, the body of evidence is itemized or merely referred to, if the step from Spec (ATC*) to q is not of the defeasible kind, then the step from ATCe to q is not of the defeasible kind either. It in fact seems to us that, though there is an. important difference between the two cases residing in the fact that in the first case, but not in the second, the legitimacy of the inference is relative to a particular subject at a particular time, the irrationality of refusing to move from the appropriate ATC* judgement to q will be the same in kind as the irrationality involved in refusing to move (as, perhaps, Lewis Carroll's tortoise did) from 'given the fact that pand that if p, q'to 'q'; and furthermore, that the irrationality inquestion is not of a kind that either we or Davidson would wish to attribute to the typical incontinent man.  If the above argument is correct, to preserve as much as possible of Davidson's theses we should have to suppose that the typical incontinent man judges (unconditionally) that he should judge that he should do A, but does not actually judge that he should do A. If we try to take this position, we are at once faced with the following awkward questions: the position, like what we may call the 'naïve' view of incontinence, involves the supposition that for a certain substituend for @ it is true of a typical incontinent man that he judges that he should o but does not ; it differs from the 'naive' view in taking as the favoured substituend for o 'x judges that x should do a', rather than 'x does a'. Why should this departure from the 'naive' view be thought to give a better account of incon-tinence? On the face of it, the 'naïve' view scems superior. It seems casier to attribute to people a failure to act as they fully believe they ought to act than to attribute to them a failure to believe what they fully believe they ought to believe. What is there to prevent a man from judging that he should do a, when he judges that he should judge that he should do a, except his disinclination to do a, and would it not be more natural to suppose that this disinclination prevents his judgement that he should do a from being followed by his doing a than to suppose that it prevents his judgement that he should judge that he should do a from being followed by his judgement that he should do a?  So far as we can see, the only motivation for disallowing the possibility of incontinence with respect to action, as most straightforwardly conceived, while allowing the possibility of the realization of a similarly straightforward conception of incontinence of belief or judgement, lies in the supposed theoretical attractiveness of the equation of a decision or intention on the part of x to do a with a judgement on the part of x that x should do a or that it is best for x to do a. To examine the case for this theoretical idea would take us beyond the limits of the paper. But before concluding our discussion we shall mention one or two considerations which seem to tell against the account of incontinence which has just been formulated.  The actual logical situation is even more complex than we have represented it is being; but present complexities are perhaps sufficient for present purposes.For the purposes of this discussion, we should think of the incontinent man as being just a special case of someone who  is faced with a practical problem about what to do; envisages himself as settling the problem by settling what it is best for him to do (what he should do); and envisages himself as settling what it is best for him to do by deliberation. He is a special case in that his deliberation is defective in one or other of a number of special ways. There may be occasions in which one decides, or forms the intention, to do something without reference to the question what it is best to do, though some philo-sophers, who may include Davidson, have been disposed to deny this possibility. There may also be occasions in which one settles on something being the best thing to do, without any recourse to delib-eration, by an immediate or snap judgement. Both of these possible routes to the resolution of a practical problem may, perhaps, in certain circumstances involve incontinence, but it would not be the variety with which we and Davidson are primarily concerned. Any one who, in consequence of satisfying the three conditions speci-fied, has recourse to deliberation in the settlement of a practical problem, whether or not he ends up by exhibiting incontinence, engages in an undertaking which is generically similar to other kinds of undertaking in that there is a specifiable outcome or completion towards which the undertaking is directed. One who is engaged in fixing the supper, whether or not as a result of prior decision, completes his operations when he reaches his objective of having the supper ready, and if he breaks off his opcrations before completing it, some explanation is required. Similarly, one who deliberates in the face of a practical problem completes his operations when he reaches the objective of having settled what is unconditionally the best thing for him to do, and again, if he fails to complete the operation some explanation is required.  We must first distinguish a failure to complete deliberation from a miscompletion; for the present discussion a failure to complete due to interruption seems irrelevant. What we need to consider are the various ways in which a man may miscomplete deliberation; and here, it seems, attraction or revulsion, rather than externalsources which interrupt deliberation, are in play. Now there are forms of miscompletion which will present us with cases of incontinence which are net of the type with which we, and Davidson, are concerned; a man may see a number of initial considerations, all or some of which are favourabie to a, and because of the attractions of a or his reluctance to deliberate, seize on one of these considerations and jump to the unconditional conclusion that he ought to  a. This is not Davidson's case. Again, a man might deliberate and reach an 'all things before me' judgement which represents the totality of his evidence at that stage, though it is inadequate since more considerations are demanded. He jumps to a judgement that he ought to a, in line with the latest 'all things before me' judgement; this is not Davidson's case either, since here the relevant conditional judgement and the unconditional judgement are both favourable to doing a. This leaves us with the possibility of a man jumping to an unconditional judgement in favour of a at a point at which the relevant 'all things before him' judgement is in favour of something other than a. We shall discuss this possibility with some care since, in spite of the fact that if taken as a characterization of typical incontinence it is open to an objection which we briefly advanced earlier (pp. 34-5), we are not absolutely certain that it does not represent Davidson's view of the incontinent man.  Obviously, there is in general no conceptual difficulty attaching to the idea of someone who is in the midst of some undertaking and who, as a result of revulsion, tedium, or the appeal of some alter-native, breaks off what he is doing and instead embarks on some other undertaking or action. The miscompletion of deliberation which concerns us will, however, constitute a special case of this kind of phenomenon, in that the substituted performance has to be regarded as one with the same objective as the original undertaking, namely, finding the best thing to do. Again, there is no lack of examples which satisfy this more restrictive condition; one may break off one's own efforts to get one's car running and, instead, send for a mechanic to get the job done. But even this restriction is not restrictive enough in view of the special character of the objective involved in deliberation. While there are alternative routes to realizing the objective of getting one's car going besides working on it oneself, it is not clear that there are alternative routes to settling what is the best thing to do besides deliberating; or that if there are (for example, asking some one else's advice), they are at all germaneto the phenomenon of incontinence. One who arrives at a holiday resort and embarks on the undertaking of finding the best hotel to stay in may tire of his search and decide to register at the next presentable hotel that he encounters, but in doing so he can hardly regard himself as having adopted an alternative method of finding the best hotel to stay in. In fact, to provide a full parallel for cases of incontinence, if these are conceived of as cases of making an unconditional evaluation in a direction opposed to that of a current  'all things before me' judgement, the examples would have to be even more bizarre than that just offered. One would rather have to imagine someone who, with a view to winning a prize at a party later in the day, sets out to find and to buy the largest pumpkin on sale in any store in his neighbourhood. After inspecting the pumpkins at three of the local stores, he tires of his enterprise and decides to buy the largest pumpkin in the fourth store, which he is now inves-tigating, even though he knows that the evidence so far before him gives preference to the largest pumpkin at store number two, which is, of course, larger than the one he proposes to buy. It is obvious that such a man cannot regard himself as having adopted an alternative way to finding the largest pumpkin on sale. This elaboration is required since, on the scheme presently being considered, the incontinent man may typically substitute, for the continuation of deliberation, the formation of an intention to do b, to which he is prompted by its prospective pleasantness, in spite of the fact, of which he is aware, that the considerations so far taken into account (which include the prospective pleasantness of b) so far as they go favour a. The outcome of these attempts to find parallels suggests forcibly that it is logically impossible that one should without extreme logical incoherence make an unconditional judgement favour-ing b when one is fully conscious of the thought that the totality of evidence so far considered favours a, unless one thinks (reasonably or unreasonably) that the addition of further evidence, so far un-identified, would tilt the balance in favour of b. This last possibility must be regarded as irrelevant to our discussion of incontinence, since it is not a feature of the kind of incontinence with which we are concerned, if indeed of any kind of incontinence, that the incontinent man should think that further investigation and reflection would, or would have, justified the action which the incontinent man performs. We are then left with the conclusion that to suppose someone to make an unconditional judgement in a direction op-  posed to an 'all things before me' judgement, we must also suppose the latter jugdement not to be 'fully present' to the judger, on some suitable interpretation of that phrase. We can support this point directly without having to rely on analogies with other forms of undertaking. Mr and Mrs John Q. Citizen have decided they want a dog and are engaged in trying to settle what would be the best breed of dog for them to acquire. This enterprise involves them in such activities as perusing books about dogs, consulting friends, and reminding themselves of pertinent aspects of their own experience of dogs. At a certain point, not one at which they regard their deliberations as concluded, it looks to them as if the data they have so far collected favour the selection of a short-haired terrier, though there is something also to be said for a spaniel or a dachshund. At this point, Mrs Citizen says, 'My aunt's spaniel, Rusty, was such a lovely dog. Let's get a spaniel', and her husband says, 'All right.' This story arouses no conceptual stir. But suppose that (1) Mrs Citizen, instead of saying 'Let's get a spaniel' had said 'A spaniel's the best dog to get'  ', and that (2) previously in their deliberation  they had noted the endearing qualities of Rusty, but in spite of that had come to lean towards a short-haired terrier. The story, thus altered, will conform to the alleged course of the incontinent man's reflections; at a certain point it appears to him that the claims of prospective pleasure are, or are being, outweighed, but nevertheless he judges that the pleasant thing is the best thing for him to do and acts on the judgement. But in the altered story the judgement of Mr and Mrs Citizen that a spaniel is the best dog for them to buy, to which they are prompted by a consideration which has already been discounted in their deliberations, scems to us quite incredible, unless we suppose that they have somehow lost sight of the previous course of their deliberations. (The further possibility that they suddenly and irrationally changed their assessment of the evidence so far before them, even if allowable, will not exemplify the idea that there is some sense in which the incontinent man thinks that what he is doing is something which he should not be doing.)  The conceptual difficulty is hardly lessened if we suppose the example of Rusty to be a new consideration instead of one already discounted. The couple could not move from it to the judgement that a spaniel is best without weighing it in the balance together with the body of data which, so far as it goes, they have deemed to point towards a short-haired terrier in preference to a spaniel,unless again they had somehow lost sight of the course of their deliberation.  If, as we have been arguing, an unconditional judgement against a can be combined with an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a only if the latter judgement is not fully present to the judger, a precisely parallel conclusion will hold with respect to an  'all things considered' judgement (ATC*), since an ATC* judgement consists of an 'all things before me' judgement together with an 'optimality" judgement about it. Unless it should turn out to be otherwise logically indefensible, it would be preferable, as being more in accord with common sence, to attribute to the typical incontinent man (as we have been supposing Davidson to do) not merely an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a but also an ATC judgement in favour of a, with the additional proviso that the ATC* judgement is not fully present. On the face of it, this would not involve the attribution to the incontinent man of an unconditional judgement in favour of a, and so we leave room for an unconditional judgement, and so for an intention, against a.  Unfortunately, as has been partially foreshadowed by our discussion of the question whether an ATC* judgement is a conditional judgement, the position just outlined is, in our view, logically inde-fensible, as we shall now attempt to show.  We attach different numerical subscripts to particular occurences of the word 'justify' in order to leave open the possibility, without committing ourselves to its realization, that the sense of 'justify" varies in these occurrences; and we attach subscripts to the word  'optimality' in order to refer to some formulation (or reformula-tion) of the optimality condition previously sketched by us on page 38 which would be appropriate to whatever sense of 'justified' is distinguished by the subscript.  Let us suppose that:  (I) * judges at / that  (1) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimality,, justifies, x's doing a.  Unless we attribute to x extreme logical confusion or blindness, the supposition (I) seems tantamount to the supposition that:  (1l) x judges at / that  (2) x should do a.It seems, however, that we are merely reformulating the supposition already expressed by (I) if we suppose that:  (IlI) * judges at r that  (3) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimalitya, justifies, x's judging at t that x should do a.  Again, as in the case of supposition (Il), supposition (III) seems tantamount to supposition (IV):  (IV) x judges at !  (4) x should judge at t that x should do a.  This argument seems to us to establish the conclusion that, extreme logical confusion apart, one judges on what seems to one an adequate basis that one should judge that one should do a if and only if one judges on the same basis that one should do a. That is to say, any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as also a case of believing that one's belief that one should do a is a belief which one should hold: and any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should believe that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as a case of believing that one should do a. If this conclusion is correct it seems that we have excluded the possibility of finding a reasonable interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement that one should do a which would be distinct from, and would not involve, an unconditional judgement that one should do a.  We are left then with the conclusion that to attribute to the incontinent man an ATC* judgement in favour of a is, in effect, to attribute to him an unconditional judgement in favour of a; and so, presumably, to attribute to him a not fully present ATC® judgement in favour of a is to attribute to him a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a. If this is so, then there seem to be initially the following options:  1. To hold that an incontinent act, though voluntary, is not inten-tional: on this assumption we are free to hold, if we wish, both (i) that forming an intention to do a is identifiable with making a fullypresent unconditional judgement in favour of a, and (ii) that a not fully present judgement in favour of a is incompatible with a fully present unconditional judgement against a (more generally, patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible, even if one or both are not fully present to the judger). To adopt this option would seem heroic.  2. To allow that the incontinent man, at least sometimes, acts with an intention; in which case it must be allowed either that (i) patently conflicting unconditional value judgements are compossible, provided that at least one of them is not fully present to the judger; or that (ii) an intention to do a is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a; the most that could be maintained would be that making a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a entails forming an intention to do a or, altenatively and less strongly, is incompatible with having an intention to do b, where b patently conflicts with a.  The upshot of these considerations with respect to the search for an adequate theory of incontinence seems to be that the following contending theses remain in the field, though some of them, particularly the first, may not appear very strong contenders:  The typical incontinent man (who does not do a though in some sense he thinks that he should) reaches only a not fully present 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement against a, and (conse-quentially) with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that intention is identifiable with fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances. The typical incontinent man reaches a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement, and an intention, against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that an intention is identifi. able with a fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are compossible provided that at least one of them is not fully present.  3. The typical incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a, but not with a fully present unconditional judgementagainst a. Together with this thesis go the theses that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances and that an intention is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement, though it is perhaps true that a fully present unconditional judgement entails the presence of an intention (or at least excludes the presence of a contrary intention).  4. The 'naïve' view: the incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that the existence of a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a carries no implications with regard to the presence or absence of an intention to do a or, again, to do something which patently conflicts with a. The 'naive' view is uncommitted at this point with respect to the compossibility of patently conflicting unconditional value judgements.  A proper decision between these contending theses will clearly depend on the provision of a proper interpretation of the expression 'fully present', used by us a dummy, an undertaking which in turn will require a detailed examination of the phenomena of incontinence. These are matters which lie beyond the scope of this paper. H. P. Grice.  I shall devote this Epilogue to a detailed review of the deeper aspects of the unity which I believe the essays in this volume to possess.  These deeper aspects are three in number, and I shall now enumerate them separately. The first is that the connections between the topics discussed are sometimes stronger and more interesting than the essays themselves make clear: partly this is due to the fact that these connections were not, I think, seen by me at the time at which the essays were written, and it is only in retrospect that I begin to see their number and their importance. The second aspect, on which I think the first is dependent, is that the various topics which interested me at the time at which these essays were written seem to be ones which are, first of all, important and second, topics which still interest me, and some of them, perhaps all of them, are matters which I still feel that I need to make up my mind about more thoroughly and clearly. Consequently these essays can perhaps be regarded as the first word but not the last word in a number of directions in which it is important that philosophers should go. The third and last of these deeper aspects is one that has already been remarked upon in the preface as providing the methodological theme which runs through the contents of this volume. It consists in the application of or illustration of a certain sort of way of doing philosophy, one which was one of the many ways in which philosophy was done in Oxford at the time at which I was there and which are connected with the application to philosophy of a particular kind of interest in language, particularly ordinary language. Such interest took more than one form, and I do not think that in any of the forms it has been very well articulated orexpressed or described by those who practised it; and I think it is of fundamental importance to philosophizing. The last part of this epilogue will be devoted to an attempt to make its character more clear.  I shall begin by listing the persistent or recurrent thematic strands which it seems to me I can discern in the essays appearing in this volume, and 1 shall then return after having listed them to consider them one by one in varying degrees of detail. I think I can detect eight such strands though some of them have more than one component and the components do not necessarily have to be accepted as a block.  The first of these main strands belongs to the philosophy of percep-tion; it involves two theses; first that the general notion of perception, the concept expressed by the verb "perceive," is properly treatable by means of causal analysis; and second that in the more specific notions connected with perception like those involving different modalities of perception like "seeing" and "hearing," various elements have to be considered but one which cannot be ignored or eliminated is the experiential quality of the sense-experiences perception involves. A third question, about the analysis of statements describing objects of perception like material objects, was also prominent in my thinking at the time at which these essays were written but does not figure largely in these pages. The second strand is a concern to defend the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction together perhaps with one or more of such closely related distinctions as that between necessary and contingent or between a priori and a posteriori. A third strand is a defense of the rights of the ordinary man or common sense vis-à-vis the professional philosopher, the idea being that for reasons which have yet to be determined and accurately stated the ordinary man has a right to more respect from the professional philosopher than a word of thanks for having got him started.  The fourth strand relates to meaning; it consists in two theses: first, that it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of meaning which is relativized to the users of words or expressions and one that is not so relativized; and second, of the two notions the unrelativized notion is posteriori to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized notion; what words mean is a matter of what people mean by them.  The fifth strand is the contention that in considering the notion of meaning we should pay attention to two related distinctions. First, a distinction between those elements of meaning which are present by virtue of convention and those which are present by virtue of something other than convention; and second, between those elements ofmeaning which standardly form part of what a word or form of words asserts (or its user asserts), and those elements of meaning which rather form part of what the words or their users imply or otherwise convey or are committed to. A distinction, that is to say, (a) between conventional and nonconventional meaning and (b) between assertive and nonassertive meaning. Strand six is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of rational activity and that those rational activities which do not involve the use of language are in various ways importantly parallel to those which do. This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational cooperation; the merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.  Strands seven and eight both relate to the real or apparent opposition between the structures advocated by traditional or Aristotelian logic, on the one hand, and by modern or mathematical logic, on the other. In a certain sense these strands pull in opposite directions.  Strand seven consists in the contention that it is illegitimate to repre-sent, as some modern logicians have done, such grammatical subject phrases as "the King of France," "every schoolboy," "a rich man," and even "Bismarck" as being only ostensibly referential; that they should be genuinely referential is required both for adequate representation of ordinary discourse and to preserve a conception of the use of language as a rational activity.  Strand eight involves the thesis that, notwithstanding the claims of strand seven, genuinely referential status can be secured for the subject phrases in question by supplementing the apparatus of modern logic in various ways which would include the addition of the kind of bracketing devices which are sketched within the contents of this volume.  Strand One  I now turn to a closer examination of the first of these eight thematic strands, the strand, that is, which relates to the analysis of per-ception.' The two essays involving this strand seem to me not to be devoid of merit; the essay on the Causal Theory of Perception served to introduce what later I called the notion of Conversational Impli-  1. Cf. esp. Essays 15-16.cature which has performed, I think, some useful service in the philosophy of language, and also provided an adequate base for the rejection of a bad, though at one time popular, reason for rejecting a causal analysis of perception; and the essay called "Some Remarks about the Senses," drew attention, I think, to an important and neglected subject, namely the criteria by which one distinguishes between one modality of sense and another. But unfortunately to find a way of disposing of one bad reason for rejecting a certain thesis is not the same as to establish that thesis, nor is drawing attention to the importance of a certain question the same as answering that question.  In retrospect it seems to me that both these essays are open to criticisms which so far as I know have not been explicitly advanced In "The Causal Theory of Perception" I reverted to a position about sense-datum statements which was originally taken up by philosophers such as Paul and Ayer and some others; according to it, statements to the effect that somebody was having a sense-datum, or had a sense-datum or was having a sense-datum of a particular sort, are to be understood as alternative ways of making statements about him which are also expressible in terms of what I might call phenomenal verbs like "seem" or, more specifically, like "looks," "sounds," and "feels."  This position contrasted with the older kind of view, according to which statements about sense-data were not just alternative versions of statements which could be expressed in terms of phenomenal verbs but were items which served to account for the applicability of such a range of verbs. According to the older view, to say that someone had a sense-datum which was red or mouselike was not just an outlandish alternative way of saying it looked to him as if there was a mouse or something red before him, but was rather to specify something which explained why it looked to him as if there was something red before him or as if there were a mouse before him. The proponents of the newer view of sense-data would have justified their suggestion by pointing to the fact that sense-data and their sensible characteristics are mysterious items which themselves stand in need of explanation, and so cannot properly be regarded as explaining rather than as being explained by the applicability of the phenomenal verb-phrases associated with them. It is not clear that these criticisms of the older view are justified; might it not be that while in one sense of the word "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to "rendered intelligible") sense-data are explained in terms of phenomenal verbs,in another sense of "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to  "accounted for") the priority is reversed, and the applicability of phenomenal verbs is explained by the availability of sense-data and their sensible feature. The newer view, moreover, itself may run into trouble. It seems to me to be a plausible view that the applicability of phenomenal verbs is itself to be understood as asserting the presence or occurrence of a certain sort of experience, one which would explain and in certain circumstances license the separate employment of a verb phrase embedded in the phenomenal verb-phrase; for it to look or seem to me as if there is something red before me is for me to have an experience which would explain and in certain unproblematic circumstances license the assertion that there is something red before me. It will be logically incoherent at one and the same time to represent the use of phenomenal verbs as indicating the existence of a ba-sis, of some sort or other, for a certain kind of assertion about percep tible objects and as telling us what that basis is. The older view of sense-data attempted to specify the basis; the newer view, apparently with my concurrence, seems to duck this question and thereby to render mysterious the interpretation of phenomenal verb-phrases.  Second, in "Some Remarks about the Senses" I allow for the possibility that there is no one criterion for the individuation of a sense, but I do not provide for the separate possibility that the critical candidates are not merely none of them paramount but are not in fact independent of one another. For example, sense organs are differentiated not by their material character, but by their function. Organs that are just like eyes would in fact be not eyes but ears if what they did was, not to see, but to hear; again, real qualities of things are those which underlie or explain various causal mechanisms, such as our being affected by vibrations or light rays. So criterial candidates run into one another; and indeed the experiential flavor or quality of experience to which 1 attach special importance is in fact linked with the relevant ranges of what Locke called secondary qualities which an observer attributes to the objects which he perceives; so we might end up in a position that would not have been uncongenial to Locke and Boyle, in which we hold that there are two ways of distinguishing between senses, one of which is by the character of their operations (processes studied by the sciences rather than by the ordinary citizen), and the other would be by the difference of their phenomenal char-acter, which would be something which would primarily be of interest to ordinary people rather than to scientists. These reflections sug-  gest to me two ideas which I shall here specify but not argue for. The first is that, so far from being elements in the ultimate furniture of the world, sense-data are items which are imported by theorists for various purposes; such purposes might be that one should have bearers of this or that kind of relation which is needed in order to provide us with a better means for describing or explaining the world. Such relations might be causal or spatial where the space involved is not physical space but some other kind of space, like visual space, or it might be a system of relations which in certain ways are analogous to spatial relations, like relations of pitch between sounds. This idea might lead to another, namely that consideration of the nature of perception might lead us to a kind of vindication of common sense distinct from those vindications which I mention elsewhere in this epilogue, for if sense-data are to be theoretical extensions introduced or concocted by theorists, theorists will need common sense in order to tell them what it is to which theoretical extensions need to be added. Philosophers' stories derive their character and direction from the nonphilosophical stories which they supplement.  Strand Two  The second of these eight strands consists in a belief in the possibility of vindicating one or more of the number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of "The analytic/syn-thetic distinction." I shall say nothing here about this strand not because I think it is unimportant; indeed I think it is one of the most important topics in philosophy, required in determining, not merely the answers to particular philosophical questions, but the nature of philosophy itself. It is rather that I feel that nothing less than an adequate treatment of the topic would be of any great value, and an adequate treatment of it would require a great deal of work which I have not yet been able to complete. This lacuna, however, may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that I provided some discussion of this topic in "Reply to Richards" contained in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality and by the fact that at the conclusion of this epilogue I shall also advance a slightly skittish hint of the direction in which I have some inclination to go. I hope that this treatment will serve as an interim indication of what my final position might be.  2. Cf. esp. Essay 13.  346  RetrospectiveThe third strand' consists in a disposition on my part to uphold in one form or another the rights of the ordinary man or of common sense in the face of attacks which proceed from champions of specialist philosophical or scientific theory. All parties would, I think, agree that specialist theory has to start from some basis in ordinary thought of an informal character; the question at issue is whether the contents and views contained in that thought have to continue to be respected in some measure or other by the specialist theorist even after the specialist theorist has embarked on his own work.  According to some, at that point, the contribution of ordinary thought and speech can be ignored, like a ladder to be kicked away once the specialist has got going. My support for common sense is not eroded by the failure of many attempts made by philosophers to give a justification or basis for such support; indeed the negative part of my contribution to the subject consists in the rejection of a number of such attempts. Some of these rejections appear in discussions contained in this volume, others in other places. One form of defense of common sense is one propounded by Moore in the famous paper on that subject. This seems to consist in the presumed acceptability of the obvious; it seems to consist in that because so far as I can see no other reason is given for the acceptance of what Moore counts as propositions of common sense. If I have read Moore aright I find this form of defense of common sense unsatisfactory on the grounds that the conception of the obvious is not in an appropriate sense an objective conception. This is pointedly illustrated by the famous story of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, who in a lecture announced that a certain mathematical proposition was obvious, at which point one of his audience demurred and said that it was not obvious to him.  Hardy then halted the lecture, paced outside the lecture room for a quarter of an hour, returned, and said "It is obvious." The trouble is that obviousness requires consent, on the part of the parties con-cerned, in the obviousness of what is thought of as obvious.  A second and different line of defense of common sense comes from Thomas Reid, who points to the need for first principles of human knowledge. Once these are secured, then various forms of derivation and deduction and inference can account for the accumulation of  3. Cf. esp. Essays 8-10.  Retrospectiveknown propositions which are as it were theorems in the system of knowledge; but theorems need to look back to axioms and these axioms are things which Reid regards as matters which it is the function of common sense to provide. The fault which I find here is a conflation of the notion of axioms as being organizational items from which nonaxiomatic propositions are supposed to be derivable with an epi-stemic interpretation of axioms as providing the foundations of human knowledge; whereas it seems to me arguable and indeed plausible to suppose that the grounds for the acceptance of the contents of this or that system do not lie in the prior evidence or self-evidence of the axioms of the system but in the general character of the system in containing what one thinks it ought to contain in the way of what is knowable.  From an epistemic point of view the justifiability of the system lies in its delivering, in general, what one wants it to deliver and thinks it should deliver, rather than in the availability of a range of privileged intuitions which, happily, provide us with a sufficiency of starting points for rational inference. If common sense comes into the picture at all in this connection it seems to me that it should be with regard to a recognition in some degree or other of what the system ought to be expected to deliver to us rather than as a faculty which assures us of starting points which form the axioms of the system.  A third attempt to justify common sense is that provided by Malcolm in his interpretation of Moore; Malcolm suggested that Moore's point should be thought of as being that standard descriptions of certain sorts of situations cannot be incorrect since the standards of correctness are set by the nature of the descriptions which are standardly used to describe those situations. The trouble with this line, to my mind, is that it confuses two kinds of correctness and incorrectness.  Correctness of use or usage, whether a certain expression is properly or improperly applied, gives us one kind of correctness, that of proper application, but that an expression is correct in that sense does not guarantee it against another sort of incorrectness, namely logical in-coherence.  The final form of an attempt to justify common sense is by an appeal to Paradigm or Standard Cases; cases, that is, of the application of an expression to what are supposedly things to which that expression applies if it applies to anything at all; for example, if the expression "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like "desks" and "walls" and "pavements." The difficulty with this attempt is thatit contains as an assumption just what a skeptic who is querying common sense is concerned to deny: no doubt it may be true that if the word "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like  "desks," but it is the contention of the skeptic that it does not apply to anything, and therefore the fact that something is the strongest candidate does not mean that it is a successful candidate for the application of that expression. On the positive side I offered as an alternative to the appeals I have just been discussing, a proposed link between the authority of common sense and the theory of meaning. 1 suggested roughly that to side with the skeptic in his questioning of commonsense beliefs would be to accept an untenable divorce between the meaning of words and sentences on the one hand, and the proper specification of what speakers mean by such words and sentences on the other. This attempt to link two of the eight strands to one another now seems to me open to several objections, at least one of which I regard as fatal.  I begin with two objections which I am inclined to regard as non-fatal; the first of these is that my proposed reply to the skeptic ignores the distinction between what is propounded as, or as part of, one's message, thus being something which the speaker intends, and on the other hand what is part of the background of the message by way of being something which is implied, in which case its acceptance is often not intended but is rather assumed. That there is this distinction is true, but what is, given perfect rapport between speaker and hearer, something which a speaker implies, may, should that rapport turn out to be less than perfect, become something which the speaker is committed to asserting or propounding. If a speaker thinks his hearer has certain information which in fact the hearer does not, the speaker may, when this fact emerges, be rationally committed to giving him the information in question, so what is implied is at least potentially something which is asserted and so, potentially, something the acceptance of which is intended.  A second (I think, nonfatal) objection runs as follows: some forms of skepticism do not point to incoherences in certain kinds of mes-sage; they rely on the idea that skeptical doubts sometimes have to have been already allayed in order that one should have the foundations which are needed to allay just those doubts. To establish that I am not dreaming, I need to be assured that the experiences on which I rely to reach this assurance are waking experiences. In response to this objection, it can be argued, first, that a defense of common sensedoes not have to defend it all at once, against all forms of skeptical doubts, and, second, it might be held that with regard to the kinds of skeptical doubts which are here alluded to, what is needed is not a well-founded assurance that one's cognitive apparatus is in working order but rather that it should in fact be in working order whatever the beliefs or suppositions of its owner may be.  The serious objection is that my proposal fails to distinguish between the adoption, at a certain point in the representation of the skeptic's proposed position, of an extensional and of an intensional reading of that account. I assumed that the skeptic's position would be properly represented by an intensional reading at this point, in which case I supposed the skeptic to be committed to an incoherence; in fact, however, it is equally legitimate to take not an intensional reading but an extensional reading in which case we arrive at a formulation of the skeptic's position which, so far as has been shown, is reasonable and also immune from the objection which I proposed.  According to the intensional reading, the skeptic's position can be represented as follows: that a certain ordinary sentence s does, at least in part, mean that p, second, that in some such cases, the prop osition that p is incoherent, and third, that standard speakers intend their hearers incoherently to accept that p, where "incoherently" is to be read as specifying part of what the speaker intends. That position may not perhaps be strictly speaking incoherent, but it certainly seems wildly implausible. However, there seems to be no need for the skeptic to take it and it can be avoided by an extensional interpretation of the appearance in this context, of the adverb "incoherently." According to this representation it would be possible for s to mean (in part) that p and for p to be incoherent and also for the standard speaker to intend the hearer to accept p which would be to accept something which is in fact incoherent though it would be no part of the speaker's intention that in accepting p the hearer should be accepting something which is incoherent. To this reply there seems to me to be no reply.  Despite this failure, however, there seem to remain two different directions in which a vindication of common sense or ordinary speech may be looked for. The first would lie in the thought that whether or not a given expression or range of expressions applies to a particular situation or range of situations is simply determined by whether or not it is standardly applied to such situations; the fact that in its application those who apply it may be subject to this or that form ofintellectual corruption or confusion does not affect the validity of the claim that the expression or range of expressions does apply to those situations. In a different line would be the view that the attributions and beliefs of ordinary people can only be questioned with due cause, and due cause is not that easy to come by; it has to be shown that some more or less dire consequences follow from not correcting the kind of belief in question; and if no such dire consequences can be shown then the beliefs and contentions of common sense have to be left intact.  Strand Four*  This strand has already been alluded to in the discussion of Strand 3, and consists in my views about the relation between what might roughly be described as word-meaning and as speaker's-meaning. Of all the thematic strands which I am distinguishing this is the one that has given me most trouble, and it has also engendered more heat, from other philosophers, in both directions, than any of its fellows. I shall attempt an initial presentation of the issues involved.  It has been my suggestion that there are two distinguishable meaning concepts which may be called "natural" meaning and "non-natural" meaning and that there are tests which may be brought to bear to distinguish them. We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of the verb "mean" is factive or nonfactive, that is to say whether for it to be true that so and so means that p it does or does not have to be the case that it is true that p; again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to enclose the specification of what is meant would be inappropriate or appropriate. If factivity is present and quotation marks would be inappropriate, we would have a case of natural meaning; otherwise the meaning involved would be nonnatural meaning. We may now ask whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of this dichotomy of uses to which the word "mean" seems to be subject. If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and in what direction such elucidation should proceed. I have fairly recently (in Essay 18) come to believe that there is such an overarching idea and that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The  4. Cf. esp. Essays 5-6, 7, 12.idea behind both uses of "mean" is that of consequence; if x means y then y, or something which includes y or the idea of y, is a consequence of x. In "natural" meaning, consequences are states of affairs; in "nonnatural" meaning, consequences are conceptions or complexes which involve conceptions. This perhaps suggests that of the two concepts it is "nonnatural" meaning which is more in need of further elucidation; it seems to be the more specialized of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate; we may, for example, ask how conceptions enter the picture and whether what enters the picture is the conceptions themselves or their justifiability. On these counts I should look favorably on the idea that if further analysis should be required for one of the pair the notion of "nonnatural" meaning would be first in line.  There are factors which support the suitability of further analysis for the concept of "nonnatural" meaning. "Meaningnn" ("non-natural meaning") does not look as if it names an original feature of items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually independent: (a) given suitable background conditions, meaningn can be changed by fiat; (b) the presence of meaningn is dependent on a framework provided by a linguistic, or at least a communication-engaged community.  It seems to me, then, at least reasonable and possibly even manda-tory, to treat the meaning of words, or of other communication ve-hicles, as analyzable in terms of features of word users or other com-municators; nonrelativized uses of "meaningnN  " are posterior to and  explicable through relativized uses involving reference to word users or communicators. More specifically, what sentences mean is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them; that is to say, what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users standardly intend (more precisely, M-intend) to produce by their utterance. Sentence-meaning then will be explicable either in terms of psychological attitudes which are standardly M-intended to produce in hearers by sentence utterers or to attitudes taken up by hearers toward the activities of sentence utterers.  At this point we begin to run into objections. The first to be considered is one brought by Mrs. J. Jack, whose position I find not wholly clear. She professes herself in favor of "a broadly 'Gricean' enter-  5. In an as yet unpublished paper entitled "The Rights and Wrongs of Grice on Mean-ing."prise" but wishes to discard various salient elements in my account (we might call these "narrowly Gricean theses"). What, precisely, is  "broad Griceanism"? She declares herself in favor of the enterprise of giving an account of meaning in terms of psychological attitudes, and this suggests that she favors the idea of an analysis, in psychological terms, of the concept of meaning, but considers that I have gone wrong, perhaps even radically wrong, in my selection of the ingredients of such an analysis.  But she also reproves me for "reductionism," in terms which suggest that whatever account or analysis of meaning is to be offered, it should not be one which is "reductionist," which might or might not be equivalent to a demand that a proper analysis should not be a proper reductive analysis. But what kind of analysis is to be provided?  What I think we cannot agree to allow her to do is to pursue the goal of giving a lax reductive analysis of meaning, that is, a reductive analysis which is unhampered by the constraints which characteristically attach to reductive analysis, like the avoidance of circularity; a goal, to which, to my mind several of my opponents have in fact addressed themselves. ((In this connection I should perhaps observe that though my earlier endeavors in the theory of meaning were attempts to provide a reductive analysis, I have never (I think) espoused reduction-ism, which to my mind involves the idea that semantic concepts are unsatisfactory or even unintelligible, unless they can be provided with interpretations in terms of some predetermined, privileged, and favored array of concepts; in this sense of "reductionism" a felt ad hoc need for reductive analysis does not have to rest on a reductionist foundation. Reductive analysis might be called for to get away from unclarity not to get to some predesignated clarifiers.)) I shall for the moment assume that the demand that I face is for a form of reductive analysis which is less grievously flawed than the one which I in fact offered; and I shall reserve until later consideration of the idea that what is needed is not any kind of reductive analysis but rather some other mode of explication of the concept of meaning.  The most general complaint, which comes from Strawson, Searle, and Mrs. Jack, seems to be that I have, wholly or partially, misidentified the intended (or M-intended) effect in communication; according to me it is some form of acceptance (for example, belief or desire), whereas it should be held to be understanding, comprehension, or (to use an Austinian designation) "uptaké." One form of the cavil (the more extreme form) would maintain that the immediate intended tar-get is always "uptake," though this or that form of acceptance may be an ulterior target; a less extreme form might hold that the immediate target is sometimes, but not invariably, "uptake." I am also not wholly clear whether my opponents are thinking of "uptake" as referring to an understanding of a sentence (or other such expression) as a sentence or expression in a particular language, or as referring to a comprehension of its occasion-meaning (what the sentence or expression means on this occasion in this speaker's mouth). But my bafflement arises primarily from the fact that it seems to me that my analysis already invokes an analyzed version of an intention toward some form of "uptake" (or a passable substitute therefor), when I claim that in meaning a hearer is intended to recognize himself as intended to be the subject of a particular form of acceptance, and to take on such an acceptance for that reason. Does the objector reject this analysis and if so why? And in any case his position hardly seems satisfactory when we see that it involves attributing to speakers an intention which is specified in terms of the very notion of meaning which is being analyzed (or in terms of a dangerously close relative of that notion). Circularity seems to be blatantly abroad.  This question is closely related to, and is indeed one part of, the vexed question whether, in my original proposal, I was right to embrace a self-denial of the use of semantic concepts in the specification of the intentions which are embedded in meaning, a renunciation which was motivated by fear of circularity. A clear view of the position is not assisted by the fact that it seems uncertain what should, or should not, be counted as a deployment of semantic notions.  So far we seem to have been repelling boarders without too much difficulty; but I fear that intruders, whose guise is not too unlike that of the critics whom we have been considering, may offer, in the end at least, more trouble. First, it might be suggested that there is a certain arbitrariness in my taking relativized meaning as tantamount to a speaker's meaning something by an utterance; there are other notions which might compete for this spot, in particular the notion of something's meaning something to a hearer. Why should the claims of "meaning to," that is of passive or recipient's meaning, be inferior to those of "meaning by" (that is, of acting or agent's meaning)? Indeed a thought along these lines might lie behind the advocacy of  "uptake" as being sometimes or even always the target of semantic intention.  A possible reply to the champion of passive meaning would run asfollows: (1) If we maintain our present program, relativized meaning is an intermediate analytic stage between nonrelativized meaning and a "semantics-free" ("s-free") paraphrase of statements about mean-ing. So, given our present course, the fact (if it should be a fact) that there is no obviously available s-free paraphrase for "meaning to" would be a reason against selecting "meaning to" as an approved specimen of relativized meaning. (2) There does however seem in fact to be an s-free paraphrase for "meaning to," though it is one in which is embedded that paraphrase which has already been suggested for  "meaning by"; "s means p to X" would be interpreted as saying  "X knows what the present speaker does (alternatively a standard speaker would) mean by an utterance of s"; and at the next stage of analysis we introduce the proffered s-free paraphrase for "meaning by." So "meaning to" will merely look back to "meaning by," and the cavil will come to naught.  At least in its present form. But an offshoot of it seems to be available which might be less easy to dispose of. I shall first formulate a sketch of a proposed line of argument against my analysis of mean-ing, and then consider briefly two ways in which this argumentation might be resisted.  First, the argument.  In the treatment of language, we need to consider not only the relation of language to communication, but also, and concurrently, the relation of language to thought. A plausible position is that, for one reason or another, language is indispensable for thought, either as an instrument for its expression or, even more centrally, as the vehicle, or the material, in which thought is couched. We may at some point have to pay more attention to the details of these seeming variants, but for the present let us assume the stronger view that for one reason or another the occurrence of thought requires, either invariably or at least in all paradigmatic cases, the presence of a "linguistic flow." The "linguistic flows" in question need to attain at least a certain level of comprehensibility from the point of view of the thinker; while it is plain that not all thinking (some indeed might say that no thinking) is entirely free from confusion and incoherence, too great a departure of the language-flow from comprehensibility will destroy its character as (or as the expression of) thought; and this in turn will undermine the primary function of thought as an explanation of bodily behavior. Attempts to represent the comprehensibility, to the thinker, of the expression of thought by an appeal to either of the relativized concepts of meaningn so far distinguished encounter serious, if not fatal, difficulties. While it is not impossible to mean something by what one says to oneself in one's head, the occurrence of such a phenomenon seems to be restricted to special cases of self-exhortation ("what I kept telling myself was......"), and not to be a general feature of thinking as such. Again, recognition of a linguistic sequence as meaning something to me seems appropriate (perhaps) when I finally catch on to the way in which I am supposed to take that se-quence, and so to instances in which I am being addressed by another not to those in which I address myself; such a phrase as "I couldn't get myself to understand what I was telling myself" seems dubiously admissible. So an admission of the indispensability of language to thought carries with it a commitment to the priority of nonrelativized meaning to either of the designated relativized conceptions; and there are no other promising relativized candidates. So nonrelativized meaning is noneliminable. The foregoing resistance to the idea of eliminating nonrelativized meaning by reductive analysis couched in terms of one or the other variety of relativized meaning might, perhaps, be reinforced by an attempt to exhibit the invalidity of a form of argument on which, it might be thought, the proponent of such reduction might be relying.  While the normal vehicles of interpersonal communication are words, this is not exclusively the case; gestures, signs, and pictorial items sometimes occur, at times even without linguistic concomitants. That fact might lead to the supposition that nonlinguistic forms of communication are pre-linguistic, and do not depend on linguistic mean-ing. A closely related form of reflection would suggest that if it is the case (as it seems to be) that sometimes the elements of trains of thought are nonlinguistic, then prelinguistic thinking is a genuine pos-sibility. (This was a live issue in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-tury.) But, it may be said, both of these lines of argument are incon-clusive, for closely related reasons. The fact that on occasion the vehicles of communication or of thought may be wholly nonlinguistic does not show that such vehicles are prelinguistic; it may well be that such vehicles could only fulfill their function as vehicles against a background of linguistic competence without which they would be lost. If, for example, they operate as substitutes for language, lan-guage for which they are substitutes needs perhaps to be available to their users.  We now find ourselves in a serious intellectual bind. (1) Our initial attention to the operation of language in communication has provided powerful support for the idea that the meaning of words or other communication devices should be identified with the potentiality of such words or devices for causing or being caused by particular ranges of thought or psychological attitudes. When we are on this tack we are inexorably drawn toward the kind of psychological reductionism exhibited in my own essays about Meaning. (2) When our attention is focused on the appearance of language in thinking we are no less strongly drawn in the opposite direction; language now seems constitutive of thought rather than something the intelligibility of which derives from its relation to thought.  We cannot have it both ways at one and the same time. This dilemma can be amplified along the following lines. (1) States of thought, or psychological attitudes cannot be prelinguistic in char-acter. (2) Thought states therefore presuppose linguistic thought-episodes which are constitutive of them. (3) Such linguistic thought-episodes, to fulfill their function, must be intelligible sequences of words or of licensed word-substitutes. (4) Intelligibility requires ap: propriate causal relation to thought states. (5) So these thought states in question, which lie behind intelligibility, cannot themselves be built up out of linguistic sequences or word-flows. (6) So some thought states are prelinguistic (a thesis which contradicts thesis 1).  It appears to me that the seemingly devastating effect of the preceding line of argument arises from the commission by the arguer of two logical mistakes-or rather, perhaps, of a single logical mistake which is committed twice over in substantially similar though superficially different forms. The first time round the victim of the mistake is myself, the second time round the victim is the truth. In the first stage of the argument it is maintained that the word-flows which are supposedly constitutive of thought will have to satisfy the condition of being significant or meaningful and that the interpretation of this notion of meaningfulness resists expansion into a relativized form, and resists also the application of any pattern of analysis proposed by me. The second time round the arguer contends that any word-flow which is held to be constitutive of an instance of thinking will have to be supposed to be a significant word-flow and that the fulfillment of this condition requires a certain kind of causal connection with ad-missible psychological states or processes and that to fulfill their function at this point neither the states in question nor the processes connected with them can be regarded as being constituted by further word-flows; the word-flows associated with thinking in order to provide for meaningfulness will have to be extralinguistic, or prelinguis-tic, in contradiction to the thesis that thinking is never in any relevant sense prelinguistic.  At this point we are surely entitled to confront the propounder of the cited argument with two questions. (1) Why should he assume that I shall be called upon to identify the notion of significance, which applies to the word-flows of thought, directly with any favored locution involving the notion of meaning which can be found in my work, or to any analysis suggested by me for such a locution? Why should not the link between the significance of word-flows involved in thinking and suggestions offered by me for the analysis of meaning be much less direct than the propounder of the argument envisages? (2) With what right, in the later stages of the argument, does the pro-pounder of the argument assume that if the word-flows involved in thought have to be regarded as significant, this will require not merely the provision at some stage of a reasonable assurance that this will be so but also the incorporation within the defining characterization of thinking of a special condition explicitly stipulating the significance of constitutive word-flows, despite the fact that the addition of such a condition will introduce a fairly blatant contradiction?  While, then, we shall be looking for reasonable assurance that the word-flows involved in thinking are intelligible, we shall not wish to court disaster by including a requirement that may be suggested as a distinct stipulated condition governing their admissibility as word-flows which are constitutive of thinking; and we may even retain an open mind on the question whether the assurance that we are seeking is to be provided as the conclusion of a deductive argument rather than by some other kind of inferential step.  The following more specific responses seem to me to be appropriate at this point.  (1) Since we shall be concerned with a language which is or which has been in general use, we may presume the accessibility of a class of mature speakers of that language, who by practice or by precept can generate for us open ranges of word-sequences which are, or again are not, admissible sentences of that language.  A favorable verdict from the body of mature speakers will establish particular sentences both as significant and, on that account, as expressive of psychological states such as a belief that Queen Anne is dead or a strong desire to be somewhere else. But the envisaged favorable verdicts on the part of mature speakers will only establish particular sentences as expressive of certain psychological states in general; they will not confer upon the sentences expressiveness of psychological states relative to particular individuals. For that stage to be reached some further determination is required Experience tells us that any admissible sentence in the language is open to either of two modes of production, which I will call "overt" and "sotto voce." The precise meaning of these labels will require further determination, but the ideas with which I am operating are as follows. (a) "Overt" production is one or another of the kinds of production, which will be characteristic of communication. (b) "Sotto voce" production which has some connection with, though is possibly not to be identified as, "unspoken production," is typically the kind of production involved in thinking. (c) Any creature which is equipped for the effective overt production of a particular sequence is also thereby equipped for its effective sotto voce production.  (4) We have reached a point at which we have envisaged an indefinite multitude of linguistic sequences certified by the body of mature speakers not merely as legitimate sentences of their language but also as expressive of psychological states in general, though not of psychological states relevant to any particular speaker. It seems then that we need to ask what should be added to guarantee that the sentences in the repertoire of a particular speaker should be recognized by him not merely as expressive of psychological states in general but as expressive of his psychological states in particular. I would suggest that what is needed to ensure that he recognizes a suitable portion of his repertoire of sentences as being expressive relative to himself is that he should be the center of a life story which fits in with the idea that he, rather than someone else, is the subject of the attributed psychological states. If this condition is fulfilled, we can think of him, perhaps, not merely as linguistically fluent but also as linguistically proficient; he is in a position to apply a favored stock of sentences to himself. It would of course be incredible, though perhaps logically conceivable, for someone to be linguistically fluent without being linguistically proficient.  It is of course common form, as the world goes, for persons who are linguistically fluent and linguistically proficient to become so by natural methods, that is to say, as a result of experience and training, but we may draw attention to the abstract possibility that the attributes in question might be the outcome not of natural but of artificial processes; they might, for example, be achieved by some sort of physiological engineering. Are we to allow such a fantasy as being con-ceivable, and if not, why not?  I shall conclude the discussion of Strand Four with two distinct and  seemingly unconnected reflections.  (A) We might be well advised to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.  (1) That representation by means of verbal formulations is an artificial and noniconic mode of representation. (2) That to replace an iconic system of representation by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.  (3) That every artificial or noniconic system is founded upon an antecedent natural iconic system.  Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation. That work will consist in the representation of objects and situations in the world in something like the sense in which a team of Australian cricketers may represent Aus-tralia; they do on behalf of Australia something which Australia cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket. Similarly our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable objects and situations in the world to do something which they cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behavior.  (B) It remains to inquire whether there is any reasonable alternative program for the problems about meaning other than of the provision of a reductive analysis of the concept of meaning. The only alternative which I can think of would be that of treating "meaning" as a theoretical concept which, together perhaps with other theoretical con-cepts, would provide for the primitive predicates involved in a semantic system, an array whose job it would be to provide the laws and hypotheses in terms of which the phenomena of meaning are to be explained. If this direction is taken, the meaning of particular express-sions will be a matter of hypothesis and conjecture rather than of intuition, since the application of theoretical concepts is not generally  thought of as reachable by intuition or observation. But some of those like Mrs. Jack who object to the reductive analysis of meaning are also anxious that meanings should be intuitively recognizable. How this result is to be achieved I do not know.  Strand Five  Strand Five is perhaps most easily approached through an inquiry whether there is any kind, type, mode, or region of signification which has special claims to centrality, and so might offer itself as a core around which more peripheral cases of signification might clus-ter, perhaps in a dependent posture. I suggest that there is a case for the supposition of the existence of such a central or primary range of cases of signification; and further that when the question of a more precise characterization of this range is raised, we are not at a loss how to proceed. There seem to be in fact not merely one, but two ways of specifying a primary range, each of which has equally good claim to what might be called "best candidate status." It is of course a question which will await final decision whether these candidates are distinct from one another. We should recognize that at the start we shall be moving fairly large conceptual slabs around a somewhat crudely fashioned board and that we are likely only to reach sharper conceptual definition as the inquiry proceeds.  We need to ask whether there is a feature, albeit initially hazy, which we may label "centrality, " which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of signification from nonprimary ranges.  There seems to be a good chance that the answer is "Yes." If some instances of signification are distinguishable from others as relatively direct rather than indirect, straightforward rather than devious, plain rather than convoluted, definite rather than indefinite, or as exhibiting other distinguishing marks of similar general character, it would seem to be not unreasonable to regard such significations as belonging to a primary range. Might it not be that the capacity to see through a glass darkly presupposes, and is not presupposed by, a capacity at least occasionally to achieve full and unhampered vision with the naked eye?  But when we come to ask for a more precise delineation of the initially hazy feature of centrality, which supposedly distinguishes primary from nonprimary ranges of signification, we find ourselves confronted by two features, which I shall call respectively "formality"and "dictiveness," with seemingly equally strong claims to provide for us a rationally reconstructed interpretation of the initially hazy feature of centrality.  Our initial intuitive investigation alerts us to a distinction within the domain of significations between those which are composite or complex and those which are noncomposite or simple; and they also suggest to us that the primary range of significations should be thought of as restricted to simple or noncomposite significations; those which are complex can be added at a later stage. Within the field left by this first restriction, it will be appealing to look for a subordinate central range of items whose signification may be thought of as being in some appropriate sense direct rather than in-direct, and our next task will be to clarify the meaning, or meanings, in this context of the word "direct." One class of cases of signification with a seemingly good claim to centrality would be those in which the items or situations signified are picked out as such by their falling under the conventional meaning of the signifying expression rather than by some more informal or indirect relationship to the signifying expression. "The President's advisers approved the idea" perhaps would, and "those guys in the White House kitchen said 'Heigh Ho'" perhaps would not, meet with special favor under this test, which would without question need a fuller and more cautious exposition.  Perhaps, however, for present purposes a crude distinction between conventional or formal signification and nonconventional or informal signification will suffice.  A second and seemingly not inferior suggestion would be that a special centrality should be attributed to those instances of signification in which what is signified either is, or forms part of, or is specially and appropriately connected with what the signifying expression (or its user) says as distinct from implies, suggests, hints, or in some other less than fully direct manner conveys. We might perhaps summarily express this suggestion as being that special centrality attaches to those instances of signification in which what is signi-ied is or is part of the "dictive" content of the signifying expres-ion. We should now, perhaps, try to relate these suggestions to one another.  Is the material just sketched best regarded as offering two different formulations of a single criterion of centrality, or as offering two distinct characterizations of such centrality? It seems fairly clear to me that, assuming the adequacy for present purposes of the formulationof the issues involved, two distinct criteria are in fact being offered.  One may be called the presence or absence of formality (whether or not the relevant signification is part of the conventional meaning of the signifying expression); the other may be called the presence or absence of dictive content, or dictiveness (whether or not the relevant signification is part of what the signifying expression says); and it seems that formality and informality may each be combined with dic-tiveness or again with nondictiveness. So the two distinctions seem to be logically independent of one another. Let us try to substantiate this claim.  If I make a standard statement of fact such as "The chairman of the Berkeley Philosophy Department is in the Department office.", what is signified is, or at least may for present purposes be treated as being, the conventional meaning of the signifying expression; so formality is present. What is signified is also what the signifying expression says; so dictiveness is also present. Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Dar-ien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I," his hearer might well be somewhat baffled; and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the onetime activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase "on the other hand." But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement. So we seem to have a case of a condition which is part of what the words conventionally mean without being part of what the words say; that is, we have formality without dictiveness. Suppose someone, in a suitable context, says "Heigh-ho." It is possible that he might thereby mean something like "Well that's the way the world goes." Or again if someone were to say "He's just an evangelist," he might mean, perhaps, "He is a sanctimonious, hypo-critical, racist, reactionary, money-grubber." If in each case his meaning were as suggested, it might well be claimed that what he meant was in fact what his words said; in which case his words would be dictive but their dictive content would be nonformal and not part of the conventional meaning of the words used. We should thus find dictiveness without formality. (4) At a Department meeting, one of my colleagues provides a sustained exhibition of temperamental perversity and caprice; at the close of the meeting I say to him, "Excuse me, madam," or alterna-tively, I usher him through the door with an elaborate courtly bow. In such a case perhaps it might be said that what my words or my bow convey is that he has been behaving like a prima donna; but they do not say that this is so, nor is it part of the conventional meaning of any words or gestures used by me that this is so. Here something is conveyed or signified without formality and without dictiveness.  There seems then to be a good prima-facie case for regarding formality and dictiveness as independent criteria of centrality. Before we pursue this matter and the questions which arise from it, it might be useful to consider a little further the details of the mechanism by which, in the second example, we achieve what some might regard as a slightly startling result that formality may be present independently of dictiveness. The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels. One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand." The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker's words.  We may note that a related kind of nonformal (as distinct from formal) implicature may sometimes be present. It may, for example, be the case that a speaker signals himself, by his use of such words as  "so" or "therefore," as performing the speech-act of explaining will be plausible only on the assumption that the speaker accepts as true one or more further unmentioned ground-floor matters of fact. His acceptance of such further matters of fact has to be supposed in order to rationalize the explanation which he offers. In such a case we mayperhaps say that the speaker does not formally implicate the matters of fact in question.  A problem which now faces us is that there seem to be two "best candidates," each of which in different ways suggests the admissibility of an "inner/outer" distinction, and we need to be assured that there is nothing objectionable or arbitrary about the emergence of this seemingly competitive plurality. The feature of formality, or conventional signification, suggests such a distinction, since we can foresee a distinction between an inner range of characteristics which belong directly to the conventional meaning of a signifying expression, and an outer range of characteristics which, although not themselves directly part of the conventional meaning of a given signifying expres-sion, are invariably, perhaps as a matter of natural necessity, concomitant with other characteristics which do directly belong to the conventional meaning of the signifying expression. Again, if there is an inner range of characteristics which belong to the dictive content of a signifying expression as forming part of what such an expression says, it is foreseeable that there will be an outer range of cases involving characteristics which, though not part of what a signifying expression says, do form part of what such an expression conveys in some gentler and less forthright manner-part, for example, of what it hints or suggests.  To take the matter further, I suspect that we shall need to look more closely at the detailed constitution of the two "best candidates." At this point I have confined myself to remarking that dictiveness seems to be restricted to the ground-floor level, however that may be determined, while formality seems to be unrestricted with regard to level. But there may well be other important differences between the two concepts. Let us turn first to formality, which, to my mind, may prove to be in somewhat better shape than dictiveness. To say this is not in the least to deny that it involves serious and difficult problems; indeed, if some are to be believed-for example, those who align themselves with Quine in a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion-these problems may turn out to be insuperable, and may drive us into a form of skepticism. But one might well in such an event regard the skepticism as imposed by the intractability of the subject-matter, not by the ineptitude of the theorist. He may well have done his best.  Some of the most pressing questions which arise concerning theconcept of formality will be found in a fourfold list, which I have compiled, of topics related to formality. First and foremost among these is the demand for a theoretically adequate specification of conditions which will authorize the assignment of truth conditions to suitably selected expressions, thereby endowing those expressions with a conventional signification. It is plain that such provision is needed if signification is to get off the ground; meanings are not natural growths and need to be conferred or instituted. But the mere fact that they are needed is insufficient to show that they are available; we might be left in the skeptic's position of seeing clearly what is needed, and yet being at the same time totally unable to attain it. We should not, of course, confuse the suggestion that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the exercise of rationality with the suggestion that there is no rationally acceptable theoretical account of what the exercise of rationality consists in; but though distinct these suggestions may not be independent; for it is conceivably true that the exercise of rationality can exist only if there is a theoretically adequate account, accessible to human reason, of what it is that constitutes rationality; in which case an acceptance of the second suggestion will entail an acceptance of the first suggestion. These remarks are intended to raise, but not to settle, the question whether our adoption of linguistic conventions is to be explained by appeal to a general capacity for the adoption of conventions (the sort of explanation offered by Stephen Schiffer in Meaning), here I intend neither to endorse nor to reject the possibility of such an explanation. Similar troubles might attend a superficially different presentation of the enterprise, according to which what is being sought and, one hopes, legitimately fixed by fat would be not conventional meanings for certain expressions, but a solid guarantee that, in certain conditions, in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so. The conditions in question would of course have to be conditions of truth.  Inquiries of the kind just mentioned might profitably be reinforced by attention to other topics contained in my fourfold list. Another of these would involve the provision of an inventory which will be an example of what I propose to call a "semi-inferential sequence." An example of such a sequence might be the following:  (I) It is, speaking extensionally, general practice to treat d as signifying F.  (Il) It is, speaking intensionally, general practice to treat @ as signifying F.  III) It is generally accepted that it is legitimate to treat @ as signifying F.  (IV) It is legitimate to treat d as signifying F.  (V) o does signify F.  Explanatory Remarks  What is involved in the phenomenon of treating & (an expres-sion) as signifying F has not been, and would need to be, explicitly stated. A "semi-inferential sequence" is not a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by its predecessor in the sequence. It is rather a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by a conjunction of its predecessor with an identifiable and verifiable supplementary condition, a condition which however has not been explicitly specified. Some semi-inferential sequences will be "concept-determining" sequences. In such sequences the final member will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure which has appeared previously in the sequence, though only as embedded within a larger structure which specifies some psychological state or practice of some rational being or class of rational beings. It is my suggestion that, for certain valuational or semantic con-cepts, the institution of truth-conditions for such concepts is possible only via the mediation of a semi-inferential concept-determining se-quence. To speak extensionally is to base a claim to generality on actual frequencies. To speak intensionally is to base a claim to generality on the adoption of or adherence to a rule the observance of which may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency. The practical modalities involved in (III) and (IV) may be restricted by an appended modifier, such as "from a logical point of view" or "from the point of view of good manners." It might also be valuable to relate the restricted field of inferences connected with semantic proprieties to the broader and quite possibly analogous field of inferences connected with practical proprieties in general, which it would be the business of ethics to systematize. If skepticism about linguistic proprieties could not be prevented fromexpanding into skepticism about improprieties of any and every kind, that might be a heavier price than the linguistic skeptic would be prepared to pay.  It would be unwise at this point to neglect a further direction of inquiry, namely proper characterization of the relation between words on the one hand, and on the other the sounds or shapes which constitute their physical realizations. Such reflections may be expected to throw light on the precise sense in which words are instru-ments, and may well be of interest both in themselves and as a needed antidote to the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-token distinc-tion. It is perhaps natural to assume that in the case of words the fundamental entities are particular shapes and sounds (word tokens) and that words, in the sense of word-types are properly regarded as classes or sets of mutually resembling word tokens. But I think that such a view can be seen to be in conflict with common sense (to whatever extent that is a drawback). John's rendering of the word "soot" may be indistinguishable from James's rendering of the word "suit"; but it does not follow from this that when they produce these render-ings, they are uttering the same word, or producing different tokens of the same word-type. Indeed there is something tempting about the idea that, in order to allow for all admissible vagaries of rendering, what are to count for a given person as renderings of particular words can only be determined by reference to more or less extended segments of his discourse; and this in turn perhaps prompts the idea that particular audible or visible renderings of words are only established as such by being conceived by the speaker or writer as realizations of just those words. One might say perhaps the words come first and only later come their realizations.  Together with these reflections goes a further line of thought.  Spades are commonly and standardly used for such purposes as digging garden beds; and when they are so used, we may speak indifferently of using a spade to dig the bed and of using a spade (simpliciter).  On a windy day when I am in the garden, I may wish to prevent my papers from blowing away, and to achieve this result, I may put my spade on top of them. In such a case I think I might be said to be using a spade to secure the papers but not to be using a spade (sim-pliciter) unless perhaps I were to make an eccentric but regular use of the spade for this purpose. When it comes, however, to the use for this or that purpose of words, it may well be that my freedom of speech is more radically constrained. I may be the proud possessor ofa brass plaque shaped as a written representation of the word  "mother." Maybe on a windy day I put this plaque on top of my papers to secure them. But if I do so, it seems to be wrong to speak of me as having used the word "mother" to secure my papers. Words may be instruments but if so, they seem to be essentially confined to a certain region of employment, as instruments of communication. To attempt to use them outside that region is to attempt the conceptually impossible. Such phenonema as this need systematic explanation.  On the face of it, the factors at work in the determination of the presence or absence of dictiveness form a more motley collection than those which bear on the presence of formality. The presence or absence of an appropriate measure of ardor on behalf of a thesis, a conscientious reluctance to see one's statements falsified or un-confirmed, an excessive preoccupation with what is actually or potentially noncontroversial background material, an overindulgence in caution with respect to the strength to be attributed to an idea which one propounds, and a deviousness or indirectness of expression which helps to obscure even the identity of such an idea, might well be thought to have little in common, and in consequence to impart an unappealing fragmentation to the notion of dictive content. But perhaps these factors exhibit greater unity than at first appears; perhaps they can be viewed as specifying different ways in which a speaker's alignment with an idea or thesis may be displayed or obscured; and since in communication in a certain sense all must be public, if an idea or thesis is too heavily obscured, then it can no longer be regarded as having been propounded. So strong support for some idea, a distaste for having one's already issued statements discredited, an unexciting harmony the function of which is merely to establish a reference, and a tentative or veiled formulation of a thesis may perhaps be seen as embodying descending degrees of intensity in a speaker's alignment to whatever idea he is propounding. If so, we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or an-other, have drawn a distinction between "phrastics" and "neustics,"  who, in one  philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or im-peratively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tenta-tively.  In this connection it would perhaps be appropriate to elaboratesomewhat the characters of tentativeness and obliqueness which are specially visible in cases of "low commitment." First "suggestion." Suggesting that so-and-so seems to me to be, with varying degrees of obviousness, different from (a) stating or maintaining that so-and-so  (b) asserting it to be likely or probable that so-and-so (c) asserting it to be possible that so-and-so, where presumably "it is possible" means "it is not certain that it is not the case that so-and-so." Suggesting that so-and-so is perhaps more like, though still by no means exactly like, asserting there to be some evidence that so-and-so. Stan-dardly, to suggest that so-and-so invites a response, and, if the suggestion is reasonable, the response it invites is to meet in one way or another the case which the maker of the suggestion, somewhat like a grand jury, supposes there to be in favor of the possibility that so-and-so. The existence of such a case will require that there should be a truthful fact or set of facts which might be explained by the hypothesis that so-and-so together with certain other facts or assumptions, though the speaker is not committed to the claim that such an explanation would in fact be correct. Suggesting seems to me to be related to, though in certain respects different from, hinting. In what seem to me to be standard cases of hinting one makes, explicitly, a statement which does, or might, justify the idea that there is a case for supposing that so-and-so; but what there might be a case for supposing, namely that so-and-so, is not explicitly mentioned but is left to the audience to identify. Obviously the more devious the hinting, the greater is the chance that the speaker will fail to make contact with his audience, and so will escape without having committed himself to anything.  Strand Sixt  Strand Six deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle. In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse. I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of  6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.  It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.  Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.  I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.  A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the following way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected. The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act. I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.  (1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.  False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.  (2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.  Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic. The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question.  Strands Seven and Eight?  These strands may be considered together, representing, as they do, what might be deemed a division of sympathy on my part between two different schools of thought concerning the nature and content of Logic. These consist of the Modernists, spearheaded by Russell and other mathematically oriented philosophers, and the Traditionalists, particularly the neo-Traditionalists led by Strawson in An Introduction to Logical Theory. As may be seen, my inclination has been to have one foot in each of these at least at one time warring camps. Let us consider the issues more slowly.  (A) Modernism  In their most severe and purist guise Modernists are ready to admit to the domain of Logic only first-order predicate logic with identity, though laxer spirits may be willing to add to this bare minimum some  7. Cf. esp. Essays 3, 17.more liberal studies, like that of some system of modalities. It seems to me that a Modernist might maintain any one of three different positions with respect to what he thinks of as Logic.  He might hold that what he recognizes as Logic reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives. Unless more is said, this position is perhaps somewhat low on initial plausibility. He might hold that though not every feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which deserve to be preserved, all features that is to say, which are not irremediably vitiated by obscurity or incoherence. Without claiming that features which are omitted from his preferred system are ones which are marred by obscurity or incoherence he might claim that those which are not omitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order, that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the "Cathedral of Learning." (B) Neo-Traditionalism  So far as I can now reconstruct it, Strawson's response to Modernism at the time of An Introduction to Logical Theory, ran along the following lines.  At a number of points it is clear that the apparatus of Modernism does not give a faithful account of the character of the logical connectives of ordinary discourse; these deviations appear in the treatment of the Square of Opposition, the Russellian account of Def-inite, and also of Indefinite, Descriptions, the analysis of conditionals in terms of material implication, and the representation of universal statements by universal quantifiers. Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements in Modernism are liable to involve not merely infidelity to the actual character of vulgar connectives, but also the obliteration of certain conceptions, like presupposition and the existence of truth-gaps, which are crucial to the nature of certain logically fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference. The aspects thus omitted by Modernists are not such that their presence would undermine or discredit the connectives in the analysis of which they would appear. Like Cyrano de Bergerac's nose, they are features which are prominent without being disfiguring. Though they are not, in themselves, blemishes, they do nevertheless impede the optimally comprehensive and compendious representation of the body of admissible logical inferences. We need, therefore, two kinds of logic; one, to be called the logic of language, in which in a relaxed and sometimes not fully determinate way the actual character of the connectives of ordinary discourse is faithfully represented; the other, to be called formal logic, in which, at some cost to fidelity to the actual character of vulgar logical connectives, a strictly regimented system is provided which represents with maximal ease and economy the indefinite multitude of admissible logical inferences. (C) My Reactions to These Disputes  I have never been deeply moved by the prospect of a comprehensive and compendious systematization of acceptable logical infer-ences, though the tidiness of Modernist logic does have some appeal for me. But what exerts more influence upon me is my inclination to regard propositions as constructed entities whose essential character lies in their truth-value, entities which have an indispensable role to play in a ration al and scientific presentation of the domain of logical inference. From this point of view a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects, perhaps, for the rational construction of at least part of the realm of propositions, even though the fact that many complex propositions seem plainly to be non-truth-functional ensures that many problems remain. A few years after the appearance of An Introduction to Logical Theory I was devoting much attention to what might be loosely called the distinction between logical and pragmatic inferences. In the first instance this was prompted as part of an attempt to rebuff objections, primarily by followers of Wittgenstein, to the project of using "phe-nomenal" verbs, like "look" and "seem," to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception, particularly that of explaining the problematic notion of sense-data, which seemed to me to rest on a blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction. (That is not to say, of course, that there might not be other good reasons for rejecting the project in question.) It then occurred to me that apparatus which had rendered good service in one area might be equally successful when transferred to another; and so I canvassed the idea that the alleged divergences between Modernists' Logic and vulgar logical connectives might be represented as being a matter not of logical but of pragmatic import.  The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or is not required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope; when a sentence which used in isolation stan-dardly carries a certain implicature, is embedded in a certain linguistic context, for example appears within the scope of a negation-sign, must the embedding operator, namely the negation-sign, be interpreted only as working on the conventional import of the embedded sentence, or may it on occasion be interpreted as governing not the conventional import but the nonconventional implicatum of the embedded sentence? Only if an embedding operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the conventional import but the noncon-ventional implicatum standardly carried by the embedded sentence can the first version of my account of such linguistic phenomena as conditionals and definite descriptions be made to work. The denial of a conditional needs to be treated as denying not the conventional import but the standard implicatum attaching to an isolated use of the embedded sentence. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding locution may govern the standard nonconventional implicatum rather than the conventional import of the embedded sentence; if a friend were to tell me that he had spent the summer cleaning the Augean stables, it would be unreasonable of me to respond that he could not have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle. But where the limits of a license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the standard implicata rather than to conventional meanings, I have to admit that I do not know. The second version of my mode of treatment of issues which, historically speaking, divide Modernists from Traditionalists, including neo-Traditionalists, offers insurance against the possibility that we do not have, or that we sometimes do not have, a license to treat embedding locutions as governing standard implicata rather than conventional import. It operates on the idea that even if it should prove necessary to supplement the apparatus of Modernist logic with additional conventional devices, such supplementation is in two respects undramatic and innocuous and does not involve a radical reconstruction of Modernist apparatus. It is innocuous and undramatic partly because the newly introduced conventional devices can be re- garded simply as codification, with a consequently enlarged range of utility, of pre-existing informal methods of generating implicature; and partly because the new devices do not introduce any new ideas or concepts, but are rather procedural in character. This last feature can be seen from the fact that the conventional devices which I propose are bracketing or scope devices, and to understand them is simply to know how sentences in which they initially appear can be restructured and rewritten as sentences couched in orthodox modernistic terms from which the new devices have been eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for.  Let see if we may devote ourselves to a detailed review of the deeper aspects of the *unity* which Grice believes the essays in the volume to possess.  These deeper aspects are *three* in number, and Grice enumerates them separately.     The first aspect is that the *connections* between the topics discussed are sometimes stronger and *more interesting* than the essays themselves make it clear.    Partly this is due to the fact that these connections were not, Grice thinks, seen by Grice at the time at which the essays were composed for this or that public occasion at Oxford — the seminars were open to any member of the Jniversity — not just Ryle!      ,It is only in retrospect that Grice begins to see the *number* of the connections and their .*importance.*    The second aspect, on which Grice thinks the first is dependent, is that the various topics which interest Grice at the time at which these essays were composed for this or that public occasion  seem to be ones which *are*, first of all, *important* and second, topics which still interest Grice, and some of them, perhaps all of them, are matters which Grice still feels that he needs to make up his mind about more thoroughly and clearly.     Consequently the essays may perhaps be regarded as maybe the first word but not the last word in a number of directions in which it is important that the Oxonian *philosopher* of Grice’s generation — never mind anyone else — should go.     The third, and last, of these deeper aspects is one that has already been remarked upon in the preface as providing the *methodological*, rather than topical or substantive  theme which runs through the contents of the volume.   It consists in the application of or illustration of a certain sort of way of doing *philosophy*, one which was one of the many ways in which philosophy is done in Oxford and which are connected with the application to philosophy of a particular kind of interest in language — particularly ‘ordinary’ language.     Such interest takes more than one form, and Grice do not think that  in *any* of the forms it has been very well articulated or expressed or described by those who practised it.    And Grice thinks it is of fundamental importance to philosophizing.     A second part of the epilogue is devoted to an attempt to make its character more clear.    Grice begins by *listing* the persistent or recurrent thematic strands which it seems to Grice Grice can discern in the essays appearing in the volume, and 1 shall then return after having listed them to consider them one by one in varying degrees of detail.     Grice thinks that he can detect eight such strands, though some of them have more than one component and the components do not necessarily have to be accepted as a block.    The first of these main strands belongs to the philosophy of perception;     it involves two theses;     first that the general notion of perception, the concept expressed by the verb "perceive," is properly treatable by means of causal analysis; and     second that, in the more specific notions connected with perception —like those involving different modalities of perception like "seeing" and "hearing," —various elements may be considered but one which cannot be ignored, or eliminated, is the *experiential* quality of the sense EXPERIENCE that perception involves.     A third question, about the conceptual analysis of a a statement describing an object of perception like a thing, is also prominent in Grice’s thinking at the time at which these essays were written but does not figure largely in these pages.     A second strand is a concern to defend the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction, together perhaps with one or more of such closely related distinctions as that between necessary and contingent, or between a priori and a posteriori.     A third strand is a *defense* of the rights of the ordinary man — such as Grice’s father was — or common sense — such as Grice’s mother displayed except when it came to Noel Coward - vis-à-vis the philosopher, the idea being that for reasons which have yet to be determined and accurately stated the ordinary man has a right to more respect from the Oxonian philosopher than a word of thanks for having got him started.    The fourth strand relates to signifying; it consists in two theses: first, that it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of signifying which is relativized, or ASCRIBED, to the the utterer of this or that expression and one that is not so relativized;     and second, of the *two* notions the unrelativized notion is posteriori to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized notion;     what an expression ‘signifies’ is a matter of what this or that utterer signifies by the uttering of a token of it.    The fifth strand is the contention that, in considering the notion of signifying we should pay attention to two related distinctions.     First, a distinction between this or that element of signifying which is present by virtue of convention and those which are present by virtue of something other than convention — say Human Reason    and second,     between this or that element of signifying which standardly form part of what a word or form of words asserts (or its user asserts or SAYS — Cicero, dicere), and this or that element of signifying which rather form part of what the words or their users imply or convey or to which he is committed OTHER than by Cicero’s dicere.     A distinction, that is to say, (a) between     conventional and nonconventional     signifying and (b)     between assertive     and nonassertive     non-dictive    signifying        Strand six is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of *rational* activity and     that this or that rational activity which does not involve the use of language is in various ways importantly parallel to that which does.    This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of *rational* activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational     co-operation —     the merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.    Strands seven and eight both relate to the real or apparent opposition between the structures advocated by traditional or Aristotelian ‘semantics’, on the one hand, and by non-traditional ‘semantics’, on the other.     In a certain sense these strands pull in opposite directions.    Strand seven consists in the contention that it is illegitimate to represent, as some non-traditionalists have done, such a syntactical *subject* phrase as     "the King of France,"     every schoolboy,"     a rich man," and even     Bismarck"     as being only ostensibly referential;     that they should be *genuinely* referential — CIcero REFERENTIA denotational — is *required* both for an adequate representation of ordinary discourse and to preserve this underlying conception of the use of language as a *rational* activity.    Strand eight involves the thesis that, notwithstanding the claims of strand seven, a genuinely referential or denotational status can be secured for this or that syntactically subject phrase in question by *supplementing* the apparatus of non-traditionalism in various ways which would include the addition of the kind of bracketing of numerically subscripting devices which are sketched within the contents of the volume.    Strand One    Grice now turns to a closer examination of the first of these eight thematic strands, the strand, that is, which relates to the analysis of per-ception.'     The two essays involving this strand seem to Grice not to be devoid of merit;   the essay on the Causal Theory of Perception served to introduce — publicly, at Cambridge — what later Grice calls the notion of Conversational Implicature  1. Cf. esp. Essays 15-16.    which has performed, Grice think, some useful methodological service in philosophy, and also provides an adequate base for the rejection of a bad, though at one time popular among Oxonian Wittgensteinisns, reason for rejecting a causal analysis of perception; and     the essay called "Some Remarks about the Senses," commissioned by Butler and where Grice credits O. P. Wood, drew attention, Grice thinks, to an important and neglected subject, namely the question of what criterion to use  by which one distinguishes between one modality of sense and another.     But, unfortunately, to find a way of disposing of one bad reason for rejecting a certain thesis — the causal analysis — is not the same as to establish that thesis, nor is drawing attention to the importance of a certain question, that of the modal criterion, the same as answering that question.    In retrospect it seems to Grice that both these essays are open to criticisms which, so far as Grice knows, have not been explicitly advanced.    In "The Causal Theory of Perception" Grice reverts to a position about a sense-datum statement which is originally taken up by philosophers such as Scots philosopher Paul — to restrict myself to Austin’s Play Group — and some others — Quinton, Grice’s pupil Snowdon;     according to it, a statement to the effect that someone is having a sense-datum of a particular sort is to be understood as an alternative way of making a statement about that someone which is expressible in terms of what Grice  call a phenomenalist verb  like "it seems to someone as if” — or, more specifically, like "looks," "sounds” — someone is not hearing a noise — and "feels."    This position contrastts with the kind of view, according to which a statement about sense-data is not just an alternative version of a statements which may be expressed in terms of such a phenomenalist verbs but are items which serve to account for the applicability of such a range of verbs.     According to this other view, to say that someone is having a sense-datum of a particular sort which is red, or not green, or mouselike, or noisy, is not just an outlandish alternative way of saying it looked to him as if there was a mouse or something red, or not green, or noise-provoking before him, but is rather to specify something which explained *why* (causally) it looked to him as if there was something red or not green or noise-provoking before him or as if there were a mouse or a cat called Sylvester before him.     The proponents of the newer view of sense-data would have justified their suggestion by pointing to the fact that sense-data and their sensible characteristics are mysterious items which themselves stand in need of explanation, and so cannot properly be regarded as explaining, rather than as being explained by, the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb-phrase associated with them.     It is not clear that these criticisms of the older view are justified.    Might it not be that while in one use of the verb "explain" (that which is roughly equivalent to "to render intelligible") sense-data *are* explained in terms of this or that phenomenalist verbs,    in another usd of "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to  "to account for") the priority is reversed, and the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb *is* explained by the availability of sense-data and their sensible feature?    The newer view, moreover, itself runs into trouble — at Oxford.    It seems to Grice to be a plausible view that the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb is itself to be understood as asserting the presence or occurrence of a certain sort of *experience*, one which would explain and in certain circumstances license the separate employment of a verb phrase embedded in the phenomenalist verb-phrase;     for it to look or seem to Grice as if there is something red before Grice is for Grice to have an *experience* which would explain and, in certain unproblematic circumstances, license the assertion that there is something red before Grice.    It will be logically incoherent at one and the same time to represent the use of this or that phenomenalist verb as indicating the existence of a basis, of some sort or other, for a certain kind of assertion about perceptible objects and as telling us what that basis is.     The older view of sense-data attempts to specify the basis; the newer view, apparently with Grice’s concurrence, seems to duck this question and thereby to render mysterious the interpretation of this or that phenomenalist verb-phrase.    Second, in "Some Remarks about the Senses" Grice allows for the possibility that there is no one criterion for the individuation of a sense, but Grice does not provide for the separate possibility that the critical candidates are not merely none of them paramount but are not in fact independent of one another.     For example, this or that sense organ is differentiated not by their material character, but by their function.     Organs that are just like eyes would in fact be not eyes but ears if what they did was, not to see, but to hear;     again, the real quality of a things is that which underlies or explains various causal mechanisms, such as our being affected by vibrations or light rays.     So criterial candidates run into one another;     Indeed, and again, the *experiential* flavour or quality of, again, *experience* to which Grice attaches special importance is in fact linked with the relevant ranges of what Locke calls a secondary quality which an observer attributes to the objects which he perceives;     so we might end up in a position that would not have been uncongenial to Locke and Boyle,     in which we hold that there are *two* ways or criteria of distinguishing between the five senses, one of which is by the character of their operations (processes studied by the sciences rather than by the ordinary citizen), and the other would be by the difference of their phenomenal character, which would be something which would primarily be of interest to ordinary people rather than to scientists.     These reflections suggest to Grice two ideas which Grice shall here specify but not argue for.     The first is that, so far from being elements in the ultimate furniture of the world, a sense-datum is an item which is imported by theorists for various purposes;       such a purposes might be that one should have bearers of this or that kind of relation which is needed in order to provide us with a better means for describing or explaining Reality, or the world.     Such a relation might be causal or spatial where the space involved is not physical space but some other kind of space, like visual space, or it might be a system of relations which in certain ways are analogous to spatial relations, like an octave relations of a pitch between two sounds.     This idea might lead to another, namely that consideration of the nature of perception might lead us to a kind of vindication of common sense distinct from those vindications which Grice mentions elsewhere in this epilogue, for if a sense-datum is to be a theoretical extension introduced or concocted this or that theorist — say, Aristotle, who called it phantasmata — the theorist will need common sense in order to tell him what it is to which such theoretical extension need to be added.       A     Philosopher' story derives its character and direction from the nonphilosophical story which it supplement. I see with my eye.    A second of these eight strands consists in a belief in the possibility of vindicating one or more of a number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of "The analytic/synthetic distinction."    Grice says nothing here about this strand not because I think it is unimportant;     indeed I think it is one of the most important topics in philosophy, required in determining, not merely the answers to this or that particular philosophical question, but the nature of philosophy itself.     It is rather that Grice feels that nothing less than an adequate treatment of the topic would be of any great value, and an adequate treatment of it would require a great deal of work which Grice has not yet been able to complete.     This lacuna, however, may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that Grice provides some discussion of this topic in the volume Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions  Categories, Ends — PGRICE, Clarendon, and by the fact that at the conclusion of the epilogue he also advances a slightly skittish hint of the direction in which Grice has some inclination to go.     Grice hopes that this treatment will serve as an interim indication of what Grice’s final position might be.    2. Cf. esp. Essay 13.    A  third strand' consists in a disposition on Grice’s part to uphold, in one form or another, the rights of the ordinary man who speaks ordinary language — careless chatter -/ or of common sense in the face of attacks which proceed from this or that alleged champion — think Churchland or Place — of a *specialist* philosophical theory.     All parties would, Grice thinks, agree that this or that specialist philosophical theory has to start from some basis in ordinary thought of an informal character;     the question at issue is whether the contents and views contained in that thought have to continue to be respected, in some measure or other, by the specialist philosophical theorist even after the specialist philosophical theorist has embarked on his own work.    According to some, at that point, the contribution of ordinary thought and speech may be ignored, like a ladder to be kicked away once the specialist philosophical theorist has got going.     Grice’s Scottish support for Scottish common sense is not eroded by the failure of many attempts made by philosophers to give a justification or basis for such support;     indeed the negative part of Grice’s contribution to the subject consists in the rejection of a number of such attempts.     Some of these rejections appear in discussions contained in this volume — Malcolm professing on Moore at Cornell especially irritated both Grice and Woozley back at Oxford —, others in other places.     One form of defense of common sense is one propounded by Irish Moore in the famous essay on that subject.     This seems to consist in the presumed acceptability of the obvious;     it seems to consist in that, because — so far as Grice can see — no other reason is given for the acceptance of what Moore counts as a proposition of common sense, which he lacked.    If Grice has read Moore aright — implicature: not bloody likely, he hails from the other place — Grice finds this form of defense of common sense unsatisfactory on the grounds that the conception of the obvious is not in an appropriate sense an objective conception.    This is pointedly illustrated by the famous story of the English mathematician Hardy, who in a lecture announced, out of the blue, that a certain mathematical proposition was ‘obvious,’ at which point one of his audience demurred and said that it was not obvious *to him*.     At this point,   Hardy halts the lecture, paces outside the lecture room for a quarter of an hour, returns, and said     “It is obvious." — This was Jesus. At Oxford one may never leave the lecture room.    The trouble is that obviousness requires consent, on the part of the parties concerned, in the obviousness of what is thought of as obvious.    A second and different line of defense of common sense comes from Reid, who points to the need for a principle of human knowledge.     Once these is secured, various forms of derivation and deduction and inference can account for the accumulation of  3. Cf. esp. Essays 8-10.    known    propositions which are as it were theorems in the system of knowledge;     but theorems need to look back to axioms and these axioms are things which Reid regards as matters which it is the function of common sense to provide.    The fault which Grice finds here is a conflation of the notion of an axiom as being an organizational item from which nonaxiomatic propositions are supposed to be derivable with an epi-stemic interpretation of an axiom as providing the foundations of human knowledge;     it seems to Grice arguable  and indeed plausible to suppose that the grounds for the acceptance of the contents of this or that system do *not£ lie in the prior evidence or self-evidence of the axioms of the system, but in the general character of the system in containing what one thinks that system ought to contain in the way of what is knowable.    From an epistemic point of view the justifiability of the system lies in its delivering, in general, what one wants it to deliver and thinks it should deliver, rather than in the availability of a range of this or that privileged intuition which, happily, provides us with a sufficiency of starting points for rational inference.     If common sense comes into the picture at all in this connection it seems to Grice that it should be with regard to a recognition, in some degree or other,  of what the system ought to be expected to deliver to us rather than as a faculty which assures us of starting points which form the axioms of the system.    A third attempt to justify common sense is that provided by Malcolm notably at Cornell of all places in his interpretation of Moore;     Malcolm suggested that Moore's point should be thought of as being that a standard description of certain sorts of situations cannot be incorrect since the standards of correctness are set by the nature of the descriptions which are standardly used to describe those situations.     The trouble with this line, to Grice’s mind, is that it confuses two kinds of correctness and incorrectness — at Oxford and Athens, if not Ithaca!    Correctness of use or usage, whether a certain expression is properly or improperly applied, gives us one kind of correctness, that of proper application.    That an expression is correct in that way however hardly guarantees it against another sort of incorrectness, namely logical or semantic or categorial incoherence. Decapitation willed Charles I’s death.    Yet another form of an attempt to justify common sense is by an appeal to Paradigm or Standard Cases, as first deviced by Grice’s pupil Flew — cases, that is, of the application of an expression to what are supposedly things to which that expression applies if it applies to anything at all;     for example, if the expression "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like "desks" and "walls" and "pavements." — not to “reason”!    The difficulty with this attempt is that it contains as an assumption just what a sceptic who is querying common sense is concerned to deny:     no doubt it may be true that if the word "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like  "desks,"     but it is the contention of the sceptic that it does not apply to anything, and therefore the fact that something is the strongest candidate does not mean that it is a successful candidate for the application of that expression.    Cf. Eddington’s wavicle chair!      On the positive side Grice does offer as an alternative to the appeals he has just been discussing, a proposed link between the authority of common sense and the theory of signifying.     Grice suggests roughly that to side with the sceptic in his questioning of commonsense beliefs would be to accept an untenable divorce between the ‘signifying’ of this or that expression on the one hand, and the proper specification of what an utterer signifies by the uttering of a token of that expression (‘Impenetrability’) on the other.     Grice’s attempt to link two of the eight strands to one another seems to Grice open to several objections, at least one of which he regards as fatal.    Grice begins with two objections which he is inclined to regard as non-fatal; the first of these is that Gricd’s proposed reply to the sceptic ignores the distinction between what is propounded as, or as part of, one's message, thus being something which the utterer intends, and on the other hand what is part of the background of the message by way of being something which is implied, in which case its acceptance is often not intended but is rather assumed — often as non-controversial: My aunt’s boyfriend went to that concert!    That there is this distinction is true, but what is, given perfect rapport between utterer and addressee, something which an utterer implies, may, should that rapport turn out to be less than perfect, become something which the utterer is committed to asserting or propounding.     If the utterer thinks his addressee has certain information which in fact the addressee does not, the utterer may, when this fact emerges, be rationally committed to giving him the information in question, so what is implied is at least potentially something which is asserted — Cicero’s dictum, Varro’s prosloquium — and so, potentially, something the *acceptance* of which is intended.    A second (Grice thinks, nonfatal) objection runs as follows:     some forms of skepticism do not point to an incoherence in certain kinds of mes-sage;     they rely on the idea that a skeptical doubt sometimes has to have been already allayed in order that one should have the foundations which are needed to allay just those doubts.     To establish that I am *not* dreaming, I need to be assured that the *experience* on which I rely to reach this assurance is a waking experience.   In response to this objection, it can be argued,     first, that a defense of common sense does not have to defend it all at once, against all forms of skeptical doubts, and,     second, it might be held that with regard to the kinds of skeptical doubts which are here alluded to, what is needed is not a well-founded assurance that one's cognitive apparatus is in working order, but rather that it should in fact be in working order whatever the beliefs or suppositions of its owner - Descartes if not Ryle — may be.    The serious objection is that Grice’s proposal fails to distinguish between the adoption, at a certain point in the representation of the skeptic's proposed position, of an extensional and of a more correct *intensional* reading of that account.     Grice assumes that the skeptic's position would be properly represented by an *intensional* reading at this point, in which case I supposed the skeptic to be committed to an incoherence;     in fact, however, it is equally legitimate to take not an intensional reading but an *extensional* reading in which case we arrive at a formulation of the skeptic's position which, so far as has been shown, is reasonable and also immune from the objection which Grice proposes.    According to the *intensional* reading, the skeptic's position can be represented as follows:     that a certain ordinary sentence s does, at least in part, ‘signifies’  that the circle is square;     second, that in some such cases, the proposition that the circle is square is incoherent, and     third, that a standard utterer intends his addressee incoherently to *accept* that the circle is square, where "incoherently" is to be read as specifying part of what the utterer intends.     That position may not perhaps be strictly speaking incoherent, but it certainly seems wildly implausible.     However, there seems to be no need for the skeptic to take it.    It can be avoided by an *extensional* (transparent, substitutable salva veritate? interpretation of the appearance   in this context, of the adverb "incoherently."     According to this representation, it would be possible for s to ‘signify’ (in part) that the circle is square and for the proposition that the circle is square to be incoherent and also for a standard utterer to intend his addressee to ‘accept’ that the circle is square —     which would be to accept something which is in fact incoherent though it would be NO part of the utterer’s intention that in accepting that the circle is square the addressee should be accepting something which is incoherent.    He may have mislearned, or use the expression idiosyncratically.     To this reply there seems to me to be no reply.    Despite this failure, however, there seem to remain two different directions in which a vindication of common sense or ordinary speech may be looked for.   The first would lie in the thought that whether or not a given expression or range of expressions applies to a particular situation or range of situations is simply determined by whether or not it is standardly applied to such situations;     the fact that in its application those who apply it may be subject to this or that form of intellectual corruption or confusion or idiosyncrasy in the utterer’s inviolable liberty to utter as he pleases does not affect the validity of the claim that the expression or range of expressions does apply to those situations.     In a different line would be the view that the attributions and beliefs of ordinary people can only be questioned with due cause, and due cause is not that easy to come by;     it has to be shown that some more or less dire consequences follow from not correcting the kind of belief in question;     and, if no such dire consequences can be shown, the beliefs and contentions of common sense have to be left intact.    A fourth strand has already been alluded to in the discussion of the previous one  and consists in Grice’s views about the relation between what might roughly be described as an utterer properly signifying, and by allegorical extension, an expression ‘signifying.’    Of all the thematic strands which Grice is distinguishing this is the one that has given hin most trouble, and it has also engendered more heat, from other philosophers, in both directions, than any of its fellows.     Grice attempta a presentation of the issues involved.    It has been Grice’s suggestion that there are two distinguishable concepts of ‘signifying’ which have called "natural"  — signum naturale, phusei — and "non-natural" ‘signifying’ and that there are tests which may be brought to bear to distinguish them.     We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of the verb "signify" is factive or nonfactive, that is to say whether for it to be true that so and so signifies that p it does or does not have to be the case that it is true that p;     again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to enclose the specification of what is signified would be inappropriate or appropriate.     If factivity is present and quotation marks would be inappropriate, we would have a case of natural signifying; otherwise the dignifying involved would be nonnatural.     We may now ask whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of this dichotomy of uses to which “signify" seems to be subject.     If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and in what direction such elucidation should proceed.     Grice fairly recently (in Essay 18) cane to believe that there is such an overarching idea and that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The  4. Cf. esp. Essays 5-6, 7, 12.    The idea behind both uses of "signify" is that of consequence; if x signifies y  y, or something which includes y or the idea of y, is a consequence of x.     In "natural" signifying, consequences are states of affairs;     in "nonnatural" signifying , consequences are phantasmata — conceptions or complexes which involve conceptions.     This perhaps suggests that of the two concepts it is "nonnatural" signifying which is more in need of further elucidation;     it seems to be the more specialized of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate;     we may, for example, ask how conceptions enter the picture and whether what enters the picture is the conceptions themselves or their justifiability.     On these counts I should look favorably on the idea that if further analysis should be required for one of the pair the notion of "nonnatural" signifying  would be first in line.    There are factors which support the suitability of further analysis for the concept of "nonnatural" signifying.     "Signifying nn" ("non-natural signifying") does not look as if it names an original feature of items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually independent: (a)     given suitable background conditions, signifying nn can be changed by fiat; (    b) the presence of signifying nn is dependent on a framework provided by a communication-engaged community of at least a conversational dyad.    It seems to Grice, then, at least reasonable and possibly even mandatory, to treat the ‘signifying’ of this or that communication vehicle as analyzable in terms of features of com-municators;     A    Nonrelativised use of allegorical ‘signifying’  " is posterior to and  explicable through relativized uses involving reference to communicators.     More specifically, what an expression ‘signifies’ is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them;     that is to say,     what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users standardly intend (more precisely, M-intend) to produce by their utterance.   Sentence-meaning is thus explicable either in terms of psychological attitudes which are standardly M-intended to produce in a co-communicator  by sentence utterers or to attitudes taken up by hearers toward the activities of sentence utterers.    At this point we begin to run into objections.     The first to be considered is one brought by Jack, whose position I find not wholly clear.     She professes herself in favor of "a broadly 'Gricean' enter-  5. In an as yet unpublished paper entitled "The Rights and Wrongs of Grice on Signifying.    "prise" but wishes to discard various salient elements in Grice’s account (we might call these "narrowly Gricean theses").     What, precisely, is  "broad Griceanism"?     She declares herself in favour of the enterprise of giving an account of meaning in terms of psychological attitudes, and this suggests that she favors the idea of an analysis, in psychological terms, of the concept of meaning, but considers that I have gone wrong, perhaps even radically wrong, in my selection of the ingredients of such an analysis.    Jack also reproves Grice for "reductionism," in terms which suggest that whatever account or analysis of meaning is to be offered, it should not be one which is "reductionist," which might or might not be equivalent to a demand that a proper analysis should not be a proper reductive analysis.     But what kind of analysis is to be provided?    What Grice think we cannot agree to allow Jack to do is to pursue the goal of giving a lax reductive analysis of meaning, that is, a reductive analysis which is unhampered by the constraints which characteristically attach to reductive analysis, like the avoidance of circularity; a goal, to which, to Grice’s mind several of my opponents have in fact addressed themselves.     In this connection I should perhaps observe that though Grice’s earlier endeavors in the theory of meaning were attempts to provide a reductive analysis, he never (he thinks) espoused reduction-ism, which to Grice’s mind involves the idea that a semantic - gr semein, Cicero signare — concept is unsatisfactory or even unintelligible, unless they can be provided with interpretations in terms of some predetermined, privileged, and favored array of concepts;     in this sense of "reductionism" a felt ad hoc need for reductive analysis does not have to rest on a reductionist foundation.     Reductive analysis might be called for to get away from unclarity not to get to some predesignated clarifiers.    I shall for the moment assume that the demand that Grice faces is for a form of reductive analysis which is less grievously flawed than the one which I in fact offered;     and I shall reserve until later consideration of the idea that what is needed is not any kind of reductive analysis but rather some other mode of explication of the concept of signifying.    The most general complaint, which comes from Grice’s own pupil, Strawson, Searle, and Jack, seems to be that Grice has, wholly or partially, misidentified the intended (or M-intended) effect in communication; according to Grice it is some form of acceptance (for example, belief or desire), whereas it should be held to be understanding, comprehension, or (to use an Austinian designation) "uptaké."     One form of the cavil (the more extreme form) would maintain that the immediate intended tar-get is always "uptake," though this or that form of acceptance may be an ulterior target;     a less extreme form might hold that the immediate target is sometimes, but not invariably, "uptake."     I am also not wholly clear whether my opponents are thinking of "uptake" as referring to an understanding of a sentence (or other such expression) as a sentence or expression in a particular language, or as referring to a comprehension of its occasion-meaning (what the sentence or expression means on this occasion in this speaker's mouth).     But Grice’s bafflement arises primarily from the fact that it seems to him that my analysis already invokes an analyzed version of an intention toward some form of "uptake" (or a passable substitute therefor), when I claim that in meaning a hearer is intended to recognize himself as intended to be the subject of a particular form of acceptance, and to take on such an acceptance for that reason.     Does the objector reject this analysis and if so why?     And in any case his position hardly seems satisfactory when we see that it involves attributing to speakers an intention which is specified in terms of the very notion of meaning which is being analyzed (or in terms of a dangerously close relative of that notion).     Circularity seems to be blatantly abroad.    This question is closely related to, and is indeed one part of, the vexed question whether, in my original proposal, I was right to embrace a self-denial of the use of this or that ‘semantic’ concept in the specification of the intentions which are embedded in meaning, a renunciation which was motivated by fear of circularity.     A clear view of the position is not assisted by the fact that it seems uncertain what should, or should not, be counted as a deployment of such a ‘semantic’ notion.    So far we seem to have been repelling boarders without too much difficulty; but I fear that intruders, whose guise is not too unlike that of the critics whom we have been considering, may offer, in the end at least, more trouble.     First, it might be suggested that there is a certain arbitrariness in Grice’s taking relativized meaning as tantamount to a speaker's meaning something by an utterance;     there are other notions which might compete for this spot, in particular the notion of something's meaning something to a hearer.     Why should the claims of "meaning to," that is of passive or recipient's meaning, be inferior to those of "meaning by" (that is, of acting or agent's meaning)?     Indeed a thought along these lines might lie behind the advocacy of  "uptake" as being sometimes or even always the target of semantic intention.      A possible reply to the champion of passive meaning would run asfollows:     (1) If we maintain our present program, relativized meaning is an intermediate analytic stage between nonrelativized meaning and a "semantics-free" ("s-free") paraphrase of statements about mean-ing.     So, given our present course, the fact (if it should be a fact) that there is no obviously available s-free paraphrase for "meaning to" would be a reason against selecting "meaning to" as an approved specimen of relativized meaning. (2)     There does however seem in fact to be an s-free paraphrase for "meaning to," though it is one in which is embedded that paraphrase which has already been suggested for  "meaning by"; "s means p to X" would be interpreted as saying  "X knows what the present speaker does (alternatively a standard speaker would) mean by an utterance of s"; and at the next stage of analysis we introduce the proffered s-free paraphrase for "meaning by."     So "meaning to" will merely look back to "meaning by," and the cavil will come to naught.    At least in its present form.     But an offshoot of it seems to be available which might be less easy to dispose of.     I shall first formulate a sketch of a proposed line of argument against my analysis of mean-ing, and then consider briefly two ways in which this argumentation might be resisted.    First, the argument.    In the treatment of language, we need to consider not only the relation of language to communication, but also, and concurrently, the relation of language to thought.    A plausible position is that, for one reason or another, language is indispensable for thought, either as an instrument for its expression or, even more centrally, as the vehicle, or the material, in which thought is couched.   We may at some point have to pay more attention to the details of these seeming variants, but for the present let us assume the stronger view that for one reason or another the occurrence of thought requires, either invariably or at least in all paradigmatic cases, the presence of a "linguistic flow."    The "linguistic flows" in question need to attain at least a certain level of comprehensibility from the point of view of the thinker; while it is plain that not all thinking (some indeed might say that no thinking) is entirely free from confusion and incoherence, too great a departure of the language-flow from comprehensibility will destroy its character as (or as the expression of) thought; and this in turn will undermine the primary function of thought as an explanation of bodily behavior.    Attempts to represent the comprehensibility, to the thinker, of the expression of thought by an appeal to either of the relativized concepts of meaningn so far distinguished encounter serious, if not fatal, difficulties.     While it is not impossible to mean something by what one says to oneself in one's head, the occurrence of such a phenomenon seems to be restricted to special cases of self-exhortation ("what I kept telling myself was......"), and not to be a general feature of thinking as such.     Again, recognition of a linguistic sequence as meaning something to me seems appropriate (perhaps) when I finally catch on to the way in which I am supposed to take that se-quence, and so to instances in which I am being addressed by another not to those in which I address myself; such a phrase as "I couldn't get myself to understand what I was telling myself" seems dubiously admissible.    So an admission of the indispensability of language to thought carries with it a commitment to the priority of nonrelativized meaning to either of the designated relativized conceptions; and there are no other promising relativized candidates.     So nonrelativized meaning is noneliminable.    The foregoing resistance to the idea of eliminating nonrelativized meaning by reductive analysis couched in terms of one or the other variety of relativized meaning might, perhaps, be reinforced by an attempt to exhibit the invalidity of a form of argument on which, it might be thought, the proponent of such reduction might be relying.    While the normal vehicles of interpersonal communication are words, this is not exclusively the case; a gesture, a sign, and a pictorial item sometimes occur, at times even without linguistic concomitants.     That fact might lead to the supposition that nonlinguistic forms of communication are pre-linguistic, and do not depend on linguistic mean-ing.   A closely related form of reflection would suggest that if it is the case (as it seems to be) that sometimes the elements of trains of thought are nonlinguistic, prelinguistic thinking is a genuine pos-sibility.     This was a live issue in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-tury. At Oxford.    But, it may be said, both of these lines of argument are incon-clusive, for closely related reasons.     The fact that on occasion the vehicles of communication or of thought may be wholly nonlinguistic does not show that such vehicles are prelinguistic;     it may well be that such vehicles could only fulfill their function as vehicles against a background of linguistic competence without which they would be lost.     If, for example, they operate as substitutes for language, lan-guage for which they are substitutes needs perhaps to be available to their users.    We now find ourselves in a serious intellectual bind.     Our initial attention to the operation of language in communication has provided powerful support for the idea that the meaning of words or other communication devices should be identified with the potentiality of such words or devices for causing or being caused by particular ranges of thought or psychological attitudes.     When we are on this tack we are inexorably drawn toward the kind of psychological reductionism exhibited in Grice’s own essays about Meaning. (2)     When our attention is focused on the appearance of language in thinking we are no less strongly drawn in the opposite direction;     language now seems constitutive of thought rather than something the intelligibility of which derives from its relation to thought.    We cannot have it both ways at one and the same time.     This dilemma can be amplified along the following lines.      States of thought, or psychological attitudes cannot be prelinguistic in char-acter.     Thought states therefore presuppose linguistic thought-episodes which are constitutive of them.     Such linguistic thought-episodes, to fulfill their function, must be intelligible sequences of words or of licensed word-substitutes.     Intelligibility requires ap: propriate causal relation to thought states.     So these thought states in question, which lie behind intelligibility, cannot themselves be built up out of linguistic sequences or word-flows.     So some thought states are prelinguistic (a thesis which contradicts the first thesis     It appears to me that the seemingly devastating effect of the preceding line of argument arises from the commission by the arguer of two logical mistakes-or rather, perhaps, of a single logical mistake which is committed twice over in substantially similar though superficially different forms.     The first time round the victim of the mistake is myself, the second time round the victim is the truth.     In the first stage of the argument it is maintained that the word-flows which are supposedly constitutive of thought will have to satisfy the condition of being “significant” and that the interpretation of a notion of significance resists expansion into a relativized form, and resists also the application of any pattern of analysis proposed by me.     The second time round the arguer contends that any word-flow which is held to be constitutive of an instance of thinking will have to be supposed to be a “significant” word-flow and that the fulfillment of this condition requires a certain kind of causal connection with ad-missible psychological states or processes and that to fulfill their function at this point neither the states in question nor the processes connected with them can be regarded as being constituted by further word-flows;     the word-flows associated with thinking in order to provide for significance will have to be extralinguistic, or prelinguis-tic, in contradiction to the thesis that thinking is never in any relevant sense prelinguistic.    At this point we are surely entitled to confront the propounder of the cited argument with two questions.     Why should he assume that I shall be called upon to identify the notion of significance, which applies to the word-flows of thought, directly with any favored locution involving the notion of meaning which can be found in my work, or to any analysis suggested by me for such a locution?     Why should not the link between the significance of word-flows involved in thinking and suggestions offered by me for the analysis of meaning be much less direct than the propounder of the argument envisages?      With what right, in the later stages of the argument, does the pro-pounder of the argument assume that if the word-flows involved in thought have to be regarded as “significant,” this will require not merely the provision at some stage of a reasonable assurance that this will be so but also the incorporation within the defining characterization of thinking of a special condition explicitly stipulating the “significance” of constitutive word-flows, despite the fact that the addition of such a condition will introduce a fairly blatant contradiction?    While, then, we shall be looking for reasonable assurance that the word-flows involved in thinking are intelligible, or significant, we shall not wish to court disaster by including a requirement that may be suggested as a distinct stipulated condition governing their admissibility as word-flows which are constitutive of thinking;     and we may even retain an open mind on the question whether the assurance that we are seeking is to be provided as the conclusion of a deductive argument rather than by some other kind of inferential step.    The following more specific responses seem to me to be appropriate at this point.    Since we shall be concerned with a language which is or which has been in general use, we may presume the accessibility of a class of mature - as Timothy ain’t — speakers of that language, who by practice  or by precept, can generate for us open ranges of word-sequences which are, or again are not, admissible sentences of that language.    A favorable verdict from the body of mature speakers will establish particular sentences both as “significant” and, on that account, as expressive of psychological states such as a belief that Queen Anne is dead or a strong desire to be somewhere else.     But the envisaged favorable verdicts on the part of mature speakers will only establish particular sentences as expressive of certain psychological states in general;     they will not confer upon the sentences expressiveness of psychological states relative to particular individuals.     For that stage to be reached some further determination is required    Experience tells us that any admissible sentence in the language is open to either of two modes of production, which I will call "overt" and "sotto voce."   The precise meaning of these labels will require further determination, but the ideas with which I am operating are as follows.     Overt" production is one or another of the kinds of production, which will be characteristic of communication.     "Sotto voce" production which has some connection with, though is possibly not to be identified as, "unspoken production," is typically the kind of production involved in thinking.     Any creature which is equipped for the effective overt production of a particular sequence is also thereby equipped for its effective sotto voce production.    We have reached a point at which we have envisaged an indefinite multitude of linguistic sequences certified by the body of mature speakers not merely as legitimate sentences of their language but also as expressive of psychological states in general, though not of psychological states relevant to any particular speaker.     It seems then that we need to ask what should be added to guarantee that the sentences in the repertoire of a particular speaker should be recognized by him not merely as expressive of psychological states in general but as expressive of his psychological states in particular.     Grice suggests that what is needed to ensure that he recognizes a suitable portion of his repertoire of sentences as being expressive relative to himself is that he should be the center of a life story which fits in with the idea that he, rather than someone else, is the subject of the attributed psychological states.     If this condition is fulfilled, we can think of him, perhaps, not merely as linguistically fluent but also as linguistically proficient;     he is in a position to apply a favored stock of sentences to himself.     It would of course be incredible, though perhaps logically conceivable, for someone to be linguistically fluent without being linguistically proficient.    It is of course common form, as the world goes, for persons who are linguistically fluent and linguistically proficient to become so by natural methods, that is to say, as a result of experience and training, but we may draw attention to the abstract possibility that the attributes in question might be the outcome not of natural but of “artificial” processes;     they might, for example, be achieved by some sort of physiological engineering. — Pavlov’s dogs. Skinner’s pigeons.    Are we to allow such a fantasy as being con-ceivable, and if not, why not?    I shall conclude the discussion of this fourth Strand with two distinct and  seemingly unconnected reflections.    We might be well advised to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.    That representation by means of verbal formulations is an “artificial” — non-natural — and noniconic mode of representation.      That to replace an iconic system of representation by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.    That every “artificial” or noniconic system is founded upon an antecedent natural iconic system.    Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation.     That work will consist in the representation of things and situations in the world in something like the sense in which a team of Australian cricketers may represent Aus-tralia; they do on behalf of Australia something which Australia cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket.     Similarly our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable things and situations in the world to do something which they cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behavior.     It remains to inquire whether there is any reasonable alternative program for the problems about meaning other than of the provision of a reductive analysis of the concept of meaning.     The only alternative which I can think of would be that of treating "meaning" as a theoretical concept which, together perhaps with other theoretical concepts, would provide for the primitive predicates involved in a “semantic” system, an array whose job it would be to provide the laws and hypotheses in terms of which the phenomena of meaning are to be explained.     If this direction is taken, the meaning of particular express-sions will be a matter of hypothesis and conjecture rather than of intuition, since the application of theoretical concepts is not generally  thought of as reachable by intuition or observation.     But some of those like Jack who object to the reductive analysis of meaning are also anxious that meanings should be intuitively recognizable.     How this result is to be achieved I do not know.    A fifth strand is perhaps most easily approached through an inquiry whether there is any kind, type, mode, or region of “signification” which has special claims to centrality, and so might offer itself as a core around which more peripheral cases of “signification” might clus-ter, perhaps in a dependent posture.     Grice suggest that there is a case for the supposition of the existence of such a central or primary range of cases of “signification;” and further that when the question of a more precise characterization of this range is raised, we are not at a loss how to proceed.     There seem to be in fact not merely one, but two ways of specifying a primary range, each of which has equally good claim to what might be called "best candidate status."     It is of course a question which will await final decision whether these candidates are distinct from one another.     We should recognize that at the start we shall be moving fairly large conceptual slabs around a somewhat crudely fashioned board and that we are likely only to reach sharper conceptual definition as the inquiry proceeds.    We need to ask whether there is a feature, albeit initially hazy, which we may label "centrality, " which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of “signification” from nonprimary ranges.    There seems to be a good chance that the answer is "Yes."     If some instances of “signification” are distinguishable from others as relatively direct rather than indirect, straightforward rather than devious, plain rather than convoluted, definite rather than indefinite, or as exhibiting other distinguishing marks of similar general character, it would seem to be not unreasonable to regard such “significations” as belonging to a primary range.   Might it not be that the capacity to see through a glass darkly presupposes, and is not presupposed by, a capacity at least occasionally to achieve full and unhampered vision with the naked eye?    But when we come to ask for a more precise delineation of the initially hazy feature of centrality, which supposedly distinguishes primary from nonprimary ranges of “signification,” we find ourselves confronted by two features, which I shall call respectively "formality"and "dictiveness," with seemingly equally strong claims to provide for us a rationally reconstructed interpretation of the initially hazy feature of centrality.    Our initial intuitive investigation alerts us to a distinction within the domain of “significations” between those which are composite or complex and those which are noncomposite or simple; and they also suggest to us that the primary range of “significations” should be thought of as restricted to simple or noncomposite “significations;” those which are complex can be added at a later stage.     Within the field left by this first restriction, it will be appealing to look for a subordinate central range of items whose “signification” may be thought of as being in some appropriate sense direct rather than in-direct, and our next task will be to clarify the meaning, or meanings, in this context of the word "direct."     One class of cases of “signification” with a seemingly good claim to centrality would be those in which the items or situations “signified” are picked out as such by their falling under the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression rather than by some more informal or indirect relationship to the “signifying” expression.     “The President's advisers approved the idea" perhaps would, and "those guys in the White House kitchen said 'Heigh Ho'" perhaps would not, meet with special favor under this test, which would without question need a fuller and more cautious exposition.    Perhaps, however, for present purposes a crude distinction between conventional or formal “signification” and nonconventional or informal “signification” will suffice.    A second and seemingly not inferior suggestion would be that a special centrality should be attributed to those instances of “signification” in which “what is signified” either is, or forms part of, or is specially and appropriately connected with what the “signifying” expression (or its user) says — INDICATES — as distinct from implies, suggests, hints, or in some other less than fully direct manner conveys.     We might perhaps summarily express this suggestion as being that special centrality attaches to those instances of “signification” in which “what is signified” is or is part of the "dictive" content of the “signifying” expres-ion.     We should now, perhaps, try to relate these suggestions to one another.    Is the material just sketched best regarded as offering two different formulations of a single criterion of centrality, or as offering two distinct characterizations of such centrality?     It seems fairly clear to me that, assuming the adequacy for present purposes of the formulationof the issues involved, two distinct criteria are in fact being offered.    One may be called the presence or absence of formality (whether or not the relevant “signification” is part of the conventional meaning of the “signifying”  expression);     the other may be called the presence or absence of dictive content, or dictiveness (whether or not the relevant “signification” is part of what the “signifying” expression says or indicates or its utterer does);     and it seems that formality and informality may each be combined with dictiveness or again with nondictiveness.     So the two distinctions seem to be logically independent of one another.     Let us try to substantiate this claim.    If I make a standard statement of fact such as "The chairman of the Philosophy Department is in the Department office.", “what is signified” is, or at least may for present purposes be treated as being, the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression; so formality is present.     “What is signified” is also what the “signifying” expression says;     so dictiveness is also present.    Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I,"     his hearer might well be somewhat baffled;     and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the onetime activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally “signified” by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase "on the other hand."     But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement.     So we seem to have a case of a condition which is part of what the words conventionally mean without being part of what the words say;     that is, we have formality without dictiveness.    Suppose someone, in a suitable context, says "Heigh-ho."     It is possible that he might thereby mean something like "Well that's the way the world goes."     Or again if someone were to say "He's just an evangelist," he might mean, perhaps, "He is a sanctimonious, hypo-critical, racist, reactionary, money-grubber." Cf. Stevenson athlete — tall     If in each case his meaning were as suggested, it might well be claimed that what he meant was in fact what his words said; in which case his words would be dictive but their dictive content would be nonformal and not part of the conventional meaning of the words used.     We should thus find dictiveness without formality.    At a Department meeting, one of my colleagues provides a sustained exhibition of temperamental perversity and caprice; at the close of the meeting I say to him, "Excuse me, madam," or alterna-tively, I usher him through the door with an elaborate courtly bow.     In such a case perhaps it might be said that what my words or my bow convey is that he has been behaving like a prima donna;     but they do not say that this is so, nor is it part of the conventional meaning of any words or gestures used by me that this is so.     Here something is conveyed or “signified” without formality and without dictiveness.    There seems then to be a good prima-facie case for regarding formality and dictiveness as independent criteria of centrality.     Before we pursue this matter and the questions which arise from it, it might be useful to consider a little further the details of the mechanism by which, in the second example, we achieve what some might regard as a slightly startling result that formality may be present independently of dictiveness.   The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels.     One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts.     He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand."   The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker's words.    We may note that a related kind of nonformal (as distinct from formal) “implicature” may sometimes be present.     It may, for example, be the case that a speaker signals himself, by his use of such words as  "so" or "therefore," as performing the speech-act of explaining will be plausible only on the assumption that the speaker accepts as true one or more further unmentioned ground-floor matters of fact.     His acceptance of such further matters of fact has to be supposed in order to rationalize the explanation which he offers.     In such a case we may perhaps say that the speaker does not formally “implicate” the matters of fact in question.    A problem which now faces us is that there seem to be two "best candidates," each of which in different ways suggests the admissibility of an "inner/outer" distinction, and we need to be assured that there is nothing objectionable or arbitrary about the emergence of this seemingly competitive plurality.     The feature of formality, or conventional “signification,” suggests such a distinction, since we can foresee a distinction between an inner range of characteristics which belong directly to the conventional meaning of a “signifying” expression, and an outer range of characteristics which, although not themselves directly part of the conventional meaning of a given “signifying” expres-sion, are invariably, perhaps as a matter of natural necessity, concomitant with other characteristics which do directly belong to the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression.     Again, if there is an inner range of characteristics which belong to the dictive content of a “signifying” expression as forming part of what such an expression says, it is foreseeable that there will be an outer range of cases involving characteristics which, though not part of what a “signifying” expression says, do form part of what such an expression conveys in some gentler and less forthright manner-part, for example, of what it hints or suggests.    To take the matter further, I suspect that we shall need to look more closely at the detailed constitution of the two "best candidates."     At this point I have confined myself to remarking that dictiveness seems to be restricted to the ground-floor level, however that may be determined, while formality seems to be unrestricted with regard to level.     But there may well be other important differences between the two concepts.   Let us turn first to formality, which, to my mind, may prove to be in somewhat better shape than dictiveness.     To say this is not in the least to deny that it involves serious and difficult problems;     indeed, if some are to be believed-for example, those who align themselves with Quine in a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion-these problems may turn out to be insuperable, and may drive us into a form of skepticism.   But one might well in such an event regard the skepticism as imposed by the intractability of the subject-matter, not by the ineptitude of the theorist.     He may well have done his best.    Some of the most pressing questions which arise concerning the concept of formality will be found in a fourfold list, which I have compiled, of topics related to formality.     First and foremost among these is the demand for a theoretically adequate specification of conditions which will authorize the assignment of truth conditions to suitably selected expressions, thereby endowing those expressions with a conventional “signification.”    It is plain that such provision is needed if “signification” is to get off the ground;     meanings are not natural growths and need to be conferred or instituted.     But the mere fact that they are needed is insufficient to show that they are available;     we might be left in the skeptic's position of seeing clearly what is needed, and yet being at the same time totally unable to attain it.     We should not, of course, confuse the suggestion that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the exercise of rationality with the suggestion that there is no rationally acceptable theoretical account of what the exercise of rationality consists in;     but though distinct these suggestions may not be independent; for it is conceivably true that the exercise of rationality can exist only if there is a theoretically adequate account, accessible to human reason, of what it is that constitutes rationality; in which case an acceptance of the second suggestion will entail an acceptance of the first suggestion.     These remarks are intended to raise, but not to settle, the question whether our adoption of linguistic conventions is to be explained by appeal to a general capacity for the adoption of conventions (the sort of explanation offered by Schiffer in Meaning), alla Lewis as solution to co-ordination problem of arbitrariness.    here I intend neither to endorse nor to reject the possibility of such an explanation.     Similar troubles might attend a superficially different presentation of the enterprise, according to which what is being sought and, one hopes, legitimately fixed by fat would be not conventional meanings for certain expressions, but a solid guarantee that, in certain conditions, in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so.     The conditions in question would of course have to be conditions of truth.  Inquiries of the kind just mentioned might profitably be reinforced by attention to other topics contained in my fourfold list.     Another of these would involve the provision of an inventory which will be an example of what I propose to call a "semi-inferential sequence."     An example of such a sequence might be the following:    (I) It is, speaking extensionally, general practice to treat d as “signifying” F.    (Il) It is, speaking intensionally, general practice to treat @ as “signifying”  F.    III) It is generally accepted that it is legitimate to treat @ as “signifying” F.    (IV) It is legitimate to treat d as “signifying” F.    (V) o does “signify” F.    What is involved in the phenomenon of treating & (an expres-sion) as “signifying” F has not been, and would need to be, explicitly stated.    A "semi-inferential sequence" is not a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by its predecessor in the sequence.     It is rather a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by a conjunction of its predecessor with an identifiable and verifiable supplementary condition, a condition which however has not been explicitly specified.    Some semi-inferential sequences will be "concept-determining" sequences.   In such sequences the final member will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure which has appeared previously in the sequence, though only as embedded within a larger structure which specifies some psychological state or practice of some rational being or class of rational beings.    It is my suggestion that, for certain valuational or “semantic” con-cepts, the institution of truth-conditions for such concepts is possible only via the mediation of a semi-inferential concept-determining se-quence.    To speak extensionally is to base a claim to generality on actual frequencies.    To speak intensionally is to base a claim to generality on the adoption of or adherence to a rule the observance of which may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency.    The practical modalities involved in (III) and (IV) may be restricted by an appended modifier, such as "from a logical point of view" or "from the point of view of good manners."    It might also be valuable to relate the restricted field of inferences connected with “semantic” proprieties to the broader and quite possibly analogous field of inferences connected with practical proprieties in general, which it would be the business of ethics to systematize.     If skepticism about linguistic proprieties could not be prevented from expanding into skepticism about improprieties of any and every kind, that might be a heavier price than the linguistic skeptic would be prepared to pay.    It would be unwise at this point to neglect a further direction of inquiry, namely proper characterization of the relation between words on the one hand, and on the other the sounds or shapes which constitute their physical realizations.   Such reflections may be expected to throw light on the precise sense in which words are instru-ments, and may well be of interest both in themselves and as a needed antidote to the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-token distinc-tion. It is perhaps natural to assume that in the case of words the fundamental entities are particular shapes and sounds (word tokens) and that words, in the sense of word-types are properly regarded as classes or sets of mutually resembling word tokens.     But I think that such a view can be seen to be in conflict with common sense (to whatever extent that is a drawback). John's rendering of the word "soot" may be indistinguishable from James's rendering of the word "suit"; but it does not follow from this that when they produce these render-ings, they are uttering the same word, or producing different tokens of the same word-type. Indeed there is something tempting about the idea that, in order to allow for all admissible vagaries of rendering, what are to count for a given person as renderings of particular words can only be determined by reference to more or less extended segments of his discourse; and this in turn perhaps prompts the idea that particular audible or visible renderings of words are only established as such by being conceived by the speaker or writer as realizations of just those words.     One might say perhaps the words come first and only later come their realizations.    Together with these reflections goes a further line of thought.  Spades are commonly and standardly used for such purposes as digging garden beds; and when they are so used, we may speak indifferently of using a spade to dig the bed and of using a spade (simpliciter).    On a windy day when I am in the garden, I may wish to prevent my papers from blowing away, and to achieve this result, I may put my spade on top of them. In such a case I think I might be said to be using a spade to secure the papers but not to be using a spade (sim-pliciter) unless perhaps I were to make an eccentric but regular use of the spade for this purpose. When it comes, however, to the use for this or that purpose of words, it may well be that my freedom of speech is more radically constrained. I may be the proud possessor ofa brass plaque shaped as a written representation of the word  "mother."     Maybe on a windy day I put this plaque on top of my papers to secure them. But if I do so, it seems to be wrong to speak of me as having used the word "mother" to secure my papers. Words may be instruments but if so, they seem to be essentially confined to a certain region of employment, as instruments of communication. To attempt to use them outside that region is to attempt the conceptually impossible. Such phenonema as this need systematic explanation.    On the face of it, the factors at work in the determination of the presence or absence of dictiveness form a more motley collection than those which bear on the presence of formality.     The presence or absence of an appropriate measure of ardor on behalf of a thesis, a conscientious reluctance to see one's statements falsified or un-confirmed, an excessive preoccupation with what is actually or potentially noncontroversial background material, an overindulgence in caution with respect to the strength to be attributed to an idea which one propounds, and a deviousness or indirectness of expression which helps to obscure even the identity of such an idea, might well be thought to have little in common, and in consequence to impart an unappealing fragmentation to the notion of dictive content.     But perhaps these factors exhibit greater unity than at first appears; perhaps they can be viewed as specifying different ways in which a speaker's alignment with an idea or thesis may be displayed or obscured; and since in communication in a certain sense all must be public, if an idea or thesis is too heavily obscured, then it can no longer be regarded as having been propounded.     So strong support for some idea, a distaste for having one's already issued statements discredited, an unexciting harmony the function of which is merely to establish a reference, and a tentative or veiled formulation of a thesis may perhaps be seen as embodying descending degrees of intensity in a speaker's alignment to whatever idea he is propounding. If so, we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or an-other, have drawn a distinction between "phrastics" and "neustics,"  who, in one  philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or im-peratively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tenta-tively.    In this connection it would perhaps be appropriate to elaboratesomewhat the characters of tentativeness and obliqueness which are specially visible in cases of "low commitment."     First "suggestion."     Suggesting that so-and-so seems to me to be, with varying degrees of obviousness, different from (a) stating or maintaining that so-and-so  (b) asserting it to be likely or probable that so-and-so (c) asserting it to be possible that so-and-so, where presumably "it is possible" means "it is not certain that it is not the case that so-and-so."     Suggesting that so-and-so is perhaps more like, though still by no means exactly like, asserting there to be some evidence that so-and-so. Stan-dardly, to suggest that so-and-so invites a response, and, if the suggestion is reasonable, the response it invites is to meet in one way or another the case which the maker of the suggestion, somewhat like a grand jury, supposes there to be in favor of the possibility that so-and-so.     The existence of such a case will require that there should be a truthful fact or set of facts which might be explained by the hypothesis that so-and-so together with certain other facts or assumptions, though the speaker is not committed to the claim that such an explanation would in fact be correct. Suggesting seems to me to be related to, though in certain respects different from, hinting. In what seem to me to be standard cases of hinting one makes, explicitly, a statement which does, or might, justify the idea that there is a case for supposing that so-and-so; but what there might be a case for supposing, namely that so-and-so, is not explicitly mentioned but is left to the audience to identify.     Obviously the more devious the hinting, the greater is the chance that the speaker will fail to make contact with his audience, and so will escape without having committed himself to anything.    A sixth strand deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle.     In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse.     I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of  6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.  It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.  Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.  I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.  A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the following way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected. The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act. I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.  (1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.  False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.  (2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.  Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic. The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question.  Strands Seven and Eight?  These strands may be considered together, representing, as they do, what might be deemed a division of sympathy on my part between two different schools of thought concerning the nature and content of Logic. These consist of the Modernists, spearheaded by Russell and other mathematically oriented philosophers, and the Traditionalists, particularly the neo-Traditionalists led by Strawson in An Introduction to Logical Theory. As may be seen, my inclination has been to have one foot in each of these at least at one time warring camps. Let us consider the issues more slowly.  (A) Modernism  In their most severe and purist guise Modernists are ready to admit to the domain of Logic only first-order predicate logic with identity, though laxer spirits may be willing to add to this bare minimum some  7. Cf. esp. Essays 3, 17.more liberal studies, like that of some system of modalities. It seems to me that a Modernist might maintain any one of three different positions with respect to what he thinks of as Logic.  He might hold that what he recognizes as Logic reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives. Unless more is said, this position is perhaps somewhat low on initial plausibility. He might hold that though not every feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which deserve to be preserved, all features that is to say, which are not irremediably vitiated by obscurity or incoherence. Without claiming that features which are omitted from his preferred system are ones which are marred by obscurity or incoherence he might claim that those which are not omitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order, that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the "Cathedral of Learning." (B) Neo-Traditionalism  So far as I can now reconstruct it, Strawson's response to Modernism at the time of An Introduction to Logical Theory, ran along the following lines.  At a number of points it is clear that the apparatus of Modernism does not give a faithful account of the character of the logical connectives of ordinary discourse; these deviations appear in the treatment of the Square of Opposition, the Russellian account of Def-inite, and also of Indefinite, Descriptions, the analysis of conditionals in terms of material implication, and the representation of universal statements by universal quantifiers. Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements in Modernism are liable to involve not merely infidelity to the actual character of vulgar connectives, but also the obliteration of certain conceptions, like presupposition and the existence of truth-gaps, which are crucial to the nature of certain logically fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference. The aspects thus omitted by Modernists are not such that their presence would undermine or discredit the connectives in the analysis of which they would appear. Like Cyrano de Bergerac's nose, they are features which are prominent without being disfiguring. Though they are not, in themselves, blemishes, they do nevertheless impede the optimally comprehensive and compendious representation of the body of admissible logical inferences. We need, therefore, two kinds of logic; one, to be called the logic of language, in which in a relaxed and sometimes not fully determinate way the actual character of the connectives of ordinary discourse is faithfully represented; the other, to be called formal logic, in which, at some cost to fidelity to the actual character of vulgar logical connectives, a strictly regimented system is provided which represents with maximal ease and economy the indefinite multitude of admissible logical inferences. (C) My Reactions to These Disputes  I have never been deeply moved by the prospect of a comprehensive and compendious systematization of acceptable logical infer-ences, though the tidiness of Modernist logic does have some appeal for me. But what exerts more influence upon me is my inclination to regard propositions as constructed entities whose essential character lies in their truth-value, entities which have an indispensable role to play in a rational and scientific presentation of the domain of logical inference. From this point of view a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects, perhaps, for the rational construction of at least part of the realm of propositions, even though the fact that many complex propositions seem plainly to be non-truth-functional ensures that many problems remain. A few years after the appearance of An Introduction to Logical Theory I was devoting much attention to what might be loosely called the distinction between logical and pragmatic inferences. In the first instance this was prompted as part of an attempt to rebuff objections, primarily by followers of Wittgenstein, to the project of using "phe-nomenal" verbs, like "look" and "seem," to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception, particularly that of explaining the problematic notion of sense-data, which seemed to me to rest on a blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction. (That is not to say, of course, that there might not be other good reasons for rejecting the project in question.) It then occurred to me that apparatus which had rendered good service in one area might be equally successful when transferred to another; and so I canvassed the idea that the alleged divergences between Modernists' Logic and vulgar logical connectives might be represented as being a matter not of logical but of pragmatic import.  The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or is not required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope; when a sentence which used in isolation stan-dardly carries a certain implicature, is embedded in a certain linguistic context, for example appears within the scope of a negation-sign, must the embedding operator, namely the negation-sign, be interpreted only as working on the conventional import of the embedded sentence, or may it on occasion be interpreted as governing not the conventional import but the nonconventional implicatum of the embedded sentence? Only if an embedding operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the conventional import but the noncon-ventional implicatum standardly carried by the embedded sentence can the first version of my account of such linguistic phenomena as conditionals and definite descriptions be made to work. The denial of a conditional needs to be treated as denying not the conventional import but the standard implicatum attaching to an isolated use of the embedded sentence. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding locution may govern the standard nonconventional implicatum rather than the conventional import of the embedded sentence; if a friend were to tell me that he had spent the summer cleaning the Augean stables, it would be unreasonable of me to respond that he could not have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle. But where the limits of a license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the standard implicata rather than to conventional meanings, I have to admit that I do not know. The second version of my mode of treatment of issues which, historically speaking, divide Modernists from Traditionalists, including neo-Traditionalists, offers insurance against the possibility that we do not have, or that we sometimes do not have, a license to treat embedding locutions as governing standard implicata rather than conventional import. It operates on the idea that even if it should prove necessary to supplement the apparatus of Modernist logic with additional conventional devices, such supplementation is in two respects undramatic and innocuous and does not involve a radical reconstruction of Modernist apparatus. It is innocuous and undramatic partly because the newly introduced conventional devices can be re- garded simply as codification, with a consequently enlarged range of utility, of pre-existing informal methods of generating implicature; and partly because the new devices do not introduce any new ideas or concepts, but are rather procedural in character. This last feature can be seen from the fact that the conventional devices which I propose are bracketing or scope devices, and to understand them is simply to know how sentences in which they initially appear can be restructured and rewritten as sentences couched in orthodox modernistic terms from which the new devices have been eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. I shall conclude this Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of my attitude to ordinary language. In order to fulfill this task, I should say something about what was possibly the most notable corporate achievement of my philosophical early middle age, namely the so-called method of linguistic botanizing, treated, as it often was in Oxford at the time, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and philosophical analysis in particular. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated in Oxford. A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf correctly and playing golf properly. But also the method was commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in larger-scale attempts to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase which gives linguistic expression to just this concept; and one goal of linguistic botanizing may be to make this concept explicit and to show how the various subordinate concepts fall under it. This program is closely linked with Austin's ideas about the desirability of ture of the method is that no initial assumptions are made about the subdivisions involved in subordinate lexical entries united by a single word; "true friends," "true statements," "true beliefs," "true bills,"  "true measuring instruments," "true singing voices" will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving different uses of the word "true"; that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botanizing; subordinations and subdivisions are not given in advance. It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic proprieties and improprieties: and these may be of several different kinds; so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which proprieties and improprieties may be characterized and organized. Contradictions, incoherences, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botanizing, and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration. Not only may single words involve a multitude of lexical entries, but different idioms and syntactical constructions appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botanizing. Syntax must not be ignored in the study of se-mantics.  At this point we are faced with two distinct problems. The first arises from the fact that my purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually took place in Oxford some forty years ago but rather to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical methodology.  Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian methodol-ogy, such persons as Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Hampshire, Urmson, Warnock, and others (including myself) had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation; indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this group could have had a better idea than the members of the group since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedures which these people were seeking to deploy. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic methodology, for a fully adequate implementation of that methodology requires a good and clear representation of the methodology itself; the more fragmentary the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation; and it must be admitted  "going through the dictionary." In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the word "true"; for one fea-that the ability of many of us to say at the time what it was that we were doing was fragmentary in the extreme. This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity; to say what such an activity is presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and this in turn presupposes the ability to say what the activity in question is.  The second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing like Russell, Quine and others have exhibited strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study ordinary language. Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and the thinking of the layman is what scientific thinking is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on. The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.  Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed experts between "we" and "they"; between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the rabble on the other. But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar; they might think of themselves as qualified by extended application and education to pursue further and to handle better just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days; after all, most professionals begin as amateurs. Or they might think of themselves as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all. In any case, to recognize the rights of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority which forms the cultured elite is quite distinct from treating the majority as themselves constituting a cultured elite.  Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallels which seem to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception in the mid-twentieth century, and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of our discipline. The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of that earlier Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself. In Aristotle's writing the main sources are the beginning of the Topics, the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the end of the Posterior Analytics.  We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of fact and knowledge of reasons, where what the reasons account for are the facts. Knowledge proper involves both facts to be accounted for and reasons which account for them; for this reason Socrates claimed to know nothing; when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with many facts, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until explanations and reasons begin to become available. For explanations and reasons to be available, they must derive ultimately from first principles, but these first principles do not come ready-made; they have to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation. It is not done in one fell swoop; at any given stage researchers build on the work of their predecessors right back to their earliest predecessors who are lay inquirers. Such progressive scrutiny is called "dialectic," starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.  Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction. So first principles will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and most conceptually economical principles which will account for the data which the theory has to explain. The progress toward an acceptable body of first principles is not always tranquil; disputes, paradoxes, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress. So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many. I find it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie the twen-tieth-century Oxonian dialectic; the appeal to ordinary language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge. It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) were both skilled and enthusiastic students of Greek philosophy.  But this initially appealing comparison between what I have been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as "what is said" (ta le-gomena, ta heyóuena). The phrase "what is said" may be interpreted in either of two ways. (I) It may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought." (II) It may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these senses; sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running quickly" or "running slowly," it is not legitimate to speak of "being pleased quickly" or "being pleased slowly"; from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that running is, while pleasure is not (despite the opinions of some philosophers), a process as distinct from an activity. At other times he uses the phrase "what is said" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that people sometimes behave incontinently seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of Will, or the near-platitude that friends are worth having for their own sake seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech. In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. Though some philoso-phers, most notably G. E. Moore, have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's treatment of Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botanizing" carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, I think, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection. So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.  I am, however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison be-tween Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly. I would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration for G. E. Moore. "Some like Witters" he once said,  "but Moore is my man." It is not recorded what aspects of Moore's philosophy particularly appealed to him, but the contrast with Wittgenstein strongly suggests that Moore primarily appealed to him as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore was especially famous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Wittgenstein. The question which now exercises me is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore said on this matter seems to me to be plainly inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else. Moore's treatments of this topic seem to me to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna. The two glaring defects are: (1) he nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world"; (2) even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as I know, does Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct. The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that "Here is one human hand and here is another" and the seemingly general philosophical statement that material objects exist. Moore takes it for granted that the statement about the human hands entails the general statement that material objects exist; but as Wittgenstein remarked,  "Surely those who deny the reality of the material world do not wish to deny that underneath my trousers I wear underpants." Moore was by no means certainly wrong on this matter, but the question which comes first, interpretation or the assessment of truth-value, is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.  My explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic charity lies in my conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them. I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers. Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother. The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbor explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren. G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like the spirit of a particular language or even the spirit of language as such, the Common Man, the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth. A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers. Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes. They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.  So what G* suggested to Grice ran approximately as follows. A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as the Common Man. More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between the Common Man and other abstractions; but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1) the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2) the appeal to the structure and content of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic, which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs. G* conjectured that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botanizing, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botanizing; it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity of the instrument of language. It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due; this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's; his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.  e also have to consider the strength or weakness of my secon large against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeede in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.  Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs, (2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true. But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.  It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender of knowledge with certainty, namely Cook Wilson. Cook Wilson took the view that the very nature of knowledge was such that items which were objects of knowledge could not be false; the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object. The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object. This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Cook Wilson's position must be rejected; for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p. This difficulty led Cook Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹nowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth. Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to den that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"? But while Cook Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad; and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to bad answers seems to me a question hardly worth debating.  It is in any case my firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error. I think, moreover, that he would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as I know Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases. I think Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments were attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs. Austin plainly viewed ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use. So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one. That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.  At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother. She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable. The proper view will be that analytic propositions are among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge. Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight. As Plato once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity. Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice  Grice concludes the Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of Grice’s attitude to “ordinary language,” as Austin called it.  In order to fulfill this task, Grice feels he should say something about what is possibly the most notable *corporate* achievement of Grice’s philosophy, namely the so-called method of linguistic botany, treated, as it often is at Oxford, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and *philosophical analysis* in particular.   Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and ‘linguistic’ analysis.  So far as Grice knows, however, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ‘ordinary’ language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere  — before, — or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated at Oxford.   A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf *correctly* — Cicero: correctum — and playing golf *properly.* — Cicero: proprium.  This method is also commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in a larger-scale attempt to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. Consider: signification in conversation.    It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase — or EXPRESSION — which gives linguistic, er, expression or manifestation, to just this concept.    One goal of linguistic botaniy may be to make this or that concept explicit and to show how various subordinate concepts fall under it.   This programme is closely linked with Austin's — but not Ryle’s — ideas about the desirability of  "going through the dictionary." — The Little Oxford Dictionary.    In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the  "true".    For one feature of the method is that no initial assumption is to be made by the philosopher — who KNOWS — about any subdivision that may be involved in any subordinate lexical entry united by a single expression;     true friend    true statement,"     true belief    true bill    "true measuring instrument    ," "true singing voice    " will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving a different use of “true";     that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botany;     subordination and subdivision is not given in advance.     It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic ‘proprieties’ and improprieties:     and these may be of several different kinds;     so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which any propriety or lack of it may be characterized and organized.     A Contradiction, an incoherence, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botany.    and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration.     Not only may a single exoression involve a multitude of lexical entries, but   An idioms or a syntactical construction appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botany.    Syntax must not be ignored in the study of ‘semantics.’    At this point we are faced with two distinct problems.     The first arises from the fact that Grice’s purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually take place iat Oxford     but     rather     to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical method.    Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian method — such philosophers as in order of seniority     Ryle,     Austin,   Grice,   Hampshire,   Urmson,   Strawson, and   Warnock —     had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation;     indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this set could have had a better idea than the members of the set since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedure which *these* philosophers are seeking to deploy.     Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic method,     for a fully adequate implementation of that method requires a good and clear representation of the method itself;     the more ‘fragmentary’ — to use Bradley’s idiom — the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation;     and it must be admitted    that the ability of many of us to say what it is that we are doing is fragmentary in the extreme.     This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity;     to say what such an activity *is* presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and     this in turn     presupposes the ability to _say_ or demonstrate, successfully, what the activity in question is.    A second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing — like Russell and others — have exhibited a strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study *ordinary* language. — the silly things silly people say.    Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and     the thinking of the lay is what the learned, scientific thinking, is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on.     The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like this devilish scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.    Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed expert between "us” and "them.”    between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the riff raff rabble on the other.     But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar;     they might think of themselves as qualified, by extended application and education, to pursue further, and to handle better, just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days;     after all, a ‘professional’ usually begins as a amateur — gone wrong!    Or he might think of himself as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all.     In any case, to recognize the alleged right of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority — which forms the cultured elite — is quite distinct from treating the majority as itself constituting a cultured elite.    Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallel which seems to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of the discipline of philosophy.    The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of the Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself.     In Aristotle, the main sources are     the Topics,   the Nicomachean Ethics, and   the Posterior Analytics.    We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of a fact and the knowledge of a reason, where what the reason account for is the fact.    Knowledge proper involves both a fact to be accounted for and a reason which account for it;     for this reason Socrates claims to know nothing;     when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with the fact, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until the explanation and the reason begin to become available.    For the explanation and the reason to be available, they must derive ultimately from a principle, but this principle does not come ready-made;     It has to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation.      The principle is not devised by the philosopher in one fell swoop;     at any given stage a researcher build on the work of his predecessor right back to the earliest predecessor who is a LAY inquirer. The Stone Age metaphysician who was Thales.    Such progressive scrutiny is called  "dialectic,"     starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.    Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction.     So the principle will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and conceptually most economical item which will account for the data, the fact, which the theory has to explain.    This progress toward an acceptable principle is not always tranquil;     disputes, paradoxes, aporiae, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress.    So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many.    Grice finds it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie Oxonian dialectic;     the appeal to ‘ordinary’ language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge.     It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) are both skilled and enthusiastic students of Ancient philosophy.    But this initially appealing comparison between what Grice has been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as ta heyóuena.    The phrase ta legomena may be interpreted in either of two ways.     Ta legomena may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought."     But ta legomena may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." — their careless chatter.     In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these ways;   sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running” “quickly" or "slowly," it is not legitimate or appropriate or polite to speak of "being pleased”  “quickly" — a quickie — or "slowly";     from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that     running is, while being pleased is not     — despite the opinions of some philosophers, obviously — a process as distinct from an activity.     At other times, however, Aristotle uses the phrase "ta legomena" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that     people sometimes behave incontinently     seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of the Will, or the near-platitude that     friends are worth having for their own sake     seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing.     In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech.     In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain.     Though some philoso-phers, most notably Moore at Cambridge have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's or Grice’s pupil Flew’s treatment of a Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botany” carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, Grice thinks, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection.    Was the truth-value True taken for granted as per some form of transcendental argument?     So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.    Grice is however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison between Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly.     Grice would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration fMoore.     Some like Witters" Austin would say,   "but Moore’s MY man."     It is not recorded what aspect of Moore's philosophy particularly appeals to Austin, but the contrast with Witters strongly suggests that Moore primarily appeals to Austin as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore is especially infamous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Witters.     Oddly, Grice’s collaborator, Pears, would say: Some like Augustine, but Witters’s MY man.    The question which now exercises Grice is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore says on this matter seems to me to be *plainly* inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else.     Was it just a dismissing of the Witters?    Moore's treatments — and worse, Malcolm’s — of this topic seem to Grice to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna.     The two glaring defects are: (    1) Moore nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world";     even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as Grice knows, does apostolic Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct.     The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that     "Here is one hand and here is another"     and the seemingly general philosophical statement that a thing exists.    Moore takes it for granted that the statement about his hands entails the general statement that a thing exists, but as Witters   remarked,    "He who denies the reality of the material world may not wish to deny that he wears underpants underneath his trousers.    Moore was by no means *certainly* wrong, mistaken, or confused, on this matter, but the question which comes first,     interpretation     or     the assessment of truth-value    , is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.    Grice’s explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic *charity* towards Moore lies in Grice’s conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them.     I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers.     Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother.     The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbour explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren.     G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like     the spirit — or genio — of a particular language or even     the spirit of language as such, the Common Man,     the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth.     A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers.     Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes.     They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.    So what G* suggests to Grice ran approximately as follows.     A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as The Common Man.     More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between The Common Man and other abstractions;     but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1)     the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2)     the appeal to the structure — and content  — of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for     (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic,     which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs.     G* conjectures that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botany, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botany;     it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity — cleverness — of the instrument of language.     It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due;     this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's;     his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.    We also have to consider the strength or weakness of my second charge against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeede in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.    Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting     (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs,     2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true.     But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.    It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender at OXFORD of knowledge with certainty, namely Wilson.     Wilson takes the view that the very nature of knowledge is such that items which is an object of knowledge could not be false;     the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object.     The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object.   This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Wilson's position must be rejected;     for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p.     This difficulty led Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹knowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth.     Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"?     But while Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad;     and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to a bad answer seems to me a question hardly worth debating.    It is in any case Grice’s firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error.     Grice thinks, moreover, that Austin would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson of Grice’s pupil Flew who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as Grice knows Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases.     Grice thinks Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments are attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs.     Austin plainly views ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use.     So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one.     That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.    At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother.     She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable.     The proper view will be that an analytic proposition is among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge.     Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight.     As Socrates once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity.     Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice   I am greatly honoured and much moved by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to me. 1 am especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues; every one of them is a personal friend of mine, though I have to confess that some of them I see, these days, less frequently than I used to, and much less frequently than I should like to. So this collection provides me with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its best, a friendly subject. Twish that I could respond individually to each contribution; but I do not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to me. The editors of this volume, Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, have contributed an editorial which provides a synoptic view of my work; in view of the fact that I have so far published no book, that the number of my publications is greatly exceeded by the number of my unpublications, and that even my publications include some papers which are not easily accessible, their undertaking fulfills a crying need. But it does more than that; it presents a most perceptive and sympathetic picture of the spirit which lies behind the parts of my work which it discusses; and it is my feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. So I make my contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them I allow myself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections. For convenience I fuse the editors into a multiple personality called 'Richards',  , whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.As I look back upon my former self, it seems to me that when, fifty years ago, I began the serious study of philosophy, the temperament with which I approached this enterprise was one of what I might call dissenting rationalism.' The rationalism was probably just the interest in looking for reasons which would be found in any intelligent juvenile who wanted to study philosophy; the tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, my father. My father, who was a gentle person, a fine musician, and a dreadful business man, exercised little personal influence over me but quite a good deal of cultural influence; he was an obdurate nineteenth-century liberal nonconformist, and I witnessed almost daily, without involvement, the spectacle of his religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household-my mother, who was heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who was a Catholic convert. But whatever their origins in my case, I do not regard either of the elements in this dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at my stage of intellectual development. I mention them more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance; it seems to me that they have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded, over my philosophical life, and this I am inclined to regard as a much less usual phenomenon.  I count myself wonderfully fortunate to have begun my philosophical studies as a pupil of W. F. R. Hardie, later President of my then college, Corpus Christi, the author of a work on Plato which both is and is recognized as a masterpiece, whose book on the Nicomachean Ethics, in one of its earlier incarnations as a set of lecture-notes, saw me through years of teaching Aristotle's moral theory. It seems to me that 1 learnt from him just about all the things which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself. More specifically, my initial rationalism was developed under his guidance into a belief that philosophical questions are to be settled by reason, that is to say by argument; I learnt also from him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than  1 As I read what I find myself to have written in this Reply, I also find myself ready to expand this description to read "irreverent, conservative, dissenting rationalism'.an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised). I came also to see that though philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonizing labours, it is worth achieving; and that the difficulties involved in achieving it offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like rabble-rousing. His methods were too austere for some, in particular the long silences in tutorials were found distressing by some pupils (though as the years went by I believe the tempo speeded up). There is a story, which I am not sure that I believe, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was Hardie's turn to speak, which was at long last broken by Hardie saying. 'And what did you mean by "of"*? There is another story, which 1 think 1 do believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, who was a pupil of Hardie's two or three years before me, decided that the next time a silence developed in one of his tutorials he was not going to be the one to break it. In the next tutorial, after Berlin had finished reading his essay to Hardie, there followed a silence which lasted twenty-five minutes, at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.  These tutorial rigours never bothered me. If philosophizing is a difficult operation (as it plainly is) then sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as chess-players are only too well aware). The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess. I liked the slow pace of discussion with Hardie; I liked the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which he would sometimes emit when he had caught you in, or even pushed you into, a patently untenable position (though I preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself): and I liked his resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which he once told me about himself. He had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema. Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights were at that time controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.  The police decided to prosecute. I indicated to him that this didn'tsurprise me at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off?  Lasked him how on earth he managed that. 'Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference, They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and I answered that since my car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been my car which caused the obstruction.*  Hardie never disclosed his own views to students, no doubt wishing them to think their own thoughts (however flawed and immature) rather than his. When one did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of his own position, what one got was liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly conservative in tone; not surprisingly, it would not contain much in the way of battle-cries or campaign-material. Aspiring knights-errant require more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: they require a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of Damsels in Distress.  In the later 1930s Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by  A. J. Ayer, at that time the enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy.  Many people, including myself, were greatly interested by the methods, theses, and problems which were on display, and some were, at least momentarily, inspired by what they saw and heard. For my part, my reservations were never laid to rest; the crudities and dogmatisms seemed too pervasive. And then everything was more or less brought to a halt by the war.  After the war the picture was quite different, as a result of the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and of the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene. My own profes. sional life in this period involved two especially important aspects. The first was my prolonged collaboration with my former pupil, Peter Strawson. Our efforts were partly directed towards the giving of joint seminars; we staged a number of these on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form. But our association was much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. We consumed vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical explorations, and from these discussions sprang our joint published paper In Defense of a Dogma, and also a long uncompletedwork on predication and Aristotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's book Individuals. Our method of composition was laborious in the extreme: work was constructed together sentence by sentence, nothing being written down until agreement had been reached, which often took quite a time. The rigours of this procedure eventually led to its demise. During this period of collaboration we of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions; but to my mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; other people sometimes complained that our mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. The potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me; the collaboration with Strawson was followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example) Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, with Warnock on perception, with David Pears and with James Thomson on philosophy of action, with Fritz Staal on philosophical-linguistic questions, and most recently with George Myro on metaphysics, and with Judith Baker on Ethics. I shall return shortly to the importance which I attribute to this mode of philosophical activity.  The other prominent feature of this period in my philosophical life was participation in the discussions which took place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which were conducted by a number of the younger Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.  This  group which continued to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death was christened by me 'The Play Group', and was often so referred to, though so far as I know never by, or in the presence of.  Austin himself. I have little doubt that this group was often thought of outside  Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *Ordinary Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of Ordinary Language Philosophy'. As such it no doubt absorbed its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example Gellner, and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.  Yet, as I look back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium. To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who were concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage; besides those who, initially at least, gravitated towards Austin, there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle, and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein; and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another. But even within the Play Group, great diversity was visible, as one would expect of an association containing people with the ability and independence of mind of Austin, Strawson.  Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a few). There was no 'School'; there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism. It has, I think, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction. It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid; the sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread. We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition). But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.  Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacrosanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgements or world-pictures may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse. Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense', It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore. 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man', I once heard him say: and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, thought that some sort of metaphysic is embedded in ordinary language. But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable. Any such further step would need justification by argument.  In fact, the only position which to my mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from person to person, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses. It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.  Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain non-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency. It was in this spirit that in early days we investigated rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning). Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.  It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing was founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage. It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style were to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the characterof language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality. Such persons do, to my mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply. Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious. The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.  But, to my mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.  That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language. Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. 'Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.  The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions). Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.  The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space. I have three comments.  (1) The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.  Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.  But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice.  Grice was greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such it no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example Gellner, and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.  Yet, as I look back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium. To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who were concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage; besides those who, initially at least, gravitated towards Austin, there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle, and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein; and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another. But even within the Play Group, great diversity was visible, as one would expect of an association containing people with the ability and independence of mind of Austin, Strawson.  Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a few). There was no 'School'; there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism. It has, I think, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction. It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid; the sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread. We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition). But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.  Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacrosanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgements or world-pictures may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse. Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense', It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore. 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man', I once heard him say: and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, thought that some sort of metaphysic is embedded in ordinary language. But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable. Any such further step would need justification by argument.  In fact, the only position which to my mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from person to person, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses. It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.  Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain non-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency. It was in this spirit that in early days we investigated rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning). Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.  It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing was founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage. It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style were to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the characterof language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality. Such persons do, to my mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply. Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious. The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.  But, to my mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.  That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language. Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. 'Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.  The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions). Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.  The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space. I have three comments.  (1) The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.  Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.  But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice. A strand deals with the idea of a Conversational Maxim and its alleged connection with the Principle of Conversational Co-operation.   This Strand is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of RATIONAL activity, and that any rational activity which does NOT involve the use of language is in various ways importantly parallel to that which does.    This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of *rational* *cooperation.*    The merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.  In his extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice Grice distinguishes this or that maxims, of this or that principle, observance of which Grice regards as providing, for his Oxford pupils, this or that standard of RATIONAL  discourse.   Grice seeks to represent this or that principles, or this of that axiom, which Grice distinguishes as being themselves dependent on one over-all super-principle enjoining conversational co-operation.   While this or that conversational maxim has on the whole been quite well received by his Oxford pupils — except Strawson — the same cannot, Grice thinks, be said about Grice’s invocation of a supreme principle of conversational co-operation.   One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that, even in the talk-exchanges of civilised people and Oxonian pupils, brow-beating disputation or conversational sharp practice are far too common or widespread — Grice is talking Oxford philosophy — to be deemed an offense against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice.  A second source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward *any* end — cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey. Never mind the too abstract maximally efficient mutual influencing!  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for.     First, it is only this or that ASPECT of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to the RATIONALITY of our conversational practice, rather than to whatever other merits or demerits that practice may possess.    Therefore, nothing on which Grice lectures should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of this or that particular issue for conversational exploration.    It is then specifically or particularly the RATIONALITY — or irrationality — of conversational conduct which Grice has been concerned to track down rather than any more *general* characterisation of conversational adequacy.     Therefore, we may expect this or that principle of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of this or that conversational interest.     Second, Grice takes it as a working assumption that, whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communication, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.    Do not multiply the critiques of reason beyond necessity.    It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew — whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.    Finally, we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises.     Grice takes it as being obvious that, insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production.   A Genuine monologue is free from the utterer’s implication.     Therefore, since we are concerned, as theorists, only with concerted talking, we should recognize that, within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us), collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may co-exist with a high degree of English Oxonian upper-class reserve, hostility, and chicanery, and with a high degree of diversity in this or that ultimate motivation underlying this or that quite meagre common objective.     Moreover, we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases, like cross-examination — in which even this or that common objective is spurious, apparent rather than real.     The joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational cooperation.    But such an exchange honours the principle of conversational co-operation — at least to the extent of aping its application.     A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.    Grice is now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational practice.    A list is presented of this or that conversational maxim — or this or that “conversational imperative” or imperative of conversational conduct — which is such that, in a paradigmatic case, observance of the maxim or imperative promotes — and its violation dispromotes — conversational rationality;     these include this or that principle as this or that maxims — under the conversational supra-categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modus.    Somewhat like a moral *commandment* — or decalogue thereof —, this or that maxim, or counsel of conversational prudence — is prevented from being just some member of some disconnected heap of this or that conversational obligation or DUTY — by its dependence on a single supreme Conversational Principle, that of cooperativeness.    An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to this or that maxim thus *generated* — or deduced as Saint Matthew’s prefers — by the Principle of Conversational Cooperation.    Another class of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class.    Conversational signification is thought of as arising in the tollowing way;     a significatum (indicative or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to the conversationalist  in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a)     that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifiable, at least in his eyes, or     b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, violation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is respected.    Surely the spirit of the overall principle of conversational cooperation IS respected.    The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature.     It was in effect there suggested that what we may call a conversational significatum is just those assumptions which have to be attributed or ascribed to a conversationalist to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being *rationalized* — to echo Anna Freud — by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act.    Rationalisation is not rationality — an action caused by no concern for rationality may be rationalized ex post facto.    Grice has so far been a monist, and talking as if the right ground *plan* is to identify, or made manifest, and formulate, for his Oxford pupils, a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to *generate* or yield by deduction — as St. Matthew deduces the ten commandments from just one injunction — and justify a range of this or that more specific, but still highly general,  conversational maxim which, in turn, could be induced to yet again yield this or that particular conversational directive — applying to a particular subject matter, a context, and a conversational procedure, and Grice has been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Principle of Conversational Cooperation is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle.     Grice has tried to give reasons for thinking, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate.     So far so good.    But Grice does in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested monistic layout.     It is not at all clear to Grice that this or that conversational maxim, at least if he has correctly identified them as such, does in fact operate as a distinct peg from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of this or that fully specific conversational directive.     And if Grice did misidentify any of them as this or that conversational maxim, it is by no means clear to Grice what substitutes he could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better.     What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims of conversational conduct, but the monistic concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate.     The monistic layout has four possible problems.    The maxims do not seem to be coordinate.     The maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.    Especially if the shared goal is that of a maximally efficacious mutual influencing.    False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.    The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested monistic layout seems to require.     To judge whether a conversationalist has been undersupplied or oversupplied with information *seems* to require that he should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate.    Only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made.    The force of this consideration seems to be blunted by those who seem to be disposed to sever the notion of relevance from the specification of this or that  particular *direction* of relevance.    Though the specification of this or that direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made.     Information will *also* be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action.    While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon conversational signification of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic.    The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as conversational signification is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim under the conversational category of Quantity.    The remaining maxim distinguished by Grice, that of or under the conversational category of Modus, which Grice represented as prescribing perspicuous presentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational propriety, but its potentialities as a generator of conversational signification seem to be somewhat open to question. H. P. Grice  Grice was greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such a core or hot-bed, the new play group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example a Hebrew from France, Gellner — Austin’s pupil — and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.    Yet, as Grice looks back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium.     To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage;     besides those who, initially at least — until Grice replaced Austin upon Austin’s death — gravitated towards Austin,     there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle,     and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein;     and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another.     But even within the new Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of     Austin,   Strawson,   Hampshire,   Paul,   Pears,   Warnock, and   Hare     (to name a few).    — very few!     There was no 'School';     there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that     an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism.     It has, Grice thinks, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction.     It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid.    The sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread.     We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition).     But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.    Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement or world-picture may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse.     Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense.’    It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore.     ‘Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man', Grice once heard Austin say:     and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, as Priscianus did, thought that some sort of metaphysic *is* embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.     But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable.     Any such further step would need justification by argument.    In fact, the only position which to Grice’s mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking;     and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from philosopher to philosopher, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses.     It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.    Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain *non*-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.     It was in this spirit that in early days they investigate rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning or signification.     Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.    It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary’language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing is founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage.     It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style are to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality.     Such persons do, to Grice’s mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply.     Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious.     The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.    But, to Grice’s mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.    That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language.     Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. '    Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:     and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.    The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions).     Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.    The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space.     Grice has three comments.    The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.    Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.    But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice. Grice is greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such a core or hot-bed, the new play group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example a Hebrew from France, Gellner — Austin’s pupil — and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.    Yet, as Grice looks back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium.     To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage;     besides those who, initially at least — until Grice replaced Austin upon Austin’s death — gravitated towards Austin,     there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle,     and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein;     and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another.     But even within the new Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of     Austin,   Strawson,   Hampshire,   Paul,   Pears,   Warnock, and   Hare     (to name a few).    — very few!     There was no 'School';     there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that     an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism.     It has, Grice thinks, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction.     It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid.    The sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread.     We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition).     But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.    Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement or world-picture may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse.     Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense.’    It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore.     ‘Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man', Grice once heard Austin say:     and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, as Priscianus did, thought that some sort of metaphysic *is* embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.     But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable.     Any such further step would need justification by argument.    In fact, the only position which to Grice’s mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking;     and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from philosopher to philosopher, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses.     It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.    Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain *non*-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.     It was in this spirit that in early days they investigate rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning or signification.     Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.    It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary’language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing is founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage.     It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style are to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality.     Such persons do, to Grice’s mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply.     Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious.     The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.    But, to Grice’s mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.    That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language.     Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. '    Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:     and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.    The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions).     Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.    The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space.     Grice has three comments.    The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.    Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.    But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extractable from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research;     for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, Eddington’s physics.     Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ‘ordinary’ language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any *belief* about how the world goes — which such ‘ordinary’ language reflects;     The metaphysic might, for example, be derived somehow from the *categorial* structure of the language. Aristotle: kata agora.    Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science.    A  rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise;     so might some highly general theory in formal ‘semantics’ — Aristotle, semein, signify.     though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:    To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary’ language philosophy such as that practised by Ryle, Austin, or Grice — to narrow down to Oxonian dialectic vintage — might have to press into service the argument which Grice represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct.     The anti-Oxonian might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general ‘semantic’ theory based squarely on data provided by ‘ordinary’ discourse — ta legomena — by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of Leibniz’s unforgettable invention: the analytic/synthetic distinction.    With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science — or some particular favoured science — Grice should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner is such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions.    Grice should start with a lively expectation that this would NOT be the case.     But even if this negative expectation is disappointed. Grice should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist.     If those standards of purity are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so NOT dictated by Eddington and the scientists, there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy —or the métier of such a philosopher as Grice — might be to discover or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language — only it would include wavicles, whattings, izzings and hazzings!    And even if the requisite kind of purity of the language were to consist in what Grice might term such logico-methodological virtues — such as consistency and systematicity —  which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ‘ordinary’ language?     How clever language is — and Grice didn’t mean Eddington’s!    In which case, an ‘ordinary’-language philosopher such as Grice would be back in business.     So far as Grice can see, once again the enemy of ‘ordinary’-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ‘ordinary’ language would have to presuppose the viability of (originally) Leibniz’s  analytic/synthetic distinction.    With regard to Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction itself, Grice first remarks that it is his view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory — a knock-down argument, that is!    For example, Quine's original argument against Leibniz that every attempt, since Leibniz — Quine has no German — to define 'analytic' ends up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to Grice’s mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment.     And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Grice and Strawson to defend Leibniz’s dogma of the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by an individual such as Leibniz - or a population of Leibnizisns — speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question survives a rigorous theoretical scrutiny.     To Grice’s mind, the mistake made by both parties — the anti-Leibnizians and the Leibnizisns — has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of a natural language such as Leibniz’s native Teutonick — only he wrote in Gallic!    it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of this or that concept — signify —  pointed to by Quine, and to regard Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in a natural language such as Gallic, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of a natural language, such as Gallic!    The viability of Leibniz’s analytic-synthetic distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as Grice can see, remains to be decided;   The decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.    Two further comments seem to Grice relevant and important.     A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is to treat as acceptable the forms of ‘ordinary’ discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it.     A common alternative proposed by this or that enemy of Oxonian dialectic or  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ‘ordinary’ language;     in the words of that wise Irishman, Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.    But why should the Bishop’s vulgarities be retained?     Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with ‘the learned’?    Is that an Irishism?    After all, if Grice’s house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that he needs another one, it is not essential that Grice construct the new house within the outer shell of his old house, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper — or aesthetically preferable?    This happened to Peano — who moved from a nice villa in the Piedmont to a literal shack — or was it the other way round?    An attachment to the form or frame of ordinary discourse even when the substance or matter is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ‘ordinary’ discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies such as the Irish bishop — it may be claimed that he claimed that he was, like Warnock, an ANGLO-Irish!    Second, whether or not a viable Leibnizian analytic/synthetic distinction exists, Grice is not happy with the claim that ‘ordinary’ language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction, or of the present king of France!     It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ‘ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable:     but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which a theory is supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would NOT be pre-supposed, even by Collingwood’s substandards — Leibniz’s distinction, and therefore Leibniz himself, would be VINDICATED!    For Leibniz’s distinction to be *entailed* — to use another Irishism, Moore’s! — by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be Collingwoodisnly presupposed by that programme.     For, if it IS to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, Grice imagines, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction;     — and how this allegation could be made out Grice cannot for the life of him discover.    Cf Owen on existence of pigs presupposing that pigs exist!    Grice turns now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which — especially subsequently — are to Grice, but not Nowell-Smith — to be particularly appealing.     First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones).     Grice was once dining with Strawson at Strawson’s college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was a scholar, sat at the tutorial feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.    Grice asks him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'.     This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth;    Grice realizes that mirth was quite inappropriate.     Indeed the message is  a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages:     for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service.     Austin's message is another platitude;     it in effect says that, if in accordance with prevailing fashion, one wants to say that every philosophical proposition is ultimately about ‘usage’ — never signification -/ one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what that usage — never signification — is and of what lies behind it.     A principle of conversation as rational co-operation!    Sophisticated but remorseless literalism is typical of Austin.    When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American (of course — what else are they good at?) logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's see if we can play it':     with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each Saturday morning to play that Saturday’s improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (Grice suspects) of less thrilling ancestors of the game later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'    Another appealing element is the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument.     By this Grice does not mean merely that Austin saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules.     Austin may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI   Holy of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies.     What Grice imputes to Austin is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose or métier as Leibniz typically put it in Gallic; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion.     It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose, or point, as Winch preferred  of this or that feature of ordinary discourse.    When put to work, this purposeful  finalist, conception of ‘ordinary’ language seems to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems or aporiae, the appeal of which approaches, in Grice’s eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in relation to Eleatic to rà Xeyouera.    When properly regulated and directed, this botany of uses' seems to Grice to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts.     Indeed, Grice will go further, and proclaim it as his belief that a botany of usage is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that at Oxford — never mind Athens — this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned.     That is not to say, of course, the very obvious idea that Grice ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for a botany of usage, namely (as one might put it) to go through the Little Oxford dictionary and to believe everything it tells you. It has an entry for ‘pirot’!    Indeed, Austin once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't give a hoot what the little Oxford dictionary said, and drew the rebuke from Austin: “And that is, Grice, where you keep making your gross mistake!’    Of course, not all these explorations are successful;     The play group once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion.     This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?'     For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from Grice, no less, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical ‘importance,’with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries.     Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.    Little did Grice cared that Austin found importance UNimportant!    Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of usage, provides a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include a botany of usage in his armoury.     Grice recounts three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim.     Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted — he is a practical Irishman —  even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's *first* remark to him was not ‘Pleased to see you’ (Boring) but:    “What would you say the difference lies between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and that he is not playing golf properly?'   On a certain occasion the play group is discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase ‘on principle'.     Nowell- Smith recalls that a pupil of Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'.     At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied,     ‘1 do not take bribes on principle.'     Austin responded by saying     '1 would never have gone into the trouble!      "No, thanks" seems more than enough — and surely less offensive.    On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offers as an example of non-understandable propositio  an extract from a sonnet of Donne:    From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.    Austin said, '    nay. PERFECTLY intelligible, our Donne    Donne means, but it wouldn’t scan,     angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."    These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why Grice should have turned away from this style of philosophy.     Well, as Gricd hasalready indicated, in a certain sense Gricd never have turned away, in that he continues to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing;     for *just how* much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer.     That linguistic information should not be just a quantity of collector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic THEORY of conversation as rational cooperation, is a proposition which would, Grice suspects, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent;     the trouble begins when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory of conversation as rational cooperation this underlying theory of conversation as rational cooperation should be.     The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which Grice has already mentioned;     by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not.     It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions;     but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of a category — kata agora — , remains to be determined.     At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by Grice;    if it is necessary to invoke the notion of a category — kata agora — . are we to suppose these to be this or that category of conversation or expression — a conversational category — or a metaphysical or ontological category (this or that category of this or that thing — substance and attributes — a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent — not just Oxonian —  ‘semantic’ theory — of signification — or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct.     Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright.     In Grice’s own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory of conversation as rational cooperation underlying ordinary discourse comes from my work on the idea of Conversational significance, which emphasises the radical importance of FOCUSING on what a *conversationalist* attempts to communicate in uttering his conversational moves.    Grice’s own efforts allowed him to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of  on conversational phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford the group is concerned.     Grice felt like throwing light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and attempted to reach the virtues of a strong methodology;     Grice aldo wanted to show vividly the kind of way in which a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control.     During this time Grice’s philosophizing developed a distinct tendency to appear in analytically formal dress;     Work in this formal analytical style  — Austin dead — was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, the shntax of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to what Russell at Cambridge called “logical form,” — Grice prefers ‘semantic representation’ — or to a suitable representation of logical form via semantic representation.     This undertaking involved the construction, for a language — System G of Deutero-Esperanto — with quantification, of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-‘semantics’ which makes minimal use of transformations.     This project is not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material is  presented in lectures  seminars, and colloquia - some of them pretty memorable (for those who were into that kind of thing).    An interest in analytic formalistic philosophizing seems to Grice to have more than one  source.     It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development;     not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system.     Grice has never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate calculus, together with set theory    in any case this kind of analytical blue-collared formal enterprise would overtax the meagre technical equipment of Gricd who had proudly earned at Oxford via a Clifton scholarship a privileged CLASSICAL education, rather!    It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of a notational device together with sketchy indications of the law or principle to be looked for in a system or theory incorporating these devices;     the object of the exercise being to seek out a hitherto unrecognized analogiy and to attain a higher level of generality.     This latter kind of interest is the one which engages Grice, and will, he thinks, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.    It is nevertheless true that in recent years Grice’s disposition to resort to analytical formalism has markedly diminished.     This retreat may well have been accelerated when some Oxoniansremarked to me that Grice was TOO formal; but its main source lay in the fact that Grice began to devote the bulk of his attentions to areas of philosophy other than semantics — to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics — ontology and eschatology — and to ethics, in which Grice’s pre-existing interest was much enlivened by an inborn capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples in such an otherwise dull field!    Such areas of philosophy — especially biological philosophy - seem, at least at present, much less amenable to an analytical formalistic treatment.     Grice has  little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology;     to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism.     But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.    The opinions which Grice voices are all be general in character:     they relate to such things as what he might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology.     He reserves for the next section anything hd might have to say about his views on the specific philosophical topic of Minimalism, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.    Grice first proclaims it as his belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun.     He would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny.     One should of course be serious about philosophy:     but being serious does not require one to be solemn.    Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy;   there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church.     The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave Grice    but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party;     each one — Austin, Strawson, Warnock, Pears, Thompson, Hare, … has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect.     To Grice’s mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth;     and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors published or unpublished — with Strawson and Pears  and Warnock— then so much the better.    But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in Oxford’s philosophical world.     It was said of the Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery;     he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.    Though this comment referred to his proper severity in tutorials, Joseph was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with his scholars;     philosophical productivity among his contemporaries in Oxford was low,     and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. He unpublished quite a few, though!    Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the scholars of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.     The tradition does not die with Joseph;     to take just one example, Grice has never been as happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia as with Austen’s eponym, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality —- it’s all about Ayer and Berkeley — and two Penguin books, too — , but *more* because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant.   . So far as Grice knows, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes.   There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.    Though it is no doubt plain that Grice is not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, he has to confess when it comes to Witters that Grice is not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus.     The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending:     indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher such as Witters is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims.     To Grice’s stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person like Witters or a philosophical creed like Wittersianism.    zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship.   Rational and *dispassionate* commendation or criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth:     but passion directed towards either philosophers like Witters or philosophies like Wittersianism is out of place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured.     What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.    Grice has little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement.     But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution.     One of these factors is, Gricd suspects   a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.    It is, Grice is inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or aporia or raises a certain question.     At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it;     and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.    Think signification — think rule utilitarianism! Think Gettier!    Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.    It is, however, Grice’s hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals.     Grice refers to this issue again later when he comes to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument.     The kind of metaphysical argument which Grice has in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epagogic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation.     Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people;     and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.    A second possible source of atmospheric amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry.     An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (however difficult the realization of this index might be to determine).     Of course one must try to be right, but even so Grice doubts whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons.     An eminent topologist whom Grice knew was regarded with something approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake.     Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.    The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar.     Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.     The cause which Grice has just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy.     There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which Grice also believes.    These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline:     the first I Grice calls the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity.     With regard to the first, it is Grice’s firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline.     By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principle falls within the epistemological classification of A PRIORI knowledge.    Gricd means (or hopes he means) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others;     to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens Grice is introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), Grice is immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff.     Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.     Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them.     At this point, however, Grice must admit a double embarassment;     He does not know exactly what the thesis is which he wants to maintain, and he does not know how to prove it, though he is fairly sure that his thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarassments may not be independent of one another.     So the best Grice can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.    It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter of a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry.     On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S.     There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines.     Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline.     For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics;     some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking:     some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on.     All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.    It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature.     But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments;     each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.    There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline.     There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual.     This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain.     Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).    In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', Grice is referring to the unity of Philosophy through time.     Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries;     and it is only a little less obvious that often substantially similar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates.     Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another,     for example between Western European and Indian philosophy.     If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that, in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems, we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead.       And when Grice says proper consideration Grice is not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame;     Grice means rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now;   and, further, that, in order to do this, we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking:     indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves.     Groce might add at this point that it seems to him that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology.     By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists;     indeed. Grice is tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers.     So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.    Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while;     but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding.     But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from philosopher to philosopher;     and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.    This reflection Griceme to one of his favourite fantasies.     Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved.     As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else.     Grice’s fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark;     in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times;     that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems.   The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject;     but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright.     Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.    As he threads his way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, Grice finds himself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like     Extensionalism,   Nominalism,   Positiv-ism,   Naturalism,   Mechanism,   Phenomenalism,   Reductionism,   Physical-ism,   Materialism,   Empiricism,   Scepticism, and   Functionalism;     — menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey.     The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another;     and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.    There are not few philosophers, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism;     and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.    After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. Grice has come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to Grice a good deal more than they do now.    But how would Grice justify the hardening of his heart?    The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that Grice can think of himself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.     To this question Grice’s answer is that all the items are forms of what Grice calls isms — or Minimalism, — cf Griceianism —  a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth.     In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.    In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'.     But such an appeal Grice would regard as inappropriate;     we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape;     we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time;     to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer.     To change the image some-what, what bothers Grice about what he is being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.    Grice is also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess.   Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission:     they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.    They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation;     some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away;   and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs.     Grice’s own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this.     Grice is inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.    Grice is conscious that all he has  so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.    This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same Grice should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack.    Grice can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism';     the best Grice can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what he would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.     My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is a pillar box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Grice"T,     and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of set theory.     The picture which, Grice suspects, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong;     and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs.     As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system.   Explanation of the actual presence of a particular PREDICATE in a particular SUBJECT depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such a PREDICATE in that SUBJECT, regardless of whether the PREDICATE in question even do appear in that SUBJECT, or indeed in any subject.     On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set;     but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of an in fact unexemplified PREDICATE would be invariably the same, no matter how different in significance the expressions used to specify such a PREDICATE would ordinarily be judged to be.     This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.    Grice can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to Grice to suffer from serious drawbacks.     The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas.     In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to the empiricist principle through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived;   somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve this or that vacuous predicate or general term from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of some other predicate or general term which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms.      Start with two vacuous predicates, say     ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (    oz) is a climber on hands and knees of  of a29,000 foot mountain. (8)     If aj and a z are vacuous, the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y)     Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8)     We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees.     These sequences are certainly distinct, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.    Grice’s chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.    For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using a vacuous predicate in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of this or that non-empty set.    This is a condition which, Grice suspects, might not be met by every vacuous predicate.     But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of this or that would-be explanatory term.    The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first;     it certainly seems simpler.     The admissibility of a vacuous predicate in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition.   And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, would certainly be trivial.     Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1)     they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2)     these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of this or that non-vacuous predicate.    The explanatory opportunities for a vacuous predicate depend on their embodiment in a system.    Grice’s doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.    Grice conjectures, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides.     But now a problem arises:     the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability seems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact.     It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. Eddington’s solid chair.     But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom Grice knows or knows of have not seemed anxious to confer.     But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege?     If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.    Grice has, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted;   Grice has been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed.     Grice should be less than honest if he pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained.     Grice should, however, also be less than honest if he concealed the fact that, should Gricd be left without an argument, it is very likely that Grice should not be very greatly disturbed.     For Grice’s antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experience in a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.     But at this point some people, Grice thinks, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way.     For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with Grice, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with Grice.     Now Grice certainly does wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and Grice also wishes to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.    But perhaps Grice had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.    Grice believes (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of a rational being, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.    Grice also believes that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.    Grice believes that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value.     Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination.    The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes).    The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere:    The adoption of a constructivist approach  makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism.     That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have this or that reason for our beliefs (ratio cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed).     Such a reason will be, in Cicero’s parlance, a ratio essendi.    It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure.     Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which Grice shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply:     for Grice shall need to invoke specific theses within particular departments of philosophy.     Grice hopes to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.    The editors of the volume Grounds. Rationality, Intention, Category, End — — G. R. I. C. E. — devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in Grice’s work; to questions about conversational significance,  philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, value, including ethical questions.     Grice first comments on what the editors have to say about conversational significance, and then in his concluding section Grice turrns to the remaining topics.    In the course of a penetrating treatment of the ‘development’ of Grice’s views on the topic of conversational significance, the editors list, in connection with what they see as a third stage of this development three objections to which Grice’s work might be thought to give rise.    Grice shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order;     Grice shall also add a fourth objection which Grice knows some philosophers have regarded as acute, and Grice shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in his thinking, which the editors have presented and which may not be generally familiar.    As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, Grice may remark that the treatment of the topic by the editors seems to offer strong support to Grice’s thesis about the latitudinal unity of philosophy:     for the problems which emerge about conversational significance are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and Grice hopes that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.    A first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of the propositio as an entities:     In the explication of the ‘significance’ of an TYPE of utterance — or Emmissio or Profferatii. what does the variable "that p" or  “that S is P” take as values?     The values of "that p" or “that S is P” — S est P — are the objects of conversational significance, intention, and belief- a proposition, to call it by its traditional name since Boezio. Varrone calls it proloquium.    But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory or philosophical analysis  or philosophical conceptual analysis to give an account of what such a proposition is?.. +     Much of the history of philosophy of language or ‘semantics’ consists of attacks on or defences of this or that conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the triangular relation Aristotle proposed in De Interpretatione to hold anong language, thought, and reality.    How can Grice offer an explication of the type of ‘significance’ of a profferatio that simply takes the notion of a proposition that p or that S is P more or less for granted?    A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition or philosophical analysis of conversational significance which Grice qua semanticist would be willing to countenance, the letter 'p', in that p or S and P in that S is P — the dog is shaggy — operate simply as this or that gap sign;     if Alpha and Beta appear in a definiendum or analysandum alpha and beta appears in the corresponding definiens or analysans.    If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to ‘feel’ Byzantine is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is, or might *be*  Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to a feeling, or to a mode of a feeling.     If a quantification of the predicate is covertly or implicaturally involved at all, it will only be a total or universal quantification of the predicate which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a SUBSTITUTONAL account of such quantification of the predicate.    Grice’s situation vis-a-vis a proposition that p  or that the alpha is beta — Fidus est hirsutus — is in no way different.    Moreover, if this last part of this rather commissioned — by the Clarendon — objection is to be understood as suggesting that a philosopher such as Grice has been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of a proposition with a view to using it, in this or that way, as a key to the triangular relationship that, since Aristotle’s DE INTERPRETATIONE, holds among language. thought, and reality, Grice rather doubtswhether this claim is true, and if it is true, Grice would regard any attempt to use the proposition in such a manner as a gross mistake to which Boezio did but Grice never subscribed.     A Proposition should not, Grice thinks, be viewed as a tool, a gimmick, or a bit of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality!    For one, Aristotle’s treatment in DE INTERPRETATIONE is quite its own trick!    The furthest Grice, who lectured on DE INTERPRETATIONE for years — for Oxonian pupils earning their Lit. Hum. — would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition,     and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of a proposition would undermine the enterprise within which it makes an appearance.    It is, however, not apparent to Grice that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over Grice’s head.     In his “Meaning Revisited” Grice does in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for language, thought, and reality,  - an in Aristotle’s footsteps in DE INTERPRETATIONS offers three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, a rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences of the members of any pair selected from this trio.     Grice suggests that without a correspondence between thought and reality, any individual member of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, function, or métier, of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another;     that, without a correspondence between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated;     and that without a direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for a belief to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us.     So far as I can see, the foregoing transcendental or metaphysical justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the *reality* of a proposition; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption, the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to Grice the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.    Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to a proposition in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what a propositions is, Grice thinks this obligation could be discharged.     It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way.     One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item.     Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, Fidus est hirsutus  might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of hairy-coated things, or (alternatively) the attribute Hairy-Coatedness, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be Fidus or the singleton of Fidus;     and the sentence, 'John wants Martha', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is wanting (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of john and Martha, in that order.     We can define a property of factual or alethic satisfactoriness which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate PREDICATION relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.    A Proposition may be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context,     This idea will in a moment be expanded.    The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification.     In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification.     A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object;     to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf.     We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate.     So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.    The apparatus which Grice sketches is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification.     It will not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification;     it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant.     To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for this or that ‘semantic’ purpose, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (    i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl;     and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems NOT to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its ‘semantic’ function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value.     But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus;     it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers.     The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects or things  which it invokes as metaphysically — ontologically — disreputable.    Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, Grice thinks that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available.     The one which Grice has immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme.     The new proposal, like its predecessor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a SUBJECT-item and a PREDICATE-item, and will, therefore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification.     Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow an individual thing, like a grasshopper, a girl, and a boy, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets — or attributes,     Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, Grice thinks, available, Grice shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.    According to this version, we associate with the SUBJECT-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order.     If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name.     The treatment of a singular term which is not a name will be parallel, but is here omitted.     If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the PREDICATE to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper.     If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached;     thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions.     It now remains to specify the PREDICATION-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be alethically satisfactory.     A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element;     so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.    Grice devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and he convinced himself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which he shall not here discuss.     Before moving on, however, Grice might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal.     First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements.   Second, an individual name is in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic.     Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:    as I envisage them, a proposition will be regarded as a family of propositional complexes.     Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty';     indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.    The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine the identity of a proposition — what is said — remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.    Wilson is a great man  The British Prime minister is a great man.    It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched.     We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of a proposition used to be that a proposition is needed to give us something for logic to be about;     sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of communication.    Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards a proposition if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.    If our thought proceeds along these lines, a proposition might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for a logical law to hang from, but as the thing whose nature determines the content of the logical system.     It might even be possible to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of a proposition; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display a proposition as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as the content or the object of a psychological attitude.    How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear;     but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What is a proposition?", not by identificatory dissection but rather by pointing to the work that a proposition of their very nature does.    Grice has little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on some fundamental issues in metaphysical methodology.     What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respectability?     What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing?     What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output?     Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?    Two further objections cited by the editors may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to Grice’s treatment of the idea of a conversational procedure.    One of these objections disputes Grice’s right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of science by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of this or that basic procedure underlying other this or that ‘semantic’ procedure which is, supposedly, derivative from the former.     The other objection starts from the observation that Grice’s account of communication  involves the attribution to this or that communicator of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning this or that procedure possessed and utilised by his conversational partner,     notes that these steps, and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide, are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness,     and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit of tacit rather than explicit.     The editors suggest that answers to these objections can be found  in Grice’s published and unpublished work.    Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to Grice with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reasoning. which the editors illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in conversational significance, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods — by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think.’    Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered.     But Grice thinks that he would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines.     Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of this or that langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of this or that language, is a matter for the scientist except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principle.    But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do, and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever.     Now one might argue for the existence of this or that principle on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible communicative performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of this or that primitive procedure in accordance with the general principle in question.    One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in this general principle, is guaranteed by this or that metaphysical or ontological consideration, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  this or that conversational categorry on the one hand and this or that metaphysical, or, ontological, or real category — of REALITY — on the other.     Grice will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.    As regards the second objection, Grice must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply the editors of the G. R. I. C. E. compilation envisage Grice as wishing to make, but he will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view.     They first very properly refer to Grice’s discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in his Kant Lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition;     the suggested conditions are     that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly presen t material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.    The G. R. I. C. E. editors are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided;     indeed, Grice never supposed that he had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of his Kant Lectures is published.     The G. R. I. C. E. editors then bring to bear some further material from Grice’s writings, and sketch, on his behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I)     That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification;     if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2)     We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.    The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum.    The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings.     We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question.    So it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way.     We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.    Now whether or not it was something of this sort which the G. R. I. C. E. editors had it in mind to attribute to Grice, the argument as Grice sketches it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration;     it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of Grice’s, and exerts upon Grice at least, some degree of seductive appeal.     But whether Grice would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, Grice is not sure.     There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought.     Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to others to judge how closely what Grice says when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of the G. R. I. C. E. editors.     Grice would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.    There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p;     if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.    (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '.     We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.    If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess.    Grice is strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort.     Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination.     I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise.    On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures  can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard.     Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence:     The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician.     Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.    That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a procedure-governed system of communication.     There are two kinds of magic travel.     In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go.     The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second.    But problems still remain.     A deductive system concocted by this or that logician varies a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors this or thprocedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases.     But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances.    They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences or this or that conversational move, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.    That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize conversational performance; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.    There is one further objection, not mentioned by the editors of G. R. I. C. E., which seems to me to be one to which Grice must respond.     It may be stated thus:    One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language.     Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending.     Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough.     For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.    A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later.     According to Grice’s speculations about conversational significance, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present).     The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose.     At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise.     Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language.     But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.    In a final section of my Reply to the editors of G. R. I. C. E., Grice takes up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section.     I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them.     Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines.     I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures.     So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.    At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima.     The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology.     Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology?     Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?    If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it.     That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another.     One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory.     The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories.     In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.    A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us.   We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us.     Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.    I have at this point three comments to make.     First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.    Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.    Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.    Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded.     But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics.     But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality.     In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics.     Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.    The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach.     The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements.     That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.    But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties.     Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often?     These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?    Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction,     My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798.     Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity.     We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.    Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character.     It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed.     As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place.     One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction,     My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.    Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed.     As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place.     One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.    Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment.     A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'.     It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers.     But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.    Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics.     One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.    I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago.     Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question.     The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it.     But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets.     It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness.     All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.    The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline.     Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.    To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.    Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A.     It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept.     Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions.     It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves);   properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them.     But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of a thing and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction.     It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.   In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap.     The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language.     So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.    I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question of how a metaphysical principle is ultimately to be established.     A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argument, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a ‘transcendental’ argument.     Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argument.     Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis — or category of items — as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep;     and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking a transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or communication or conversation or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach.     Grice’s view (and Grice’s view of Kant) takes a different tack.    One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of a transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that a Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing.     Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of reason, or the notion of a rational being or person.    Precisely what remedy Grice should propose for these omissions is far from clear to Grice    Grice has to confess that his ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state.     But I will do the best I can.    I suspect that there is no single characterization of a Transcendental Argument which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind;     indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.    Strong — impossibility of a conversational move  weak — impossibility of an appropriate conversational move    One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic.     This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, SVM  to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt;     and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self-destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that it is not the case that Descartes exists), and on the other hand the possession by Descartes’s act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character — being the expression of a doubt — which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have.     It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression of doubt the exercise of reason will be impossible;     but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.    Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what Grice might call 'epistemological nominalism';     that is against someone who proposes to admit ys (phenomenalist proposition) but not xs (noumenalist proposition? on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys phenomenalist proposition  but not for anything like xs, noumenalist proposition thing which supposedly go beyond ys;     Cf Grice Strawson Pears Metaphysics    we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events.     The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy;     that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure;     if a thing or a cause goes, a sense-datum and a datable event goes  too.     In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of this pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of reason will have to go.    Another pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic is allowed to fall, something else would have to fall, which is a pre-condition of the exercise of reason;     it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever.  It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic.     But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect.     Some less ambitious argument might threaten a local breakdown of reason, a breakdown in some particular area.     It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of reason in a practical domain, such as conversation!     While such an argument may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality;     he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason — if not instrumental, or strategical, or utilitarian reason — from the area of action, or conversation.    The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of reason; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.    A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though Grice would prefer to abandon the adjective  'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument.     In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted;     alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain, or likely, to be true.     But sometimes one may be lled to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by a consideration other than the likelihood of its truth. Think Cicero’s disloyalty to Mark Antony!    This or that Thing that is a matters of faith of one sort of another —  like fidelity of one's wife, or the justice of England’s cause, us typically not accepted on evidential grounds — but as a demand imposed by loyalty, or patriotism;     and the argument produced by those who wish us to HAVE such a faith may well not be silent about this fact.     A Metaphysical or ontological argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith.     In the metaphysical or ontological region, too, the practical aspect of tag may come first;     we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of reason.    But in the case of this or that metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability.     Proof of the pudding comes from the NEED to eat it, not vice versa.     These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some philosophers, including himself, have felt with respect to this of that transcendental argument.     It has seemed to Grice, in at least some cases, that the most that such an argument can hope to show is that reason demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.    This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.    It is now time for Grice to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical or ontological construction of this or that thing is effected, and Gric shall attempt to sketch three of these: projection, category shift, and transubstantiation.    But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines.     It is pretty obvious that metaphysical or ontological  construction needs to be disciplined,     this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all.     The list of available routines determines what metaphysical or ontological construction is; so it is no accident that it employs this or that routine for the construction of a thing.    This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to Grice, and to other philosophers such as Kneale or Keynes, as a difficult problem in the methodology of ontology and metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical or ontological construction of a thing from the mere cursory discovery of an electrons or a quark?    What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?    Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical or ontological construction, including hypostasis, we reach a thing or entity (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical or ontological construction;     A scientist on the other hand merely hypothesizes.     we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoretical change.    Grice shall first introduce two of these construction routines. Projection and Caregory Shift.     before Grice introduces the third of transubstantiation he shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to his task in other ways.     The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.    Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the soul’s propensity to spread or cast itself on things';     but Hume seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, his human  nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason.     In Grice’s version of the routine of projection, one can distinguish different stages.     At this initial stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word Wood’s 'or' or "not' — as in someone is not hearing a noise  or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value.     We can think of this or that  initial item as, at this stage, an intuitive and unclarified element in Grice’s conceptual vocabulary.     At a later stage we reach a specific psychological state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier,     we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying that someone is hearing a noise or   'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving).     These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concept.    At a later stage, reference to this specific state is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in this or that sub-clause.    So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'.     At a later stage, the restriction imposed by the demand that the operators at this stage should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed;     there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in this or that subordinate clause.    With regard to this routine of construction Grice would make a few observations:    The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, a concepts (in something like a Fregean sense — or SINN) rather than a thing.     To generate a thing we must look to other routines.    The provision, at a later stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operator which correspond to the initial concept is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuation, for statements within which the operators appear.     Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible.    Because of this, the difference between these stages is apparent rather than real.     The latter  stage provides only a notational variant of the former stage, at least unless a later stage is also reached.    It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine of projection must not be merely formal or arbitrary.     The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for.    Subject to these provisos, application of this routine of construction to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with an ontological *reconstruction* of this or that concept;     or, if the first stage is missing, we are given an ontological *construction* not reconstruction of a concept.    A different construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and the category, and Grice presents his version of it as briefly as he can.     Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, — as in paradigm switch — but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing this or that subject of discourse of conversation, by a procedure reminiscent of the operation of nominalization, Grice might also refer to it as subjectification.    Given a class of this or that primary subject of discourse or conversation, namely, a substance such as Bunbury — he is in the next room —, there are a number of this or that ‘slot’ — this or other category — which predicates of this or that substantia prima like Unbury of this or that primary subject may fit;   One slot is substance itself (substantia seconda, secondary substance), in which case the PREDICATION  is intra-categorial or SUB-categorial and essential — Bunbury is an Englishman —     Theee are other categories into which the predicate assigned in non-essential or accidental PREDICATION hazzing may fall.    The catalogue, table, or list of these would resemble Aristotle's of Kant’s list of the category of quality affirmation negation infinity, the category of quantity, totality partiality infinity the category of relation categorial disjunctive conditional and the category of modus necessary possible contingent.    It might be, however, that the members of Grice’s list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, or Kant, or Kantotle, would not be fully co-ordinate:     the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows;     we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary.     It has to be properly motivated;     if it is not, perhaps it fails to quantitive and non-quantitative attribute (the category of quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.    Now, though it is to be the primary subjects of PREDICATION, this or that substance will not be the only subject.    A Derivatives of, or a conversions of, an item which start life (so to speak) as a PREDICABLE, in one NON-SUBSTANTIAL slot or another, of this of that substance, may themselves come to occupy the first slot;     Disinterestedness doesn’t exist    they will be a qualitiy of, or a quantity of, or a relation of, or a modus of, a particular type or token of this or that substantial:     not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities *simpliciter*.    It is Grice’s suspicion that only for a PRIMARY SUBSTANCE substantia prima as a subject, are all the slots filled by PREDICABLE items.    Some of this or that substantial which which is not a substance may derive from a plurality of items from this or that DIFFERENT original CATEGORY;   An action, even concerted like conversation, or an event, for example, might be a complex substantial deriving from a subject or substance, a predicate or attribute, and a time or occasion of utterance.    Grice’s position with regard to thus routine of metaphysical construction runs parallel to his position with regard to projection, in that here too Grice holds strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a CATEGORY of this or that entitiy must not be blindly arbitrary.     It has to be visually arbitrary, i. e. properly motivated;     if it is not properly motivated, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking — which this or that Italian rhetorician would call allegory or metaphor — you’re the cream in my coffee.    What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear;     one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up this or that secondary application for this or that existing primary mode of explanation:     it may be, for example, that the *substantial* introduction of this of that abstract entitiy, like a property or predicate — a quality, a quantity, a relation, a modus, makes possible the application to what Kneale calls secondary induction' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principle at work in boring primary induction.     But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question.     When Grice discusses metaphysical argument, it seems that to achieve reality the acceptance of a CATEGORY of entities has to be mandatory:   whereas the recent discussion has suggested that, apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated?     Which view would be correct?     Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency?     Or is there just one sort of admission requirement, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?    Before characterizing a construction routine Grice must say a brief word about the essential propertiy and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular — especially after Anglo-Jewish Ayer attacked Oxford — but for which Gricd wants to find or restore the metaphysical room they once held at Oxford and still do at Cambridge due to Keynes.    In its logical dress, an essential property would appear either as a property which is constitutive or definitive of a given, usually subject or substantial, kind; or as an individuating property of this or that individual member of a kind, a property such that if an ‘individual’ or specimen were to lose it, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself.     It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of each individual member of a kind, a property such that if an individual or specimen were to lose it, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist.    A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the construction routine might require, we subscribed to Grice’s view of chronologically-relative identity.     Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio- temporal continuity or continuancy as Wiggins did  as a definitive property for a subject substantial kinds, indeed for any subject of substantial kind.    But there is another more metaphysical dress which an essential property may wear.     An essential property or predicate may appear as a Keynesian generator-property,  *core' propertiy of a substantive kind or genus of subject item which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional feature of this or that member of that kind.     Keynes observes that induction is only rational if there is a finite a priori probability in favour of what he calls the Hypothesis of Limited Independent Variety; i.e., that all properties arise out of a finite number of this or that generator property.     If this is to be taken literally, ie., "property" interpreted in the wide sense = propositional function of one variable, it is clearly equivalent to the hypothesis that the classes of things of the type considered are finite in number, since equivalent properties define the same class and on the hypothesis any property is equivalent to one of a finite number of properties (i.e., this or that generator propertiy and negations conjunctions and alternations of them).   And this hypothesis that the classes of things are finite in number, since, if n be the number of things, 2" is the number of classes of things; so that the Hypothesis of Limited Variety is simply equivalent to the contradictory of the Axiom of Infinity.    On the face of it, this is a quite different approach;     but on reflection Grice finds myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear.     Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are,a logically essential property and the fundamentally explanatory property of a substantial kind come together;     A subject or substance is essentially (in the logical' sense) a thing — res — such that in circumstances C it manifests feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic law of the theory.      So perhaps, at this level of theory, a subject or substance requires a theory to give expression to the nature of that substance or subject, and a theory — say, of inter-subjectivity — requires a substance or subject to govern that theory.    Finality, particularly detached finality — a function or a purpose which does not require sanction from purposers or users — is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with this or that final cause.    Grice, qua Oxonian of the Old Guard — pre-Anglo-Jewish Ayer — is somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of this or that superstition and priestcraft.     That, in Grice’s view, derached finslity is certainly not.    The concepts (Aristotelian ta legomena) and vocabulary (Austinian ta legomena) of finality, operating as if they are detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedure for recognizing and describing what goes on around us.     This point is forcibly illustrated by Golding in The Inheritors.     There Golding describes, borrowing from the myth of Tantalus, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age metaphysical couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people.     In the description, functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age metaphysical couple is vividly shared by the reader.     Now an end, finis, métier or finality is sometimes active rather than passive;     the finality of a thing then consists in what the thing is supposed or meant by the Genitor to do rather than in what the thing is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it.     Sometimes the finality of a thing such as Howard is not dependent on some ulterior end, goal, finis, or métier which the thing is envisaged as realizing.     Sometimes the finality — finis — of a thing — res — is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous or extrinsic to the thing.     And sometimes the finality of a thing — res — is not subordinate to the finality of some whole TOTUM — of which the thing is a component or PARS —, as the finality of one of Grice’s two eyes or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which that eye or foot belongs. — see or walk.    When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier.     Grice will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous or extrindically weighed finality, which may attach to a subject or a substance, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous — but is only intrinsically-weighed — and which will attach to the conception of kinds or genera of substance or of this or that other constructed entity.    The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre.     It is this latter kind of finality which Grice has been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of a construction routine.    Now it is Grice’s position that what ge might call Howard’s end  goal, finis, or finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous or extrinsically-weighed finality, may find a place as an essential property or predicate of at least some kinds of substances of subject — for example, a tiger or a person.     This or that subject or substance may be essentially 'for doing such and such'.     Indeed Grice suspects we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous or extrinsic finis, goal  métier, or finality not merely can fall within a substance’s essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature.     Tigers tigerise.    If a substance has a certain end, finis, or métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the MOTIVE alla Pritchard or motivation to fulfil the métier should it choose to follow that motive or motivation.     And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, métier or FINIS, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature.     But however that may be, once we have this or that end FINIS or finality feature enrolled as an essential HAZZING property of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory, or system of conduct, for that kind or GENUS of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's this or that essential descriptive property.    Grice now gives a brief characterization of another metaphysical construction routine, Trans-Substantiation.    Let us suppose that the Genitor sanctions the appearance of a biological type called a HOMO, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called REASON — of RATIONALITAS —, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist any possessor of it in coping speedily and resourcefully with this or that survival problem posed by a wide range of environments, which each HOMO would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain himself in.     But, perhaps unwittingly, the Genitof will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians;    and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves from a mere HOMO to a full PERSON.    They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as a human or HOMO possesses — hazzes — but they re-distribute them.    An attribute, predicate, or property which they possess HAZZES essentially — digestion, excretion — as a human become a predicate, attribute, or property, which, as a substance of a new psychological type, A PERSON, the person possesses accidentally.    On the other hand, a predicate, attribute, differentia, or property or properties called REASON, which attaches only accidentally to homo, pace the Lycaeum, attaches essentially to a PERSON.     While each human is standardly coincident with a particular PERSON — cf. Locke —  (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time — cf. REID), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that PERSON are no longer identical —  when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist.     But though logic is insufficient, it may be that this or that other theory will remedy the deficiency.     Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.    Grice’s final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which he has been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value — what Oxonians of Grice’s scholar days used to call Axiology — after Hartmann — Barnes, Duncan-Jones, and others at Corpus.    Grice shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with this or that unsolved problem or this or that unformulated supporting argument.     What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.    The details of the logic of this or that value-concept and of its possible relativisation are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog;     so Grice shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, Grice regards as two distinct dichotomies.     First, there is a dichotomy between a value-concept which is relativized to some focus of relativization, and that which is not so relativized, which is absolute.     If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type.     With regard to this dichotomy Grice is inclined to accept the following theses.    First, the presence in GRICE of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a "bite" on GRICE,  that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to Grice does, or should, carry weight for Grice.    Only if Grice cares for his aunt can Grice be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden.     Second, the fact that a RELAT-ivised value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on Grice’s part for the focus of relativization, engages Grice does not imply that the original RELAT-ivisation has been cancelled, or rendered absolute.     If Grice’s concern for your health stimulates in Grice a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medication, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still RELAT-ivised to your health.    Without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold.    The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a *transmitting* transitive relation which links the current bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'.     In the case of the transmission or transition of a relativized value-concept, the transmitting of transitive relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the RELAT-ion which is embodied in the RELAT-ivisation.    The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to ‘do not say what you believe to be false’ or promise-keeping or to GRICE’s keeping a promise, and to attach, indirectly or by transmission, to GRICE’s digging your garden for you, should that be something which Grice has promised to do;     it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and, indirectly or by transmission, to the payment of doctor's bills — an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativising relation are one and the same.    The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.    It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value, the notion of an END or GOAL or métier or finality would be in a certain sense *dispensable*, or eliminable via reduction, and further, that, if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity.    A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of an attributions of relativised value, is mechanistically substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics, and on the fact that the non-pursuit of this or that goal such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanation is replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, or reduced to, an explanation of a sort congenial to this or that mechanicist philosopher.    But, if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwickian’ in character, it is required that it be supported by a kind of END, métier, or finality which extends beyond any overlap with mechanistically-substitutable finality;     autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so he is committed to a denial of absolute value.    That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand.     To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction.     It is, rather, to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be accepted that the notion is acceptable.     There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire.     It might be that we FEEL a need to appeal to absolute value, in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (for example) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself, or that one should pay his creditors, or do not say what he believes to be false.    Or again, it might be that, by this or that Leibnizian standard for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires this or that relatively simple principle, is richer and so better than a flat world which does not.    But, granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limit is imposed by a metaphysical construction already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimise the conception of absolute value;     what it is proper to accept to be accepted may depend in part on what one would like to be accepted.     Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of freedom, a dignity which as a rational being a HUMAN enjoys, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of reason, to fix its rules as well.     In any case, a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one.     Grice has some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with Grice’s ideas about the practical character of metaphysical argument.    On the assumption that the operation of Trans-Substantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of this or that biological creature has been 'invented' into a class of this or that psychological substance, namely this or that PERSON, who possess as part of the essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of REASON, and who has only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realise that métier.     The degree to which the PERSON fulfils the métier will constitute the PERSON a good person (good qua' person); and while the reference to the substantial kind of a person undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization.    Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of this or that substance, the way is opened for the appearance of a transmitting relationship which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to this or that suitably qualified NON-SUBSTANTIAL aspect if members of a kind, such as this or that action, — or inter-action, like conversation qua rational cooperation, and characteristies.     While it cannot be assumed that this or that PERSON will be the only original instance of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instance there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Projection.     It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in the style of the Lycaeum to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge.    And a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good PERSON operating in conditions of freedom.     Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than this or that PERSON.    In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to this or that PERSON as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value.    Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.    Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems.     Grice does not find this thought daunting.    If philosophy generated no problem it would be dead, because it would be finished.    And if philosophy recurrently regenerated the same old problem it would not be alive because it could never begin.     So those who still look to philosophy for this or that should pray that the supply of this or that problem never dries up.     H. P. Grice. J. L. Speranza. Luigi Speranza. “Grice e Speranza” -- Keywords: Grice, etc. Vide: The Grice Papers, BANC, MSS. Speranza

Online Archive of California   Finding Aid to the H. Paul Grice Papers, 1947-1989, bulk 1960-1989 Finding Aid written by Bancroft Library staff The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Finding Aid to the H. Paul Grice Papers, 1947-1989, bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 The Bancroft Library    University of California, Berkeley  Berkeley, California Finding Aid Written By: Bancroft Library staff The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Collection Summary  Collection Title: H. Paul Grice papers Date (inclusive): 1947-1989, Date (bulk): bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 Creator : Grice, H. P. (H. Paul) Extent: Number of containers: 10 cartons Linear feet: 12.5 Repository: The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California, 94720-6000 Phone: (510) 642-6481 Fax: (510) 642-7589 Email: bancref@library.berkeley.edu URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ Abstract: The H. Paul. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consist of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice, during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and the University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research Grice conducted on theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English Physical Location: Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog. Information for Researchers  Access  Collection is open for research. Publication Rights  Materials in these collections may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley See:. Preferred Citation  [Identification of item], H. Paul Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Alternate Forms Available  There are no alternate forms of this collection.  Indexing Terms  The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog. Grice, H. P. (H. Paul)--Archives Language and languages--Philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Faculty papers. Manuscripts for publication. Administrative Information  Acquisition Information  The H. Paul Grice papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Kathleen Grice on March 9, 1990 Accruals  No additions are expected. System of Arrangement  Arranged to the folder level. Processing Information  Processed by Bancroft Library staff in 2009-2010. Biographical Information  Herbert Paul Grice, born in 1913 in Birmingham, England, obtained his degree at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he returned to teach until 1967 after providing teaching services at a public school in Rossall. In 1967, H.P. Grice moved to California, becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained until his death in 1988. His long list of contributions during his teaching career include the William James Lectures from 1967-1968, his publication of "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning," from 1968-1969, his Urbana lectures presented in 1970, "Logic and Conversation," published in 1975, Kant lectures delivered in 1978-1977, John Locke lectures presented in 1978-1979, and Carus lectures presented in 1983. Grice's publications and lectures are compilations of his extensive research performed in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, Aristotelian philosophy, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Grice is also attributed with coining the word "implicature" in 1968 to describe speakers, and for defining his own paradox known as "Grice's paradox," introduced in Grice's "Studies in the Way of Words," (1989) a volume of all his publications and writings. Scope and Content of Collection  The H.P. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consists of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research, some in the form of audio files, Grice conducted on his theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Also included in the H.P. Grice collection is Grice's research on Aristotelian philosophy with Judith Baker and metaphysics with George Myro, his other research focusing on the philosophy of the mind with such subjects as perception. Also included is documentation of Grice's involvement with the American Psychological Association (APA) during his professorship at UC Berkeley.   Series 1 Correspondence 1947-1988  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 1-15) Arrangement  Arranged alphabetically according to last name; followed by general correspondence Scope and Content Note  Series includes correspondence with Grice's student and colleague Judith Baker, and colleagues Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Carton 1, Folder 1 Bennett, Jonathan Circa 1984  Carton 1, Folder 2 Baker, Judith Undated  Carton 1, Folder 3 Bealer, George 1987  Carton 1, Folder 4 Code, Alan 1980  Carton 1, Folders 5-6 Suppes, Patrick 1977-1982  Carton 1, Folders 7-8 Warner, Richard 1971-1975  Carton 1, Folder 9 Wyatt, Richard 1981  Carton 1, Folders 10-12 General to H.P. Grice 1947-1986  Carton 1, Folders 13-14 General 1972-1988  Carton 1, Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice 1968    Series 2 Publications 1957-1989  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates Scope and Content Note  Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" 1957  Carton 1, Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" 1957, 1976-1980  Carton 1, Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing 1958  Carton 1, Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" 1966  Carton 1, Folders 21-23 "Logic and Conversation" 1966-1975  Carton 1, Folders 24-26 William James Lectures 1967  Carton 1, Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning" 1968  Carton 1, Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" 1969  Carton 1, Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture IX 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Circa 1971  Carton 2, Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" 1971-1973  Carton 2, Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures I-III 1973  Carton 2, Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures 1986  Carton 2, Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 22-23 "Two Chapters on Incontinence" with Judith Baker Circa 1976  Carton 2, Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Circa 1977  Carton 2, Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" 1977-1981  Carton 2, Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" 1978  Carton 2, Folders 29-30 John Locke Lectures "Aspects of Reason" 1979  Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Circa 1985  Carton 3, Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy 1986  Carton 3, Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" 1986-1989  Carton 3, Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" 1987  Carton 3, Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" 1987  Carton 4, Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" 1988  Carton 4, Folder 5 Grice Reprints 1953-1986  Carton 4, Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 10 "Negation I" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 11 "Negation II" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Undated  Carton 4, Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Undated  Carton 4, Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 4, Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Undated  Carton 4, Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Undated    Series 3 Teaching Materials 1964-1983  Physical Description: Carton 5, Carton 6 (folders 1-3) Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; alphabetical for those teaching materials without dates. Scope and Content Note  Includes seminars and lectures given during Grice's years as a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Carton 5, Folder 1 Student Notes on Grice's Seminar at Cornell 1964  Carton 5, Folder 2 Grice Seminar 1969  Carton 5, Folder 3 Philosophy 290-2 with Judith Baker 1992  Carton 5, Folder 4 Philosophy 290-2 1993  Carton 5, Folders 5-6 Seminar on Kant's Ethical Theory 1974-1977  Carton 5, Folder 7 Seminar on "Aristotle Ethics" 1975-1996  Carton 5, Folder 8 Philosophy 290, Kant Seminar with Judith Baker 1976-1977  Carton 5, Folder 9 "Kant's Ethics," Volume II 1977  Carton 5, Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures 1977  Carton 5, Folders 14-15 Philosophy 290 1977-1978  Carton 5, Folders 16-17 "Kant's Ethics," Volume III 1978  Carton 5, Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Seminar 1979-1980  Carton 5, Folders 19-21 Seminar on Kant's Ethics, Volume V 1980-1982  Carton 5, Folder 22 Philosophy 200. Grice and Myro 1982  Carton 5, Folder 23 Notes on Kant 1982  Carton 5, Folder 24 Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy 1983  Carton 5, Folder 25 Seminar on Freedom Undated  Carton 5, Folder 26 Grice Lectures Undated  Carton 5, Folders 27-28 Seminar on Kant's Ethics Undated  Carton 5, Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Lectures II-IV Undated  Carton 5, Folder 30 UC Berkeley, Modest Mentalism Undated  Carton 5, Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Grice/Staal Seminar, Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 3 Grice/Staal, "That" Clause Undated    Series 4 Professional Associations 1971-1987  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 4-12), Carton 10 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically. Scope and Content Note  Includes Kant's Stanford Lectures, various notes and audio tapes of Beanfest, Grice's fall 1987 group research on universals, and conferences and discussions concerning the American Psychological Association (APA). Also includes a carton of cassettes, magnetic recorder tapes, and cassette sets of four on professional talks with colleague George Myro on identities, metaphysics, and relatives and Grice's various seminars given at different institutions such as Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and Seattle on his philosophical theories. Carton 6, Folder 4 APA Symposium - "Entailment" 1971  Carton 6, Folders 5-6 Stanford - "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant 1977  Carton 6, Folder 7 Conferences - Causality Colloquium At Stanford University Circa 1978  Carton 6, Folder 8 Conferences - APA Discussion - Randall Parker's Transcription of Tapes 1983-1989  Carton 6, Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest 1985  Carton 6, Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes 1985  Carton 6, Folder 11 Group Universals 1987  Carton 6, Folder 12 Group Universals - Partial Working Copy 1987  Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences 1970-1986    Series 5 Subject Files 1951-1988  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 13-38), Cartons 7-9 Arrangement  Alphabetically Scope and Content Note  Includes Reed Seminar notes, notes on ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes and their own philosophical theories, research and accompanying notes on other prominent philosophers such as Kant and Davidson, notes with colleagues Judith Baker, Alan Code, Michael Friedman, George Myro, Patrick Suppes, and Richard Warner, on various theories of reason, trust, language semantics, universals, and values. Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" 1983  Carton 6, Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship Undated  Carton 6, Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Undated  Carton 6, Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Undated  Carton 6, Folder 20 Bealer Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 21 Berkeley Group Team Notes 1983  Carton 6, Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Undated  Carton 6, Folder 23 Categories with Strawson Undated  Carton 6, Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives 1981  Carton 6, Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 26 Davidson's "On Saying That" Undated  Carton 6, Folders 27-28 Descartes Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 29 "Grice on Denials of Indicative Conditionals" by Michael Sinton Circa 1971  Carton 6, Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Undated  Carton 6, Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Undated  Carton 6, Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 34-35 Notes on Ethics with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 6, Folder 36 North Carolina Ethics Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 37 Festschrift and Warner Notes Circa 1981-1982  Carton 6, Folder 38 "Finality" Notes with Alan Code Undated  Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" by Grice Undated  Carton 7, Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 3 "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" by Kant Undated  Carton 7, Folder 4 "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics with Richard Warner Undated  Carton 7, Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated  Carton 7, Folder 7 Notes on Hume 1975  Carton 7, Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 10 Identity Notes with George Myro 1973  Carton 7, Folders 11-12 "Ifs and Cans" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Undated  Carton 7, Folders 14-16 Notes on Kant 1981-1982  Carton 7, Folder 17 Kant's Ethics 1982  Carton 7, Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Undated  Carton 7, Folder 19 Language and Reference Circa 1966  Carton 7, Folder 20 Language Semantics Undated  Carton 7, Folders 21-22 John Locke Lecture Notes 1979  Carton 7, Folder 23 Logical Form and Action Sentences Undated  Carton 7, Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Undated  Carton 7, Folders 26-27 Notes on Metaphysics 1988  Carton 7, Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Undated  Carton 7, Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Undated  Carton 7, Folder 30 Method and Myth Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 31 Mills Induction Undated  Carton 7, Folder 32 Miscellaneous on Actions and Events Undated  Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous - Judith Baker Undated  Carton 8, Folder 2 Miscellaneous - Metaph Notes 1987-1988  Carton 8, Folder 3 Miscellaneous - Oxford Philosophy Undated  Carton 8, Folders 4-8 Miscellaneous Philosophy Notes 1981-1985  Carton 8, Folders 9-13 Miscellaneous Philosophy Topics Undated  Carton 8, Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Undated  Carton 8, Folders 16-17 Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics 1975-1976  Carton 8, Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Undated  Carton 8, Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Circa 1978  Carton 8, Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Undated  Carton 8, Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Papers Undated  Carton 8, Folder 23 Papers on Perception Undated  Carton 8, Folder 24 Perception Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 25 Notes on Perception with Richard Warner 1988  Carton 8, Folder 26 "Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 27 "A Pint of Philosophy" by Alfred Brook Gordon, includes notes by Grice Circa 1951  Carton 8, Folder 28 "A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 29 "Lectures on Pierce" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 30 Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Circa 1970  Carton 8, Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Undated  Carton 8, Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Undated  Carton 9, Folder 2 "Preliminary Valediction" 1985  Carton 9, Folder 3 Presupposition and Implicative Circa 1979  Carton 9, Folder 4 Probability and Life Undated  Carton 9, Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 6 Reasons 1966  Carton 9, Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Circa 1980  Carton 9, Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Undated  Carton 9, Folder 9 Schiffer Undated  Carton 9, Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Undated  Carton 9, Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 13 "Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics" by Alan Code Undated  Carton 9, Folder 14 Social Justice Undated  Carton 9, Folder 15 "Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Undated  Carton 9, Folder 16 Super-Relatives Undated  Carton 9, Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Notes 1986-1987  Carton 9, Folder 20 Various work on Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc/ with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 9, Folder 21 Universals 1987  Carton 9, Folder 22 Universals with Michael Friedman 1987  Carton 9, Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Undated  Carton 9, Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Undated  Carton 9, Folders 25-27 Miscellaneous - Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Undated  Carton 9, Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated  Carton 9, Folder 29 "Virtues and Vices" by Philippa Foot Undated  Carton 9, Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs 1974-1975 References  ACKRILL, J. L. cited by Grice, on ‘Happiness.’ ACKRILL, J. L. citing Grice AUSTIN, Philosophical papers. AUSTIN, How to do things with words. AUSTIN, Sense and sensibilia. BOSTOCK – cited by Walker. DUMMETT – cited by Grice. EWING FLEW, citing Grice. Grice, H. P. Prejudices and predilections; which become, The Life and Opinions of H. P. Grice’ HAMPSHIRE – cited by Grice. HARE, Practical inferences HART, citing Grice, Philosophical Review.  KNEALE, Induction, cited by Grice. OVER, D. E. citing Grice PEACOCKE, C. A. B. citing Grice in Evans/Mcdowell PEARS, citing Grice PEARS cited by Grice Prichard, ed. By Urmson – cited by Prichard. SAINSBURY citing Grice SMITH, P. H. Nowell. Cited by Grice. Speranza, J. L. The sceptic and language. Speranza Speranza STOUT – cited by Grice STRAWSON, P. F. citing Grice Introduction to logical theory URMSON, cited by Grice WoW URMSON citing Grice WARNOCK – cited by Grice –  citing Grice in ‘Saturday mornings.’ WIGGINS citing Grice, Dictionary WIGGINS and STRAWSON, see Strawson WILSON, John Cook – Statement and Inference  APPENDIX – Conversational Reason.  J. L. Speranza  Luigi Speranza, “Grice e la storia della filosofia italiana.” Speranza has done crucial research on Griceianism, unearthing some documents by O.Wood, J. O. Urmson, P. H. Nowell-Smith, and many many others – not just H. P. Grice.  University of California, Berkeley  Berkeley, California Finding Aid Written By: Bancroft Library staff The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Collection Summary  Collection Title: H. Paul Grice papers Date (inclusive): 1947-1989, Date (bulk): bulk 1960-1989 Collection Number: BANC MSS 90/135 Creator : Grice, H. P. (H. Paul) Extent: Number of containers: 10 cartons Linear feet: 12.5 Repository: The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, California, 94720-6000 Phone: (510) 642-6481 Fax: (510) 642-7589 Email: bancref@library.berkeley.edu URL: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ Abstract: The H. Paul. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consist of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice, during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and the University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research Grice conducted on theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Languages Represented: Collection materials are in English Physical Location: Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog. Information for Researchers  Access  Collection is open for research. Publication Rights  Materials in these collections may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of University of California gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from, or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley See:. Preferred Citation  [Identification of item], H. Paul Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Alternate Forms Available  There are no alternate forms of this collection.  Indexing Terms  The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog. Grice, H. P. (H. Paul)--Archives Language and languages--Philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Faculty papers. Manuscripts for publication. Administrative Information  Acquisition Information  The H. Paul Grice papers were given to The Bancroft Library by Kathleen Grice on March 9, 1990 Accruals  No additions are expected. System of Arrangement  Arranged to the folder level. Processing Information  Processed by Bancroft Library staff in 2009-2010. Biographical Information  Herbert Paul Grice, born in 1913 in Birmingham, England, obtained his degree at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he returned to teach until 1967 after providing teaching services at a public school in Rossall. In 1967, H.P. Grice moved to California, becoming a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley where he remained until his death in 1988. His long list of contributions during his teaching career include the William James Lectures from 1967-1968, his publication of "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning," from 1968-1969, his Urbana lectures presented in 1970, "Logic and Conversation," published in 1975, Kant lectures delivered in 1978-1977, John Locke lectures presented in 1978-1979, and Carus lectures presented in 1983. Grice's publications and lectures are compilations of his extensive research performed in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, Aristotelian philosophy, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Grice is also attributed with coining the word "implicature" in 1968 to describe speakers, and for defining his own paradox known as "Grice's paradox," introduced in Grice's "Studies in the Way of Words," (1989) a volume of all his publications and writings. Scope and Content of Collection  The H.P. Grice Papers (1947-1989) consists of publications, unpublished works, and correspondence from the notable English philosopher of language H. Paul Grice during his years as Professor Emeritus at Oxford until 1967 and University of California, Berkeley until his death in 1988. Also included are extensive notes and research, some in the form of audio files, Grice conducted on his theories of language semantics and theories of reason, trust, and value. His most popular lectures, including the John Locke lectures, William James lectures, Carus lectures, Urbana lectures, and Kant lectures are all documented as drafts and finalized forms of transcripts and audio files within the collection. Also included in the H.P. Grice collection is Grice's research on Aristotelian philosophy with Judith Baker and metaphysics with George Myro, his other research focusing on the philosophy of the mind with such subjects as perception. Also included is documentation of Grice's involvement with the American Psychological Association (APA) during his professorship at UC Berkeley.   Series 1 Correspondence 1947-1988  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 1-15) Arrangement  Arranged alphabetically according to last name; followed by general correspondence Scope and Content Note  Series includes correspondence with Grice's student and colleague Judith Baker, and colleagues Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Carton 1, Folder 1 Bennett, Jonathan Circa 1984  Carton 1, Folder 2 Baker, Judith Undated  Carton 1, Folder 3 Bealer, George 1987  Carton 1, Folder 4 Code, Alan 1980  Carton 1, Folders 5-6 Suppes, Patrick 1977-1982  Carton 1, Folders 7-8 Warner, Richard 1971-1975  Carton 1, Folder 9 Wyatt, Richard 1981  Carton 1, Folders 10-12 General to H.P. Grice 1947-1986  Carton 1, Folders 13-14 General 1972-1988  Carton 1, Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice 1968    Series 2 Publications 1957-1989  Physical Description: Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates Scope and Content Note  Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" 1957  Carton 1, Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" 1957, 1976-1980  Carton 1, Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing 1958  Carton 1, Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" 1966  Carton 1, Folders 21-23 "Logic and Conversation" 1966-1975  Carton 1, Folders 24-26 William James Lectures 1967  Carton 1, Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning" 1968  Carton 1, Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" 1969  Carton 1, Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" 1969  Carton 2, Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture IX 1970-1971  Carton 2, Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Circa 1971  Carton 2, Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" 1971-1973  Carton 2, Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures I-III 1973  Carton 2, Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures 1986  Carton 2, Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" 1974  Carton 2, Folders 22-23 "Two Chapters on Incontinence" with Judith Baker Circa 1976  Carton 2, Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Circa 1977  Carton 2, Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" 1977-1981  Carton 2, Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" 1978  Carton 2, Folders 29-30 John Locke Lectures "Aspects of Reason" 1979  Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Circa 1985  Carton 3, Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy 1986  Carton 3, Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" 1986-1989  Carton 3, Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" 1987  Carton 3, Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" 1987  Carton 4, Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" 1987  Carton 4, Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" 1988  Carton 4, Folder 5 Grice Reprints 1953-1986  Carton 4, Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 10 "Negation I" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 11 "Negation II" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Undated  Carton 4, Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Undated  Carton 4, Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Undated  Carton 4, Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 4, Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Undated  Carton 4, Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Undated    Series 3 Teaching Materials 1964-1983  Physical Description: Carton 5, Carton 6 (folders 1-3) Arrangement  Arranged chronologically; alphabetical for those teaching materials without dates. Scope and Content Note  Includes seminars and lectures given during Grice's years as a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Carton 5, Folder 1 Student Notes on Grice's Seminar at Cornell 1964  Carton 5, Folder 2 Grice Seminar 1969  Carton 5, Folder 3 Philosophy 290-2 with Judith Baker 1992  Carton 5, Folder 4 Philosophy 290-2 1993  Carton 5, Folders 5-6 Seminar on Kant's Ethical Theory 1974-1977  Carton 5, Folder 7 Seminar on "Aristotle Ethics" 1975-1996  Carton 5, Folder 8 Philosophy 290, Kant Seminar with Judith Baker 1976-1977  Carton 5, Folder 9 "Kant's Ethics," Volume II 1977  Carton 5, Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures 1977  Carton 5, Folders 14-15 Philosophy 290 1977-1978  Carton 5, Folders 16-17 "Kant's Ethics," Volume III 1978  Carton 5, Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Seminar 1979-1980  Carton 5, Folders 19-21 Seminar on Kant's Ethics, Volume V 1980-1982  Carton 5, Folder 22 Philosophy 200. Grice and Myro 1982  Carton 5, Folder 23 Notes on Kant 1982  Carton 5, Folder 24 Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy 1983  Carton 5, Folder 25 Seminar on Freedom Undated  Carton 5, Folder 26 Grice Lectures Undated  Carton 5, Folders 27-28 Seminar on Kant's Ethics Undated  Carton 5, Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Lectures II-IV Undated  Carton 5, Folder 30 UC Berkeley, Modest Mentalism Undated  Carton 5, Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Grice/Staal Seminar, Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 3 Grice/Staal, "That" Clause Undated    Series 4 Professional Associations 1971-1987  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 4-12), Carton 10 Arrangement  Arranged chronologically. Scope and Content Note  Includes Kant's Stanford Lectures, various notes and audio tapes of Beanfest, Grice's fall 1987 group research on universals, and conferences and discussions concerning the American Psychological Association (APA). Also includes a carton of cassettes, magnetic recorder tapes, and cassette sets of four on professional talks with colleague George Myro on identities, metaphysics, and relatives and Grice's various seminars given at different institutions such as Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and Seattle on his philosophical theories. Carton 6, Folder 4 APA Symposium - "Entailment" 1971  Carton 6, Folders 5-6 Stanford - "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant 1977  Carton 6, Folder 7 Conferences - Causality Colloquium At Stanford University Circa 1978  Carton 6, Folder 8 Conferences - APA Discussion - Randall Parker's Transcription of Tapes 1983-1989  Carton 6, Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest 1985  Carton 6, Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes 1985  Carton 6, Folder 11 Group Universals 1987  Carton 6, Folder 12 Group Universals - Partial Working Copy 1987  Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences 1970-1986    Series 5 Subject Files 1951-1988  Physical Description: Carton 6 (folders 13-38), Cartons 7-9 Arrangement  Alphabetically Scope and Content Note  Includes Reed Seminar notes, notes on ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes and their own philosophical theories, research and accompanying notes on other prominent philosophers such as Kant and Davidson, notes with colleagues Judith Baker, Alan Code, Michael Friedman, George Myro, Patrick Suppes, and Richard Warner, on various theories of reason, trust, language semantics, universals, and values. Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" 1983  Carton 6, Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Undated  Carton 6, Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship Undated  Carton 6, Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Undated  Carton 6, Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Undated  Carton 6, Folder 20 Bealer Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 21 Berkeley Group Team Notes 1983  Carton 6, Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Undated  Carton 6, Folder 23 Categories with Strawson Undated  Carton 6, Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives 1981  Carton 6, Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Undated  Carton 6, Folder 26 Davidson's "On Saying That" Undated  Carton 6, Folders 27-28 Descartes Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 29 "Grice on Denials of Indicative Conditionals" by Michael Sinton Circa 1971  Carton 6, Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Undated  Carton 6, Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Undated  Carton 6, Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Undated  Carton 6, Folders 34-35 Notes on Ethics with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 6, Folder 36 North Carolina Ethics Notes Undated  Carton 6, Folder 37 Festschrift and Warner Notes Circa 1981-1982  Carton 6, Folder 38 "Finality" Notes with Alan Code Undated  Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" by Grice Undated  Carton 7, Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 3 "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" by Kant Undated  Carton 7, Folder 4 "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics with Richard Warner Undated  Carton 7, Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated  Carton 7, Folder 7 Notes on Hume 1975  Carton 7, Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 10 Identity Notes with George Myro 1973  Carton 7, Folders 11-12 "Ifs and Cans" Undated  Carton 7, Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Undated  Carton 7, Folders 14-16 Notes on Kant 1981-1982  Carton 7, Folder 17 Kant's Ethics 1982  Carton 7, Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Undated  Carton 7, Folder 19 Language and Reference Circa 1966  Carton 7, Folder 20 Language Semantics Undated  Carton 7, Folders 21-22 John Locke Lecture Notes 1979  Carton 7, Folder 23 Logical Form and Action Sentences Undated  Carton 7, Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Undated  Carton 7, Folders 26-27 Notes on Metaphysics 1988  Carton 7, Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Undated  Carton 7, Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Undated  Carton 7, Folder 30 Method and Myth Notes Undated  Carton 7, Folder 31 Mills Induction Undated  Carton 7, Folder 32 Miscellaneous on Actions and Events Undated  Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous - Judith Baker Undated  Carton 8, Folder 2 Miscellaneous - Metaph Notes 1987-1988  Carton 8, Folder 3 Miscellaneous - Oxford Philosophy Undated  Carton 8, Folders 4-8 Miscellaneous Philosophy Notes 1981-1985  Carton 8, Folders 9-13 Miscellaneous Philosophy Topics Undated  Carton 8, Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Undated  Carton 8, Folders 16-17 Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics 1975-1976  Carton 8, Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Undated  Carton 8, Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Circa 1978  Carton 8, Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Undated  Carton 8, Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Papers Undated  Carton 8, Folder 23 Papers on Perception Undated  Carton 8, Folder 24 Perception Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 25 Notes on Perception with Richard Warner 1988  Carton 8, Folder 26 "Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 27 "A Pint of Philosophy" by Alfred Brook Gordon, includes notes by Grice Circa 1951  Carton 8, Folder 28 "A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Notes Undated  Carton 8, Folder 29 "Lectures on Pierce" Undated  Carton 8, Folder 30 Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Circa 1970  Carton 8, Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Undated  Carton 8, Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Undated  Carton 9, Folder 2 "Preliminary Valediction" 1985  Carton 9, Folder 3 Presupposition and Implicative Circa 1979  Carton 9, Folder 4 Probability and Life Undated  Carton 9, Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 6 Reasons 1966  Carton 9, Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Circa 1980  Carton 9, Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Undated  Carton 9, Folder 9 Schiffer Undated  Carton 9, Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Undated  Carton 9, Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Undated  Carton 9, Folder 13 "Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics" by Alan Code Undated  Carton 9, Folder 14 Social Justice Undated  Carton 9, Folder 15 "Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Undated  Carton 9, Folder 16 Super-Relatives Undated  Carton 9, Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated  Carton 9, Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Notes 1986-1987  Carton 9, Folder 20 Various work on Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc/ with Judith Baker Undated  Carton 9, Folder 21 Universals 1987  Carton 9, Folder 22 Universals with Michael Friedman 1987  Carton 9, Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Undated  Carton 9, Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Undated  Carton 9, Folders 25-27 Miscellaneous - Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Undated  Carton 9, Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated  Carton 9, Folder 29 "Virtues and Vices" by Philippa Foot Undated  Carton 9, Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs 1974-1975 References  ACKRILL, J. L. cited by Grice, on ‘Happiness.’ ACKRILL, J. L. citing Grice AUSTIN, Philosophical papers. AUSTIN, How to do things with words. AUSTIN, Sense and sensibilia. BOSTOCK – cited by Walker. DUMMETT – cited by Grice. EWING FLEW, citing Grice. Grice, H. P. Prejudices and predilections; which become, The Life and Opinions of H. P. Grice’ HAMPSHIRE – cited by Grice. HARE, Practical inferences HART, citing Grice, Philosophical Review.  KNEALE, Induction, cited by Grice. OVER, D. E. citing Grice PEACOCKE, C. A. B. citing Grice in Evans/Mcdowell PEARS, citing Grice PEARS cited by Grice Prichard, ed. By Urmson – cited by Prichard. SAINSBURY citing Grice SMITH, P. H. Nowell. Cited by Grice. Speranza, J. L. The sceptic and language. Speranza Speranza STOUT – cited by Grice STRAWSON, P. F. citing Grice Introduction to logical theory URMSON, cited by Grice WoW URMSON citing Grice WARNOCK – cited by Grice –  citing Grice in ‘Saturday mornings.’ WIGGINS citing Grice, Dictionary WIGGINS and STRAWSON, see Strawson WILSON, John Cook – Statement and Inference  APPENDIX – Conversational Reason.  J. L. Speranza  Luigi Speranza, “Grice e la storia della filosofia italiana.” Speranza has done crucial research on Griceianism, unearthing some documents by O.Wood, J. O. Urmson, P. H. Nowell-Smith, and many many others – not just H. P. Grice.  A number of people have made this book possible by giving generously of their time to talk about Paul Grice, his life and his work, whether by letter, by e-mail or in person. I would therefore like to thank the fol-lowing, in an order that is simply alphabetical, and in the hope that I have not omitted anyone who should be thanked: Professor Judith Baker; the staff at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, in particular David Farrell; Tom Gover of the Old Cliftonian Society; Kathleen Grice; Adam Hodgkin; Professor Robin Lakoff; The Rossallian Club; Michael Stansfield, college archivist at Corpus Christi and Merton colleges;  Professor Sir Peter Strawson; Professor Richard Warner. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Grice for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and to quote from manuscript material; and to the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which gave permission to quote from their manuscript holdings.There is an inherent tension in writing about Paul Grice because two separate academic disciplines lay claim to his work, and do so with jus-tification. Those who know him as a philosopher may not be aware of the full significance of his role in the development of present day linguistics, while those whose interest in him originates from within linguistics may be unfamiliar with the philosophical questions that are integral to his work. Grice would not have considered himself to be anything other than a philosopher, so the title of this book might seem odd or even provocative. But I chose it in order to reflect the profound influence he has had on a discipline other than his own. Grice's work is of interest to philosophers and to linguists alike.  I myself belong to the second group. My first encounter with Grice's work was when I was introduced to his theory of conversation as a student, and was struck by the ambition and elegance of his proposed solution to a range of linguistic problems, as well as by the questions and difficulties it raised. I have since been pleased to recognise just these reactions to the theory in many of my own students. As I read more of Grice's work, I became intrigued by the question as to whether there was a unity to be found in his thought that would incorporate the familiar work on conversation into a larger and more significant philosophical picture. This book is my attempt to answer that question. I certainly hope that it will be of interest to readers from both philosophical and linguistic backgrounds, with the following words of caution to the former.  Grice's work draws on a range of previous writings that often go unac- knowledged, presumably because he assumed that his audience would be aware of its philosophical pedigree. The questions he is addressing can be less familiar to linguists, so on a number of occasions I have offered an overview of the history of an idea or an exegesis of a work.  I run the risk that these sections may appear to be superficial, or alternatively to be labouring the obvious, to readers well versed in philoso-phy, but I have offered the degree of detail necessary to enable those unfamiliar with the relevant background to follow Grice's arguments and appreciate the nature of his contribution. Further, my intention inthese sections is to sketch the relevant history of a philosophical debate, rather that to offer either a critique of or my own contribution to that debate. I can only ask for tolerance of these aspects of my book from readers already familiar with the relevant areas of philosophy.In 1986 Oxford University Press published a volume of essays drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, who was then 73. It was not formally described as a Festschrift, but Grice's name was concealed as an acronym of the title, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, and many of those who contributed to the volume took the opportunity of paying tribute to his work and influence. Among these, Gordon Baker revealed that what he admired most was Grice's  'skilful advocacy of heresies'.' In a similar vein, Grice's colleague Richard Grandy once introduced him to an audience with the comment that he could always be relied on to rally to 'the defence of the underdogma'.?  Given Grice's conventional academic career together with his current status in philosophy and, particularly, in linguistics, these accolades may seem surprising. His entire working life was spent in the prestigious universities of Oxford and Berkeley, making him very much an establishment figure. Much of his philosophy of language , particularly his theory of conversational implicature, has for a number of decades played a central role in debates about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, or meaning as a formal linguistic property and meaning as a process taking place in contexts and involving speakers and hearers. But the canonical status of Grice's ideas masks their unconventional and even controversial beginnings. As Baker himself ob-serves, Grice's heresies have tended to be transformed by success into orthodoxies.  In fact, Grice's work was often characterised by the challenges it posed to accepted wisdom, and by the novel approaches it proposed to established philosophical issues. The theory of conversational implicature is a good example. It is often summarised as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the fact, familiar to common sense, thatwhat people literally say and what they actually mean can often be quite different matters. In particular, the theory is concerned with some apparent discrepancies between classical logic and natural language.  More generally, it addresses the question of whether the meaning of everyday language is best explained in terms of formal linguistic rules, or in terms of the vagaries and variables of human communication.  Grice's theory developed against the background of a sharp distinction of approaches to these issues. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who saw logic as the appropriate apparatus for explaining meaning, dismissed the differences displayed by natural language as examples of its inherent imperfection. Everyday language was just too messy and imprecise to form an appropriate topic for philosophical inquiry.  The opposing view is perhaps best summed up by the slogan from Wittgenstein's later work that 'meaning is use'? Philosophers from this school of thought argued that if natural language diverges from logical meaning, this is simply because logic is not the appropriate philosophical tool for explaining language. Meaning in language is an important area of study in its own right, but can be considered only in connection with the variety of ways in which language is used by speakers.  Grice's approach to this debate was to argue that both views were wrong-headed. He proposed to think outside the standard disjunction of positions. Logic cannot give an adequate account of natural language, but nor is language simply a multifarious collection of uses, unamenable to logical analysis. Rather, logic can explain much, but not all, of the meaning of certain natural language expressions. More generally, formal semantic rules play a vital part in explaining meaning in everyday lan-guage, but they do not do the whole job. Other factors of a different but no less important type are also necessary for a full account of meaning. Most significantly, Grice argued that these other, non-semantic factors are not a random collection entirely dependent on individual speakers and contexts, but can be systematised and explained in terms of general principles and rules. The principles that explain how natural language differs from logic can also explain a wide range of other features of human communication.  In this novel attitude, Grice was certainly rejecting formal approaches, with their claim that the only meaning amenable to philosophical discussion was that which could be described in terms of truth-conditions, and could enter into truth-functional relationships. But also, and perhaps more surprisingly, he was rejecting a belief in everyday use as the chief, or indeed the only, location of meaning. This was a central tenet of philosophy at Oxford while Grice was developing his theory ofconversation, or at least of that subsection of Oxford philosophy known as the philosophy of ordinary language. Grice himself was an active member of this subsection and is often referred to as a leading figure in the movement. However, his use of formal logic in explaining conversational meaning demonstrates that his heretical impulse extended even to ordinary language philosophy itself. Indeed, the success of his theory of conversational implicature has been credited with the eventual demise of this movement as a viable philosophical approach.* Grice's readiness to question conventions, even those of his own subdiscipline, makes him hard to categorise in terms of the usual philosophical distinctions. He does not sit easily on either side of the familar dichotomies; he is neither exactly empiricist nor exactly rationalist, neither behaviourist nor mentalist. This makes synoptic discussions of his work difficult, as is perhaps entirely appropriate for a philosopher who readily expressed his dislike of attempts to divide philosophy up into a series of '-ologies' and '-isms'.  The theory of conversation is undoubtedly the best known of Grice's work. The particular, and often exclusive, emphasis on it can be explained perhaps in part by its intrinsic potential as a tool for linguistic analysis, and perhaps also, more accidentally, by the historical inaccessibility of much of his other writing. A notorious perfectionist, Grice was seldom happy that his work had reached a finished, or acceptable, state, and was therefore always reluctant to publish. Those who knew him have related this reluctance to the penetration of his own philosophical vision, turned as relentlessly on his own work as on that of others. His Oxford colleague Peter Strawson has suggested that this resulted in an uncomfortable degree of self-doubt:  I suspect, sometimes, that it was the strength of his own critical powers, his sense of the vulnerability of philosophical argument in general, that partially accounted, at the time, for his privately expressed doubts about the ability of his own work to survive criti-cism. After all, if there were always some detectable flaws in others' reasoning, why should there not be detectable, even though by him undetected, flaws in his own?  Certainly, Grice's account of conversation as an essentially cooperative enterprise is generally discussed, and frequently criticised, in isolation from the rest of this work, seen as a free-standing account of linguistic interaction. It is paraphrased, often in just a few pages, in most introductory text books on pragmatics and discourse analysis.' It hasbeen used or referred to in analyses of gendered language, children's language, code switching, courtroom cross-examination, the language of jokes, oral narrative and the language of liturgy, along with many other topics? However, it is only one aspect of a large and diverse body of work from a career of over four decades. In the context of this work, it can be seen as an intrinsic part of the gradual development of Grice's thinking on a range of philosophical topics. It also offers an analytic tool that Grice himself applied in his later work to a variety of philosophical problems, although never to the data of actual conversation.  To some extent, then, Grice's later use of the theory of conversation offers its own explanation of the significance, and the theoretical purpose, of that work. More than that, however, Grice's less-known work merits attention in its own right. It ranges over a wide range of topics: not just the philosophy of language but epistemology, per-ception, logic, rationality, ethics and metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of running threads, and some striking continuities of theme and approach, throughout this diverse oeuvre. Grice himself argued that the disparate themes and ideas of his career displayed a fundamental unity.® In general, however, as Richard Grandy and Richard Warner observe in their introduction to Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, 'the systematic nature of his work is little recognised'!'  Throughout his work Grice focused on aspects of human behaviour, linguistic or otherwise, and the mental processes underlying them.  Increasingly central in his work was the idea that an analysis of these processes revealed people to be rational creatures, and that this rationality was fundamental to human nature. In an overview of his own work, Grice himself suggested, with typical tentativeness, that: 'It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves. '° He also displayed a sophisticated respect for common sense as a starting point in philosophical inquiry. It is sophisticated in that he did not espouse the straightforward adoption of common sense attitudes and terminology into philosophy. Rather, he urged that the philosopher remain aware of how the themes of philosophical inquiry are usually understood by non-philosophers. In a large part, this meant paying serious attention to the language in which particular issues were ordinarily dis-cussed, or to what Grice once described as 'our carefree chatter'." In this focus at least he retained an approach recognisable from his background in ordinary language philosophy. However, he proved himself ready to go beyond the dictates of common sense where the complexity of the subject matter demanded. Philosophy, he argued, is a difficult subjectthat deals with difficult issues, and it is often necessary to posit entities not current in everyday thought: to construct theoretical, empirically unverifiable entities if they are explanatorily useful. Within these para-meters, as he once suggested, 'whatever does the job is respectable'. 12 He was certainly not a simple egalitarian in philosophy. In the early 1980s he noted down, apparently for his own edification, the following complaint:  It repeatedly astonishes me that people who would themselves readily admit to being devoid of training, experience, or knowledge in philosophy, and who have plainly been endowed by nature with no special gifts of philosophical intelligence should be so ready to instruct professional philosophers about the contents of the body of philosophical truths. 13  Despite his readiness to add entities to philosophical explanations when this seemed appropriate, Grice was concerned that such explanations should remain as simple as possible, in the philosophical sense of simplicity as drawing on as few entities as possible. In the lectures on conversation he endorsed 'Modified Occam's Razor', which he defined as 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'.I This philosophical parsimony was carried over into other areas of his work; he sought general explanations that would account for as wide a range of subject matter, for as few theoretical constructions, as possible. If he prized philosophical simplicity, Grice's ideas were often far from reductive in more general terms. In particular, he did not shrink from explanations that saw people as separate and different: different from animals, in terms of communicative behaviour, or from automata, in terms of rational thought.  More generally, Grice sustained an enthusiasm for the business of philosophy itself, accompanied by a conviction, unfashionable at the start of his career, that the works of philosophers from other schools of thought and different ages deserve thoughtful and continual re-analysis. His work reveals a belief that philosophical investigation and analysis are worthwhile ventures in their own right and a willingness to employ them to offer suggested approaches, rather than completed solutions, to philosophical problems. Further, Grice was always ready to hunt out and consider as many possible counter-arguments and refutations of his own ideas as he could envisage, often advancing some particular idea by means of a detailed discussion of an actual or potential challenge to it. These factors together lend a 'discursive' and at times afrustratingly tentative air to Grice's work. But despite the earnestness of Grice's interest in philosophy, and the rigour with which he pursued it, his tone was often playfully irreverent. This was, to some extent, the result of a deliberate policy that philosophy could, indeed should, be fun. 'One should of course be serious about philosophy', he argued, 'but being serious does not require one to be solemn.'5 Grice was not a gifted public speaker, given to elaborate divergences in exegeses, and to stuttering and even mumbling in presentation. l Nevertheless, his presentations could be entertaining occasions; tape recordings of him speaking about philosophy, both informally and formally, are often punctuated by laughter.  Grice himself suggested that his search for the fun, even the funny in philosophy was prompted by 'the wanton disposition which nature gave me'." But it had been reinforced 'by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect'. He had no time for those whose method of conducting philosophical debate was that of 'nailing to the wall everything in sight'. In his view, philosophy was best when it was a collaborative, supportive activity. This idea was, to some extent, inherent in his philosophical background; ordinary language philosophy was frequently undertaken as a group activity. However, it is an idea that was peculiarly suited to his person-ality. Grice could be extremely convivial; he was often surrounded by people, and preferred to develop his ideas by discussion rather than by solitary composition. He was no ascetic; he ate, drank and smoked copi-ously. But conviviality is not the same as affability. His delight in philosophical discussion often spilled over into an intense desire to 'win' the argument. He could be curt in response to points of view with which he was not in sympathy. On those occasions when he sought intuitive responses to his linguistic examples, he could be dismissive of those who got it 'wrong'. Moreover, those who know him have suggested that at times his tendency towards self-doubt could manifest itself in gloomi-ness, even moroseness. 18  Grice's tendency was to become entirely absorbed with whatever he was engaged in, if it interested him intellectually. Often this was some philosophical issue of substance or of composition. His wife Kathleen recalls that he frequently stayed up late into the night, often pacing up and down as he battled with some problem.l' Sometimes other people were caught up in this absorption. During his time at Oxford, he conducted a long collaboration with Peter Strawson. In later life, Gricehimself would recount how he was once phoned up by Strawson's wife who told him to stop bothering her husband with late night phone calls.20 This obsessiveness was characteristic of all the activities to which he devoted his considerable energies. Kathleen remembers that he was always engaged on some project; if it was not philosophy then it was playing the piano, or chess, bridge or cricket. These last two were more absorbing than mere hobbies. He played both bridge and cricket competitively at county level. Cricket, in particular, was an obsession that almost rivalled philosophy; he played for a number of different clubs and 'became an inelegant but extremely effective and prolific opening batsman'.2 During his Oxford career, he spent the large part of each summer on cricket tours.  Grice's immense energy in these different directions was undoubtedly aided by the amount of time he had at his disposal, in part the consequence of not having to concern himself too much with everyday prac-ticalities; according to Kathleen, from childhood onwards he always had, or found, people to look after him. He certainly pursued his interests to the exclusion of the mundane, often neglecting food and sleep if a particular problem, or game, had his attention. In those areas where he did have practical responsibility, Grice was legendarily untidy. He took little concern over his clothes, or his personal appearance gener-ally. His desk was constantly covered by huge and apparently unsorted piles of paper. However, he would not allow anyone else to touch these, claiming that he knew exactly where everything was. After he died, these papers were deposited in the Bancroft library at the University of California, Berkeley, as the H. P. Grice Papers. This archive, which amounts to 14 large cartons, contains whatever Grice had about himself at the end of his life, mainly heaped on his desk or crammed under his bed. It consists largely of papers from after his move to Berkeley in 1967.  But it also includes those papers from his Oxford days, dating right back to the 1940s, that had seemed important enough to him to take and keep with him.  The cartons contain a mixture of finished manuscripts, draft versions, lecture notes and odd jottings. These are often crammed with writing, but never with anything extraneous to the matter in hand; it seems that Grice never doodled. They offer some clue to at least one reason for Grice's reluctance to publish. Grice seems to have been more struck than most by the essentially inconclusive nature of his own work; no project was, for him, ever really completed, or ever separate from the work that preceded and followed it. So notes and manuscripts were stored along with those from decades earlier if they were perceived to be on a relatedtheme. Papers covered in Grice's cramped hand in faint pencil, characteristic of his work from Oxford, were annotated and added to by notes in ball-point made years later in Berkeley. Ideas generally associated exclusively with his late work, such as those relating to rationality and to finality, are explored in notes dating back to the 1960s. Work often remained in manuscript form for so long that it needed to be updated as the years went by. In the original version of 'Indicative conditionals', part of the William James lectures of 1967, Grice uses the example:  'Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M.'. At a later date 'MacMillan' has been crossed out and 'Heath' written over the top in a different coloured ink. This was the example used when the lecture was eventually published. 22  Above all, the H. P. Grice papers confirm that for Grice there was no real distinction between life and work. He was not in the habit of keeping regular hours of work, or of distinguishing between philosophical and private concerns. In the same way, his current philosophical preoccupation would spill over into his everyday life. Any piece of paper that came to hand would be covered in logical notation, example sentences, trial lists of words, invented dialogues, or whatever else was preoccupying him at that moment, all written in what Grice himself described as 'a hand which few have seen and none have found legible'.2 So the cartons contain not just the orthodox pages of ruled note paper, but also a miscellany of correspondence (often unopened), financial statements, menus, paper napkins, playing card boxes, cigarette packets and even airline sick bags that came to hand as ideas occurred to him during a flight. Some of these suggest that Grice's writing style was not as spontaneous as it may sometimes appear. Certainly the manuscripts of articles and the lecture notes, always written out in full, were produced in longhand with little significant revision.  But Grice was not averse to jotting down what he once described as  'useful verbiage' in preparation for these. In conjunction with some work on the place of value in human nature drawing on, but diverging from a number of previous philosophers including John Stuart Mill, he noted down the phrase: 'so as not to be just Grice to your Mill..!.24 While working on an account of value and freedom drawing on both Aristotle and Kant, he tried out possible hybrids: 'Ariskant? Kantotle?'. 25 This book considers Grice's work within a broadly chronological framework, following the course of his philosophical life. However, because Grice did not work on discreet topics in neat succession, it is sometimes necessary to group together strands of work on related topics even where they in fact extend over years or decades. Nevertheless, thechronological arrangement makes possible an understanding of the development, as well as the remarkable unity, of Grice's thinking. It also allows some scope for considering the impact on it of the work of other philosophers, and of the various personal associations he formed throughout his life. The final chapter is concerned with the impact of Grice's ideas on linguistics. It is concerned with the development of what has become known as 'Gricean pragmatics' and therefore concentrates on responses to the theory of conversation.In a conversation recorded in 1983, Grice commented that fairly early in his career he stopped reading current philosophy.' In the light of his constant engagement with the work of his contemporaries, this characteristically mischievous claim need not be taken at face value. Indeed, his own immediate elaboration somewhat modifies it. Instead of spending his time trying to keep up with all the philosophical journals, he concentrated increasingly on the history of philosophy, choosing his reading matter by strength of ideas rather than by date of composition.  To this it might be added that he also devoted a great deal of time to face-to-face discussion with those he chose as his philosophical col-leagues. Grice's exaggerated claim therefore draws attention to two constant influences on his own philosophy: debate and collaboration with others engaged in similar fields of enquiry, coupled with what in the same conversation he calls 'respect for the old boys'.  It is tempting to identify the emergence of this tension between old and new ideas, or perhaps more accurately this dialogue between orthodox and challenging ways of thinking, throughout Grice's early life.  Born on 15 March 1913, he was the first son of a wealthy middle-class couple, Herbert and Mabel (née Felton) Grice, and grew up in Harborne, an affluent suburb of Birmingham. He was named after his father, but preferred his middle name, and was from an early age known generally as Paul. His early publications were credited to 'H. P. Grice', and are sometimes still cited as such, but in later years he published as simply  'Paul Grice'  '. Herbert Grice is described in his son's college register as  'business, retd'. In fact he had owned a manufacturing business making small metal components that prospered during the First World War.  When the business subsequently began to fail, Mabel stepped in to save the family finances by taking in pupils. She included Paul and hisbrother Derek in this miniature school, meaning that the first few years of their education were conducted at home. This reversal of roles explains Herbert's early 'retirement'. After the failure of the manufacturing business, he did not attempt another venture, preferring instead to concentrate on his skills as a concert cellist. His musical talent was inherited by both his sons; Herbert, Paul and Derek would often perform domestically as a trio.  Family life at Harborne was punctuated not just by musical recitals, and by innumerable games of chess, but also by controversy and debate, although the topic was generally theological rather than philosophical.  Herbert had been brought up in a nonconformist tradition, while Mabel was a devout Anglo-Catholic. The third adult member of the household, an unmarried aunt, had converted to Catholicism. Grice recalled fondly the many doctrinal clashes he witnessed as a result of this mix, particularly those between his aunt and his father. He suggested that his father's self-defence in these circumstances awakened, or at least rein-forced, his own tendency towards 'dissenting rationalism'; this tendency stayed with him throughout life? It would seem from this that he lent more towards his father's way of thinking, but certainly by the time he reached adulthood he had abandoned any religious faith he may initially have held. He did not retain the Christianity with which he had been surrounded as a child, but he kept the enthusiasm for debate in general, and for the habits of questioning received wisdom and challenging orthodoxy on the basis of personal reasoning in particular.  When Grice was 13 his education was put on to a more formal footing when he went as a boarder to Clifton College in Bristol. This public school, exclusively male at the time, provided excellent preparation for Oxford or Cambridge for the sons of those wealthy enough to afford it, or for those who, like Grice, passed the scholarship examination. Boys belonged to one of a number of 'houses',  ', rather in the style of Oxbridge  colleges, and received the education in classics that would equip them for entry to university. It seems that Grice excelled at this; at the end of his Clifton career, in July 1931, he won a classical scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He had not concentrated exclusively on academic matters, however. He had been 'Head of School' during his final year, and had also kept up his musical interests. He performed a piano solo in the school's 1930 Christmas concert. Joseph Cooper, Grice's contemporary at Clifton who went on to become a concert pianist and then chairman of the BBC television programme 'Face the Music', played a piece by Rachmaninoff at the same concert. 'Weenjoyed Grice's playing of Ravel's "Pavane"', runs the school's report on the concert, 'its stateliness provided an effective contrast to the exuberance of the Rachmininoff.'3  Corpus Christi had a strong academic tradition, but was not as socially fashionable as some of the larger colleges. It therefore tended to attract students from more modest backgrounds than colleges such as Christ Church or Magdalen, where social success often depended on demonstrable affluence. However, despite such distinctions between individual colleges, Oxford in general was a place of privilege. Students were nearly all male, were predominantly from public schools, and were generally preparing to take their places as members of the establish-ment. Fashionable political opinions were left wing, and students of Grice's generation tended to see themselves as rebelling against nineteenth-century notions of responsibility and propriety. Such rebel-liousness, however, was of a very passive nature; it lacked the zeal and the active protest that was to characterise student rebellion in the 1960s.  It did little to affect the day to day life in Oxford, where the university was legally in loco parentis, and where all undergraduates lived and dined in college. Some 50 years later, Grice recalled the atmosphere of the time with amused but affectionate detachment:  We are in reaction against our Victorian forebears; we are independent and we are tolerant of the independence of others, unless they go too far. We don't like discipline, rules (except for rules of games and rules designed to secure peace and quiet in Colleges), self-conscious authority, and lectures or reproaches about conduct....  We don't care much to talk about 'values' (pompous) or 'duties' (stuffy, unless one means the duties of servants or the military, or money extorted by the customs people). Our watchwords (if we could be moved to utter them) would be 'Live and let live, though not necessarily with me around' or 'If you don't like how I carry on, you don't have to spend time with me.  Grice was at Corpus Christi for four years. Classics was an unusual subject in this respect; most Oxford degree programmes were a year shorter. At that time, philosophy was taught only as part of the Classics curriculum, and it was in this guise that Grice received his first formal training in the subject. The style was conservative, based largely on close reading of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. This seems to have suited Grice's meticulous and analytical style of thought well, as the tutorial teaching method suited his dissenting and combativenature. Although there were lectures, open to all members of the uni-versity, teaching was based principally at tutorial, therefore college, level. Students would meet individually with their tutors to read, and then defend, an essay. In reflecting on his early philosophical educa-tion, Grice always emphasised what he saw as his own good fortune in being allocated as tutee to W. F. R. (Frank) Hardie. A rigorous classical scholar and an exacting tutor, Hardie might not have been everyone's first choice, but Grice credited him with revealing the difficulty, but also the rewards of philosophical study. Grice also, it seems, relished the formalism that Hardie imposed on his already established appreciation of rational debate. Under Hardie's guidance, this appreciation developed into a belief that philosophical questions are best settled by reason, or argument:  I learnt also form him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).  Grice even recounts with approval, but reluctant disbelief, the story that a long silence in another student's tutorial was eventually broken by Hardie asking 'And what did you mean by "of"?' No doubt the contemporary detractors of ordinary language philosophy would have seen Grice's enthusiasm for this anecdote of the 1930s as a sign that he was perfectly suited to the style of philosophy that would flourish at Oxford in the following two decades. This was crucially concerned with minute attention to meaning and to the language in which philosophical issues were traditionally discussed.  Grice's admiration for Hardie was later to develop into friendship; they were both members of a group from Oxford that went on walking holidays in the summers leading up to the Second World War, and Hardie taught Grice to play golf. The friendship was based in part on a number of characteristics the two had in common. There was their shared rationalism; Grice found welcome echoes of his own approach in Hardie's 'reluctance to accept anything not properly documented'?  Moreover, Hardie never admitted defeat. Discussions with him, Grice later observed, never actually ended; they would simply come to a stop.  In response, Grice learnt to adopt a similar stance in philosophical argument, clinging tendentiously to whatever position he had set out to defend. Once, when Grice was taught by a different philosophy tutor for one term, the new tutor reported back to Hardie that his studentwas 'obstinate to the point of perversity'. To Grice's enduring delight, Hardie received this report with thorough approval.  However some may have judged his style of argument, Grice's undergraduate career was an indisputable success. Students took 'Modera-tions' exams five terms into their degree, before proceeding to what was popularly known as 'Greats',  , the stage in the degree at which philoso-  phy was introduced. Grice achieved First Class in his Moderations in  1933. In the summer of 1935 he took his finals, and was awarded First Class Honours in Literae Humaniores, as 'Greats' was officially called. His studies did not take up all of his time during these years, however, and he mixed academic success with extracurricular activities, particularly sporting ones. He played cricket, and in the summer of 1934 captained the college team. In the winter he followed up this success by becoming captain of the college football team. During this same period, he was president of the Pelican Philosophical Society and editor of the Pelican Record. Both took their name from the bird forming part of the Corpus Christi crest that had become the informal symbol of the college.  After Grice completed his undergraduate studies, there was a brief hiatus in his academic career. There were at that time few openings at Oxford for those graduates who had not yet gained a University Lectureship or been elected to a College Fellowship. For the academic year 1935-6 Grice left Oxford, but not the elite education system of which he had been part for the past decade, when he went as Assistant Master to Rossall in Lancashire. At a time when there were very few Universities in the country, an Honours degree, especially from Oxford or Cambridge, was regarded as more than adequate a qualification to teach at a public school such as Rossall. It was not at all uncommon for Assistant Masters to stay in post for just a year or two before moving on to a more permanent position or embarking on a career in some other field. Indeed, of the 11 other Assistant Masters appointed between 1933 and 1937 by the same headmaster as Grice, only four stayed for more than a year; none of the other seven went on to careers as school masters.® In Grice's case, his appointment at Rossall filled the time between his undergraduate studies and his return to Oxford in 1936. It was also in 1936, unusually a year after the completion of his studies, that Grice was willing, or perhaps able, to pay the fee necessary for con-ferment of his BA degree.  He was enabled to return to Oxford by two scholarships, both of which would have required him to sit examinations. First was an Oxford University Senior Scholarship, an award for postgraduate study at anycollege and in any subject. In the same year, Grice was awarded a Harmsworth Senior Scholarship, a 'closed' scholarship to Merton college. The Harmsworth Scholarships, funded by an endowment from former college member Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, were a relatively new venture, aimed specifically at raising the profile of postgraduate achievement at the college. A history of Merton notes that the scheme  'brought to the college a succession of intelligent graduates from all col-leges. In that way a window was opened on to the world of graduate research at a time when there were few opportunities at that level in the university as a whole." The scholarships had been available only since 1931, and only three were awarded each year, across the range of academic subjects. Grice's contemporaries were Richard Alexander Hamilton, also from Clifton College, in sciences, and Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn in modern languages. Grice was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton between 1936 and 1938, but no award or higher degree resulted from his time there. He was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1939 but this was a formality, available seven years after initial matriculation to students who had received a BA, upon payment of a fee. Nevertheless, the time spent at Merton was an important period in Grice's philosophical development not least because it was during this time that he became aware of subjects and methodologies then current in philosophy, and indeed taking shape in Oxford itself. He added knowledge of contemporary and dissenting philosophy to his existing familiarity with established orthodoxy.  Grice's experiences of undergraduate study had been typical of the time. The philosophy taught and conducted at Oxford between the wars was extremely conventional, that is to say speculative and metaphysical in nature, with an almost institutionalised distrust of new ideas. The business of philosophy was centred on the exegesis of the philosophi-cal, and particularly the classical 'greats'. Indeed, until just before the Second World War, no living philosopher was represented on the Oxford philosophy syllabus. The picture was different at Cambridge.  From early in the century, Russell had been developing his analytic approach to issues of knowledge and the language in which it is expressed, arguing that suitable rigorous analysis can reveal the 'true' logical form beneath the 'apparent' grammatical surface of sentences.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus, first published in English in 1922, had taken these ideas further, arguing that such analysis could reveal many of the traditional concerns of philosophy to be merely 'pseudo-problems' However, such was the insularity of academic institutions at the time that Oxford had not officially, and barely in practice, been aware ofthese developments in Cambridge, let alone of those in other parts of Europe.  This isolation was fairly abruptly ended, at least for some of the younger philosophers at Oxford, during the period when Grice was at Merton. This change was due in a large part to A. J. Ayer, and to the publication of his controversial first book Language Truth and Logic in  1936. Ayer had himself been an undergraduate at Oxford between 1929 and 1932 but, unusually, had read many of Russell's works, as well as the Tractatus. He had been encouraged in this by his tutor, Gilbert Ryle, a socially conservative but intellectually progressive don, who had even taken Ayer on a trip to Cambridge where he had met Wittgenstein personally. Ayer was impressed by the methods of analytic philosophy in general, and in particular by Wittgenstein's ambitious claims that it could 'solve' age-old philosophical problems for good by analysing the language in which they were traditionally expressed. He was even more profoundly affected by the ideas with which he came into contact during a visit to Austria after finishing his studies. There he became acquainted with a number of members of the Vienna Circle, and attended several of their meetings. Then as now, this group of scientists and philosophers were referred to collectively as 'the logical positivists' They represented a number of separate interests and specialisms, but shared at least one common goal: the desire to refine and perfect language so as to make it an appropriately precise tool for scientific and logical discussion. They distinguished between meaningful statements, amenable to scientific study and discussion, and other statements, strictly meaningless but unfortunately occurring as sentences of imperfect everyday language. Their chief tool in this procedure was the principle of verification.  The logical positivists divided the category of meaningful statements into two basic types. First, there are those expressed by analytic, or necessarily true, sentences. 'All spaniels are dogs' is true because the meaning of the predicate is contained within the meaning of the subject, or because 'dog' is part of the definition of 'spaniel'. They added the statements of mathematics and of logic to the category of analytic sentences, on the grounds that a sentence such as 'two plus two equals four' is in effect a tautology because of the rules of mathematics. The second category of meaningful statements is those expressed by synthetic sentences, or sentences that might be either true or false, that are capable of being subjected to an identifiable process of verification. That is, there are empirically observable phenomena sufficient to determine the question of truth. All other statements, those neither expressed byanalytic sentences nor verifiable by empirical evidence, are meaning-less. This includes statements concerning moral evaluation, aesthetic judgement and religious belief. For the logical positivists, such statements were not false; they merely had no part in scientific discourse.  The doctrine of the Vienna Circle was radically empiricist and strictly anti-metaphysical.  When Ayer returned to Oxford in 1933 as a young lecturer, he set himself the task of introducing the ideas of logical positivism to an English-speaking audience. Language, Truth and Logic draws heavily on the ideas of the Vienna Circle, but also includes elements of the British analytic philosophy Ayer had found persuasive as an undergraduate. In the opening chapter, provocatively entitled 'The Elimination of Meta-physics', he outlines the views of logical positivism on meaning. He also offers his own formulation of the principle of verification:  We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. 10  In subsequent chapters, Ayer applies this criterion uncompromisingly to the analysis of statements such as those of ethics and theology, those of our perceptions of the material world, and those relating to our knowledge of other minds and of past events.  Language, Truth and Logic, which was widely read and discussed both within Oxford and beyond, tended to polarise opinions. Not surpris-ingly, many of the older, established Oxford philosophers reacted strongly against it and the explicit challenge it posed to philosophical authority. It dismissed many of the traditional concerns of philosophy on the grounds that they were based on the discussion of meaningless metaphysical statements; it proposed to solve many apparent philosophical problems simply by analysis of the language in which they were expressed and, of course, it rejected all religious tenets. However, to many of the younger philosophers it offered a welcome and exhilarating change for precisely these same reasons. Ayer became a central figure in a group of young philosophers who met to discuss various philosophical topics. The meetings took place in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College during term times for about two years from early 1937. Here Ayer first began to talk, and to disagree, with another young philosopher, J. L. Austin.In the decade immediately following the Second World War, Austin was to be instrumental in the development of ordinary language phi-losophy, which dominated Oxford, and was deeply influential on Grice personally. In the late 1930s, however, his philosophical position was yet to be fully articulated. Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, has suggested that Austin was initially very impressed by Ayer, who was the only member of the group to have published, but that 'during the course of the All Souls Meetings... Austin staked out, if not a set of doctrines, then an approach which was very much his own'." This approach brought him increasingly into conflict with Ayer. Initially their disagreements were amicable enough, but in later years their differences of opinion were to lead to an increasing and unresolved hostility.  Grice perhaps identifies what it was that Austin found increasingly unsatisfactory about Ayer's logical positivism when he observes in an unpublished retrospective that: 'between the wars, in the heyday of Philosophical Analysis, when these words were on every cultured and progressive lip, what was thought of as being subjected to analysis were not linguistic but non-linguistic entities: facts or (in a certain sense) propositions, not words or sentences'.12 Analytic philosophy, whether in terms of Russell's 'logical form', or of the verificationists' 'meaning-fulness'  ', was concerned with explaining problematic expressions by translating statements in which such expressions occur into more ele-mentary, logically equivalent statements in which they do not occur. It considered language as an important tool for the clarification of concepts and states of affairs, not as an appropriate target of analysis in its own right. Indeed language, as used in ordinary discourse, offered potential dangers that the philosopher needed to avoid; it could mislead the unwary into inappropriate metaphysical commitments.  The major advocates of philosophical analysis between the wars, Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, all shared the conviction that everyday language was 'imperfect' and needed to be purified and improved before it could be ready for philosophical use. This disdain for ordinary language is at least in part the source of Austin's growing discontent with analytic philosophy in general, and with its spokesman Ayer in particular. Austin became increasingly convinced that ordinary language was a legitimate focus of philosophical enquiry. Not only was it 'good enough' as a tool for philosophy, it was also possible that the way in which people generally talk about certain areas of experience might offer some important insights into philosophically problematic concepts. For instance, there is the problem of our knowledge of other minds. For Ayer, statements about the mental states of others weremeaningless and unacceptable as they stood. A statement such as 'he is angry' was not amenable to any process of verification, and committed its speaker to the existence of unempirical concepts such as minds and emotions. To avoid the unpleasant prospect of having to dismiss all such statements as simply meaningless, Ayer insisted in Language, Truth and Logic that they must be translatable into verifiable statements.  Statements about others' mental states are most appropriately translated into statements about their physical states: about their appearance and behaviour. Such statements, which concern phenomena that can be directly perceived, are amenable to verification. Assumptions about mental states are merely inferences from these. Austin's defence of statements about other minds would run as follows. People use statements such as 'he is angry' all the time, with no confusion or misun-derstanding. Therefore, it seems appropriate to take such statements seriously: to analyse them as they stand rather than to treat them as being in some way 'really' about perceptions and inferences. Further-more, the fact that people ordinarily talk in this way might be seen as good grounds for accepting emotions and mental states as valid concepts.  Grice had a lot in common with the group meeting in All Souls. He was much the same age; of the main members of the group, Austin was two years older than him, Ayer three and Berlin five, while Stuart Hampshire was a year younger. Moreover, like both Ayer and Austin he had studied Classics at Oxford, and been introduced to the study of philosophy in 'Greats'. But college life was so insular that he was not aware of this group or party to its discussions. Merton was in many ways a similar college to Corpus Christi: small and relatively low in the social hierarchy of colleges. Indeed, it had a growing reputation for offering places to students without traditional Oxford credentials: to those from the Midlands and the North of England, and to grammar school pupils.  In contrast, Christ Church and Magdalen, where Ayer and Austin were respectively, were both large and prestigious colleges. All Souls was exclusively a college of Fellows, offering no places to undergraduate or postgraduate students. Grice was later to account for his own absence from the meetings by explaining that he was 'brought up on the wrong side of the tracks'. 13 He did read Language Truth and Logic, and like many of his contemporaries was extremely interested in the methodology it suggested for tackling philosophical problems. However, he recalled in later life that from the beginning he had certain reservations about Ayer's claims that were never laid to rest; 'the crudities and dogmatism seemed too pervasive'. 14Grice may have been unimpressed by some of Ayer's more sweeping claims, but they opened up to him analytic possibilities that affected his own style of philosophy. An early typescript paper on negation has survived. This was a topic to which Grice returned in a series of lectures in the early 1960s, but on which he never published. The paper is not dated, but the use of his parents' address in Harborne suggests that it was written before he obtained a permanent position at Oxford, therefore presumably before the Second World War. He tackles the epistemological problem posed by negative statements such as 'this is not red' or 'I am not hearing a noise'.  '. Such statements raise the question of how  it is that we become acquainted with a negative fact. Grice argues that knowledge of negative facts is best seen as inferential. We are confident in our knowledge of a negative because we have evidence of some related positive fact. So our knowledge that a certain object is not red might be derived by inference from knowledge that it is green, together with an understanding that being green is incompatible with being red.  The second example sentence is more problematic. It expresses a 'priv-ative fact', an absence. If the inferential account of negative knowledge is to be maintained, it must be possible to suggest a type of fact incompatible with the positive counterpart of the negative, that is with the sentence 'I am hearing a noise', for which the speaker can have adequate evidence. Grice's suggestion is that the incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the speaker entertains the positive proposition in question, without having an attitude of certainly to that proposition. If you think of a particular proposition, and are aware that you do not know it to be true, then you may be said to be inferring knowledge of a negative. If you entertain the proposition that you are hearing a noise, but do not know this proposition to be true, then you are in a position to assert 'I do not hear a noise'. More generally, to state 'I do not know that A is B' is in effect to state 'Every present mental process of mine has some characteristic incompatible with knowledge that A is B'. 15  Although Grice does not acknowledge any such influences, his paper can be placed very much within the analytic tradition, and its main proposal draws on verificationist assumptions. The problem it tackles is the issue of how we are 'really' to understand negative statements: how we are to translate them so that they do not contain the problematic term  'not'. Grice's proposed analysis can be subjected to a process of verifi-cation, on the understanding that perception though the senses (it is green') and introspection (every present mental process of mine...) are empirical phenomena.On completion of his Harmsworth studentship in 1938, Grice was appointed to a lectureship in philosophy at the third college of his Oxford career, St John's. In the complex social hierarchy of Oxford col-leges, this was definitely a step up; St John's was larger, more affluent and more prestigious than either Merton or Corpus Christi. More impor-tantly, it was a sign that Grice's career was progressing well. Although it carried a relatively high teaching load, and brought with it no benefits of college membership, a lectureship was a good position from which to impress the existing Fellows of the college, who had control over the appointment of new members. In fact, Grice was elected to the position of full Fellow, tutor and lecturer in philosophy after just one year. He was to hold this post for almost 30 years, but initially he stayed at St John's for only one because his career, like that of many of his con-temporaries, was interrupted by war service. Grice was commissioned Lieutenant in the Navy in 1940. Initially, he was on active service in the North Atlantic. Then in March 1942 he joined Navy Intelligence at the Admiralty, where he stayed until the war ended.  The war years saw the publication of Grice's first article, 'Personal Identity', in Mind. Neither the topic nor the journal were particularly surprising choices for a young Oxford philosopher at that time. Mind, edited by G. E. Moore, was one of the leading, indeed one of the few, journals of contemporary philosophy, and had reflected the interest in logical positivism of the 1930s. After the war, under the editorship of Gilbert Ryle, it would become the acknowledged organ for much of the work from the new school of Oxford philosophy.l The topic of personal identity was one of long-standing philosophical interest, and had received renewed attention during the 1930s; indeed, it was one of the topics discussed in the meetings at All Soul's. It is ultimately concerned with a question that was to underlie Grice's work throughout his life: the question of what it is to be a human being. Discussing personal identity means considering the relative importance of, and relationship between, physical and mental properties. Describing identity exclusively in terms of physical bodies presents problems, but so does describing it entirely in terms of mental entities. The former position would suggest that a single body must always be the location of a single iden-tity, or person, regardless of personality change, memory loss or mental illness. Moreover, it would seem to entail that, since the composition of a physical body does not stay the same throughout a lifetime, someone must be regarded as having separate identities, or being different people as, say, a baby, an adult, and an old man. An account of personal identity based exclusively on mental sameness, however,would force us to accept that one mental state transferred into another body, perhaps by surgery or reincarnation, should result in no change of identity. Philosophers wrestled with hypothetical 'problem cases'. If it were possible to take the brains out of two bodies and swap them over, would this be best described as a brain transplant or a body trans-plant? Ayer, Austin and their companions had concerned themselves with the status of Gregor Samsa from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis': 'was he an insect with the mind of a man, or a man with the body of an insect?'. 17  In attempting to negotiate between these two opposing, equally prob-lematic, accounts, Grice looks to 'memory theories' of personal iden-tity. In this, he draws on work produced almost 250 years previously by John Locke, while acknowledging some of Locke's critics and attempting to suggest a way of addressing them. In other words, Grice's first published work shows the characteristic combination of old and new ways of thinking. He draws on work from philosophical 'old boys', such as Locke and his eighteenth-century critic Thomas Reid. At the same time, he looks for solutions to their problems in a much newer style of philosophy, one in general terms analytic, and in more particular terms concerned with the close analysis of individual linguistic examples.  Locke argues that, unlike in the case of inanimate masses, the identity of living creatures must depend on more than bodily unity. As evidence he suggests the examples of an oak growing from a seedling into a great tree and then cut back, or a colt growing into a horse, being sometimes fat and sometimes thin; throughout these changes they remain the same oak, and the same horse. In search of an appropriate substitute for bodily sameness, he discusses what might be seen as a hierarchy of living beings, and considers where a notion of identity can be located in each case. In general, at each stage of the hierarchy, what is required is an account of function. The parts of a tree form a single entity not because they remain physically constant, but because they are arranged in such a way as to fulfil certain functions: the processes of nutrition and growth that together ensure the continued existence of the tree. In much the same way, the identity of an animal can be described in terms of the fulfilment of the functions that ensure its sur-vival. Even 'man' is no different in this respect; human identity consists in the collection of parts functioning together over the course of a lifetime, to ensure the growth, maturation and survival of the individual human being. Various different particles of matter form a single human at different points in time precisely because they all participate in a single, continued, life.Locke points out that this account of a man or human being, although it does not rely on simple bodily identity, does make necessary reference to the physical body. The parts of the body may change over time, but, united by common functions, they together form part of the definition of 'a man'  '. If we relied only on mental identity, or 'the  identity of soul', we would not be able to resist the idea that physically and temporally separate bodies might all belong to the same man. Locke suggests that an account based just on the soul could not rule out the unacceptable claim that the ill-assorted list: 'Seth, Ismael, Socrates, Pilate, St Austin, and Caesar Borgia, ... may have been the same man.'18 Furthermore, the form of a man is a necessary part of our understanding of the concept of a man, and of the meaning of the word 'man'.  Even if we were to hear a creature that looked like a parrot hold intelligent conversation and discuss philosophy, functions normally associated exclusively with people, we would hardly be tempted to say that it must be a man, but rather we would say that it was 'a very intelligent rational parrot'. 19  Locke's next move is to suggest a categorial distinction between 'man' and 'person'.  , a distinction he admits is at odds with normal under-  standing and speech. He offers a very specific definition of a person as  'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places' 20 The point of this distinction is to explain the 'extra' properties persons are generally seen as possessing, beyond those of animals.  It might be said variously to account for consciousness, self-awareness or the soul. The identity of a person, then, consists not just in the unity of functioning parts, the criterion that accounts alike for the identity of a plant, or an animal, or a 'man'. The identity of a person depends on the continuation of the 'reason and reflection' across a range of different times and places. In Locke's words, 'as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person'? Locke offers his own solution to what has come to be known as the 'brain transplant' problem, which he explains in terms of the transfer of souls. In Locke's fanciful illustration, the soul of a prince is transferred into the body of a cobbler, the cobbler's soul having been removed. We would say that what was left was the same person as the prince, since he would have the thoughts of the princeand the consciousness of the prince's past life. However, we would at this point be forced to acknowledge the distinction Locke is drawing between 'man' and 'person', by saying that this was the same man as the cobbler, as demonstrated by the continuity of bodily functioning.There is one fairly obvious problem with an account of identity dependent on the extension back in time of a single consciousness.  Locke in effect dismisses this problem by arguing that it is an error arising from a particular way in which language is generally used. The problem is concerned with memory loss. If he were completely and irrevocably to lose his memory, Locke suggests, we would still want to say that he was the same person as the one who performed the actions he has now forgotten. Yet on Locke's own account, if his consciousness could no longer be extended back to these past actions, he could not be the same person as the one who performed them. Locke suggests that our reluctance to accept this conclusion, our inclination to insist that he is still the same person, can be traced to a lack of reflection about the use of the pronoun 'I'. In this case, the amnesiac Locke would in fact be using 'I' to refer not to the person, but to the man. Locke does not himself offer any examples, but the following illustrates his point.  If, having lost his memory and then been instructed about his own past life, he were to state 'I was exiled by James Il', he would be using the pronoun to refer only to the same man, or living creature, as he is now, not to the same person. Our tendency to maintain that 'I' must in these examples stand for the same person is because of our failure to distinguish properly between 'man' and 'person': our habit of conflating the two. Once this conflation is recognised for what it is, the problem can be resolved; it may be possible for a single man to be more than one person during his life. Indeed, although our use of the pronoun sometimes seems to miss this, elsewhere in the language it is apparently acknowledged:  when we say such a one is not himself, or is beside himself; in which phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least first used them, thought that self was changed; the selfsame person was no longer in that man.22  Grice's account of personal identity relies on Locke's theory, but draws more directly on two later philosophers. Thomas Reid, writing about a hundred years after Locke, produces a 'problem example'. Ian Gallie, just a few years before Grice, offers a more developed discussion of the use of the first person pronoun. Reid points out that the notion of consciousness extending back in time can only make sense if it is understood as memory; Locke's account can only be coherently understood as a memory theory of identity. Further, he cautions that although the expressions 'consciousness' and 'memory' are sometimes used inter-changeably in normal speech, it is important for philosophers not to confuse the two. 'The faculties of consciousness and memory are chiefly distinguished by this, that the first is an immediate knowledge of the present, the second an immediate knowledge of the past. 23 But if personal identity is dependent on knowledge of the past or on memory, the following case, which has become known as the 'brave officer' example, presents severe difficulties. A boy is whipped for stealing apples. When the boy grows up, he joins the army and, as a young officer, captures an enemy standard. In later life, the officer is made a general. It is perfectly possible that, when rescuing the standard, the officer was able to remember, even did actively remember, that he was whipped as a child. It is also possible that the elderly general can remember clearly the time when he captured the standard but, with memory fading, has forgotten all about being whipped as a boy. The memory is lost irrevocably; even if prompted about the incident, he cannot remember it. According to Locke's account, we would have to say that the young boy was the same person as the brave officer, and the brave officer was the same person as the old general, but that the old general was not the same person as the young boy. Not only does this offend against our intuitive notions of identity, it also runs counter to basic logic. If A is identical to B, and B is identical to C, then it follows that C must be identical to A.  In 'Personal identity', Grice acknowledges his considerable debt to Gallie's article 'Is the self a substance?', which was published in 1936, also in Mind. It is a revealing choice of inspiration, perhaps reflecting Grice's growing interest in the style of philosophy being practised by some of his Oxford contemporaries: the analysis of specific linguistic examples as a means of approaching more general philosophical prob-lems. Gallie does not directly discuss the memory theory of identity. He assesses the case for the existence of a 'self', a metaphysical entity or substance, remaining constant across a series of temporally different mental experiences. As an enduring ego it forms a mental unit of iden-tity, in addition to any purely physical phenomenon. From the outset, he proposes an account of 'self' in terms of 'a certain class of sentences in which the word "I" (or the word "me") occurs' 2 Such sentences can, he suggests, be grouped into two or perhaps three sets. The first of these is the set of sentences in which 'my mind' could be substituted for 'T'.  Gallie admits that in some cases the result may be 'unusual English', but maintains that it is enough that they would not be false. Examples include 'I feel depressed' and 'I see it is raining'. The second set of sentences is defined negatively; such substitution is impossible in examplessuch as 'I am under 6 feet in height' and 'I had dinner at 8 o'clock to-night'. Gallie acknowledges but dismisses from discussion a third but purely philosophical use of 'T'; expressions such as 'I hear a noise now' and 'I see a white expanse now' are concerned with facts of which the speaker has introspective knowledge, rather than with any claims about properties of longer duration. Gallie's starting point is the contention that examples from his first set offer evidence that the self must exist.  If we use T' in these cases, and use it legitimately, there must be something to which we are referring; there must be a mental property that endures across a range of temporarily distinct experiences.  Grice's article also starts with a discussion of 'I' sentences, but his analysis of them is rather more subtle than Gallie's, and his claims about their significance more ambitious. He divides Gallie's two basic categories into three, although he implicitly dismisses the idea that Gallie's  'philosophical' uses constitute a separate class. His starting point is not with minds but with bodies; the easiest sentences to define are those into which the phrase 'my body' can be substituted, sentences such as  'I was hit by a golf ball' and 'I fell down the cellar steps'.  . A second class,  one not distinguished by Gallie, seems to require something extra as well as a physical body to be involved. This includes sentences such as  'I played cricket yesterday' and 'I shall be fighting soon', in which substituting 'my body' for 'I' does not provide an exact or full paraphrase.  These sentences in turn are to be distinguished from a further class in which substitution of 'my body' is even less satisfactory, sentences such as 'I am hearing a noise' and 'I am thinking about the immortality of the soul'. Grice is not explicit about what would count as a suitable substitute for 'I' in these sentences. By implication, the 'I' of bodily identity is easier to paraphrase than the 'T' of mental identity, and Grice is not prepared as Gallie was to offer a paraphrase into 'unusual English' But he does suggest tentatively that, in the cricket and fighting sen-tences, reference to the physical body would need to be supplemented with 'something about the sort of thoughts and intentions and decisions I had.'25  Grice's ambitious claim is that the dispute about personal identity is really a disagreement about the status of certain 'I' sentences. Examples not concerned with bodily identity, sentences of the 'I am hearing a noise' category, are central to the type of identity philosophers have generally discussed. Philosophers over the centuries who have addressed the nature of personal identity have been concerned with the correct analysis of this type of 'I' sentence, whether they knew it or not. More-over, Grice argues, they have also been concerned with the correctanalysis of a class of sentences closely related to these but containing the word 'someone' instead of the word 'I'. An adequate account of personal identity must be able to offer an analysis both of 'I am hearing a noise' and of 'someone is hearing a noise'.  Grice's theory of personal identity is based on Locke's account, but attempts a modification to answer its critics. His analysis of the relevant  'I' and 'someone' sentences is in terms of a particular relationship between experiences divided by time and place. A series of such experiences can be said to belong to the same person. The relationship in question cannot be a simple one of memory, or possible memory, because this raises the 'brave officer' problem; a person having a particular experience may be quite incapable of remembering an earlier experience, but yet be the same person as the person who had that expe-rience. As a maneuver to avoid this problem, Grice introduces the phrase 'total temporary state' (t.t.s.), as a term of art to describe all the experiences to which an individual is subject at any one moment. These t.t.s.'s can occur in series, and describing a person means describing what it is that makes any particular series the t.t.s.'s of one and the same person. Grice's suggestion is that every t.t.s. in a 'person' series contains or could contain an element of memory relating it to some other t.t.s. earlier in the same series. In this way, the 'brave officer' problem is avoided. The t.t.s of the general contains a memory trace of the experience of the brave officer, and the t.t.s. of the brave officer contains a memory trace of the experience of the boy. The three t.t.s.'s are linked into a series and it does not matter that there is no direct link between that of the general and that of the boy.  Grice analyses 'someone hears a noise'  ', the example type he identi-  fied as central to personal identity, in terms of his notion of t.t.s.:  a (past) hearing of a noise is an element in a t.t.s. which is a member of a series of t.t.s.'s such that every member of the series either would, given certain conditions, contain as an element a memory of some experience which is an element in some previous member, or contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member; there being no subset of members which is independent from all the rest.26  Each t.t.s. contains at least one memory link, or potential memory link, either forward or backward in an appropriate series. Sentences containing the problematic 'I' and 'someone'  ', the 'I' and 'someone' that cannotbe paraphrased in terms of bodies, can be re-expressed in terms that remove the problem word and replace it with a suitably defined series of t.t.s.'s. Personal identity is shown to be a construction out of a series of experiences.  Grice considers various possible objections that might be raised to his analysis, including the objection that it is just too complicated as an account of a set of apparently simple sentences. He is himself unsure that this is a particularly damning objection, but argues that his analysis of 'self'-sentences is in any case:  probably far less complicated than would be the phenomenalist's analysis of any material object-sentence, if indeed a phenomenalist were ever to offer an analysis of such a sentence, and not merely tell us what sort of an analysis it would be if he did give it.?7  This is an interesting dig. Phenomenalism was most closely associated at this time with the logical positivists, and therefore at Oxford with Ayer. It was a form of scepticism, holding that we do not have direct evidence of material objects; we have evidence only of various 'sense data'  ', and infer the existence of material objects from these. In other words, phenomenalists claimed that statements about material objects need to be translatable into empirically verifiable statements about sense data. Grice's objection is that the appropriate translations were never actually offered, merely discussed; his complicated analysis of  'someone is hearing a noise', on the other hand, offered something def-inite. This is closely related to the type of objection Austin was raising to Ayer's method; his theories introduced technical terms such as 'sense data', but did not explain them in ordinary language.  In the light of Grice's sideswipe at sense data theories, it is perhaps surprising that John Perry, in his commentary, should find phenome-nalist tendencies in Grice's account of personal identity. His reason lies in the analytic approach Grice shares with phenomenalism. Both were concerned with analysing sentences that contain a problem expression (for the phenomenalists words referring to material objects, for Grice the relevant uses of 'I' and 'someone') in such a way that these expressions are removed and empirically observable phenomena are substi-tuted. Sense data and total temporary states are both available to introspection. For phenomenalists, material objects are logical constructions based on the evidence of sense data; they need to be recog-nised as such and the 'true' form of the sentences expressing them needs to be understood. For Grice, persons are logical constructions fromexperiences. Perry does, however, acknowledge an important difference between Grice's enterprise and that of other analytic philosophers, of whom he takes Russell to be a prime example:  In Russell's view, the logical construction was the philosopher's contribution to an improved conception of, say, a material object, free of the epistemological problems inherent in the ordinary conception.  So analysis, for Russell, does not preserve exact meaning. But Grice intends to be making explicit, through analysis, the concept we already have.28  In other words, Grice sees ordinary ways of talking as adequate and valu-able, if in need of clarification. For analytic philosophers such as Russell, ordinary language is simply not good enough; it needs to be purged of inappropriate existential commitments and vague terms before it can be a fit tool for philosophy or science.  Grice's account of personal identity has been generally well received in its field. Despite his reservations, Perry describes it as 'the most subtle and successful' attempt to rescue Locke's memory theory? Similarly, Timothy Williamson cites Grice's paper as the first in a succession of responses to the 'brave officer' problem in terms of a transitive relation between a set of spatio-temporal locations.3º In many ways it seems far removed from the work for which Grice is now best known. And indeed when he returned to philosophy after the war he was concerned with rather different topics. But this early article shows some of the traits that were to become characteristic of his work across a range of subjects, in particular a close attention to the nuances of language use. One theme in particular, the notion of what it is to be a person, and Locke's idea of an ontological distinction between 'man' and 'person' was to prove central to much of Grice's later philosophy.  The publication of 'Personal identity' meant that Grice's professional life was not entirely put on hold during the war years, and neither was his personal life. In 1943 he married Kathleen Watson. Kathleen was from London, but they had met through an Oxford connection. Her brother J. S. Watson had held a Harmsworth senior scholarship shortly after Grice and the two had become friends. James married during the war and, when his best man was killed on active service shortly before the ceremony, called on Paul at short notice to perform the duty. Paul and Kathleen met at the wedding. At the time of his own wedding, Paul still had two years of war service ahead of him, but it meant that when he returned permanently to Oxford he would not be living in St John's,as he had done briefly as a bachelor. There were no rooms for married Fellows in college; indeed, women were not permitted on the premises, even at formal dinners. Paul and Kathleen settled in a flat on the Woodstock Road rented from his college. His Fellowship at St John's was, of course, still open to him, as was the prospect of a closer involvement with the new style of philosophy taking shape in Oxford.The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford philosophy during the decade or so from 1945 was very different from that which Grice had known before the Second World War. As students and dons alike returned from war service, the process of change that had begun with a few young philosophers during the 1930s picked up momentum. Old orthodoxies and methods were overthrown as a host of new thinkers and new ideas took their place. The style of study was questioning, exploratory and cooperative. Many of the philosophers who were active in this period, such as Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson, have since testified to the spirit of optimism, enthusiasm and sheer excitement that predom-inated.' The reasons for these emotions were similar to those that had drawn A. J. Ayer to the work of the Vienna Circle just over a decade earlier. A new style of philosophy was going to 'solve' many of the old problems. Once again, this was to be achieved by close attention to and analysis of language. For logical positivists this involved 'translating' problematic statements of everyday language into logically rigorous, empirically verifiable sentences. For the new Oxford philosophers, however, no such translations would be necessary. A suitably rigorous attention to the facts of language was going to be a sufficient, indeed the only suitable, philosophical tool.  In retrospect, Grice suggested the following causes of the differences after the war:  the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene.?Gilbert Ryle, the tutor who had introduced Ayer to Wittgenstein and encouraged him to travel to Vienna, was a decade or more older than Grice and his contemporaries, having been born in 1900. However, his influence on Oxford philosophy during the 1940s and 1950s was con-siderable. His philosophy of mind, in particular, was widely known through his teaching, and was eventually published as The Concept of Mind in 1949. In this book, Ryle argues against the received idea of the mind as a mental entity separate from, but in some way inhabiting, the physical body: Descartes's 'ghost in the machine'. All that can legitimately be discussed are dispositions to act in a certain way in certain situations. The error of dualism can be attributed to the tendency to analyse minds as 'things' just as bodies are things. Taken together with a strict distinction between mental and physical, this gives rise to the error of defining minds as 'non-physical things'. This error stems from a basic category mistake involving the type of vocabulary used in discussions of minds. Differences between the physical and the mental have been 'represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of "thing", "stuff", "attribute", "state", "process"  "change"  ', "cause" and "effect"' 3 Only close attention to language  reveals this tendency among philosophers to extend erroneously terms applicable to physical phenomena, and thus to enter into unproductive metaphysical commitments. Ryle was keen to see this philosophical approach adopted more widely, and after he took over as editor of Mind in 1947, began what Jonathan Rée has described as a 'systematic cam-paign' to take control of English philosophy. He drew together some of the more promising young Oxford philosophers and 'by galvanising them into writing, especially about each other, in the pages of Mind, he gave English academic philosophy in the fifties an energy and sense of purpose such as it has never seen before or since."  The style of philosophy Ryle was deliberately promoting found resonances in the work of J. L. Austin, who was continuing to develop the notions about ordinary language with which he had confronted Ayer before the war. Ayer himself had returned to Oxford only briefly, before taking up a chair at University College London in 1946. The ideas of logical positivism were, in any case, losing their earlier glamour and appeal for younger philosophers, and Austin became the natural leader of the next wave of Oxford philosophy, both before and after his appointment as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. This promotion may seem surprising today; Austin had published just three papers by 1952, none of which were strictly about moral philosophy. It seems that credit was given to the importance of his ideas, and his rep-utation as an inspiring and charismatic teacher, a reputation achieved despite his rather austere personality. Few if any of his colleagues felt that they really got to know him personally. This was perhaps in part because, as Geoffrey Warnock has suggested, he was 'a shy man, wary of self-revelation and more than uninviting of self-revelation by others'. It may also have been in part because, unusually among his peers, he eschewed college social life, preferring to spend his time quietly at home with his family in the Oxfordshire countryside. Never-theless, most people who knew him had their favourite story to sum up what could be a formidable and confrontational, but also a humourous and humane personality. George Pitcher relates how Austin once attended a meeting at his college concerned with plans for the college buildings. The meeting got embroiled in a long and seemingly unrec-oncilable discussion about the President's Lodgings. When finally asked for his opinion, Austin's response was 'Mr President, raze it to the ground. Grice recalls how a colleague once challenged Austin with Donne's lines 'From the round earth's imagined corners,/ Angels your trumpets blow' as an example of non-understandable English. 'It is perfectly clear what it means,' replied Austin, 'it means "Angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth" "  Such anecdotes illustrate Austin's ability to cut through protocol and rhetoric and reveal the plain facts underneath: often to reveal that things are just as simple as they seem, and a lot more simple than they are made out to be. This was the spirit in which he approached philosophy. He was undoubtedly lucky in this project in the number of dedicated and talented young philosophers who, as Grice puts it,  'appeared' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early post-war years, undergraduates and new tutors were generally older than had been the tradition, and eager to study, their university careers having been postponed or interrupted by the war. Austin played an active role in spotting and encouraging talent, building up what quickly came to be seen as his own 'school' of philosophy. This development seems rather at odds with his views on discipleship. Ben Rogers has suggested that, unlike Wittgenstein, Austin 'discouraged anything like a cult of personality: he wanted to put philosophy on a collective footing' However, there is some evidence that Austin was at least in part predisposed to encourage, and even to enjoy, his status as leader. Grice reports that Austin was once heard to remark to a colleague, 'if they don't want to follow me, whom do they want to follow?"The style of philosophy developed and practised by Austin and his followers has been variously labelled as 'Oxford philosophy', linguistic philosophy' and 'ordinary language philosophy'. It is in fact far from uncontroversial that a single, identifiable approach united the philosophers working in Oxford at this time, even those in Austin's immediate circle. Grice himself denies this assumption in a number of published commentaries, such as the uncompromising claim that: 'there was no  "School"; there were no dogmas which united us.' Perhaps the only common position of the Oxford philosophers, certainly the only one Grice acknowledges, was a belief in the value, indeed the necessity, of the rigorous analysis of the everyday use of words and expressions. They worked on a wide range of philosophical problems, and even when addressing the same issue they often disagreed on analysis or conclu-sion. But in approaching these problems they were in agreement that careful attention to the words in which they were conventionally expressed was the best path to understanding, tackling and perhaps eliminating the problems themselves. The origins of this approach are controversial. Commentators have looked beyond Ryle and Austin to suggest Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and even Gotlob Frege as candidates for the title 'father' of ordinary language phi-losophy. There is certainly something in all these claims; each thinker was  influential in the development of the analytic tradition from which ordinary language philosophy emerged. But under Ryle's and Austin's guidance it developed in directions not envisaged, and in some cases explicitly not approved, by its putative mentors.  In the late nineteenth century Frege proposed analysis of language as a method for tackling philosophical problems. He was chiefly a math-ematician, but in the course of his work addressed the language of logical expressions, and the potential problems inherent in it. Frege's most influential contribution to the philosophy of language is his distinction between 'sense' and 'reference'. Any name, whether a proper name or a description, that points to some individual in the world, does so by way of a particular means of identifying that individual. A name therefore has both a reference, the individual it denotes, and a sense, the means by which reference is indicated. In this way, Frege explains statements of identity. If we attend only to reference, an example such as 'Sophroniscus is the father of Socrates' would have to be dismissed as uninformative; it would simply offer a logical tautology, stating of an individual that he is identical with himself. If, however, we attend to sense as well as reference, we can analyse this example as making an informative statement to the effect that the two names may differ insense but share the same reference. The example is significant because, although there is no difference between the denotation of the two names, there is nevertheless 'a difference in the mode of presentation of the thing designated'."  Russell proposed the 'translation'  account that became characteristic  of analytic philosophy. Suitably rigorous attention could reveal the logical structure beneath a grammatical form that was often misleading and imperfect. His main difference from Frege was in his analysis of descriptions. Russell observes in his 1905 article 'On denoting' that 'a phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; for example,  "the present king of France" 1 For Frege such examples posed no problem. It was perfectly possible to say that such an expression had a sense but no reference. But the consequences of this position are unacceptable to Russell because of their impact on logic. If 'the king of France' simply has no reference, then any sentence of which it is subject, such as Russell's famous example 'the king of France is bald', must also fail to refer to the world; in other words it must fail to be either true or false. For Russell this result is intolerable because it dispenses with clas-sical, two-valued logic, in which every proposition must be capable of being judged either 'true' or 'false'  . Classical logic states that if a propo-  sition is true then its negation must be false, and vice versa. But under Frege's analysis 'the king of France is bald' and 'the king of France is not bald' are indistinguishable in terms of truth value; both fail to be either true or false. Not only is this unacceptable, argues Russell, it also goes against the facts of the matter; 'the king of France is bald' is a simple falsehood.  Russell uses the label 'definite descriptions' for phrases such as 'the king of France', and claims that they are a particular type of expression demanding a particular type of analysis. Despite appearances, they are not denoting expressions, and they do not function as subjects of sentences in which they superficially appear to be in subject position. The subject/predicate form of a sentence containing a definite description, a sentence such as 'the king of France is bald', is misleading. That is, the logical structure of the sentence is at odds with its purely grammatical form; it is actually a complex of propositions relating to the existence, the uniqueness, and then the characteristics, of the individual apparently identified. Russell's rendition of this example can be paraphrased as: 'there exists one entity which is the king of France, and that entity is unique, and that entity is bald! Re-analysed in this way, it is possible to demonstrate that, in the absence of a unique king of France, one of these propositions is simply false. If it is not true thatthere is a present king of France, the first part of the logical form is false, making the sentence as a whole also false.  Russell's theory of descriptions has been seen as the defining example of analytic philosophy. Ayer often repeated his admiration for it in these terms. His close attention to language as well as to logic further caused Russell to be credited with inspiring ordinary language philosophy. 13 However, he would certainly not have been pleased by this latter acco-lade; he was still active in philosophy when the new approach was in the ascendant and he publicly and vociferously opposed it.' His own motivation in 'On denoting', and elsewhere, was not to describe natural language for its own sake, but to explain away the apparent obstacles it offered to classical logic. If every statement containing a denoting phrase could be explained as a complex proposition not involving a denoting phrase as a constituent, bivalent logic could be maintained.  Like Frege, Russell's first and primary philosophical interest was in mathematical logic. His interest in the analysis of language and therefore in meaning grew out of a concern for analysing the language in which the ideas of logic are expressed, and ultimately for refining that language.  Russell's Cambridge colleague and almost exact contemporary G. E.  Moore would perhaps have been less uncomfortable with being credited as genitor of ordinary language philosophy. Like many of the Oxford philosophers a generation later, he came to philosophy from a background in classics, and remained sensitive to details of meaning.  This was coupled with a rather leisured approach to philosophical enquiry; a private fortune enabled him to spend seven years at the start of his career away from all professional responsibilities, pursuing his own philosophical interests. Certainly, the result was a thorough and meticulous attention to the language in which philosophical discussion is couched. Another common feature between Moore and many ordinary language philosophers, one identified by Grice, was an anti-metaphysical, determinedly 'common-sense' approach to philosophical issues. 15  An illustration of both the rigorous analysis and the confidence in intuitive understanding can be found in Moore's article 'A defence of common sense', published in 1925. This was a forerunner of the infamous British Academy lecture of 1939 in which he held up his own hand as incontrovertible and sufficient 'proof' of the existence of material objects. In the published article, too, Moore addresses the question of the status of our knowledge of external objects, as well as our belief in the existence of other human beings, and indeed the viability of anyphysical reality independent of mental fact. In asserting such viability Moore is, as he explains, arguing against the sceptical view that all that we have access to are 'ideas' of objects, offered to us by means of our sense impressions, never the objects themselves. Such philosophical views were dominant in English philosophy when Moore himself was a young man, and were in part what he was reacting against in defending common sense. Moore's 'defence' rests almost entirely on his assertion of what he knows to be the case, by introspection based on the dictates of common sense. He knows with certainty of the existence and continuity of his own body, as well as its distinction from other, equally real physical objects. Not only that, but all other human beings have a similar, but distinct set of knowledge relating to their own bodies.  Further, to describe these as common-sense beliefs is actually to admit that they must be true, since the very expression 'common sense' implies that there is a set of other minds holding this belief and therefore that other minds, and other people, exist. Common sense should extend to analysis of the language of philosophy as well. In assessing the truth of a sentence such as 'The earth has existed for many years past', it is necessary to consider only 'the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions'  '. Moore comments dryly that the existence of such  a unique, ordinary meaning 'is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing'. This capacity, he suggests, has led to the erroneous argument that a statement such as this is questionable, and perhaps even false.  This insistence that philosophers attend to the ordinary use of the expressions with which they are dealing, together with the expression of bafflement that they should declare themselves unsure of the nature of such ordinary use, was to become as characteristic of Austin's work as it was of Moore's. Austin was widely known to be impressed by Moore's work, and inspired by his methodology, although he was less convinced that intuitive convictions and commonplace orthodoxies could be accepted at face value without further exploration. Grice recalls him declaring, with a characteristic combination of scholarly enthusiasm and school-boy jocularity: 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man.'" This pithy summary of his own philosophical influences introduces one of the most controversial issues concerning the origins of ordinary language philosophy: the impact of Wittgenstein. Some commentators have argued that Wittgenstein's later work was crucially important; Ernest Gellner, for instance, discusses 'linguistic philosophy' as if it were uncontroversially a product of Philosophical Investigations. 18 But in his biographical sketch of Austin, Geoffrey Warnock argues cat-egorically that Wittgenstein did not influence the philosophical method Austin promoted."' The issue is a difficult one to settle. Ben Rogers suggests that: 'Oxford philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s was more indebted to Wittgenstein than it liked to admit, 20 and it is certainly possible that his ideas informed discussion at the time, even if his intellectual presence was not directly acknowledged. Philosophical Investigations, presenting Wittgenstein's later work on language, was not published until 1953, but earlier versions of it were circulated and read in Oxford in the immediate post-war years. Other commentators, such as Williams and Montefiore, emphasise what they see as the striking differences between Wittgenstein and Austin. The two men's personalities, they suggest, were reflected in their different styles of philoso-phy: Wittgenstein's intense and introspective, Austin's scholarly and meticulous.22  Wittgenstein's early work had been inspired by his former tutor Russell. Although highly original, it was very much within Russell's formal, analytic tradition. Language operates by expressing propositions that may differ from apparent surface form but map on to the world by means of the basic properties of truth and falsity. 'To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true,' Wittgenstein suggests in his Tractatus, prefiguring the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle23 However, the work Wittgenstein produced when he returned to philosophy after a self-imposed break was notoriously different from that of his youth. It shows some striking similarities to ordinary language philosophy. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that language is better defined in terms of the uses to which it is put than the situations in the world it describes. Words are tools for use and, just as a tool may not always be used for the same function, meaning is not necessarily constant. Coining one of the most enduring metaphors in the philosophy of language, he argues that a word is best described as having a loose association of meanings that are essentially independent but may display certain 'family resemblances'  '. He argues  that apparent philosophical problems are in fact issues of language use; correct investigation of the language in which problems are posed reveals them to be merely 'pseudo problems'  '. Also, and perhaps even  more strikingly, he comments that, in philosophical discussion as else-where, 'When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day.'24  Whatever positive influences may have acted on Austin, it is certain that he was at least in part reacting against some other philosophical styles. In particular, he was taking issue with logical positivism, and withthe work of his old sparring partner A. J. Ayer. Soon after the war, Austin developed his response to Ayer on sense data. This was presented as a series of lectures, first delivered in 1947, and was published only posthumously, when Geoffrey Warnock edited the lecture notes under the title Sense and Sensibilia. Austin deals in detail and critically with Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, the book published in 1940 that expanded on and developed the implications of the verificationist account presented in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued in the earlier book that the operation of the principle of verification for an individual is not directly dependent on the physical world, but relies on the data we receive through our senses. These 'sense data' are the only evidence we have available by which to subject sentences making statements about the world to appropriate processes of verification. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer addresses the question of whether our knowledge is determined by material objects themselves or by our personal sense data. He develops a phenomenalist approach to this question, arguing that beliefs and statements about material objects are only legitimate if they are translated into beliefs and statements about our sense data. In this way, he maintains that discussion of the status of material objects is primarily a dispute about language. It is a dispute about the best way to analyse statements of experience. Sentences concerned with material objects and those concerned with sense data are simply uses of two different types of language. They refer to the same things in two different ways, rather than describing ontologically different phenomena.  25  Austin disliked the idea that philosophers need to 'see through' ordinary language before they can say anything rigorous about material objects. In his lectures on perception he argues that belief in sense data is an error into which philosophers have been led by the words they coin. The term itself is introduced artificially; ordinary people in everyday life find no need of it. Even the word 'perception' has an unnecessarily technical ring for Austin. People rarely talk about perceiving material objects, and still less frequently of experiencing sense data.  They do talk about seeing things, and so philosophers should attend to the suggestions this offers as to how the world works. The 'plain man' can cope perfectly well with distinguishing appearance from reality, with describing rainbows, or with commenting that ships on the horizon may appear closer than they are. Philosophers need only look to the actual use of words such as 'reality', 'looks' and 'seems' to understand this. Ordinary language has its own, perfectly adequate way of dealing with the difference between appearance and reality. Near thebeginning of his lectures, Austin sums up his response to sense data theorists:  My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described... Ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realised.26  In other work, Austin objects to the assumption he finds in logical positivism and elsewhere that the most important or the only philosophically interesting function of language is to make statements about the world. Philosophers concerned with questions of truth and falsity, and with determining meaning in terms of verification, overlook the many different ways in which speakers actually use language, and fall into the fallacy of seeing it as merely a tool for description. 'The principle of Logic that "Every proposition must be true or false" has too long operated as the simplest, most persuasive and most pervasive form of the descriptive fallacy.2 Only a careful consideration of the way in which people actually use language enables philosophers to dispense with this fallacy. Even when people do make statements of fact, it is often necessary to consider 'degrees' of success, rather than simple truth.  It is only with such a concept that we can make sense of various loose ways of talking, such as 'the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg', or explain why a statement may be true, but somehow 'inept' , such as saying 'all  the signs of bread' when clearly in the presence of bread.  Austin's approach, then, was based on a distrust of philosophical constructions and technical terminology, especially terminology he suspected of being unnecessary or poorly defined, but it was not entirely negative. He wanted to replace these with a serious and rigorous attention to the way in which any matter of philosophical interest is discussed in everyday language. He sets out these ideas particularly clearly and characteristically stridently in 'A plea for excuses' , a paper delivered  to the Aristotelian Society in 1956, which came to be seen almost as a manifesto for ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers have for too long conducted their discussion in real or feigned ignorance of the way in which key words and phrases are used in ordinary, everyday lan-guage. It is not just that the language of everyday is a worthy subject and adequate vehicle for philosophical enquiry. Rather, it is the only tool with a claim to being sufficient for philosophical purposes, honedas it is by generations of use to describe the distinctions and connections human beings have found necessary. These can reasonably be claimed to be more sound and subtle 'than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon - the most favoured alternative method'28 Meanings, including the meanings of philosophical terms, can only coherently be discussed with reference to the ways in which words are used in ordinary discourse.  More specifically in 'A plea for excuses', Austin is concerned with a rigorous examination of the circumstances in which excuses are offered, and the different forms they may take. For instance, excuses are only offered for actions performed freely. A consideration of the ordinary use of 'freely' to describe an action reveals that it does not introduce any particular property, but serves to negate some opposite, such as  'under duress'. It would be used only when there is some suggestion that the opposite could or might apply. There would be something strange about applying the term 'freely' to a normal action performed in a normal manner. Austin sums up this claim in the slogan 'no modification without aberration'? For many ordinary uses of many verbs, there is simply no modifying expression, either positive or negative that can appropriately and informatively be applied. The  'natural economy of language' dictates that we can only add a modifying expression 'if we do the action named in some special way or cir-cumstance'.30  Austin promoted his approach to philosophy through personal contact, including his own teaching, at least as much as through published papers such as 'A plea for excuses'. Lynd Forguson has studied undergraduate Oxford philosophy examination papers and observed that questions reflecting ordinary language philosophy began to appear as early as 1947, and were increasingly frequent throughout the 1950s.  For instance, students were asked: 'Is it essential to begin by deciding the meaning of the word "good" before going on to decide what things are good?'31 Perhaps most significantly Austin's ideas were disseminated through active collaboration in philosophy with his colleagues. This did not take the form of any co-authored papers or books. Indeed, both Grice and Stuart Hampshire have suggested that Austin's independent character and idiosyncratic style would have made him an awkward writing companion.32 His approach to collaboration in philosophy was to draw together the responses and insights of as many different informed observers of language use as possible. In the late 1940s, he instituted a series of 'Saturday Mornings'  ', meetings that ran in term time  and brought together a number of like-minded Oxford philosophers.Grice was present from the start. Other members included R. M. Hare, Herbert Hart, David Pears, Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson. Grice recalls how Austin described these meetings, perhaps semi-seriously, as a weekend break from the regular work of 'philosophical hacks', enabling them to turn their attention to less narrowly philosophical topics. Perhaps with this explanation in mind, Grice labelled the meetings 'The Play Group'. He seems to have been inordinately pleased with this name, and employed it in both spoken and written accounts of Oxford philosophy throughout his life. He used it at the time with some of his colleagues but never, it seems, with Austin himself. Austin was not the sort of man with whom to share such a joke. 34  The American logician W. V. O. Quine spent the academic year 1953-4 at Oxford as visiting Eastman professor. In his memoir of this period he passes on the rumour that attendance at Saturday Mornings was controlled by rules devised by Austin to preclude particular individu-als.35 There does not seem to be any explicit first-hand support from members of the group for this allegation. However, there is some evidence from them that Austin imposed criteria for attendance that would, in effect, have ruled out anyone older than himself who might prove a challenge to his leadership. Geoffrey Warnock remarks simply that attendance was 'restricted to persons both junior to Austin and employed as whole-time tutorial Fellows' 3 Many years later, when Grice was thinking back to the days of the Play Group, he jotted down a list of Oxford philosophers of the time. Interestingly, he divides his list into three categories: 'yes' (Austin, Grice, Hampshire, Strawson, Warnock...), 'no' (Anscombe, Dummett, Murdoch...) and 'overage' (Ryle, Hardie ...).37  Initially, at least, Austin seems to have stuck to his self-imposed remit.  The Play Group engaged not so much in philosophical debate as in intellectual puzzles and exercises pursued for their own sake. A favourite occupation was to analyse and categorise the rules of games, or to invent games of their own. Kathleen Grice recalls that one term they seemed to spend most of their time drawing dots on pieces of paper. Another term they decided to 'learn Eskimo' 38 However, they gradually turned their attention to more obviously philosophical occupations. Austin liked to pick a text per term for the group to read and discuss. However, some of the group did not find this a particularly fruitful philosophical method, largely because of Austin's preferred pace, which was painstakingly slow. 'Austin's favoured unit of discussion in such cases was the sentence', Warnock recalls, 'not the paragraph or chapter, still less the book as a whole. 39 At other times, the Play Group put into practiceAustin's views about the correct business of philosophers by engaging in 'linguistic botanising'.  Austin admired the sciences, and regretted that his own education had given him little real knowledge or expertise in them. His idea was to apply the same techniques of rigorous observation and attention to detail as would be used in a discipline such as botany to the material of linguistic use. The language, and the way in which it was ordinarily used, were there as empirical facts to be observed by those with the sensitivity to do so. Only in this way could its categories and fine distinc-tions, honed over generations, become available to the philosopher.  Examples of this philosophical method are to be found in many of Austin's own writings. For instance, in 'A plea for excuses', where he advocates philosophical attention to 'what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it', he suggests some of the words and phrases related to excuses that may shed light on its use: abstract nouns such as 'misconception', 'accident', 'purpose' and verbs such as  'couldn't help', 'didn't mean to', 'didn't realise'. 4º He proposes a philosophical methodology of 'going through the dictionary'; only such a rigorous analysis of the language will give a thorough and objective overview of the subject matter, which can then be subjected to a process of introspective analysis.  At the Play Group, linguistic botanising was no less painstaking, but it took a discursive, collaborative form. The members would, in effect, pool their linguistic resources in order to draw up lists of words related to the particular subject under discussion. They would then analyse the uses and nuances of these words, deciding which were suitable, and which unsuitable, in various different contexts. As Grice later explained it, they would examine a wide range of the relevant vocabulary, to 'get a list of "okes and nokes"'* J. O. Urmson has described the processes involved more fully:  Having collected in terms and idioms, the group must then proceed to the second stage in which, by telling circumstantial stories and constructing dialogues, they give as clear and detailed examples as possible of circumstances under which this idiom is to be preferred to that, and that to this, and of where we should (do) use this term and where that.... At [the next] stage we attempt to give general accounts of the various expressions (words, sentences, grammatical forms) under consideration; they will be correct and adequate if they make it clear why what is said in our various stories is or is not felic-itous, is possible or impossible.  42Austin argued that this process was both empirical and objective.  Several philosophers conferring together would avoid the possible distortions and idiosyncrasies that might skew the findings of a single researcher, as well as bringing together a wide range of different experiences and specialisms. At a conference in 1958, he was challenged to say what set of criteria was adequate for judging a philosophical analysis of a concept. He is reported as replying, 'If you can make an analysis convince yourself, no matter how hard you try to overthrow it, and if you can get a lot of cantankerous colleagues to agree with it, that's a pretty good criterion that there is something in it. '43 Their task was not just to list and to categorise areas of vocabulary, but to analyse the conceptual distinctions these indicated. Only after selecting relevant terms and discussing their usage was it legitimate to compare the findings with what philosophers had traditionally said. Despite his frosty demeanour and austere habits, Austin displayed huge enthusiasm and optimism, attitudes that infected the members of the Play Group. Grice has commented that Austin clearly found philosophy tremendous fun, although he 'would not be vulgar enough to say anything like that'. 4  If Austin's method attracted devotees, however, it also attracted critics. The practitioners of ordinary language philosophy saw it as an exciting new approach capable of overthrowing past orthodoxies and offering solutions to age-old problems, but its critics saw it as sterile and complacent, valuing lexicographical pedantry over real philosophical argument.4 Some of its more high profile opponents, such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, targeted what they saw as the shallow insights, even the platitudes, to which the Oxford philosophers limited them-selves. Maintaining his position that ordinary language is simply not good enough for rigorous philosophical enquiry, Russell derided what he saw as the triviality of ordinary language philosophy; 'To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. Other critics targeted the practitioners more directly, characterising them as spoilt and snobbish, 'playing' at philosophy without feeling the need to justify their leisurely activities.  Ernest Gellner, a former student of Austin's, published a book in 1959 exclusively concerned with attacking the Oxford philosophers and their method. Gellner finds his own way of repeating Russell's mockery when he suggests that ordinary language philosophy suggests that 'the world is just what it seems (and as it seems to an unimaginative man at about mid-morning)' 4 This style of philosophy 'at long last, provided a philosophic form eminently suitable for gentlemen' because it demanded immense leisure and 'yet its message is that everything remains as itis'.48 C. W. K. Mundle argues that Austin's elitism mars his philosophy.  He detects prescriptivism beneath Austin's apparently descriptivist concern for 'what we should say'. 'In the name of ordinary language, he demands standards of purity and precision of speech which are extraordinarily rare except among men who got a First in Classical Greats.'49 There is undoubtedly some substance in the accusations of elitism.  The members of the Play Group shared an understanding that detailed analysis and meticulous enquiry were important ends in themselves, but also a certainty of leisure and means to pursue these ends. Their appointments did not carry the pressure to publish that to modern academics is a matter of course, a fact almost certainly crucial to the success of ordinary language philosophy. Linguistic botanising was often conducted self-consciously for its own sake, without expectations of spe-cific, publishable 'results'. Stuart Hampshire has admitted that Austin's method depended on a comparatively careless attitude to time and pub-lication: 'you're apt to get discouraged about publishing because you can't fit it all neatly into a journal article.  150  At the time, the Oxford philosophers were in general reluctant to argue their own case. Partly in response to this, Grice later took on the task of offering a first-hand account of ordinary language philosophy in defence against some of its critics. The subject clearly exercised him from the mid-1970s on; he talked, both formally and informally on the topic, and wrote copious notes about it. In a move that would have seemed to the critics to have confirmed their worst fears about snobbery and self-importance, he compares post-war Oxford to the Academy at Athens, with Austin by implication playing the role of Aristotle. In fact the comparison is not as pompous as it may first appear; Grice is not suggesting that mid-twentieth-century Oxford was as important to the history of philosophy as ancient Athens. Rather, he sees certain similarities between the two enterprises that gave ordinary language philosophy a philosophical pedigree its critics claimed it lacked. He sees reflections of Austin's method in what he describes as the 'Athenian dialectic': the interest in discourse ingeneral, and in the facts of speech in particular. The connection is summed up for Grice in the two aspects of the Athenian interest in ta Zeyoueva. The phrase can refer to 'what is spoken', both in the sense of ordinary ways of talking, and of generally received opinions. Both schools were concerned not just with the analysis of language, but with seeing the way people speak as a reflection of how they generally understand the world, a reflection of the  'common-sense' point of view. The difference is, Grice argues, that Austin and his school concentrated more closely on the first aspect;Aristotle and his on the second. Aristotle was concerned not so much with methodology as with picking out foundations of truth. Austin was interested in the 'potentialities of linguistic usage as an index of conceptual truth, without regard for any particular direction for the deployment of such truth.'51  Grice also addresses critics of ordinary language philosophy more directly, accusing them of simple misrepresentation. Gellner's book, in particular, he describes informally as 'a travesty'. In effect, he accuses the critics of inverted snobbery: of assuming that ordinary language philosophy must be trivial and elitist because it was practised by a socially privileged group of people in an ancient university. He admits that the style of philosophy came easiest to those who had received a classical, therefore a public school, education. Education in the classics had fitted the Oxford philosophers to the necessary close attention to linguistic distinctions: ordinary language philosophy involved 'the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage' 5 Grice's response is perhaps confused. At times he seems to accept the accusation of elitism but to argue against its derogatory implications. Why should high culture in philosophy be considered bad, he wonders, if it is prized in art, literature and opera? At other times, however, he seems simply to reject the accusation, arguing that anyone with suitably acute powers of observation could engage in this kind of analysis. This ambivalence is most apparent in some of his comments that did not make it into print. In a section of the handwritten draft of the 'Reply to Richards', but not of the published version, he comments on the accusation of elitism:  To this the obvious reply would seem to be that if it were correct that philosophy is worth fostering, and that proficiency demands a classical education, then that would provide additional strength to the case for the availability of a classical education. But I doubt if the facts are as stated; I doubt if 'linguistic sensitivity' is the prerogative of either the well-to-do or of the products of any particular style of education. 53  Grice's attitude to his social environment may have been, or have become, somewhat ambivalent, but during the 1940s and 1950s he was central to the ordinary language philosophy movement. He attended Austin's Saturday Mornings regularly and enthusiastically. Outside these meetings, he worked collaboratively with other members of the group.He even collaborated with Austin himself, although in teaching rather than writing. The two taught joint sessions on Aristotle. Grice later claimed that these were particularly easy teaching sessions for him because no preparation was necessary. They would simply arrive in class and Austin would start talking, freely and spontaneously. At some point Grice would find something with which he disagreed and say so, 'and the class would begin'* It seems that their style of teaching often rested on each holding fast to an opposing position. Speaking long after he had left Oxford, Grice recalled Austin's typical response when challenged on some point: 'Well, if you don't like that argument, here's another one.'55 Grice may have been amused by Austin's view of philosophy in terms of 'winning', but he himself was not likely to back down on a position once he had taken it up. However, this method had its successes. Their pupil J. L. Ackrill went on to become a Fellow of Brasenose College, and to publish his own translation of Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione in 1963. Among his acknowledgements to those who had helped him in understanding these works, he comments:  I am conscious of having benefited particularly from a class given at  Oxford in 1956-7 by the late J. L. Austin and Mr H. P. Grice.'56  For Grice himself, the most fruitful collaboration during this period was the joint work he undertook with Peter Strawson. Strawson had gone up to Oxford in 1939 and had been Grice's tutee. He later commented that: 'tutorials with [Grice] regularly extended long beyond the customary hour, and from him I learned more of the difficulty and possibilities of philosophical argument than from anyone else.'" Strawson's career also had been interrupted by the war, and he did not gain a permanent position until 1948, when he was appointed Fellow of University College. He was one of the younger members of the Play Group, but nevertheless a central figure in ordinary language philosophy, and unusually successful in completing work. In 1950 he published 'On referring', in which he offered a response to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, an account that had been widely praised, and practically unchallenged, since it first appeared in 1905. Russell had argued that natural language can be misleading as to the structure of our knowledge of the world; Austin and his followers that, on the contrary, it is the best guide we have to that structure. Strawson suggests that, preoccupied with mathematics and logic, Russell had overlooked the fact that language is first and foremost a tool in communication. Russell had ignored the role of the speaker: '"mentioning", or "referring", is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do. Once an appropriate distinction is drawn between'a sentence' and 'a use of a sentence', it is possible to consider how most people would actually react on hearing the 'king of France' example (in which, for some reason, Strawson changes 'bald' to 'wise'). When used in 1950, or indeed in 1905, the example is not false. Rather, the question of whether it is true or false simply does not arise, precisely because the subject expression fails to pick out an individual in the world, and therefore the expression as a whole fails to say anything.  For Strawson, then, 'the king of France is wise' does not entail the existence of a unique king of France. Rather, it implies this existence in a 'special' way. In later work he uses the label 'presupposition' to describe this special type of implication. This was a term originally used by Frege in his discussion of denoting phrases and, like Frege, Strawson notes that presupposition is distinct from entailment because it is shared by both a sentence and its negation. Both 'the king of France is wise' and 'the king of France is not wise' share the presupposition that there exists a unique king of France, although their entailments contradict each other. On Russell's analysis, the negative sentence is ambiguous. Both the existence and the wisdom of the king of France are logical entailments, so either could be denied by negating the sen-tence. Strawson argues that Russell has attempted, inappropriately, to apply classical logic to what are in fact specific types of natural language use. 'Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language'; he concludes, 'for ordinary language has no exact logic.'60  Stawson and Grice taught together, covering topics such as meaning, categories and logical form. W. V. O. Quine, who attended some of their weekly seminars in the spring of 1954, paints a picture of these sessions:  Peter and Paul alternated from week to week in the roles of speaker and commentator. The speaker would read his paper and then the commentator would read his prepared comments. 'Towards the foot of page 9, I believe you said. Considered judgement was of the essence; spontaneity was not. When in its final phase the meeting was opened to public discussion, Peter and Paul were not outgoing.  'I'm not sure what to make of that question.' 'It depends, I should have thought, on what one means by .. 'This is a point that I shall think further about before the next meeting. '61  This style of debate was obviously not to Quine's taste, and there is certainly something reminiscent of Grice's former tutor W. F. R. Hardie in what he describes. Grice worked and talked very much within theformal and mannered social milieu of Oxford at the time. His lecture notes from the period, generall y written out in full, contain many references to what 'Mr Stawson proposed last week' or 'Mr Warnock has suggested'. But there is evidence also that the apparently prevaricating answers Quine ridicules were genuine responses to the complexity of the matter in hand. Grice often begins his lectures with a return to 'a question raised last week to which I had no answer'. Indeed, he later argued explicitly that philosophy works best not as a series of rapid retorts to impromptu questions, but as a slow and considered debate:  The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpov ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightening chess.  62  This slow, thoughtful style was carried over to the deliberation and composition of Grice and Strawson's writing and was, Grice later sug-gested, the reason why the collaboration eventually ceased. Strawson, who seems to have been much more interested in finished products than Grice was, eventually could no longer cope with the laborious process, in which complete agreement had to be reached over a sentence before anything could be written down. But it lasted long enough for Grice to be impressed by the 'extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport' they developed, such that 'the potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me.'63 One of their writing projects developed from their teaching on categories. Their topic dated back to Aristotle, and had also been discussed by Kant. It is a type of descriptive metaphysics, in that it involves analysis and classification towards an account of the very general notion of 'what there is'. In metaphysics, this account is offered in terms of the nature and status of reality, rather than in terms of the types of description of individual aspects of that reality to be found in the sciences. In particular, it is concerned with reality as reflected in human thought. Kant had argued that the study of human thinking is important precisely because it is the only guide we have to reality. The facts of 'things in themselves', aside from our human perceptions of them, are unknowable. For Aristotle, these questions had been closely linked to his interest in the study of language.  Human language is the best model we have available of human thought.  We structure our language to reflect the structure of our thought. So, for instance, the division of sentences into subjects and predicatesreflects the way we cognitively divide the world into things and attrib-utes, or particulars and universals.  Grice and Strawson's long, slow collaboration on this topic was not very productive, by modern standards at least, in that it resulted in no published work. But Grice himself valued it very highly, and commented late in his life that he had always kept the manuscripts with him. Unfortunately, only a fragment of these appears to have survived.  However, this is accompanied by rough notes indicating something of their working method. They apply a distinctively 'Austinian' approach to Aristotle's use of language, experimenting together to see which English words can successfully combine with which others, trying out combinations of possible subjects and predicates. Notes in Grice's hand record that 'healthy' can be applied to, or predicated of, 'person', 'place'  'occupation', or 'institution', while 'medical' can be applied to 'lecture'  'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription', and 'advice'. 65 Grice notes that the neutral term 'employment' can cover the importantly different terms 'use', 'sense' and 'meaning', and that here it is perhaps most appropriate to say that the predicate has the particular range of 'uses'. This aspect of the work seems to take over Grice's attention at one point. The notions of 'sense', 'meaning' and 'use' need to be distinguished not just from each other, but between discussions of sentences and of speakers. 'Need to distinguish all these from cases where speaker might mean so-and-so or such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of the sentence' he notes, '"Jones is between Williams and Brown" either spatial order or order of merit, but doubtful this renders it an ambiguous sentence.'  The notes also explore the difference in grammatical distribution between substantial and non-substantial nouns. 'Mercy' can be both referred to and predicated, whereas 'Socrates' can only be referred to.  In other words, it seems that although both substantials and non-substantials can occupy subject position, substantials must be seen as the primary occupiers of this slot because they cannot occur as predi-cates. To demonstrate this point he distinguishes between establishing existence by referring to, and by predicating, expressions. The distinction is established by means of a comparison between two short dia-logues. The following is perfectly acceptable; evidence is successfully offered for the existence of a universal by predicating it of a particular:  Bunbury is really disinterested. Disinterested persons (real disinterestedness) does not exist. A: Yes they do (it does); Bunbury is really disinterested.In contrast descriptive statements do not guarentee the existence of their subjects, but rather stand in a 'special relation' to statements of existence. This special relation is, they note, elsewhere called 'presup-position'; it seems that at this stage at least, Grice was prepared to endorse Strawson's response to Russell. The following is 'not linguistically in order :  Bunbury is really disinterested. There is no such person as Bunbury. A: Yes there is, he is really disinterested.  Producing a sentence in which something is predicated of a substantial subject is not enough to guarentee the existence of that subject. They note that the situation would be quite different if 'in the next room' were substituted into A's response. Here A's choice of predicate does more than just offer a description of Bunbury; it points to a way of verifying his existence. Our use of language, then, very often presupposes the existence of substantial objects. Furthermore, substances are in a sense the basic, or primary objects of reference. Grice and Strawson admit that they have no conclusive proof of this latter claim, but they offer their own intuitions in support, presumably drawn from their experiments with substantial and non-substantial subjects. Further, substances are, in general, what we are most interested in talking about, asking about, issuing orders about; 'indeed the primacy of substance is deeply embedded in our language'  Grice later suggested that the closest echoes of this joint work in published writing were in Strawson's book Individuals, subtitled 'An essay in descriptive metaphysics', published in 1959. In this Strawson considers in much more detail the implications of various kinds of descriptive sentences for the theory of presupposition. But there were also resonances of the joint project in various aspects of Grice's own later work. Two points from the end of the manuscript fragment, one a non-linguistic parallel and one a consequence of their position, indicate these. The parallel comes from a consideration of the basic needs for survival and the attainment of satisfaction people experience as living creatures. Processes such as 'eating', 'drinking', 'being hurt by', 'using',  'finding', are entirely dependent on transactions with substances. Grice and Strawson suggest that it is not entirely fanciful to consider that the structure of language has developed to reflect the structure of these most basic interactions with the world.The relevant consequence of their position relates to a familiar target for ordinary language philosophers: the theory of sense data. Their argument is in essence a version of the argument from common sense, although they do not explicitly acknowledge this. If substances are a primary focus of interest, and if this fact is reflected in the language, then this offers good evidence that the world must indeed be substantial in character. If the proponents of sense data were correct, if all we can accurately discuss are the individual sensations we receive through our sense, then 'substantial terminology would have no application'. Of course, this argument is fundamentally dependent on faith in ordinary language. In effect it claims that, since people talk about, and indeed focus their talk on, material objects, we have adequate grounds for accepting that material objects exist.  The second major collaboration between Grice and Strawson, which produced their only jointly published paper, was composed uncharacteristically rapidly. It was written in the same year as Quine observed their joint seminars, and indeed was in direct response to his visit.  Quine introduced to Oxford an American style of philosophy. This had its roots in logical positivism, but had developed in rather different directions. In particular, Quine's empiricism took the form of an extreme scepticism towards meaning. He argued that it was legitimate to look at meaning in terms of how words are used to refer to objects in the world, but not to discuss meanings as if they had some existence independent of the set of such uses. In an essay published in 1953 he argues that the error of attributing independent existence to meaning explains the tenacity of the doctrine of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, even in empirical philosophies where it should have been abandoned.  Quine argues that, although it is a basic doctrine of many empirical theories, the analytic/synthetic distinction is inherently unempirical. It relies on the notion that words have meaning independent of individ-ual, observable instances of use. The sentence 'no bachelor is married' can be judged analytic and therefore necessarily true only on the assumption that 'bachelor' is synonymous with 'unmarried man'. Yet such an assumption depends on a commitment to abstract meaning. It is legitimate only to consider the range of phenomena to which the two terms are applied, a process that must inevitably be open-ended. In other words, we are committed to the truth of so-called analytic sentences for exactly the same reason that we are committed to the truth of certain synthetic sentences, such as 'Brutus killed Caesar'  Our past  experience of the world, including our experience of how the words ofour language are applied, has led us to accept them as true. However, our belief in any statement established on empirical grounds is subject to revision in the light of new experience. We may find it hard to imagine what experience could lead us to abandon belief in 'no bachelor is married', but that is simply because of the strength of our particular empirical commitment to it. The difference between analytic and synthetic statements, then, is not an absolute one, but simply a matter of degree. The distinction reflects 'the relative likelihood, in practice, of choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience'.66  One weekend during Quine's 1953-4 visit, Grice and Strawson put together their response to this argument, to be presented at a seminar on the Monday. In 1956 Strawson revised the paper on his own and sent it to The Philosophical Review, where it was published as 'In defence of a dogma'. Their defence is exactly of the type that Quine might have expected to encounter in Oxford in the 1950s; it rests on the way in which some of the key terms are actually used. The terms 'analytic' and  'synthetic' have a venerable pedigree. Generations of philosophers have found them useful in discussions of language and, moreover, are generally able to reach consensus over how they apply to novel, as well as to familiar examples. But the argument does not end with philosophical usage. Grice and Strawson argue that closely related distinctions can be found in everyday speech. The notion of analyticity rests, as Quine had noted, on the validity of synonymy. The expression 'synonymous' may not be very common in everyday speech, but the equivalent predicate 'means the same as' certainly is. Borrowing an example from Quine's essay, Grice and Strawson note that 'creature with a heart' is extensionally equivalent to 'creature with kidneys'; it picks out the same group of entities in the world precisely because all creatures with a heart also have kidneys. However, Grice and Stawson argue that the relationship between these two expressions is not the same as that between  'bachelor' and 'unmarried man'. Many people would be happy to accept that '"bachelor" means the same as "unmarried man"' but would reject  '"creature with a heart" means the same as "creature with kidneys"'.  In effect, Grice and Strawson are defending the existence of exactly the type of meaning Quine dismisses. The element distinguishing the second pair of terms, but not the first, cannot be anything to do with the objects in the world they are used to label, because in this they are exactly equivalent. Rather, there must be some further notion of  'meaning' that people are aware of when they deny that 'creature with heart' and 'creature with kidneys' mean the same. It is this notion ofmeaning, which forms part of the description of the language but does not directly relate to the world it describes, that Quine rules inadmissi-ble. This also allows for the existence of analytic sentences. 'A bachelor is an unmarried man' is analytic precisely because its subject means the same as its predicate. This can be confirmed by studying just the lan-guage, not the world. In much the same way, the meaning of some sentences makes them impossible in the face of any experience. That is, we just cannot conceive of any evidence that would lead us to acknowledge them as true. Grice and Strawson contrast 'My neighbour's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types' with 'My neighbour's three-year-old-child is an adult. The first may well strike us as impossible, but we can nevertheless imagine the sort of evidence that would force us, however reluctantly, to change our mind and accept it as true. But in the second case, unless we allow that the words are being used figuratively or metaphorically, there is just no evidence that could be produced to lead us to change our minds. The impossibility of the second example is entirely dependent on the meanings of the words it contains.  It is clear that the nature of analytic and synthetic sentences, and of our knowledge of them, exercised Grice a good deal both at this time and later. Kathleen Grice recalls that, during the 1950s, he delighted in questioning his children's playmates about 'whether something can be red and green all over'  ', and enjoyed their subsequent confusion, insist-  ing that spots and stripes were not allowed. As he observes in his own notes, 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is a supposed candidate for a statement that is both synthetic and a priori. Grice was presumably amusing himself by testing this claim out on some genuinely naive informants. In later years, he expressed himself still committed to the validity of the distinction between synthetic and analytic sentences, and indeed as seeing this as one of the most crucial of philosophical issues.  However, he had grown unhappy with his and Strawson's original defence of it. In particular, he no longer felt that it was enough to argue that the distinction is embedded in philosophical conscience. The argument indicates that the distinction is intelligible, in that it is possible to explain what philosophers mean by it, but not that it is theoretically necessary. In other words, 'the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny'? Certainly their case in defence of the distinction may seem rather weak as a piece of ordinary language philosophy. Austin had rejected other terms, such as 'sense data', precisely because theiruse seemed to be restricted to philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, philosophers as distinguished as Anthony Quinton found their argument against Quine compelling, paraphrasing them as saying that: 'An idea does not become technical simply by being dressed up in an ungainly polysyllable.' Grice never really returned to the task of mounting a new defence for the distinction, although he maintained that it was important and, crucially, 'doable'. 72  Grice's other major collaboration of the 1950s was with Geoffrey Warnock, a regular member of the Play Group, and later Principal of Hertford College. As with Strawson, Grice's collaboration with Warnock grew out of a joint teaching venture, and again this took the form of a series of evening lectures at which they alternated as speaker and com-mentator. The pace was leisurely and exploratory; a single topic might be developed over the course of a term, or even over successive years.  Their theme was perception, the subject of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia lectures. In these, Austin had applied his method of trying out examples to investigate shades of meaning for some of the relevant termi-nology. For instance, he argued that the terms 'looks', 'appears' and  'seems', which Ayer had assumed to be as good as synonymous, in fact displayed some striking differences in meaning when considered in a set such as 'the hill looks steep', 'the hill appears steep', 'the hill seems steep'73  Warnock has commented that, perhaps because of the intense treatment in these lectures, the vocabulary of perception was never discussed on Saturday mornings.* However, this was an omission that he and Grice made up for in private; their surviving notes are full of lists of words and usages by means of which they hoped to discover the understanding of perception embedded in the language. For instance, they draw up a list headed 'Syntax of Illusion', considering the various constructions in which the word 'illusion' can appear, and the shades of meaning associated with these. 'Be under the illusion (that)' and 'have the illusion (that)' are grouped together, presumably as predicates that can attach to people. 'Gives the illusion (that)' and 'creates the illusion (that)' are listed separately, with the note that these might 'apply exclusively to cases where anyone might be expected, in the circs, to handle the illusion'. The example 'it is an illusion' is accompanied by the unanswered question 'what is it?"7s  Grice and Warnock are concerned here with the so-called 'argument from illusion'. This had been put forward by a number of philosophers in support of the need to explain perception in terms of sense data. Austin spends a considerable proportion of Sense and Sensibiliaattacking Ayer over exactly this issue, although he acknowledges that Ayer's commitment to it is tentative. The argument draws on the fact that in a number of more or less mundane situations things appear to be other than they in fact are. For instance, a stick placed partially in water has the appearance of being bent, even though it is perfectly straight. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, your body appears to be located several feet behind the mirror when in fact it is located several feet in front of it. In these cases, the argument goes, there must be something that looks bent, or behind the mirror, that is distinct from the material object in question. The term 'sense data' is necessary in order to discuss this; the individual receives sense data that are distinct from the material object in question. From here, the argument is extended to cover all perception, even when no such illusions are involved. Seeing these types of illusion does not feel like a qualitatively different experience from seeing things as they actually are, hence it would be bizarre to maintain that the object of perception is of one kind in the cases of illusion and of another kind in other cases. It must be the case that all we ever do perceive are sense data, not material objects themselves.  Austin spends several lectures addressing these issues, arguing that it is an unnecessary imposition to claim that there must be one type of object of perception. Ayer and others have illegitimately assumed that optical illusions, such as the ones discussed, along with dreams, mirages, hallucinations and various other phenomena can all be explained in the same way. Rather, we see a whole host of different entities in different situations. These different types of experience are in fact generally fairly easy to distinguish, as any reflection on the language available to discuss them will reveal. People ordinarily are quite capable of saying that 'the stick looks bent but it is really straight'; it is philosophical sophistry to claim that there must be something, distinct from the stick itself, which has the 'look' in question. With typical bluntness, Austin dismisses the question of what you see when you see a bent stick as 'really, completely mad'. And with perhaps some sleight of hand he dismisses the mirror example by arguing that what actually is several feet behind the mirror is 'not a sense datum, but some region in the adjoining room'.76  In their lectures on perception, Grice and Warnock take up the question of whether or not it is legitimate to talk of any intermediary between material objects and our perceptions of them. They notice an asymmetry between the senses, or at least the vocabulary that describes them. The verbs 'hear', 'smell' and 'taste' can all take objects that donot describe material phenomena. It is possible to 'hear a car', but is equally possible to 'hear the sound of a car'  . In a similar way, it is pos-  sible to describe the 'smell of a cheese' or the 'taste of a cake'. This is not the case for the other two senses. The objects of touch are always material and not, or not primarily, the 'feeling' of material things.  Feeling, they note, perhaps entails having sensations, but it is not the case that these sensations are what we feel. Furthermore, there is no word at all to occupy this intermediary place in the case of sight. Certainly there is no general word analogous to 'sounds'. This conclusion was not reached lightly. Notes in Grice's hand on the back of an envelope try out a list of words in an attempt to find a suitable candidate for the role, but all are rejected. The following types of objects, he notes, fail to fit the bill because they are not universal objects of seeing;  'surface, colour, aspect, view, sight, gleam, appearance...' can all be used, but only in special circumstances. In most cases, we simply talk of seeing the object in question.  In response to this lack of a word analogous to 'sound', Grice and Warnock do something rather surprising for philosophers of ordinary language; they make one up. They introduce the word 'visa' to describe the non-material intermediaries between material objects and sight.  Commenting later on this enterprise, Grice was keen to point out that ordinary language philosophy did not in fact rule out the introduction of jargon, so long as it was what he rather enigmatically describes as  'properly introduced'." Their manoeuvre was rather different from that of introducing a technical term such as 'sense data',  ', and then basing a  philosophy around the existence of sense data. Instead, they were giving a name to what they had discovered to be a gap in the language in order to explore the language itself: to consider why no such word, and therefore presumably no such concept, was necessary. Their suggestion is that sight and touch are the two essential senses. That is, they are the senses on which we rely most closely to tell us about the material world. Touch is primary. Material objects are most essentially present to us through touch, and this is the sense we would be least ready to disbelieve.  However, because our capacity to touch material objects at any one time is limited, we rely to varying degrees on our other senses. Of these, sight correlates most closely with touch. It offers us the best indication of what an object would feel like. It is also more constant; an object capable of being heard may sometimes fail to produce its distinctive sound, but an object capable of being seen cannot fail to produce its  'visum'. For precisely this reason, the word 'visum', to describe something separate from the object producing it, does not exist.There are two possible accounts of the absence of a word such as  'visum'. The stronger account is that there is no space in the language for such a word; it could not exist. The weaker claim is that such a word could exist, but there is simply no need for it, because we never need to talk about the perceptions of sight without talking about material objects themselves. Warnock held to the stronger view and Grice to the weaker. This difference seems to have been rather a fraught one; Grice begins one lecture with the following extended metaphor.  I begin with an apology (or apologia). Last week it might well have appeared to some that W. was doing the digging while I was administering the digs. I should not like it to be thought that I am not in sympathy with his main ideas about 'visa'; the only question in my mind is precisely what form an answer on his general lines should take; and if I am busier with the awl than with the spade, the reason (aside from ineptitude with the latter instrument) is that I am pretty sure that he is digging in the right place.  78  It seems that the previous week Warnock had argued that if there were a word 'visum'  ', then, analogous to sound, it would have to be possible  to say that a material object could be 'visumless', but that this would not fit into our existing conceptual framework. Grice's argument is that if we want to use such a word, we can always make use of one of his suggestions, such as 'colour expanse'. It is probably correct to say that whenever we see a material object we see a colour expanse, but such an expression is reserved for those occasions when appearance and reality differ. It would not be strictly false to use them on other occasions, but:  'it would be unnatural or odd to employ this expression outside a limited range of situations, just because the empirical facts about perception mentioned by W. ensure that normally we are in a position to use stronger and more informative language! Grice's implication is that if a speaker is in a position to say something more informative, the less informative statement would not be used.  There was no joint publication for Grice and Warnock. On his own, Warnock did publish in this general field, although he did not make direct use of the notion of 'visa'. His 1955 paper to the Aristotelian Society, 'Seeing', is chiefly concerned with a close examination of 'the actual employment of the verb "to see"' 79 Warnock considers the implications of the various categories of object that the verb commonly takes.  In a footnote he acknowledges his general debt to 'Mr H. P. Grice'. Grice himself made even less direct use of their joint project in his own laterwork, although in the early 1960s he published two papers concerned with general questions about the status of perception. Later in that same decade he wrote a reflection on Descartes, although this was not published for more than 20 years.81 Descartes's scepticism leads Grice to reconsider the claims of phenomenalism, and to argue for a clearer distinction between 'truth-conditions', 'establishment-conditions' and  'reassurance-conditions' for statements about material objects.  It is evident that in drawing on the vocabulary of perception, Grice and Warnock were not just dutifully following Austin's lead; both were enthusiastic about the enterprise, and impressed by its results. Warnock recalls that at one point during this process Grice exclaimed, 'How clever language is!', and goes on himself to gloss this remark by explaining:  'We found that it made for us some remarkably ingenious distinctions and assimilations.'8 At this stage at least, Grice was committed to the close study of ordinary language as a productive philosophical enter-prise, and to Austin's notion of 'linguistic botanising' as a philosophical tool. He was very much a part of the social, as well as the philosophical, milieu of 1950s Oxford. He and Kathleen still lived on the Woodstock Road with their children Karen and Tim, born in 1944 and 1950. However, he took a full and active role in the life of St John's College which meant dining there frequently. Kathleen remembers the college as a distant, hierarchical institution. Women were permitted to enter college only once a year, when the porters and college servants arranged a Christmas party for the wives and children of Fellows.83 Quine's thumbnail sketch of his impressions of Grice in 1953, unflattering in the extreme, suggests that his concern for college proprieties was even stronger than his disregard for personal appearance:  Paul was shabby... His white hair was sparse and stringy, he was missing some teeth, and his clothes interested him little. He was vice-president of St John's college, and when I came as guest to a great annual feast there I was bewildered to encounter him impeccably decked out in white tie and tails, strictly fashion-plate.84  The vice-presidentship in question was a one-year appointment, and seems to have been largely social in nature, concerned with the organ-isation and running of college events. However, Grice's academic standing was also rising; in 1948 he was appointed to a University lectureship in addition to his college fellowship. This meant giving lectures open to all members of the university, in addition to the tutorial teaching duties at St. John's. Grice was also making a growing number of visitsaway from Oxford to give lectures and seminars. Most significantly, he began to make fairly frequent trips to America, where he was invited to speak at various universities. He was in fact one of the few to talk about ordinary language philosophy outside Oxford at that time, giving the lecture later published as 'Post-War Oxford Philosophy' at Wellesley College, Massachusetts in 1958.8 However, during this time he was gradually moving away from some of the strictures and dogmas of that approach. In many ways, Grice never fully abandoned ordinary language philosophy; his notes testify to the fact that he frequently returned to it as a method, in particular using 'linguistic botany' to get his thinking started on some topic. However, his philosophy began to diverge from it during this period in some highly significant ways that were to make themselves manifest in his best known work.G rice's growing unease with ordinary language philosophy brought him into conflict with J. L. Austin. Speaking long after leaving Oxford, he mentioned that he himself had always got on well with Austin, at least  'as far as you can get on with someone on the surface so uncosy'! But he clearly found that engaging with him in philosophical discussion could be a frustrating enterprise. Austin would adopt a stance on some particular aspect of language, often formed on the basis of a very small number of examples, and defend his position against a barrage of objections and counter-examples, however obvious. His tenacity in this would be impressive; Grice knew he himself had won an argument only on those occasions when Austin did not return to the topic the following week.  There is something in this reminiscent of the criticisms of obstinacy levelled against Grice himself as an undergraduate. However, it seems that there was more to Grice's frustration than simply encountering someone even less ready to back down in an argument than he was himself. He was becoming increasingly unhappy with the methodology supporting Austin's hasty hypothesis formation: the absolute reliance on particular linguistic examples. It is not that Grice lost faith in the importance of ordinary language or the value of close attention to differences in usage. However, along with some of Austin's harsher and more outspoken critics, Grice came to regard his approach as unfocused and even trivial. In his reminiscences of Oxford, he complained that Austin's ability to distinguish the philosophically interesting from the mundane was so poor that the Saturday morning Play Group sometimes ended up devoting an inordinate amount of time to irrelevant minu-tiae. They once spent five weeks trying to discern some philosophically interesting differences between 'very' and 'highly', considering why, forinstance, we say 'very unhappy' but not 'highly unhappy'. The result was 'total failure'. On another occasion, Austin proposed to launch a discussion of the philosophical concept of Pleasure with a consideration of such phrases as I have the pleasure to announce..!. Stuart Hampshire remarked to Grice that this was rather like meeting to discuss the nature of Faith, and proceeding to discuss the use of 'yours faithfully'.  In a similar vein, Grice was far from convinced that Austin's trusted method of 'going through the dictionary' had much to offer in the way of philosophical illumination. Speaking publicly in the 1970s, he commented that he once decided to put this method to the test by using it to investigate the vocabulary of emotions. He started at the beginning of a dictionary in search of words that could complement the verb 'to feel'. He gave up towards the end of the Bs, on discovering that the verb would tolerate 'Byzantine', and realising that 'the list would be enor-mous'? He never found any satisfactory way of narrowing such a list so as to include only philosophically interesting examples, and clearly believed that Austin had no such method either. Grice did not hesitate to explain his views to Austin, whose reply was typical of both his commitment to his methodology, and his intransigent response to opposi-tion. Grice reports himself as commenting that he, for one, 'didn't give a hoot what the dictionary says', to which Austin retorted, 'and that's where you make your big mistake. 3  The differences between Austin and Grice were not simply matters of personality or even of methodology. They reflected some important ways in which the two philosophers disagreed over what was appropriate in an account of language. Grice was increasingly convinced of the necessity for explanations that took the form of general theories, rather than the ad hoc descriptions that were Austin's trademark. He believed that Austin should be prepared to go further in drawing out the theoretical implications of his individual observations. Indeed, it has been suggested that Austin was suspicious of broad theories, generally supposing them to be over-ambitious and premature.* Grice also differed from Austin in his growing conviction that a distinction needed to be recognised between what words literally or conventionally mean, and what speakers may use them to mean on particular occasions. This conviction is not present in his earliest work. In 'Personal identity', for instance, he writes of 'words' and of 'the use of words' interchangeably.  However, the distinction is the subject of the long digression in his notes for the 'Categories' project with Strawson. It was to play an increasingly prominent part in his work, and to set him apart mostsharply from the orthodoxies of ordinary language philosophy. For Austin, as for Wittgenstein in his later work, use was the best, indeed the only, legitimate guide to meaning. The privilege afforded to use left no room for a distinction between this and literal meaning. Grice did not claim that actual use is unimportant. Indeed, in many of his writings he studied it with as much zeal as Austin. Rather, he saw it as a reliable guide just to what people often communicate, not necessarily to strict linguistic meaning.  Both the general interest in explanatory theories and the more particular focus on the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning are apparent in 'Meaning', a short but hugely influential article first published in 1957. It is tempting to trace the development of Grice's ideas through his work during the 1950s, but in fact this is ruled out by the article's history. Grice wrote the paper in practically its final form in 1948 for a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society but, as usual, he was hesitant to disseminate his ideas more widely. Almost a decade later, Peter Strawson was worried that the Oxford philosophers were not sufficiently represented in print. Unable to convince Grice to revise his paper and send it to a journal, he persuaded him to hand over the manuscript as it stood. Strawson and his wife Ann edited it and submitted it to the Philosophical Review. The paper therefore dates in fact from before Grice's collaborations with Warnock and with Strawson, from before Austin's development of speech act theory, and before even the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind.  'Meaning' offers a deceptively straightforward-looking account of meaning, apparently based on a common-sense belief about the use of language. In effect, Grice argues that what speakers mean depends on what they intend to communicate. However, his project is much more ambitious, and its implications more far-reaching, and also more prob-lematic, than this suggests. First, he introduces hearers, as well as speak-ers, into the account of meaning. The intention to communicate is not sufficient; this intention must be recognised by some audience for the communication to succeed. Hence the speaker must have an additional intention that the intention to communicate is recognised. More sig-nificantly, Grice proposes to broaden out his account to offer a theory of linguistic meaning itself. Linguistic meaning depends on speaker meaning, itself explained by the psychological phenomenon of inten-tion; conventional meaning is to be defined in terms of psychology.  In the opening paragraphs of 'Meaning', Grice does something Austin seems never to have attempted. He focuses the methodology of ordinary language philosophy on the concept of meaning itself, consider-ing and comparing some different ways in which the word 'mean' is used. His conclusion is that there are two different uses of 'mean' reflecting two different ways in which we generally conceive of meaning. The first use is exemplified by sentences such as 'those spots mean measles' and 'the recent budget means that we shall have a hard year'. The second includes examples such as 'those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full' and 'that remark, "Smith couldn't get on without his trouble and strife", meant that Smith found his wife indispensable'. Grice draws up a list of five defining differences between these sets of examples, differences themselves expressed in terms of linguistic relations. For instance, the first, but not the second set of examples entail the truth of what is meant. It is not possible to add 'but he hasn't got measles', but it is possible is to add 'but the bus isn't in fact full - the conductor has made a mistake'. Further, the examples in the first set do not convey the idea that anyone meant anything by the spots or by the budget. It is, however, possible to say that someone meant something by the rings on the bell (the conductor) and by the remark (the original speaker). And only in the second set of examples can the verb 'mean' be followed by a phrase in quotation marks. So 'those three rings on the bell mean "the bus is full"' is pos-sible, but not 'those spots mean "measles"'.  Grice characterises the difference between his two sets of uses for  'mean' as a difference between natural and non-natural meaning. The latter, which includes but is not exhausted by linguistic meaning, he abbreviates to 'meaningn'. In pursuing the question of what makes  'meaning' distinctive, he considers but rejects a 'causal' answer. He offers the following as a summary of this type of answer, paraphrasing and partly quoting C. L. Stevenson:  For x to meann something, x must have (roughly) a tendency to produce in an audience some attitude (cognitive or otherwise) and the tendency, in the case of a speaker, to be produced by that atti-tude, these tendencies being dependent on 'an elaborate process of conditioning attending the use of the sign in communication'.  This account makes the causal answer look very much like be-haviourism, with its notion of meaning as, in effect, the tendency for certain responses to be exhibited to certain stimuli. However, in the work from which Grice quotes, a book called Ethics and Language published in 1944, Stevenson is careful to distance himself from straightforwardly behaviouristic psychology. He argues that such an accountwould be too simplistic to explain a process as complex as linguistic meaning because it could refer only to overt, observable behaviour.  Rather, meaning is a psychologically complex phenomenon. The  'responses' produced will include cognitive responses, such as belief and emotion. Therefore, any account in terms of responsive action must be allowed 'to supplement an introspective analysis, not to discredit it'.  Stevenson, like Grice after him, draws attention to a distinction between two ways in which 'mean' is used, although he does so only in passing. He, too, defines one class of meaning as 'natural', a class he illustrates by suggesting that 'a reduced temperature may at times  "mean" convalescence'? He contrasts these uses of 'mean' with linguistic meaning which, he argues, is dependent on convention. The ways in which speakers use words on individual occasions may vary considerably, but conventional meaning must be seen as primary and relatively stable, underlying any of the more specific meanings in context. A word may be used in context to 'suggest' many things over and above what by convention it 'means'.  '. So, for instance, the sentence  'John is a remarkable athlete' may have a disposition to make people think that John is tall, 'but we should not ordinarily say that it "meant" anything about tallness, even though it "suggested" it'. The connection between 'athlete' and 'tall' is not one of linguistic rule, so tallness cannot be part of the meaning, however strongly it is suggested. What is suggested can sometimes be even more central, as in the cases of metaphors. Here, a sentence is 'not taken' in its literal meaning, but can be paraphrased using an 'interpretation' that 'descriptively means what the metaphorical sentence suggests'?  Grice's critique of the 'causal' theory of meaning includes a response to Stevenson's 'athlete' example. He argues that, in declaring 'tallness' to be suggested rather than meant, Stevenson is in effect pointing to the fact that it is possible to speak of 'nontall athletes': that there is no contradiction in terms here. This argument, Grice claims, is circular. He does not elaborate this point, but he presumably means that in establishing the acceptability of this way of speaking we need to refer to the conventions of linguistic behaviour, yet it is these very conventions we are seeking to establish. Grice adds that, on Stevenson's account, it would be difficult to exclude forms of behaviour we would not normally want to regard as communicative at all. It may well be the case that many people, seeing someone putting on a tailcoat, would form the belief that that person is about to go to a dance, and that the belief would arise because that is conventional behaviour in such circum-stances. But it could hardly be correct to conclude that putting on a tail-coat means n that one is about to go to a dance. To qualify by stating that the conventions invoked must be communicative simply introduces another circle: 'We might just as well say "X has meaning. if it is used in communication", which, though true, is not helpful.'o As a solution to the problems inherent in the notion of conventional behaviour, Grice introduces intention, doing so abruptly and without much elaboration. However, the concept would probably not have been much of a surprise to his original audience in 1948, having had a long pedigree in Oxford philosophy. Grice later commented that his interest in intention was inspired in part by G. F. Stout's 'Voluntary action' Stout was a previous editor of Mind, and his article was published there in 1896. In it he argues that if voluntary action is to be distinguished from involuntary action in terms of 'volition', it is necessary to offer a unique account of volition, distinguishing it from will or desire. He suggests that in the case of volition, but not of simple desire, there is necessarily 'a certain kind of judgement or belief', namely that 'so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the attainment of the desired end'." Indeed, if there is any doubt about the outcome of the volition, expressed in a conditional statement, this must refer to circumstances outside our control. This explains the difference between willing something and merely wishing for it. However, there is another crucial distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. In the case of the former, the action takes place precisely because of the relevant belief; a voluntary action happens because we judge that we will do it. An involuntary action may be one we judge is going to take place, but only because other factors have already determined this.  Further light is shed on Grice's interest in intention by a paper called  'Disposition and intention' he circulated among his colleagues just a few years after he had first written 'Meaning'. The paper was never pub-lished, and has survived only in manuscript, accompanied by a number of written responses in different hands. Reading these, it is not hard to imagine how a writer who tended towards perfectionism and self-doubt could be further dissuaded from publication by the results of canvassing opinion. Oxford criticism might be couched in genteel terms, but it could be harsh. One commentary begins: 'What it comes to, I think, is this; it seems to me that there is something wrong with the way Grice  goes to work....  ^ In 'Dispositions and intentions', Grice declares that  his purpose is to consider the best analysis of 'psychological concepts', concepts generally expressed in statements beginning with phrases such as 'I like.., 'I want..!, I expect... Such statements present analytical problems because they seem to refer to experience that is essen-tially private and unverifiable. Grice proposes to compare two common approaches to this problem. One he labels the 'dispositional' account, whereby the relevant concept is seen as a disposition to act in certain ways in certain hypothetical situations. Thus a statement of 'I like X' could be seen as specifying that the subject would act in certain ways in the interests of X, should the situation arise. The alternative is to consider such statements as describing 'special episodes', in other words to concede that they can be understood as descriptive only of private sensations, directed simply at the individual concept in question. These sensations take the form of special and highly specific psychological entities, such as liking-feelings'. Grice is dismissive of a third pos-sibility, an explanation from behaviourism describing psychological concepts purely in terms of observable responses. He rejects such approaches as 'silly'.  Grice argues that although the dispositional account runs into difficulty in certain cases, such as 'I want..!, 'I expect..' and, signifi-cantly, T intend.., it is not appropriate simply to switch to the 'special episode' account. The problems for the dispositional account are connected to their analysis in terms of hypotheticals. It would seem reasonable in the case of any genuine hypothetical to ask 'how do you know?' or 'what are your grounds for saying that?'. But in the case of the psychological concepts mentioned above, no such evidence can generally be offered, or reasonably expected. Speakers cannot be expected to be judging such concepts from observation, not even from a special vantage point; they can only be judging from personal ex-perience. In Grice's metaphor, 'I am not in the audience, not even in the front row of the stalls, I am on the stage.'3 The 'special episode' account does not fare much better. Every case of wanting, for instance, must create a separate psychological episode. The system of explanation quickly becomes unwieldy; wanting an apple, for instance, must be a discrete phenomenon, different from wanting an orange or a pear or a banana.  The third alternative, any version of a behaviourist account, is simply doomed to failure in cases such as 'want'. Grice singles Gilbert Ryle out for criticism. Ryle's account of psychological concepts is at best not clearly distinguished from behaviourism because of its ambiguity over whether the evidential counterparts of dispositions can be private or must always be observable by other people. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle describes certain statements concerned with psychological concepts as acts characteristic of certain moods. This is in keeping with his refusal to distinguish between physical and mental entities or activities. Whenwe feel bored, we are likely to utter 'I feel bored' in just the same way as we are likely to yawn. We do not observe our own mood and then offer an account of it; we simply act in accordance with it. Thus the statement is not produced as a result of assessing the evidence, but may itself form part of that relevant evidence, even to the speaker. 'So the bored man finds out he is bored, if he does find this out, by finding that among other things he glumly says to others and to himself "I feel bored" and "How bored I feel" '14 In response to such statements, we may want to ask 'sincere or shammed?', but not 'true or false?'. This is because statements such as 'I feel bored', ' I want..!' or 'I hope ..! act not as descriptive statements about ourselves but as 'avowals': unreflective utterances that may be treated as pieces of behaviour indicative of our frame of mind. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions, Ryle argues that the grammatical form of such sentences 'makes it tempting to misconstrue [them] as self-descriptions'. 15 In fact they are simply things said in the relevant frames of mind. However, unlike other forms of behaviour, speech is produced to be interpreted.  Grice argues that the difference between speech and other forms of behaviour is much greater than Ryle allows. In particular, while it is possible to 'sham' behaviour such as yawning without being false, a  'shammed' statement of 'I feel bored' will be simply false. A statement of boredom is not of the same order as a yawn when it comes to offering information precisely because, as Ryle acknowledges, it is uttered voluntarily and deliberately. Grice adds another possible indicator of boredom into the comparison. When listening to a political speech, we might give an indication that we feel bored by saying 'I feel bored', by yawning, or indeed by making a remark such as 'there is a good play coming on next week'. This last remark is also voluntary and deliber-ate, but it does not offer anything like the same strength of evidence of our state of boredom as the alleged 'avowal', precisely because it is not directly concerned with our state of mind. Only 'I am bored' is a way of telling someone that you are bored. Furthermore, although it might be possible to some extent to sustain a theory of avowals or other behav-iour as offering information about the state of mind of others, it will hardly do for one's own state of mind. A man does not need to wait to observe himself heading for the plate of fruit on the table before he is a position to know that he wants pineapple.  Grice's suggested solution to the apparent failure of the 'dispositional' and the 'special event' accounts, together with the unsustainability of a behaviourist approach, rests on intention. When analysing manyverbs of psychological attitude used to refer to someone else, we can produce a straightforward hypothetical, saying 'if so and so were the case he would behave in such and such a way'. However, the same does not seem to be the case when talking about oneself. 'If so and so were the case I would behave in such and such a way' cannot really be understood as a statement of hypothetical fact, but as a statement of hypothetical intention, just so long as the behaviour in question can be seen as voluntary. Further, it is simply not possible to say 'I am not sure whether I intend.', in the way it is possible to doubt other psychological states. It might be possible to utter such a sentence meaning-fully, but only to express indecision over the act in question, as when someone replies to the question 'Do you intend... ?' by saying 'I'm not sure'  '. It cannot mean that the speaker does not know whether he or she  is in a psychological state of intending or not.  Grice argues that a correct analysis of intention can form an important basis for the analysis of a number of the relevant psychological con-cepts. He offers a twofold definition of statements of intention, which relies on dispositional evidence without divorcing itself completely from the privileged status of introspective knowledge. The first crite-rion, familiar from Stout's original paper, is that the speaker's freedom from doubt that the intended action will take place is not dependent on any empirical evidence. Grice's second stipulation is that the speaker must be prepared to take the necessary steps to bring about the fulfil-ment of the intention. There would be something decidedly odd about stating seriously, 'X intends to go abroad next month, but wouldn't take any preliminary steps which are essential for this purpose'. Grice's analysis of statements of intention ends his unpublished paper rather abruptly, without returning to the other psychological verbs discussed at the outset. Having established that a doubt over one's own intention is something of an absurdity, he offers a characteristically tantalis-ing suggestion that 'we may hope that this may help to explain the absurdity of analogous expressions mentioning some other psychological concepts, though I wouldn't for a moment claim that it will help to explain all such absurdities.' Although his analysis of psychological concepts is here incomplete, he has established two significant com-mitments. First, he has justified the inclusion of psychological concepts in analyses; they do not need to be 'translated' away into behavioural tendencies or observable phenomena. Second, he has established the concept of intention as primary; it offers an illustration of how a psychological concept may be described, and is also in itself implicit in the analysis of other such concepts.Grice was not the only Oxford philosopher to revisit the topic of intention in the mid-twentieth century. In 1958, Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart published 'Decision, intention and certainty'. This echoes Grice's earlier, unpublished paper in arguing that there is a type of certainty about future actions, independent of any empirical evidence, that is characteristic of intention. They distinguish between a 'prediction' of future action and a 'decision' about it. A statement of the first is based on considering evidence, but a statement of the second on considering reason, even if this is not done consciously. People who say 'I intend to do X' may reasonably be taken to be committed to the belief that they will try to do X, and will succeed in doing X unless prevented by forces outside their control. Hampshire and Hart's claims are similar to those of Stout, but there are interesting differences in approach and style, revealing of the distance between the philosophical methods characteristic of their times. Stout is representative of an older style of Oxford philosophy, complete with sweeping generalisations and moralistic musings. In discussing the tendency of voluntary determination to endure over time and against obstacles, he comments that: 'If we are weak and vacillating, no one will depend on us; we shall be viewed with a kind of contempt. Mere vanity may go far to give fixity to the will.16 After logical positivism, and after Austin's insistence on close attention to the testimony of ordinary language, such unempirical excesses would not have been tolerated. Hampshire and Hart stick to more sober reflections on the language of intention and certainty. They come very close to one of Austin's observations in 'A plea for excuses' when they comment that: 'If I am telling you simply what someone did, e.g. took off his hat or sat down, it would normally be redundant, and hence mis-leading, though not false, to say that he sat down intentionally."' They describe the adverb 'intentionally' as usually used to rule out the suggestion that the action was in some way performed by accident or mistake. Also like Austin, they do not dwell on the possible consequences of the inclusion of the 'redundant' material.  An interest in the psychological concept of intention, and a reaction against the behviouristic tendencies he identified in work by Stevenson and by Ryle, were not the only sources of inspiration for Grice's  'Meaning'. In the following brief paragraph from that article, he comments on theories of signs:  The question about the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is, I think, what people are getting at when they display an interest in a distinction between 'natural' and 'conventional' signs.But I think my formulation is better. For some things which can mean. something are not signs (e.g. words are not), and some are not conventional in any ordinary sense (e.g. certain gestures); while some things which mean naturally are not signs of what they mean (cf. the recent budget example). 18  The mention of 'people' is not backed up by any specific references, but the unpublished papers Grice kept throughout his life include a series of lectures notes from Oxford in which he presents and discusses the  'theory of signs' put forward in the nineteenth century by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. These suggest that Grice's account of meaning developed in part from his reaction to Peirce, whose general approach would have appealed to him. Peirce was anti-sceptical, committed to describing a system of signs elaborate enough to account for the classification of the complex world around us, a world independent of our perceptions of it, and available for analysis by means of those perceptions. His theory of signs was therefore based on a notion of categories as the building blocks of knowledge; signs explain the ways we represent the world to ourselves and others in thought and in language.  In a paper from 1867, Peirce reminds his readers 'that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it'l' Conceptions, and the signs we use to identify them, comprise our understanding of the world. Signs act by representing objects to the understanding of receivers, but there are a number of different ways in which this may take place. There are some representations  'whose relation to their object is a mere community of some quality, and these representations may be termed likenesses', such as for example the relationship between a portrait and a person. The relations of other representations to their object 'consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed indices or signs'; a weathercock represents the direction of the wind in this way. In the third case, there are no such factual links, merely conventional ones. Here the relation of representation to object 'is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed symbols'; such is the relationship between word and object.2º Peirce later extended the general term 'sign' to cover all these cases, and used the specific terms icon, index and symbol for his three classes of representation.  In his lectures and notes on 'Peirce's general theory of signs', Grice analyses Peirce's use of the term 'sign', and proposes to equate it witha general understanding of 'means'. His chief argument in favour of this equation is that Peirce is not using 'sign' in anything recognisable as its everyday or ordinary sense. In a piece of textbook ordinary language philosophy, he argues that 'in general the use (unannounced) of technical or crypto-technical terms leads to nothing but trouble, obscuring proper questions and raising improper ones'.?' Restating Peirce's claims about 'signs' in terms of 'means' draws attention to shared features of a range of items commonly referred to as having 'meaning', as well as highlighting some important differences between Peirce's categories of  'index' and 'symbol'. Grice does not seem to have anything to say about Peirce's 'icons'.  , perhaps because this type of sign is least amenable to  being re-expressed in terms of meaning.  Using his translation of 'is a sign of' into 'means', Grice reconsiders Peirce's own example of an index. He observes that the sentence 'the position of the weathercock meant that the wind was NE' entails, first, that the wind was indeed NE; and second, that a causal connection holds between the wind and weathercock. This feature, he notes, seems to be restricted to the word 'means'. You can say 'the position of the weathercock was an indication that the wind was NE, but it was actually SE'; 'was an indication that' is not a satisfactory synonym of 'means' because it does not entail the truth of what follows. The causal connection also offers an interesting point of comparison to different ways in which 'mean' is used. Grice draws on an example that also appears in 'Meaning' when he suggests a conversation at a bus stop as the bus goes. The comment 'Those three rings of the bell meant that the bus was full' could legitimately be followed by a query of 'was it full?'.  At this early stage in the development of his account of meaning, Grice was obviously troubled by the relationship between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and that between the meaning words have by convention and the full import they may convey in particular contexts. There is no fully developed account of these issues in the lec-tures, but there are a few rough notes suggesting that he was aware of the need to identify some differences between 'timeless' meaning and speaker meaning. At one point he notes to himself that the following questions will need answers: 'what is the nature of the distinction between utterances with "conventional" meaningn and those with non-conventional?' and 'nature of distinction between language and use language? (sic)'. Elsewhere, he ponders the difference between 'what a sentence means (in general; timeless means; if you like the meaning of (type) sentence)' and 'what I commit myself to by the use of a sentence (if you like, connect this with token sentence)'. It is not clear fromthis whether he is seeing 'non-conventional' aspects of meaning as separate from, or coterminous with, those aspects of meaning arising from particular uses in context. However, the first two questions suggest that  'non-conventional' and 'use' are at least potentially separate issues.  When Grice collected his thoughts on meaning into the form in which they were eventually published, he produced a definition dependent on a complex of intentions. In the case of straightforwardly informative or descriptive statements, meaning is to be defined in terms of a speaker's intention to produce certain beliefs in a hearer. It is also necessary that the speaker further intends that the hearer recognise this informative intention and that this recognition is itself the cause of the hearer's belief. This definition excludes from meaningn a case where 'I show Mr X a photograph of Mr Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs X', but includes the related but crucially different case where 'I draw a picture of Mr Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr X'.22 In the former case, the effect would be produced in Mr X whether or not he paid any attention to the intention behind the behaviour. In the second example the recognition of this intention is crucial, and precisely this case would normally be seen as a piece of communication. A similar distinction can be made when the definition is extended to include communication intended to influence the action of others. A policeman who stops a car by standing in its way will produce his desired effect whether or not the motorist notices his intention. A policeman who stops a car by waving is relying on the motorist recognising the wave as intended to make him stop. The latter, but not the former, is an example of meaningnn. Avoiding the problem he identified in Stevenson's work, that of being unable to offer a full account of partic-ular, context-bound uses, Grice proposes to describe meaning in relation to a speaker and a particular occasion in the first place, and the meaningn of words and phrases as secondary, and derived from this.  He tentatively suggests that 'x means. that so-and-so' might be equated with some statement 'about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x'.23  In the concluding paragraphs of his article, Grice alludes briefly to two further aspects of meaning that draw on the questions he was posing himself in his notes and that were to prove central to his later work. First, although he is dealing primarily with specific instances of meanings on particular occasions, his account of meaning is not intended to cover the total significance potentially associated with the use of an expression. He draws a distinction between the 'primary' intention of an utterance, relevant to its meaning, and any furtherintentions: 'If (say) I intend to get a man to do something by giving him some information, it cannot be regarded as relevant to the mean-ingen of my utterance to describe what I intend him to do.2 Even though conventional meaning is to follow from intention, Grice hints that some types of intention, possibly highly relevant to how an utterance is received, cannot properly be described as part of the meaningN of that utterance. In his published paper, Grice is noncommittal about the precise number of distinctions between 'levels' of significance needed, and his rough notes suggest that this was an area in which he was unsure. Second, the hearer may sometimes look to specific context to determine the precise intention behind an utterance; he may con-sider, for instance, which of two possible interpretations would be the most relevant to what has gone before, or would most obviously fit the speaker's purpose. Grice notes that such criteria are not confined to linguistic examples:  Context is a criterion in settling the question of why a man who has just put a cigarette in his mouth has put his hand in his pocket; relevance to an obvious end is a criterion in settling why a man is running away from a bull. 25  Grice's suggestion that conventional meaning can be defined in terms of intentions has been widely praised. The philosopher Jonathan Bennett suggests that the idea of meaning as a kind of intending was commonplace, but that 'Grice's achievement was to discover a defensible version of it.26 Grice's postgraduate student and later colleague Stephen Schiffer went further, describing 'Meaning' as 'the only published attempt ever made by a philosopher or anyone else to say precisely and completely what it is for someone to mean something'27 However, commentators were not slow to point out the problems they saw as inherent in such an account. Responses to 'Meaning' have been numerous, and ranged over more than 40 years, but some raising the most fundamental objections were from Oxford in the years immediately following its publication. Austin did not produce a formal response, and Grice has suggested that they never even discussed it informally. This, he suggests, was not at all unusual. Austin rarely discussed with Grice, or with other colleagues, views that had become established through publication. He preferred his conversations to be about new directions and new channels of thought. 28  To those Oxford philosophers who did discuss 'Meaning' in print, a comparison with Austin's account of 'speech acts' was almost inevitable.Austin's version of speaker meaning was developed during the 1940s and 1950s. Various versions of it appeared in lectures and articles during this period, but the most complete account was presented when Austin was invited to deliver the prestigious William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. An edited and expanded version of his notes from these was published posthumously as How to do Things with Words. Austin's ideas changed and developed over the course of time, and even during the lectures themselves, but some basic fundamental principles can be iden-tified. These drew on his notion of the 'descriptive fallacy', the idea that linguistic study is ill served by the traditional philosopher's focus on language as a tool for making statements capable of being judged to be either true or false. Throughout the development of speech act theory, Austin's assumptions were very different from Grice's working hypothesis in 'Meaning' that language is primarily used to make informative, descriptive statements. For Austin, making statements of fact was only one, and not a particularly significant one, of the many different things people do with words. He proposed to analyse the range of functions language can be used to perform.  Initially, Austin concentrates on explicit 'performatives' , statements  that appear to describe but in fact bring about some state of affairs, usually a social fact or interpersonal relationship. He considers ritualised performatives, which require a very particular set of circumstances to be successful, such as 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' (during the appropriate ceremony), 'I do' (at the relevant point in a marriage service) or 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' (in a will). He then expands his field to include more every day examples, such as 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'  ', and 'I promise to...'. Charac-  teristically, Austin proposes 'going through the dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit' in search of performative verbs.2 Later, however, he realises that even this could not give an exhaustive list of what people do with words. People do things with all sorts of different types of utterances. Someone who utters, 'Can you pass the salt?' may well succeed in making a request by means of apparently asking a question.  In response to his observations about the possible differences between the apparent form of an utterance and its actual function, Austin proposes to divide the analysis of meaning into three levels, or three separate acts performed in the course of a single utterance. The 'locutionary act' is determined by the actual form of words uttered, established by their sense and reference: '"meaning" in the traditional sense' sense'.3° At the level of 'illocutionary act', the notion of force becomes relevant. It isdetermined by the matter of how the locution in question is being used, of what is being done in saying what is said. This can be seen as at least in part dependent on the individual intentions of the speaker, but these in turn depend on, and follow from, certain conventions of language use. So, in the example above, we can understand that the speaker intends to request that the hearer pass the salt, but only because there are conventions of use determining that questions of ability can be used with this force. The illocutionary act is not a simple consequence of the locutionary, but is concerned with conventions 'as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance'. 31 Finally, and separately, it is necessary to consider the effect of the utterance. Austin is here perhaps making a concession to the 'causal' theories of meaning Grice considered but dismissed. Austin refers to the effect achieved by the utterance, but unlike Stevenson he sees this as just one component of meaning, not a sufficient definition. The 'per-locutionary act' is defined by this effect, which may coincide with what the speaker intended to bring about, but need not. The perlocutionary act, then, is not a matter of convention, and cannot be determined simply with reference to the words uttered.  It is no surprise that Grice's 'Meaning' should have been discussed in the light of Austin's speech act theory. The two seem in many ways to cover similar ground, in that both oppose much of the traditional philosophical literature on meaning by insisting on the roles of context and of speaker intention. In fact, some commentators have been tempted to read Grice's paper as an implicit response, or challenge, to speech act theory. As Grice himself has pointed out, there is no such direct link.  'Meaning' existed in almost its finished state before the ideas in How to do Things with Words were made public, or even in some cases devel-oped. As he became aware of Austin's ideas, Grice did recognise some connections to his own themes and preoccupations, but continued to find his own treatment of them more compelling. In particular, he remained convinced that an account of meaning needed to give prominence to psychological notions, and was unhappy with what he saw as Austin's excessive dependence on conventions; Austin was 'using the obscure to explain the obscure' 32 From this, it would seem that his main objection to speech act theory was that it did not offer much explanation of meaning. For Grice, the observable facts of the conventions of use are in need of explanation, and this is best done with reference to individual instances of intention. Austin, on the other hand, was seeking to explain these conventions simply by drawing attention to another, more complex level of conventions.Peter Strawson picks up on exactly this difference between Grice and Austin when he reflects on 'Meaning' in his 1964 article 'Intention and convention in speech acts'.  '. His chief concern is the validity of Austin's  notion of illocutionary act, based as it is on conventions, both the conventions of the language that define the locutionary act, and the further conventions of use that mediate between this and illocutionary force.  However, Strawson argues, there are many cases where the difference between locutionary and illocutionary act cannot be explained simply with reference to conventions. In certain circumstances, to say 'the ice over there is very thin' may well have the force of a warning, but there is no particular convention of language use specifying this. Similarly, the difference between an order and an entreaty may depend not on any identifiable convention, but on a range of factors concerned with the speaker's state of mind and consequent presentation of the utter-ance. Strawson looks to Grice's notion of non-natural meaning to explain this additional, non-conventional set of factors. His paraphrase of Grice's account, expressed in terms of three separate intentions, was to prove instructive to future commentators:  § non-naturally means something by an utterance x if S intends (i) to produce by uttering x a certain response (r) in an audience A and intends (iz) that A shall recognise S's intention (i) and intends (i3) that this recognition on the part of A of S's intention (i) shall function as A's reason, or part of his reason, for his response (r).33  On Strawson's interpretation, one of the defining intentions is focused on Grice's indication that the speaker provides the hearer with a 'reason' to think or act in a certain way. He proposes to modify Grice's account before enlisting it to explain the notion of illocutionary force, because of certain counter-examples to which it is subject as it stands. It is possible to envisage contexts in which S utters x with exactly the three intentions described above, but in which it does not seem appropriate to say that S was trying to communicate with A. Strawson does not illustrate this problem with a specific example, but he suggests a schematic outline. S may intend to get A to believe something, fulfilling (i). S may arrange fake evidence, or grounds for this belief, such that A can see the evidence, and indeed such that A can see S fabricating it. S knows that A will be perfectly aware that the evidence is faked, but assumes that A will not realise that S has this awareness. The intention behind this is for A to have the relevant belief precisely because he recognises that S intends him to have this belief; this is S's (i2). Further, it is S's intentionthat the recognition of (i) will be the reason why A acquires the belief; indeed, A will have no other reason to form this belief, knowing that the evidence for it is faked. This fulfils (i3). In effect, an intentional account of meaning would have to include an extra layer of intention, because for S to be telling something to, or communicating with A, S must be taken to intend A to recognise the intention to make A recog-nise the intention to produce the relevant belief in A. In other words,  § must have a further intention (4) that A should recognise intention (i2). If S's intention (i), and hence intention (i2) is fulfilled, then A may be said to have understood the utterance, a definition Strawson links to Austin's notion of 'uptake' !, and hence to the successful accomplishment  of illocutionary force. Strawson argues that the complex intention (i4) is the necessary defining characteristic of saying something with a certain illocutionary force. He hints that his additional layer of intention may not in fact prove sufficient, and that 'the way seems open to a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognised' 34 Grice's definition of meaning as determined entirely by speaker intention is at odds with, or according to Strawson can be complementary to, Austin's reliance on convention. But it also opposes him to the notion, common in philosophy and later in linguistics, that meaning is determined by the rules of the language in question, defined independently of any particular occasion of utterance. Austin does allow some space to this type of meaning, specifying that the usual sense and reference of the words uttered constitute the locutionary act. He does not, however, develop this notion, or explain its relationship to his more central concern with speaker meaning. Strawson seems to downplay the importance of linguistic meaning for  Austin when he places him on the same general side as Grice in what he describes elsewhere as the 'Homeric struggle' between 'the theorists of communication-intention and the theorists of formal semantics' 35 Unlike Austin, Grice's more extreme arguments that meaning is to be explained entirely in terms of 'communication-intention' do not presuppose any notion of semantic meaning. This is an aspect of Grice's theory on which other commentators, such as John Searle, have focused.  Searle was a student at Oxford during the 1950s, where he was taught by both Austin and Strawson. He completed a doctoral dissertation on sense and reference in 1959 before returning to his native America. Well versed in both the traditional philosophy of meaning and Austin's concentration on communication, he worked on the theory of speech acts, publishing a book on the subject in 1969 in which he classifies possible illocutionary acts into a restricted number of general categories. Healso introduces the notion of indirect speech acts, in which one illocu-tionary act is performed by means of the apparent performance of a different illocutionary act. Austin's example 'Can you pass the salt?' succeeds as a request both because the apparent act, that of asking for information about the hearer's ability, is not appropriate in the context, and because rules of language use specify that this form of words can be used to make a request. For Searle, language is essentially a rule-governed form of behaviour. It is centred on the speech act, the basic unit of communication, but its rules include the specific semantic properties of its words and phrases.  This particular point gives rise to Searle's objections to Grice's total reliance on individual speaker intention in explaining meaning. Searle does allow for intentions in his account; indeed he is interested in basing it on just such psychological concepts and proposes to develop Grice's account in order to do so. In a later discussion he comments that his analysis in Speech Acts 'was inspired by Grice's work on meaning' 36 However, like Austin before him, he sees semantic rules as underlying the range of intentions with which a speaker can appropriately produce any particular utterance. Searle is much more explicit than Austin in specifying that linguistic rules come first and restrict intentional possi-bility. Unlike Grice, he therefore singles out linguistic acts as separate from general communication; in the case of language, meaning exists independent of intention, or of occasion of use. Searle illustrates this with his own counter-example to Grice. An American soldier is captured by Italian troops in the Second World War. Neither the soldier nor his captors speak German, and the soldier speaks no Italian. The soldier wishes to make the Italian troops believe that he is German. He utters the only German sentence he knows, which happens to be 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', a line of poetry remembered from childhood that translates as 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. He hopes that his captors will guess that he must be saying 'I am a German soldier'. The soldier intends to get his captors to believe he is a German soldier. He intends that they should recognise his intention to get them to believe this, and that this recognition should serve as their reason for entertaining that belief. All the circumstances are in place for a case of Grice's meaningwn. Yet, Searle argues, it would surely be unreasonable to maintain that when the soldier says 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', he actually non-naturally means 'I am a German soldier'. The rules of German do not allow this; the words mean 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. Searle concludes that Grice's account is inadequate as itstands because Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention. 37  Like Strawson, Searle proposes to amend Grice's intentional account in the light of his own counter-example. In effect, he argues that the notion of intention must be expanded to include convention. When speakers use words literally, part of their intention is that hearers recog-nise the communicative intention precisely because of the pre-existing rules for using the words chosen. Searle attempts to balance the twin effects of intention and convention in his account of meaning. The result is rather further removed from Grice than Searle acknowledges when he suggests that he is offering an 'amendment'. It returns to the traditional idea of conventional, or linguistic, meaning as the basic location of meaning on which intention-based speaker meaning is dependent.38 The magnitude of the consequences of Searle's attempt to introduce conventions into an intentional account is perhaps illustrative of the gulf between semantic and psychological approaches to meaning. It also highlights the scale of Grice's undertaking in producing an account of meaning relying entirely on the latter.  Stephen Schiffer was a graduate student in the 1960s when, as he has since described, he was 'much taken with Grice's program'39 He was impressed by what he saw as Grice's reduction of the semantic to the psychological, but also believed he had identified the inadequacies of this particular account of speaker meaning. In the 1972 book in which he attempted to develop and improve on Grice's account, he notes that it is not possible to claim priority for conventional meaning and at the same time define meaning in terms of intention. To maintain that speaker meaning, 'what S meant by x',  ', is primary, but also that speaker  meaning could be in any way dependent on the meaning of x would be simply circular. Schiffer does not see the exclusive concentration on intention as necessarily problematic, or at least not for this reason: 'To say this does not commit Grice to holding that one can say whatever one likes and mean thereby whatever one pleases to mean. One must utter x with the relevant intentions, and not any value of 'x' will be appropriate to this end: I could not in any ordinary circumstances request you to pass the salt by uttering "the flamingoes are flying south early this year".  '40 Schiffer's own response is that conventional meaning  does exist, but is secondary to intentional meaning, because it is built up in a speech community over time, resultant on the fulfilling of certain communicative intentions.  The problems Schiffer identifies for Grice are not problems with the notion that meaning is best given a psychological rather than a seman-tic definition, an assumption with which he agrees. Rather, Schiffer questions the adequacy of intention as the relevant psychological state.  He echoes Strawson's schematic counter-example to argue that it can be possible for all the intentions Grice defines to be in place, but for no act of communication to be achieved. Strawson's example indicated that another layer of intention (Strawson's i) must be added to the defini-tion. Schiffer argues explicitly for the consequence Strawson only sug-gested, namely that the need for regressive intentions will in fact prove to be infinite. He constructs a series of more and more elaborate counter-examples to show that the levels of intention necessary fully to define meaning can never be exhausted. In the first such example, § produces a cacophonous rendition of 'Moon Over Miami' with the intention of driving A out of the room. S's intention is that A will leave the room not just because A cannot stand the noise, but because A recognises that Sis trying to get rid of A. Further, S intends that A recognise the intention that A recognise the intention to get A to leave the room, because S wishes A to be aware of S's disdain. 'In other words'  ', Schiffer explains,  'while A is intended to think that S intends to get rid of A by means of the repulsive singing, A is really intended to have as his reason for leaving the fact that S wants him to leave.'41 In order to rule out the unacceptable suggestion that by singing 'Moon Over Miami' S meant that A was to leave the room, Schiffer proposes another level of intention. Further, more complex, examples call for further such layers. For Schiffer, the infinitely regressive series of intentions that intentions be recognised that this causes makes for an unacceptable definition of meaning.  For Schiffer the best hope for a psychological account of meaning lies in an appeal to a special type of knowledge. This type of knowledge occurs when two people are in the following relation to a piece of infor-mation, or to a proposition p. S and A both know that p; S knows that A knows that p; A knows that S knows that p; A knows that S knows that A knows that p; S knows that A knows that S knows that p; and so on without limit. Such a pattern also leads to an infinite regress but, Schiffer argues, a harmless one. It is just the sort of situation we do in fact find in everyday life, as when S and A are sitting facing each other with a candle in between. Schiffer coins the phrase 'mutual knowledge* for the recursive set of knowing he describes. S and A mutually know* that there is a candle on the table. Once Grice's account of meaning is adapted to refer to mutual knowledge*, the apparent counter-examples are all ruled inadmissible, and therefore no longer pose a problem. The intentions S has in producing an utterance must be 'mutual known* by S and A for a true instance of meaning to take place. Mutual knowl-edge* with its infinite regress, is missing in each of the counter-examples.  'Meaning' might appear to be offering a definition of the concept of meaning by proposing to substitute the concept of intention: in the vein of the logical positivists to be 'translating' problematic sentences into those that do not contain the problem term. This was certainly Schiffer's interpretation when he described Grice's account as 'reduc-tionist'. However, more recent commentators have been keen to defend Grice against this interpretation. For instance, Giovanna Cosenza has suggested that the analysis would be reductionist 'only if Grice had seriously considered speakers' intentions and psychological states as more fundamental, more basic, either epistemologically or metaphysically, than all the concepts related to linguistic meaning', and claimed that Grice did not hold this view.4 Anita Avramides has also argued that Grice's account of meaning need not be seen as reductionist. *3  Grice was certainly distancing himself from those accounts of what he would call 'non-natural meaning' in which the notion of convention was primary. However, he was somewhat tentative about the precise relation between the two central concepts; his belief that convention could be entirely subsumed within an intentional account is expressed more as a hope than as a conviction. He seems, further, to have been troubled by the exact relationships between the different messages potentially conveyed by a single utterance. Even if the definition of convention is to be dependent on intention, some messages are more closely or more obviously related to conventional meaning than others. He as yet had no formal account of how the 'full significance' of an utterance might be derived or calculated. Nor had he yet drawn a clear distinction between messages conveyed by the words uttered and messages conveyed by the very act of utterance. This is a distinction Schiffer describes by differentiating between 'S meant something by (or in) producing (or doing) x' and 'S meant something by x'.* A very similar point is made by Paul Ziff in his 1967 response to 'Meaning'.  Ziff is decidedly dismissive of Grice's 'ingenious intricate discussion' of meaning and the 'fog' to which it gives rise.* He argues that the meanings of words and phrases, and indeed the lack of meaning of nonsense  'words'  , are quite independent of any individual's intention. Like Schiffer, he argues that 'Grice seems to have conflated and confused "A meant something by uttering x" ... with the quite different "A meant  something by X"146  The responses and criticisms of his peers were to feed into Grice's own thinking about meaning over the following years. His published outputduring the 1950s was restricted to 'In defence of a dogma' and  'Meaning', hardly an impressive record even by the standards of the time. Peter Strawson was responsible for seeing both these papers into print, while those he left alone fell victim to Grice's perfectionism.  Some, like 'Intentions and dispositions' were never published, while others waited in manuscript for 30 or more years. Of these, 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes' and 'Common sense and scepticism' indicate a development in Grice's thinking on the need to distinguish between what our words literally mean and what we mean by using those words. They also suggest something of Grice's ambivalence towards the place of conventional meaning. Like much of his work, these papers developed from his teaching: the former from a lecture delivered in 1950 and the latter from joint classes with A. D. Woozley at the same time or even earlier.  Grice's project in these papers was a typically 'ordinary language' enterprise: the desire to tackle a familiar philosophical problem by means of a rigorous examination of the terms characteristically employed to discuss it. The problem in question was how to address scepticism. In response to G. E. Moore's 'defence from common sense' the American philosopher Norman Malcolm had suggested that Moore was in effect approaching the problem via an appeal to ordinary lan-guage, although apparently without knowing it. We use expressions to refer to and to describe material objects, and we do so in a 'standard' or 'ordinary' way. To claim, as some philosophers have done, that there are no material objects, is therefore to 'go against ordinary language'. 47 In effect, such philosophers are claiming that some uses of ordinary language are self-contradictory, or always incorrect, an inadmissible claim because 'ordinary language is correct language'. 48 Grice challenges Malcolm's interpretation of Moore. Malcolm draws an unwarranted polarity between 'ordinary' and 'self-contradictory' in language use, he suggests. The two properties need not be incompatible; people do routinely say things that are literally self-contradictory or absurd. Further-more, not every meaningful sentence would actually find a use in ordinary language. In 'Common sense and scepticism', he offers a striking example of what he means. 'It would no doubt be possible to fill in the gaps in "The — archbishop fell down the — stairs and bumped  —- like —," with such a combination of indecencies and blasphemies that no one would ever use such an expression', but we would not therefore want to treat the expression as self-contradictory. 4 In 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes', he suggests that it is often necessary to acknowledge a difference between 'what a given expression means (ingeneral)' and 'what a particular speaker means, or meant, by that expression on a particular occasion. Figurative or ironic utterances, for instance, involve 'special' uses of language.  As a general definition, 'what a particular speaker means by a particular utterance (of a statement-making character) on a particular occasion is to be identified with what he intends by means of the utterance to get his audience to believe!»' For this intention to be successful, the speaker must at least rely on the audience's familiarity with 'standard' or 'general' use, even if individual occasion meaning is to differ from this. In this way Grice is able to offer his own challenge to the sceptic.  Faced with everyday statements about material objects, the sceptic is forced to claim either that, on particular occasions, people use expressions to mean things they have no intention of getting their audience to believe, or that people frequently use language in a way quite unlike its proper ('general') meaning, leaving the success of everyday communication unexplained. Although in general agreement with Malcolm's aim in refuting scepticism, Grice is unhappy with the apparent simpli-fications, and some of the implications, of his argument. He replaces it with his own more sophisticated argument from ordinary language, an argument depending in particular on a detailed examination of the nature of 'meaning'.As Grice's enthusiasm for ordinary language philosophy became increasingly qualified during the 1950s, his interest was growing in the rather different styles of philosophy of language then current in America.  Recent improvements in communications had made possible an exchange of ideas across the Atlantic that would have been unthinkable before the war. W. V. O. Quine had made a considerable impression at Oxford during his time as Eastman Professor. Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from him over certain specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Quine, who was visiting England for a whole year, and who brought with him clothes, books and even provisions in the knowledge that rationing was still in force, travelled by ship.' However, during the same decade the rapid proliferation of passenger air travel enabled movement of academics between Britain and America for even short stays and lecture tours. Grice himself made a number of such visits, and was impressed by the formal and theory-driven philosophy he encountered. Most of all he was impressed by the work of Noam Chomsky.  It may seem surprising that the middle-aged British philosopher interested in the role of individual speakers in creating meaning should cite as an influence the young American linguist notorious for dismissing issues of use in his pursuit of a universal theory of language. But Grice was inspired by Chomsky's demonstration in his work on syntax of how  'a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control'. Less for-mally, he expressed admiration for an approach that did not offer  'piecemeal reflections on language' but rather where 'one got a pictureof the whole thing' Chomsky's first and highly influential book Syntactic Structures was well known among Grice's Oxford contemporaries.  The Play Group worked their slow and meticulous way through it during the autumn of 1959. Austin, in particular, was extremely impressed.  Grice characterised and perhaps parodied him as revering Chomsky for his sheer audacity in taking on a subject even more sacred than phi-losophy: the subject of grammar. Grice's own interest was focused on theory formation and its philosophical consequences. Chomsky was taking a new approach to the study of syntax by proposing a general theory where previously there had been only localised description and analysis. He claimed, for instance, that ideally 'a formalised theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed'. Grice's aim, it was becoming clear, was to do something similar for the study of language use.  Meanwhile, ordinary language philosophy itself was in decline. As for any school of thought, it is difficult to determine an exact endpoint, and some commentators have suggested a date as late as 1970. However, it is generally accepted that the heyday of ordinary language philosophy was during the years immediately following the Second World War.  The sense of excitement and adventure that characterised its beginning began to wane during the 1950s. Despite his professed dislike of disci-pleship, Austin seems to have become anxious about what he perceived as the lack of a next generation of like-minded young philosophers at Oxford. It became an open secret among his colleagues that he was seriously contemplating a move to the University of California, Berkeley?  No final decision was ever made. Austin died early in 1960 at the age of 48, having succumbed quickly to cancer over the previous months.  Reserved and private to the last, he hid his illness from even his closest colleagues until he was unable to continue work. His death was certainly a blow to ordinary language philosophy, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it was the immediate cause of its demise. Grice, who seems to have been regarded as Austin's natural deputy, stepped in as convenor of the Play Group, which met under his leadership for the next seven years. Individuals such as Strawson, Warnock, Urmson and Grice himself continued to produce work with recognisably 'ordinary language' leanings throughout the 1960s.  Grice's interests at this time were not driven entirely by philosophical trends in Oxford and America; he was also turning his attention to some very old logical problems. In particular, he was interested in questions concerning apparent counterparts to logical constants in natural language. For instance, in the early 1960s he revisited a theme he hadfirst considered before the war, when he gave a series of lectures on  'Negation'  . In these, he concerns himself with the analysis of sentences  containing 'not', and with the extent to which this should coincide with a logical analysis of negation. Consideration of a variety of example sentences leads him to reject the simple equation of 'not' with the logical operation of switching truth polarity, usually positive to negative. He argues that 'it might be said that in explaining the force of "not" in terms of "contradictory" we have oversimplified the ordinary use of  "not"! In another lecture from the series he suggests that the lack of correspondence between 'not' and contradiction 'might be explained in terms of pragmatic pressures which govern the use of language in general'® Grice was hoping to find not just an account of the uses of this particular expression, but a general theory of language use capable of extension to other problems in logic. He would have been familiar enough with such problems. The discussion of some of them dates back as far as Aristotle, in whose work he was well read even as an undergraduate.  In Categoriae, Aristotle describes not just categories of lexical meaning, but also the types of relationships holding between words. To the modern logician, the use of terms in the following passage may be obscure, but the relationship of logical entailment is easily recognisable.  One is prior to two because if there are two it follows at once that there is one whereas if there is one there are not necessarily two, so that the implication of the other's existence does not hold reciprocally from one.'  The relationship between 'two' and 'one', or indeed between any two cardinal numbers where one is greater than the other, is one of asymmetrical entailment. 'Two' entails 'one',  ', but 'one' does not entail 'two'  A similar relationship holds between a superordinate and any of its hyponyms, or between a general and a more specific term. To use Aristotle's example: 'if there is a fish there is an animal, but if there is an animal there is not necessarily a fish.'º The asymmetrical nature of this relationship means that use of the more general term tells us nothing at all about the applicability of the more specific. Aristotle also considers the relative acceptability of general and specific terms, and in doing this he goes beyond a narrowly logical focus.  For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more informative and apt to give the species than the genus. For example,it would be more informative to say of the individual man that he is a man than that he is an animal (since the one is more distinctive of the individual man while the other is more general)."  Applying the term 'animal' to an individual tells us nothing about whether that individual is a man or not. Therefore, if the more specific term 'man' applies it is more 'apt', because it gives more information.  This same point arises in a discussion of the applicability of certain descriptions later in Categoriae. Aristotle suggests that: 'it is not what has not teeth that we call toothless, or what has not sight blind, but what has not got them at the time when it is natural for it to have them.'2 A term such as 'toothless' is only applied, because it is only informative, in those situations when it might be expected not to apply. Here, again, the discussion of what 'we call' things goes beyond purely logical meaning to take account of how expressions are generally used. Logically speaking a stone could appropriately be described as toothless or blind; in actual practice it is very unlikely to be so described.  Grice's self-imposed task in considering the general 'pragmatic pressures' on language use was, at least in part, one of extending Aristotle's sensitivity to the standard uses of certain expressions, and examining how regularities of use can have distorting effects on intuitions about logical meaning. He was by no means the first philosopher to consider this. For instance, John Stuart Mill, in his response to the work of Sir William Hamilton, draws attention to the distinction between logic and  'the usage of language', 13 He reproaches Hamilton for not paying sufficient attention to this distinction, and suggests that this is enough to explain some of Hamilton's mistakes in logic. Mill glosses Hamilton as maintaining that 'the form "Some A is B" ... ought in logical propriety to be used and understood in the sense of "some and some only" ' 14 Hamilton is therefore committed to the claim that 'all' and 'some' are mutually incompatible: that an assertion involving 'some' has as part of its meaning 'not all'. This is at odds with the observations on quantity in Categoriae and indeed, as Mill suggests, with 'the practice of all writers on logic'. Mill explains this mistake as a confusion of logical meaning with a feature of 'common conversation in its most unprecise form'. In this, he is drawing on the extra, non-logical but generally understood 'meanings' associated with particular expressions. In a passage that would not be out of place in a modern discussion of lin-guistics, Mill suggests that:If I say to any one, 'I saw some of your children to-day,' he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so.  15  Mill draws a distinction between what 'words mean' and what we generally infer from hearing them used. In what can be seen as an extension of Aristotle's discussion of 'aptness', he argues that it is a mistake to confuse these two very different types of significance. A more specific word such as 'all' is more appropriate, if it is applicable, than a more general word such as 'some'. Therefore, the use of the more general leads to the inference, although it does not strictly mean, that the more specific does not apply. 'Some' suggests, but does not actually entail 'not all'.  Besides his interest in logical problems with a venerable pedigree, Grice was also concerned with issues familiar to him from the work of recent or contemporary philosophers. In both published work and informal notes he frequently lists these and arranges them in groups.  Part of his achievement in the theory he was developing lay in seeing connections between an apparently disparate collection of problems and countenancing a single solution for them all. For instance, in Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that, although the expressions 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' appear to be simple opposites, they both require a particular condition for applicability, namely that the action in question is in some way reprehensible. If they were simple opposites, it should always be the case that one or other would be correct in describing an action, yet in the absence of the crucial condition, to apply either would be to say something 'absurd'. Similarly, although if someone has performed some action, that person must in a sense have tried to perform it, it is often extremely odd to say so. In cases where there was no difficulty or doubt over the outcome, it is inappropriate to say that someone tried to do something: so much so that some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have claimed that it is simply wrong. Another related problem is familiar from Austin's work; it is the one summed up in his slogan 'no modification without aberration'. For the ordinary uses of many verbs, it does not seem appropriate to apply either a modifying word or phrase or its opposite. Austin was therefore offering a gen-eralisation that includes, but is not restricted to, Ryle's claims about  'voluntary' and 'involuntary'. For many everyday action verbs, the act described must have taken place in some non-standard way for anymodification appropriately to apply. Austin offers no theory based on this observation, and indeed Grice was unimpressed by it even as a gen-eralisation; he claimed in an unpublished paper that it was 'clearly fraudulent'. 'No "aberration" is needed for the appearance of the adverbial "in a taxi" within the phrase "he travelled to the airport in a taxi"; aberrations are needed only for modifications which are corrective qualifications. 16  Grice's general account of language, conceived with the twin ambitions of refining his philosophy of meaning and of explaining a diverse range of philosophical problems, gradually developed into his theory of conversation. Like his project in 'Meaning', this draws on a  'common-sense' understanding of language: in this case, that what people say and what they mean are often very different matters. This observation was far from original, but Grice's response to it was in some crucial ways entirely new in philosophy. Unlike formal philosophers such as Russell or the logical positivists, he argued that the differences between literal and speaker meaning are not random and diverse, and do not make the rigorous study of the latter a futile exercise. But he also differed from contemporary philosophers of ordinary language, in arguing that interest in formal or abstract meaning need not be abandoned in the face of the particularities of individual usage. Rather, the difference between the two types of meaning could be seen as systematic and explicable, following from one very general principle of human behaviour, and a number of specific ways in which this worked out in practice. In effect, the use of language, like many other aspects of human behaviour, is an end-driven endeavour. People engage in communication in the expectation of achieving certain outcomes, and in the pursuit of those outcomes they are prepared to maintain, and expect others to maintain, certain strategies. This mutual pursuit of goals results in cooperation between speakers. This manifests itself in terms of four distinct categories of behaviour, each of which can be sum-marised by one or more maxims that speakers observe. The categories and maxims are familiar to every student of pragmatics, although in later commentaries they are often all subsumed under the title  'maxims'  Category of Quantity  Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).  Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.  Category of Quality  Do not say what you believe to be false.  Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.  Category of Relation   Be relevant.  Category of Manner  Avoid ambiguity of expression.  Avoid ambiguity.  Be brief.  Be orderly.!7  Grice uses the simple notion of cooperation, together with the more elaborate structure of categories, to offer a systematic account of the many ways in which literal and implied meaning, or 'what is said' and what is implicated', differ from one another. In effect, the expectation of cooperation both licenses these differences and explains their usually successful resolution. Speakers rely on the fact that hearers will be able to reinterpret the literal content of their utterances, or fill in missing information, so as to achieve a successful contribution to the conversation in hand. The noun 'implicature' and verb 'implicate' (as used in relation to that noun) are now familiar in the discussion of pragmatic meaning, but they were coined by Grice, and coined fairly late on in the development of his theory. In early work on conversation he suggested that a 'special kind of implication' could be used to account for various differences between conventional meaning and speaker meaning. He ultimately found this formulation inadequate, together with a host of other words such as 'suggest', 'hint' and even 'mean', precisely because of their complex pre-existing usage both within and outside philosophy.    The difference between saying and meaning had an established philosophical pedigree, as well as a basis in common sense. A literature dating back to G. E. Moore, but largely concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s, offers a significant context to Grice's work. Little of this is now read and none of it attempts anything as ambitious as a generalising theory of communication. With typical laxness, Grice does not refer to this body of work in any of his writings on the topic, although he must have been aware of it; much of it originated from the tight circle of Oxford phi-losophy. Writing for his fellow philosophers, and in the conventions ofhis time, he was able to refer vaguely and generally to the debate in the expectation that the relevant context would be recognised  G. E. Moore had argued that when we use an indicative sentence we assert the content of the sentence, but we also imply personal commitment to the truthfulness of that content; 'If I say that I went to the pictures last Tuesday, I imply by saying so that I believe or know that I did, but I do not say that I believe or know this."8 This distinction was picked up by a number of philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel discussed the sense of 'imply' identified by Moore, proposing to describe it as 'pragmatical'. Bar-Hillel identifies himself as a supporter of 'logical empiricism' (he quotes approvingly a comment from Carnap to the effect that natural languages are too complex and messy to be the focus of rigorous scientific enquiry) and his article is aimed explicitly at rejecting philosophy of the 'analytic method' in general and of Moore in particular. However, he suggests that by using sentences that are 'meaningless' to logical empiricists, such as the sentences of metaphysics or aesthetics, 'one may nevertheless imply sentences which are perfectly meaningful, according to the same criteria, and are perhaps even true and highly important' 2º A full account of the pragmatic sense of 'implies' might, he predicts, prove highly important in discussing linguistic behaviour. A few years later D. J. O'Connor contrasted the familiar 'logical paradoxes' of philosophy with less well known 'pragmatic paradoxes'. O'Connor draws attention to certain example sentences (such as 'I believe there are tigers in Mexico but there aren't any there at all') which, although not logically contradictory or necessarily false, are pragmatically unsatisfactory. His purpose is to distinguish between logic and language and to urge philosophers to attempt to 'make a little clearer the ways in which ordinary language can limit and mislead us'. 21  The philosophical significance of implication was also discussed by those more sympathetic to ordinary language, in particular by members of the Play Group. Writing in Mind in 1952, J. O. Urmson acknowledged the 'implied claim to truth' in the use of indicative statements, but felt the need to clarify his terms: 'The word "implies" is being used in such a way that if there is a convention that X will only be done in circumstances Y, a man implies that situation Y holds if he does X.22 Urmson suggests the addition of an 'implied claim to reasonableness'; 'it is, I think, a presupposition of communication that people will not make statements, thereby implying their truth, unless they have some ground, however tenuous, for those statements. 23 Read with hindsight, Urmson's suggestion looks like a hint towards Grice's second maxim ofQuality. Another member of the Play Group, P. H. Nowell-Smith, appears to add something like a maxim of Relevance, a notion that Grice discusses as early as the original version of 'Meaning'. In his book Ethics, Nowell-Smith suggests that there are certain 'contextual implications' that generally accompany the use of words, but that are dependent on particular contexts. Without reference to Urmson, he phrases these as follows:  When a speaker uses a sentence to make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.... A speaker contextually implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his statement.... What a speaker says may be assumed to be relevant to the interests of his audience.24  For Nowell-Smith the contextual rules are primary, and do not operate with reference to logical meaning; in effect there is no 'what is said'. In fact, he specifies that logical meaning is a subclass of contextual impli-cation, because it is meaning we are entitled to infer in any context whatsoever. Other philosophers concerned with implication, however, did identify different levels of meaning. In The Logic of Moral Discourse, 1955, Paul Edwards distinguishes between the referent of a sentence (the fact that makes a sentence true or, in its absence, false: in effect the truth-conditions) and 'what the sentence expresses' (anything it is possible to infer about the speaker on the basis of the utterance).25  Some attempted syntheses of thinking about implication lacked much in the way of generalising or explanatory force. In his 1958 article 'Prag-matic implication', C. K. Grant's account of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena leads him to the claim that 'a statement pragmatically implies those propositions whose falsity would render the making of the statement absurd, that is, pointless.26 What is implied by a statement of p, he insists, is not just the speaker's belief in p, but some further proposition. Isobel Hungerland, writing in 1960, reviews the range of attempts to mediate between asserted and implied meaning and exclaims 'What a range of rules!'? Her suggestion of a generalisa-tion across these rules is that 'a speaker in making a statement contextually implies whatever one is entitled to infer on the basis of the presumption that his act of stating is normal. 28  Grice was working on his own generalisation, which was to link together the range of principles of language use into one coherent account, and to give this a place in a more ambitious theory of lan-guage. If the maxims of Quality and of Relation were familiar from con-temporary work in Ethics, those of Quantity and Manner drew on Grice's long-standing concern about stronger and weaker statements.  This was the idea that had interested him in his rough notes on 'visa' for his work on perception with Geoffrey Warnock. The earliest published indication appeared in 1952, in a footnote to Peter Strawson's Introduction to Logical Theory. In discussing the relationship between the statement 'there is not a book in his room which is not by an English author' and the assumption 'there are books in his room', Strawson draws attention to the need to distinguish between strictly logically relations and the rules of 'linguistic conduct' 29 He suggests as one such rule:  'one does not make the (logically) lesser when one could truthfully (and with equal or greater linguistic economy) make the greater, claim. It would be misleading, although not strictly false, to make the less informative claim about English authors if in a position to make the much more informative claim that there are no books at all. Strawson acknowledges that 'the operation of this "pragmatic rule" was first pointed out to me, in a different connection, by Mr H. P. Grice!  It was typical of Grice that he did not publish his own account of this pragmatic rule until almost ten years after Strawson's acknowledgement.  'The causal theory of perception' appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, after Grice delivered it as a symposium paper at the meeting of the Society in Cambridge in July 1961. His main focus is his long-standing interest in the status of our observations of material objects. Grice offers tentative support for a causal account of percep-tion. Theories of this type date back at least to John Locke. They maintain that we directly perceive through our faculties of sense a series of information, given the title 'sense data' by later philosophers, and infer that these are caused by material objects in the world. For Locke, the inference was justifiable, but his account of perception, and causal theories ever since, had been dogged by accusations of scepticism. If we have no direct access to material objects, but only to the sense data they putatively cause, the way is left open to doubt the independent existence of such objects.  Grice's defence is tentative, even by his own circumspect standards.  He proposes to advance a version of the causal theory 'which is, if not true, at least not obviously false'.3° Some of the defence itself is presented in quotation marks, as a fictional 'opponent' argues with a fictional 'objector' to the causal theory, implicitly distancing Grice from the arguments on either side. This tentativeness might in part be explained by the extreme heresy of Grice's enterprise for a philosopher of ordinary language. Some of Austin's most strident remarks about ordi-nary language had appeared in his attack in Sense and Sensibilia on philosophical theories of perception, and their reliance on the obscure and technical notion of 'sense data'. Austin's chief target here had been phe-nomenalism which, in claiming that sense data are the essence of what we think of as material objects, is often seen as a direct competitor to the causal theory of perception. Although defending one of phenome-nalism's rivals, Grice was suggesting reasons for retaining Austin's particular bugbear, 'sense data', as a term of art. Indeed, he even goes so far as to hint that his own, speculative version of the causal theory 'neither obviously entails nor obviously conflicts with Phenomenalism'.31  Grice defends sense data because, as he argues, the sceptic who wants to question the existence of the material world needs to make use of them and the sceptic's position at least deserves to be heard. He defends it also because of his own ideas about language use. Indeed, his essay on perception seems at times in danger of being hijacked by his interest in language. This is not entirely out of keeping with the subject; through Locke and Berkeley to Ayer and Austin, the philosophy of perception had focused on the correct interpretation of sentences in which judgements of perception are expressed. However, Grice makes no secret of his hope that his interpretation of such sentences will fit with views of language and use motivated by other considerations. Much of the essay is taken up with a discussion of general principles governing the use of language. This is inspired by a standard argument for retaining  'sense data' as a technical term; it would appear to underlie ordinary expressions such as 'so-and-so looks @ [e.g. blue] to me'. In effect, a suitably rigorous account of the meaning of such expressions would need to include reference to something such as a sense datum that corresponds to the subjective experience described. A potential objector might point out that such expressions are not appropriate to all instances of perception; they would only in fact be used in contexts where a condition of either doubt or denial (D-or-D) as to the applicability of @ holds. 'There would be something at least prima facie odd about my saying "That looks red to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted by a British pillar box in normal daylight at a range of a few feet.'32  Grice considers two possible ways of explaining this oddity. It could be seen as 'a feature of the use, perhaps of the meaning' of such expressions that they carry the implication that the D-or-D condition is ful-filled. Use of such expressions in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a misuse, and would fail to be either true or false.Alternatively, such statements could be seen as true whenever the property @ applies but, in the absence of the D-or-D condition, severely mis-leading. Use in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a more general error, because of 'a general feature or principle of the use of language' 33 Grice des cribes how until recently he had been undecided as to which of these two explanations to favour. He had, however, lent towards the second because it 'was more in line with the kind of thing I was inclined to say about other linguistic phenomena which are in some degree comparable.  934  Towards the end of his discussion, Grice hesitantly suggests a first attempt at formulating the general principle of language use: 'One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for so doing. 35 This is, of course, remarkably similar to the observation attributed to him by Strawson a decade earlier.  It seems that during the intervening years Grice had become increasingly impressed by how many different types of meaning this rule could explain, in other words by how general and simple an account of language use it suggested. In two interesting respects the formulation of the rule had changed. First, it had changed from a statement about what  'one does' in language use to what 'one should do'. This brought it nearer to the first maxim of Quantity it was eventually to become.  Second, the new formulation of the rule introduces possible exceptions, by alluding to 'good reasons' for breaking it. Again, Grice does not elaborate on this qualification, but the consideration of reasons for breaching the maxims, together with a discussion of the consequences of doing so, was to be vital to the subsequent development of his work.  It was what was to give it explanatory and generalising abilities beyond those of a simple list of 'rules' of linguistic behaviour.  Grice's claims about the use of language offer support to the defender of sense data. They allow the defender to describe statements of the  'so-and-so looks @ to me' type as strictly true regardless of whether the D-or-D condition holds. If such statements call for the use of sense data as a technical term to explain their meaning, then sense data are applicable to any description of perception. It is simply that in most non-con-troversial contexts such statements will be avoided because, although perfectly true, they will introduce misleading suggestions. Here, perhaps, was Grice's greatest heresy. Austin's rejection of sense data relied on an appeal to what people ordinarily say, together with an assumption that this is the best guide to meaning and truth. Grice's tentative support for it relies on a distinction between what people can truthfully say, and what they actually, realistically do say. Despite itsemphasis on linguistic use, 'The causal theory of perception' was well received as a contribution to the philosophy of perception. It was anthologised in 1965 in Robert Swartz's Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing.  In 1967, Grice's sometime collaborator Geoffrey Warnock included the essay in his volume on The Philosophy of Perception, singling it out for praise as an 'exceedingly ingenious and resourceful contribution'. 36  As was the case throughout his working life, Grice made no firm distinction between his teaching and the development of his own philosophical ideas. A series of lecture notes from the 1960s on topics relating to speaker meaning and context therefore provide an insight into the lines along which his thinking was developing, as do some rough notes from the same period. What his students gained from the fresh ideas in Grice's lectures, however, they paid for in his cavalier attitude to the topic and aims of the class. He begins one lecture, which is entitled simply 'Saying: Week 1':  Although the official title of this class is 'Saying', let me say at once that we are unlikely to reach any direct discussion of the notion of saying for several weeks, and in the likely event of our failing to make any substantial inroads on the title topic this term, my present intention is to continue the class into next term.37  Grice's interest in these lectures was in finding out what can be learnt about speaker meaning, specifically about what sets it apart from linguistic meaning, from close attention to its characteristics and circum-stances. The opening of another of the lectures, entitled 'The general theory of context', tells rather more of his purpose and method than is made explicit in much of the later, published work.  Philosophers often say that context is very important. Let us take this remark seriously. Surely, if we do, we shall want to consider this remark not merely in its relation to this or that problem, i.e. in context, but also in itself, i.e. out of context. If we are to take this seriously, we must be systematic, that is thorough and orderly. If we are to be orderly we must start with what is relatively simple. Here, though not of course everywhere, to be simple is to be as abstract as possible; by this I mean merely that we want, to begin with, to have as few cards on the table as we can. Orderliness will then consist in seeing first what we can do with the cards we have; and when we think that we have exhausted this investigation, we put another card on the table, and see what that enables us to do.It is not hard to discern Austin's influence here, in the insistence that a particular philosophical commonplace, if it is to be accepted as a useful explanation, must first be subject to a rigorous process of analy-sis. The call for system and order, however, is Grice's own. He had reacted against precisely the tendency towards unordered, open-ended lists in Austin's work. He argues in these lectures that thinking seriously about context means thinking about conversation; this is the setting for most examples of speaker meaning. He proposes, therefore, to compile an account of some of the basic properties common to conversations generally. His method of limiting his hand was to result in certain highly artificial simplifications, but he made these simplifications deliberately and knowingly. For instance, the relevant context was to be assumed to be limited to what he calls the 'linguistic environment': to the content of the conversation itself. Conversation was assumed to take place between two people who alternate as speaker and hearer, and to be concerned simply with the business of transferring information between them.  A number of the lectures include discussion of the types of behaviour people in general exhibit, and therefore the types of expectations they might bring to a venture such as a conversation. Grice suggests that people in general both exhibit and expect a certain degree of helpfulness from others, usually on the understanding that such helpfulness does not get in the way of particular goals, and does not involve undue effort. If two people, even complete strangers, are going through a gate, the expectation is that the first one through will hold the gate open, or at least leave it open, for the second. The expectation is such that to do otherwise without particular reason would be interpreted as deliberately rude.  The type of helpfulness exhibited and expected in conversation is more specific because of a particular, although not a unique, feature of con-versation; it is a collaborative venture between the participants. At least in the simplified version of conversation discussed in these lectures, there is a shared aim or purpose. However, an account of the particular type of helpfulness expected in conversation must be capable of extension to any collaborative activity. In his early notes on the subject, Grice considers  'cooperation' as a label for the features he was seeking to describe. Does  'helpfulness in something we are doing together'  ', he wonders in a note,  equate to 'cooperation'? He seems to have decided that it does; by the later lectures in the series 'the principle of conversational helpfulness' has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation'.  During the Oxford lectures Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regu-larities, or principles, detailing expected behaviour. The term 'maxim' to describe these regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.  Grice's initial choices of term are 'objectives', or 'desiderata'; he was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose of achieving the joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits two such desiderata: those relating to candour on the one hand, and clarity on the other. The desideratum of candour contains his general principle of making the strongest possible statement and, as a limiting factor on this, the suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead.  The desideratum of clarity concerns the manner of expression for any conversational contribution. It includes the importance of expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main import of an utterance be clear and explicit. These two factors are constantly to be weighed against two fundamental and sometimes competing demands. Contributions to a conversation are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the principle of Conversational Benevolence. The principle of Conversational Self-Love ensures the assumption on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble in framing their contribution.  Grice suggests that many philosophers are guilty of inexactness in their use of expressions such as 'saying', 'meaning' and 'use'  ', applying  them as if they were interchangeable, and in effect confusing different ways in which a single utterance can convey information. For instance, Grice refers back to the discussion at a previous class he had given jointly with David Pears, when the exact meaning of the verb 'to try' was discussed. This, of course, was one of the specific philosophical problems he was interested in accounting for by means of general principles of use. Stuart Hampshire had apparently claimed that if someone, X, did something, it is always possible to say that X tried to do it. This was challenged; in situations when there is no obvious difficulty or risk of failure involved it is inappropriate to talk of someone's trying to do something. Grice's answer had been that, while it is always true to say that X tried to do something, this may sometimes be a misleading way of speaking. If X succeeded in performing the act, it would be more informative and therefore more cooperative to say so. Therefore, an utterance of 'X tried to do it' will imply, but not actually say, that X did not succeed.  In his consideration of the desiderata of conversational participation, Grice initially compiles a loose assemblage of features. By the later lectures these appear in more or less their final form under the categories Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner (or, sometimes, Mode). Inarranging the desiderata in this way, Grice was presumably seeking to impose a formal arrangement on a diverse set of principles. But it seems that he had other motives: semi-seriously to echo the use of categories in such orthodox philosophies as those of Aristotle and Kant, and more importantly to draw on their ideas of natural, universal divisions of experience. The regularities of conversational behaviour were intended to include aspects of human behaviour and cognition beyond the purely linguistic. Grice's collaborative work with Strawson had been concerned with Aristotle's division of experience into 'categories' of substances.  Aristotle's original formulation of the list of such properties allows that they can take the form of 'either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected'.38 He concentrates mainly on the first four, and these received most attention in subsequent developments of his work. They were the starting-point for Kant's use of categories to describe types of human experience, and his argument that these form the basis of all possible human knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes to divide the pure concepts of understanding into four main divisions:  'Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distinct from it in execu-tion. '39 These are categories 'Of Quantity', 'Of Quality', 'Of Relation' and  'Of Modality', with various subdivisions ascribed to each. Kant's claims for both the fundamental and the exhaustive nature of these categories are explicit:  This division is systematically generated from a common principle, namely the faculty for judging (which is the same as the faculty for thinking), and has not arisen rhapsodically from a haphazard search for pure concepts, of the completeness of which one could never be certain.  40  Kant goes so far as to suggest that his table of categories, containing all the basic concepts of understanding, could provide the basis for any philosophical theory. These, therefore, offered Grice divisions of experience with a sound pedigree and an established claim to be universals of human cognition.  Early in 1967, Grice travelled to Harvard to deliver that year's William James lectures, the prestigious philosophical series in which Austin had put forward his theory of speech acts 12 years earlier. Grice's entitled his lectures 'Logic and conversation'. He was presenting his current thinking about meaning to an audience beyond that of his students andimmediate colleagues and was clearly aware of the different assumptions and prejudices he could expect in an American, as opposed to an Oxford, audience. 'Some of you may regard some of the examples of the manoeuvre which I am about to mention as being representative of an out-dated style of philosophy', he suggests in the introductory lecture, 'I do not think that one should be too quick to write off such a style.'41 Addressing philosophical concerns by means of an attention to everyday language was still a highly respectable, even an orthodox approach in Oxford. In America it was seen by at least some as belonging to an unsuccessful, and now rather passé, school of thought. In pleading its cause, Grice argues that it still has much to offer: in this case, the possibility of developing a theory to discriminate between utterances that are inappropriate because false, and those that are inappropriate for some other reason. Despite the difficulties inherent in such an ambitious scheme, and the well-known problems with the school of thought in question, he does not give up hope altogether of 'system-atizing the linguistic phenomena of natural discourse'.  Grice's ultimate aim in the lectures is ambitious and uncompromis-ing; his interest 'will lie in the generation of an outline of a philosophical theory of language' 4 He argues for a complex understanding of the significance of any utterance in a particular context; its meaning is not a unitary phenomenon. Conventional meanin g has a necessary, but by no means a sufficient role to play. Indeed conventional meaning is itself not a unitary phenomenon. Some aspects of it involve the speaker in a commitment to the truth of a certain proposition; this is  'what is said' on any particular occasion. Other aspects may be associated by convention with the words used, but not be part of what the speaker is understood literally to have said. The examples 'She was poor but honest' and 'He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave' convey more than just the truth of the two conjuncts, more than would be conveyed by 'She was poor and honest' or 'He is an Englishman and he is brave'.  '. An idea of contrast is introduced in the first example and one of consequence in the second. These ideas are attached to the use of the individual words 'but' and 'therefore', but do not contribute to the truth-conditions of the sentences. We would not want to say that the sentences were actually false if both conjuncts were true, but we did not agree with the idea of contrast or of consequence. We might, rather, want to say that the speaker was presenting true facts in a misleading way. These examples demonstrate implicated elements associated with the conventional meaning of the words used, elements Grice labels  'conventional implicatures'There is another level at which speaker meaning can differ from what is said, dependent on context or, for Grice, on conversation. In 'con-versational implicatures' meaning is conveyed not so much by what is said, but by the fact that it is said. This is where the categories of conversational cooperation, and their various maxims, play their part.  The onus on participants in a conversation to cooperate towards their common goal, and more particularly the expectation each participant has of cooperation from the other, ensures that the understanding of an utterance often goes beyond what is said. Faced with an apparently uncooperative utterance, or one apparently in breach of some maxim, a conversationalist will if possible 'rescue' that utterance by interpreting it as an appropriate contribution. In this way, Grice offers a more detailed account of the idea he explored in 'Meaning', and in his notes from that time: that there are three 'levels' of meaning, or three different degrees to which a speaker may be committed to a proposition. His model now includes, 'what is said', 'conventional meaning' (including conventional implicatures) and 'what is conversationally implicated'.  The presentation of the norms of conversational behaviour in the William James lectures is rather different from Grice's handling of them in his earlier work. The maxims, or the categories they fall into, are no longer presented as the primary forces at work. Instead, all are assumed under a general 'Principle of Cooperation'. The principle appeared late in the development of Grice's theory. It enjoins speakers to: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.'43 The name 'Cooperative Principle' was even later; it was added using an omission mark in a manuscript copy of the second William James lecture. Grice may well have been attempting to give a name, and an exact formulation, to his previously rather nebulous idea of cooperation or 'helpfulness'. However, the effect was to change what was presented as a series of 'desiderata', features of conversational behaviour participants might expect in their exchanges, to something looking like a powerful and general injunction to correct social behaviour.  In the development of his theory of conversation, Grice was much exercised by the status of the categories as psychological concepts. He questioned whether the maxims were the result of entering into a quasi-contract by engaging in conversation, simply inductive generalisations over what people do in fact do in conversation, or, as he suggested in one rough note, just 'special cases of what a decent chap should do'.  He remained undecided on this matter throughout the development ofthe theory, content to concentrate on the effects on meaning of the maxims, whatever their status. By the time of the William James lectures, however, he seems to be closer to an answer. He is 'enough of a rationalist' to want to find an explanation beyond mere empirical generalisation.  4 The following suggestion results from this impetus:  So I would like to be able to show that observation of the Cooperative Principle and maxims is reasonable (rational) along the following lines: that anyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation/communication (such as giving and receiving information, influencing and being influenced by others) must be expected to have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges that will be profitable only on the assumption that they are conducted in general accordance with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims.45  This is a wordy explanation, and also a troublesome one. It seems to create a loop linking the aim of explaining cooperation to an account of conversation as dependent on cooperation, a loop from which it does not successfully escape. The link between reasonableness and cooperation is far from explicit. Nevertheless, this passage offers Grice's account of his own preferences in seeking an answer to the question over the status, and hence the motivation, for the Cooperative Principle. His preference, particularly his reference to 'rational' behaviour, was to prove important in the subsequent development of his work.  However derived, the maxims operate to produce conversational implicatures in a number of different ways. In many cases, they simply  'fill in' the extra information needed to make a contribution fully coop-erative. A says 'Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days' and B replies, 'He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately'. B's remark does not, as it stands, appear relevant to the preceding remark.  But it is easy enough to supply the missing belief B must hold for the remark to be relevant. B conversationally implicates that Smith has, or may have a girlfriend in New York.46  In other cases the speaker seems to be far less cooperative, at least at the level of 'what is said'. In order to be rescued as cooperative contributions to the conversation, such examples need to be not so much filled out as re-analysed. Because of the strength of the conviction that the speaker will, other things being equal, provide cooperative contri-butions, the other participant will put in the work necessary to reach such an interpretation. In perhaps his most famous example of con-versational implicature, Grice suggests the case of a letter of reference for a candidate for a philosophy job that runs as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc! The information given is grossly inadequate; the writer appears to be seriously in breach of the first maxim of Quan-tity, enjoining the utterer to give as much information as is appropri-ate. However, the receiver of the letter is able to deduce that the writer, as the candidate's tutor, must know more than this about the candidate.  There must be some reason why the writer is reluctant to offer the extra information that would be helpful. The most obvious reason is that the writer does not want explicitly to comment on Mr X's philosophical ability, because it is not possible to do so without writing something socially unpleasant. The writer is therefore taken conversationally to implicate that Mr X is no good at philosophy; the letter is cooperative not at the level of what is literally said, but at the level of what is impli-cated. In examples such as this a maxim is deliberately and ostentatiously flouted in order to give rise to a conversational implicature; such examples involve exploitation.  These examples, and others Grice discusses in the second William James lecture, are all specific to, and entirely dependent on, the individual contexts in which they occur. Grice labels all such example  'particularised conversational implicatures'. There are other types of conversational implicature in which the context is less significant, or at least can operate only as a 'veto' to implicatures that arise by default unless prevented. These are implicatures associated with the use of particular words. Unlike conventional implicatures, they can be cancelled: that is explicitly denied without contradiction. These 'generalised conversational implicatures' account for many of the differences between the logical constants and the behaviour of their natural language counterparts. In effect, Grice claims that there simply is no difference between, say '', 'n', 'v' and 'not', 'and', 'or' at the level of what is said.  The well-known differences are generalised conversational implicatures often associated with the use of these expressions, implicatures determined by the categories and maxims he has established.  Part of Grice's motivation for this proposal was the desire for a simplification of semantics. The alternative to such an account was to posit a semantic ambiguity for a wide range of linguistic expressions. Grice argues against this, proposing a principle he labels 'Modified Occam's Razor', which would rule against it in decisions of a theoretical nature.  The principle states that 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond neces-sity' 47 Grice's reference was to William of Occam, or Ockham, thefourteenth-century philosopher credited with the dictum 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. This is known as 'Occam's razor' although it is not clearly attributable to any of his writings, and it is not at all uncommon for philosophers to discuss it in isolation from Occam's actual work. It is taken as a general injunction not to complicate philosophical theories; the best theory is the simplest theory, invoking the fewest explanatory categories. The preference for simple philosophical theories that do not add complex and potentially unnecessary categories was one with an obvious appeal to philosophers of ordinary language. Indeed, when Gilbert Ryle published his collected papers in 1971, he commented on the 'Occamising zeal' particularly apparent in the earlier articles. Another contemporary philosopher to draw on an Occam-type approach to discussions of meaning was B. S.  Benjamin, whose article 'Remembering' is referred to in the first William James lecture. He does not draw an explicit comparison to Occam's razor, but he does pose himself the question of whether the verb  'remember' should be analysed as multivocal or univocal. For Benjamin, a 'universal core of meaning is preserved in its use in different contexts'.49  Grice himself did not develop the connection between conversational implicature and the logical constants in any great depth, either in the William James lectures or elsewhere. This is perhaps surprising, given that he introduces his theory in terms of the question of the equiva-lence, or lack of equivalence, between certain logical devices and expressions of natural language. The implications of this question, together with the specific answers offered by conversational implicature, are treated in detail by others.5° A. P. Martinich has suggested that the initial concentration on, and subsequent abandonment of, the logical particles is a serious flaw in the construction of the second, and most widely read, of the William James lectures. In a book aimed at describing and promoting good philosophical writing, Martinich identifies this as 'one of the greatest articles of the twentieth century', but argues that the more general theory of 'linguistic communication' ought to have been made the focus from the outset. He comments that on first reading Grice's article he was unimpressed by what he saw as an unacceptably complex mechanism to solve a very particular logical problem: 'Once I realised that the solution was a minor consequence of his theory I was awed by its elegance and simplicity.'51  Grice's discussion of logic is mainly restricted to the fourth William James lecture, which he later labelled 'Indicative conditionals' after the chief, but not the only, logical constant it discusses. Indicative condi-tions had been a central theme of some lectures on logical form Grice delivered at Oxford while working on his theory of conversation. There he had commented extensively on Peter Strawson's treatment of this topic in his 1952 book Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice does not mention Strawson at all in this fourth William James lecture. He does, however, discuss the views of what he calls a '"strong" theorist', views that accord with Strawson's in the insistence that the logical implica-tion, 'po q' is different in meaning from various expressions in natural language, most notably 'if p then q'. Strong theorists, Grice suggests, have tended to stress the difference between what he calls natural or ordinary language conditionals and 'artificial' conditionals, defined by logic and determined by truth-conditional properties.  Strawson argues that, while logical conditionals can be given a full definition in terms of a truth table involving the two simple propositions involved ('p' and 'q'), such an account will not be sufficient for natural language expressions such as 'if p then q'. The logical account specifies that if p is true, q must also be true. If p is false, however, nothing can be predicted about the truth value of q; a false antecedent coupled with a false consequent is assigned the overall value 'true', but so is a false antecedent coupled with a true consequent. This truth-conditional account seems insufficient as a definition of natural language 'if ... then ...' in at least two ways. There is a suggestion in most actual instances that there is some causal connection between the antecedent and the consequent. One of Strawson's own examples is: 'If it rains, then the party will be a failure!' Such examples, he notes, are not about linguistic elements or logical relations: 'they suggest connections between different things in the world, discovered by experience of these things 52 Later, he comments that most examples of the 'if ... then .. construction would suggest either that the truth of the antecedent is in some doubt, or that it is already known to be false. It is only in such cases that we would be likely to label the resulting statement true, or perhaps 'reasonable'. Strawson's suggestion is that 'if p then q' entails its logical counterpart 'P > q'. However, 'a statement of the form "p > q" does not entail the corresponding statement of the form "if p then 9" 153 There are aspects of the meaning of 'if p then q' that go beyond, and are not included in, the meaning of the logical conditional.  In his Oxford lecture notes, Grice singles Strawson out as an example of a philosopher who has not paid sufficient attention to the different ways in which a natural language expression can convey significance when it occurs in context. For Grice, this oversight has serious consequences for an understanding of the meaning of various crucial exam-ples. Certainly, as well as discussing the 'meaning' of particular expres-sions, Strawson writes, apparently without distinction, of the 'use'  'employment', 'sense' and 'implication' of 'if ... then ...' statements.54 He describes the speaker's relation to the relevant meaning as one of  'suggesting', 'using', 'indicating', 'saying' and even 'making' 55  Grice's contention, although not explicitly expressed in 'Indicative conditionals', is that there is a great deal of difference between the members of the sets that Strawson uses interchangeably. In particular, sufficient attention to the difference between saying and implicating can explain away the apparent differences between 'p> q' and 'if p then q'. He begins the fourth William James lecture uncompromisingly enough by proposing to consider the supposed divergence between 'if' and 's' and to demonstrate that 'no such divergence exists'. He suggests that 'if p then q' is distinguished from 'p> q' by the 'indirectness condition' associated with it: the commitment to some causal or rational link between p and q. Grice's claim, in effect, is that the literal meaning of 'if p then q', 'what is said' on any particular occasion of utterance, is simply equivalent to the logical meaning of 'p > q'. The indirectness condition is a generalised conversational implicature. Like all generalised conversational implicatures, it can be cancelled without contradiction, either by circumstances in the context or by explicit denial. In a game of bridge: 'My system contains a bid of five no trumps, which is announced to one's opponents on inquiry as meaning "If I have a red king, I also have a black king" !5 Here, Grice suggests, the indirectness condition simply does not arise because it is blocked by the context. There is no suggestion that having a black king is causally linked to having a red king, and the meaning is the same as that of the logical condition. To say 'if Smith is in the library he is working' would normally suggest the indirectness condition. But it is perfectly possible to say I know just where Smith is and what he is doing, but all I will tell you is that if he is in the library he is working', in a situation where the speaker had just looked in the library and seen Smith there working. In such a case also, the indirectness condition is not attached to the use of the expression.  Grice suggests what he describes as two separate possibilities as to how the indirectness condition might be produced as an implicature, although it is not in fact clear that these are necessarily mutually exclu-sive. The first relies on his original 'general principle' about the tendency towards stronger rather than weaker statements, and the first maxim of Quantity that results from it. It is less informative to say 'if p then q' than it is to say 'p and q', because the former does not givedefinite information about the truth values of p and q. Therefore, any utterance of 'p> q' will, unless prevented by context, give rise to the implicature that the speaker does not have definite information about the truth values of p and q. The same explanation can be extended to utterances of the form 'p or q'. These too seem to differ systematically from the apparently equivalent logical disjunction, 'p v q'. The truth-conditional meaning of logical disjunction states simply that at least one of the simple propositions involved must be true. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, for both propositions to be true. Yet in natural language there is something distinctly odd about saying 'p or q' if you know for certain that both p and q are true. In Grice's terms, 'p or q' shares the logical meaning of 'p v q', but in addition carries a gener-alised implicature that they are not both true. If the speaker were in a position to offer the more informative form 'p and q', then it would be conversationally more helpful to do so.  Grice's second suggestion is that implicated meanings of such expressions may follow from their role in conversation, and in human interaction and thought more generally. The familiar logical constants enable people to work out the problems presented to them by everyday life. In particular, disjunction enables people to consider alternatives and eliminate the untenable. It enables people to give partial answers to 'Wh'-questions such as 'Who killed Cock Robin?'. The most helpful answer would be a single subject ('the sparrow', 'the wren'), but if the speaker is not in a position to offer one, a series of disjuncts is a way of setting out the possibilities. Conditionals, on the other hand, enable people to ponder the consequences of certain choices. They are, there-fore, necessary to the successful operation of reasoning beings. It would simply not be rational to use a conditional in certain contexts: contexts where there is no doubt about the truth of the antecedent, for instance.  For this reason, on the assumption that our interlocutors are rational beings, we tend to interpret a conditional as indicating that a simple coordination will not do. Similarly, it would not be rational to use a disjunction in a context where we know that one of the disjuncts is true; we would in effect be attempting to solve a problem that had already been solved. Grice suggests, with typical tentativeness, that:  It might be that either generally or at least in special contexts it is impossible for a rational speaker to employ the conditional form unless, at least in his view, not merely the truth-table requirements are satisfied but also some strong connection holds. In such a case a speaker will nonconventionally implicate, when he uses theconditional form in such a context, that a strong connection does hold.  59  Grice offers this account in terms of the behaviour of a 'rational' speaker in at least potential opposition to an account drawing on the first maxim of Quantity. Elsewhere, however, he discusses the maxims as describing individually rational forms of behaviour. It is therefore conceivable that it might be possible to integrate the two suggestions, seeing conditionals as used rationally to introduce the implication of strong connection, precisely because their 'tentative' state does not offer the information that would be cooperative if available.  In the later 'Logic and conversation' lectures, Grice continues his pro-gramme for a philosophical theory of language by returning to older preoccupations, particularly to the problems identified in, and raised in response to, 'Meaning'. In effect, the theory of conversation offers a much fuller account of the notion of speaker meaning than had been developed in 'Meaning', together with a principled system linking this to conventional meaning. When first introduced in the second lecture, conventional meaning itself receives rather cursory treatment. Grice suggests that 'what is said' can be roughly equated with conventional meaning, including assigning of reference to referring expressions and any necessary disambiguation. He almost immediately complicates this definition by stipulating that some aspects of conventional meaning can be implicated. Grice returns to the notion of 'what is said' in the fifth William James lecture, later published under the title 'Utterer's meaning and intentions'  Grice's contention is still that intentions on individual occasions must be the primary criteria in determining meaning. However, simply referring to what some individual meant by some action on some particular occasion is not sufficient to arrive at an account of 'what is said'. It does not rule out a host of examples that have nothing at all to do with saying, such as flashing your headlights to indicate that the other driver has right of way. Grice's solution is in effect to do something close to the manoeuvre suggested by Searle in Speech Acts. He proposes to import into the definition of 'meaning' a specification that the utterer's action must constitute a unit in some linguistic system that has, or contains, the meaning intended by the utterer. In other words, 'U did something x which is an occurrence of a type S part of the meaning of which is  "p" 16 Furthermore, he introduces a notion of what U 'centrally meant' in doing x, in order to distinguish a core meaning from other aspects of what may be conveyed by an utterance, in particular from its con-ventional implicatures. In effect, Grice is introducing the notion of conventional meaning into utterer meaning, making it serve as part of the definition of what a speaker can legitimately intend by an utterance, while still maintaining that individual speaker intention is the primary factor in meaning. Grice extends his discussion of the different 'levels' of meaning to allow for four separate levels, labelled 'timeless meaning',  'applied timeless meaning', 'occasion meaning of utterance type' and  'utterer's occasion meaning'.  In the same lecture, Grice responds to some of the criticisms of  'Meaning'  '. Most of these, such as Schiffer's identification of an unten-  able infinite regress, were not published at the time. Grice is replying to objections put to him 'in conversation'. His response to Schiffer is, in effect, that the mental exercises required in recognising the infinite regress in intentions quickly become 'baffling'. Whatever they may demonstrate in theory, they are impossibly complex for any real-life situation:  At some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of A by U will be impracticably difficult; and I suspect the limit was reached (if not exceeded) in the examples which prompted the addition of a fourth and fifth condition. So U could not have the intention required of him in order to force the addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations he would be requiring of A too difficult, but it would be impossible for U to find cues to indicate to A that the calculations should be made, even if they were within A's compass. So one is tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.  62  Searle's 'American soldier' counter-example was already published in article form, and Grice responds to it by arguing that Searle is unjustified in claiming that the soldier did not mean 'I am a German officer'.  Regardless of what the utterance conventionally meant in German (the question about lemon blossom), if the soldier used it with the intention of getting his captors to believe that he was a German officer, this was what he meant by the utterance. Grice offers a revised definition of his account of meaning. Intention is still the central notion, which Grice discusses in terms of 'M-intentions', emphasising the importance of the speaker's desire for some response from the audience.  The remaining two lectures in the 'Logic and conversation' series develop further this notion of M-intending. At the start of the penultimate lecture, published under the title 'Utterer's meaning, sentencemeaning and word-meaning', Grice displays a typical mixture of caution and ambition. He is concerned with the relationship between what a particular person meant on a particular occasion, and what a sentence or word means. What he has to say about this 'should be looked upon as an attempt to provide a sketch of what might, I hope, prove to be a viable theory, rather than as an attempt to provide any part of a finally acceptable theory' 63 Speakers may have one of two attitudes to an utterance, which will determine their M-intentions. They may wish to get hearers to believe something, or they may wish to get hearers to do something. These two attitudes, or moods, relate to indicative or assertive utterances and to imperative utterances. The two moods are represented by the symbols + and ! respectively. Grice proposes that the symbol * stand as a 'dummy operator' in the place of either of these.  Thus a general statement of the form 'Jones meant that *p' could be filled out using a specific mood operator and an indicative sentence to give either 'Jones meant that + Smith will go home' or 'Jones meant that ! Smith will go home'.  • A further expansion, substituting a clause in indi-  rect speech, yields 'Jones meant that Smith will go home' and 'Jones meant that Smith is to go home',  ', both instantiations of the original  formula.  M-intentions in relation to imperative types are now defined as the intention that hearers should intend to do something, rather than the earlier, simpler definition that they should do something. The M-intended effect of an indicative-type utterance is no longer necessarily that the hearer should believe something 'but that the hearer should think that the utterer believes something'6 The effect of these two changes, particularly the first, is that all possible M-intentions are defined in terms of some psychological notion. Grice explicitly defends his use of what he calls 'intensional' concepts: those defining meaning not just in relation to how language maps on to the world, but also to how it relates to individual minds. Psychological concepts should not be ruled out, he argues, if they have something explanatory to offer to a theory of language. In this lecture, Grice indicates an account of how timeless meaning in a single idiolect may develop to become timeless meaning for a group. In effect, he is arguing that individual speaker meaning can, over time, yield conventional meaning. The exact status of this conventional meaning is perhaps still uncertain. Meaning is best explained in terms of the practices of a group; drawing on this, conventional meaning comes from 'the idea of aiming at conformity'. 65 Grice recognises a tension, or an 'unsolved problem' in the relationship between these two types of meaning. Briefly, 'linguistic rules' can beidentified such that our linguistic practice is 'as if we accepted those rules and conscientiously followed them'. But the desire to see this as an explanation rather than just an interesting fact about our linguistic practice leads us to suppose that there is a sense in which 'we do accept these rules'. This then leaves the problem of distinguishing ontologically between acceptance of the rules and existence of the practice.  In the final William James lecture, Grice attempts a restatement of his position on meaning. To say that someone, U, means something, p, by some utterance of C, is to talk about 'U's disposition with regard to the employment of C'. This disposition 'could be (should be) thought of as consisting of a general intention (readiness) on the part of U; U has the general intention to use C on particular occasions to means that p' (Grice is here using 'mean,' for 'speaker meaning'). Although he still wants to claim that all meaning is ultimately dependent on intention, Grice is no longer claiming that all meaning is derived from speaker meaning, therefore specifically from M-intentions. His extensive modifications of his theory of meaning have themselves been the subject of criticism. In 1973 Max Black, responding to the lectures so far published, commented on Grice's 'almost unmanageable elaborations' of his own theory. He likens the tenacity with which Grice clings to the original idea to the latter fate of the Principle of Verifiability', with its numerous qualifications and reservations in the face of counter-examples.  Employing an accusation that had long haunted Grice, he suggests that this tenacity goes beyond 'an admirable stubbornness' , amounting to  'something that might be called a "philosophical fixation"'.  The exact nature of conventional meaning and its relation to the more central notion of speaker's meaning are perhaps the least well resolved aspects of the William James lectures. They are, however, crucial to Grice's central programme. A fully integrated philosophy of language relating abstract linguistic meaning to what individual speakers do in particular contexts needs at least a clear account of the status of linguistic meaning. Grice seemed uncomfortable with its pres-ence, but increasingly to be aware of his need to account for it. Towards the end of his life, he commented that the relationship between word meaning and speaker meaning was the topic 'that has given me most trouble'. However, some later commentators have been more optimistic on his behalf. Anita Avramides has argued that it is possible to reconcile a psychological account of meaning with a conventional account, urging that 'Grice's work on meaning is, I believe, of a hearty nature and can endure alteration and modification without becoming obsolete.' Brian Loar has dismissed possible criticisms that Grice's account of speaker meaning must always presuppose linguisticmeaning, claiming that 'the basic illumination shed by Grice's account of speaker's meaning does not depend on such precise conceptual explication.'1  The problems surrounding conventional meaning prompted some of the earliest published responses to the William James lectures, perhaps in part because the last two lectures in the series, both concerned with this general topic, were the first to appear in print: 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in 1969. In 'Meaning and truth', his discussion of the  'Homeric struggle' between formal semanticists and communication-theorists, Strawson suggests that the latter must always acknowledge that in most sentences 'there is a substantial central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of truth-conditions or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from that of a truth-condition.' Strawson singles out Grice's 1968 article as an example of a communication theorist implicitly making such as acknowledgement.  Another published response to these early articles came from Chomsky. It is clear from his 1976 book Reflections on Language that Grice's admiration for his work was not reciprocated. Chomsky detects a return to behaviourism in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning'. This is rather surprising, given Grice's own explicit rejection of behaviourism, and given his spirited defence of the need to allow psychological concepts into the theory of language. Chomsky picks up on Grice's reliance on having 'procedures' to produce certain effects as an account of timeless meaning for a particular individual.  Such an account, Chomsky argues, simply cannot explain the creativity of language use: the ability of speakers to produce and hearers to interpret an infinity of new sentences. He is uncomfortable with the loose ends and pointers to unresolved problems typical of Grice's work.  In particular, and not surprisingly, he picks up on Grice's discussion of the status of linguistic rules. This question, Chomsky insists, is 'the central problem, not a marginal one' 73 His own answer is, of course, that speakers really do follow linguistic rules in constructing utterances, and that these rules can tell us everything about the linguistic meaning of an utterance, and nothing about what an individual speaker meant in producing the utterance. In this book, as elsewhere, Chomsky is advocating a complete divorce between the discussion of linguistic meaning and the study of communication. Communication, he argues, is not the only, and by no means a necessary, function of language. Here is the source of the ultimately irresolvable difference between Chomsky and Grice. For Grice, communication is primary; the best chance for explaining language is by way of explaining communication.Grice returned to Oxford after the William James lectures, but only for one term. In the autumn of 1967 he took up an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley. The move was permanent; during the rest of his life he was to make only a handful of brief return visits to England. It was also in many ways incongruous. A thoroughgoing product of the British elite educational system, Grice delighted in the rituals and formalities of college life. And even Kathleen was amazed that he was ready to turn his back on cricket, concluding that it was only because at 54 he was too old to play for county or college that he was prepared to move at all. But there was no reluctance in Grice's acceptance of his new appointment. In fact, he engineered the move himself. While at Harvard, he had made his interest known generally in the American academic community. When the offer came from Berkeley he had accepted it enthusiastically and, somewhat naively, without negotiation.  Grice's only published comment on the reasons for his move to America is in the philosophical memoir in his Festschrift, part of his description of the development of the theory of conversation:  During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed, the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States.'  Certainly, the later William James lectures show an increasing formal-ism. For instance, in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning and word-meaning' Grice uses symbols to generalise over variables and producegeneric logical forms to be instantiated in particular utterances. He had found this way of working with language appealing on his earlier visits to America, and two of his major philosophical influences at this time, Chomsky and Quine, were American.  There were other, more personal reasons for the move. Grice had become a confirmed admirer of all things American. He appreciated the comparatively relaxed social mores; the informality of the 1960s, which had not yet fully penetrated the Oxford colleges, suited his own disregard for personal appearance. He loved the Californian sunshine. And he was enthusiastic about the ready availability of what he saw as the most important commercial commodities. Asked by one colleague what was attracting him away to America he replied, 'Alcohol is cheap, petrol is cheap, gramophone records are cheap. What more could you want?' Perhaps above all, he liked the openness and warmth of American society. One incident in particular, from a few years earlier, had strengthened him in this opinion. He had recently returned to Oxford after a stay of several months in Stanford. He ran into a relatively close colleague, who followed up a platitudinous declaration that they must meet up some time with the comment, 'I don't seem to have seen you around. Have you been away?' For Grice, this was indicative of a certain coldness and distance in British, or at least Oxford, society that contrasted poorly with his recent experiences in America. Certainly, he took to his new lifestyle with ease and enthusiasm. Soon after the move he bought  a house in the Berkeley Hills, with a balcony overlooking San Francisco Bay. Kathleen, who had stayed in England to oversee their two children's university entrances, moved to Berkeley only in 1969, by which time the matter of the house was all settled. She took a job teaching children with special needs, and would often return after a day's work to find every window sill covered with dirty glasses, some covered in paint smudges. Grice was in the habit of extending his hospitality to every visitor to the house, whether colleague, student or decorator, but not of tidying up afterwards.?  Berkeley in 1967 was a centre for the anti-Vietnam War movement, for the student protests and for the associated questioning of social and political orthodoxy. However, such challenges were not necessarily felt within the institution of the university itself. The philosophy department had maintained a sharp hierarchical distinction between faculty and students, even at graduate level. Grice, who specified that he would teach only graduate students, had an impact on this. For all its formality and traditionalism, the Oxford college tutorial system had the effect of promoting regular contact, and free exchange of ideas, between tutorsand students. Grice had greatly benefited from this, first as a student of  W. F. R. Hardie, and later as a tutor to younger philosophers such as Peter Strawson. At Berkeley he taught his students in small groups, and encouraged them to talk to him outside class times about philosophical ideas, including their own. At his instigation, the weekly philosophy research seminars were followed by an evening for both faculty and students in a local restaurant or at his house. In turn, he was a regular and enthusiastic attender of student parties. His motives were, of course, a mixture of the intellectual and the social, but the effect was to offer students an unprecedented access to the time and ideas of a member of faculty.  Just as he retained a distinctly 'Oxford' ethos in his teaching, despite his enthusiasm for his new post, so Grice remained unmistakably British, and more specifically old-school British establishment. Perhaps even more strikingly after 1967 than before, his supposedly 'everyday' linguistic examples were peopled by majors, bishops and maiden aunts, set at tea parties and college dinners. He continued to produce manuscripts in British English spelling, to be painstakingly changed to American spellings by the copy editors. And in tape recordings even from 20 years after the move, his conservative RP accent stands out in sharp contrast to those of his American colleagues. Nor did Grice entirely leave behind the methods and orthodoxies of Oxford philosophy when he moved to Berkeley to be in closer contact with American formalism. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy have drawn attention to the different ways in which analytic philosophy developed in America and in Britain. For instance, writing in 1956, Strawson describes the American tradition as turning away from everyday language in order to concentrate on formal logic, a tendency he sees represented in the work of Carnap and of Quine. This he contrasts with the British, or rather English, tradition, exemplified by Austin and Ryle, with its continued close attention to common speech. He sees the former approach as representing a desire to create something new, and the latter a desire to understand what already exists; he even goes so far as to suggest that these 'national preferences' are indicative of 'a characteristic difference between the New World and the Old'.3 Grice could be seen as making a strong statement of academic intent by moving to America, but even in the work he produced immediately after that move, perhaps the most formal work of his career, he retained a distinctively 'Old World' sensitivity to ordinary language.  Grice's first publication after the move, apart from the two William James lectures that appeared in print in the late 1960s, was 'Vacuousnames', published in 1969. This was firmly located in a formalist tra-dition, appearing in a volume of essays responding to the work of Quine and including contributions by linguists and logicians such as Chomsky, Davidson and Kaplan. It was concerned with issues of refer-ence, in particular the question of how best to analyse sentences containing names that fail to refer, sentences such as 'Pegasus flies'. Grice had in fact been working on reference for some time, both before and after his move. He was lecturing on the topic in Oxford in October 1966, and gave a paper closely related to 'Vacuous names' at Princeton in November 1967. He comments at the start of the published paper on his own inexperience in formal logic: 'I have done my best to protect myself by consulting those who are in a position to advise me; they have suggested ideas for me to work on and have corrected some of my mistakes.* It seems that he had undertaken, quite self-consciously, to educate himself in predicate logic, so as to be in a position to answer the question in which he had become interested. The quantity of notes that survive from this period, and the wide range of materials they cover, testify to the perseverance, and also the relentlessness, with which he pursued this end. Tiny, scrawled logical symbols cover headed note-paper from both St John's College and the Berkeley department, and envelopes addressed to Grice both at Woodstock Road and at various temporary addresses from his early months in Berkeley.  In some of the notes from early in his Berkeley career, Grice devotes a lot of attention to the way in which expressions such as 'reference' and 'referring' are used in everyday language. He considers expressions such as 'in saying p, S was making a reference' and 'in what S said p occurred referentially'. Such locutions, he notes to himself, are 'princi-pally philosophical in character; ordinary chaps don't often say this sort of thing'.' Instead, he investigates expressions that do occur in ordinary language, such as the phrase 'when he said... he was referring to .., for instance 'when he said "The Vice President has resigned" he meant/was referring to the secretary'. People do regularly use the expression 'refer' to describe not just what phrases literally denote, but what people intend to pick out, or point to. Grice tackles the apparent paradox introduced by such an example. If what the speaker meant was that the secretary (Jones) had resigned, and it is true that the secretary had resigned, what he said is true. However, what he said entails that there is (was) a vice-president. In a situation where it is not true that there is (was) a vice-president, what is said is not true. It seems at least possible that the speaker's remark must be both true (because the secretary has resigned) and not true (because there is no vice-president) atthe same time. Grice notes that the 'truth of what is said (in suitable cases) must turn not only on denotation but also on reference': on what the speaker intends to pick out as well as on what the words literally indicate.  In 'Vacuous names'  ', Grice declares himself keen to uphold if possible  a number of intuitively appealing dogmas. These should ideally inform the construction of a predicate calculus to explain the semantics of natural language. The dogmas include a classical view of logic, in which if Fa is true then ~Fa must be false, and vice versa. They also include the closely related claim that 'if Pegasus does not exist, then "Pegasus does not fly" (or "It is not the case that Pegasus flies") will be true, while  "Pegasus flies" will be false'." If these truth relations hold, 'Pegasus flies' logically entails that Pegasus exists. In this, Grice is proposing to sustain a Russellian view of logic. This may seem like an unexpected or contradictory proposal from a philosopher of ordinary language who had collaborated with Strawson and employed his 'presuppositional' account of such examples in their joint work on categories. However, Grice had been moving away from a straightforwardly presuppositional account for some time. As early as the notes for the lectures on Peirce from which 'Meaning' developed, he had pondered the idea that examples Strawson would describe as presuppositional might provide illustrations of the difference he was investigating between sentence meaning and speaker meaning? Grice does not argue that Strawson's account of presupposition does not work, or does not explain accurately how people understand utterances in context. But he suggests that it is not necessary to use Strawson's observation as an explanation of sentence logic as well as speaker meaning.  In the years since he made these notes, he had of course refined this notion in much more detail, developing in the William James lectures the idea that logical form may be quite different from context-bound interpretation, with general principles of language use mediating between the two. He adopts this approach in 'Vacuous names'  '. He con-  siders two different uses of the phrase 'Jones's butler' to refer to an indi-vidual. On one occasion, people might say 'Jones's butler will be seeking a new position' when they hear of Jones's death, even if they do not know who the butler is; they might equally well say 'Jones's butler, whoever he is, will be seeking a new position'. On a different occasion, someone says 'Jones's butler got the hats and coats mixed up', describing an actual event, but mistakenly applying the name 'Jones's butler' to a person who is actually Jones's gardener; Jones does not in fact have a butler. In effect Grice wields Modified Occam's Razor, although he doesnot name it, when he insists that there is no difference in the meaning of the descriptive phrase in these two instances, only in the use to which it is put. I am suggesting that descriptive phrases have no relevant systematic duplicity of meaning; their meaning is given by a Russellian account.' So in the second case, when 'Jones's butler' fails literally to refer, 'What, in such a case, a speaker has said may be false, what he meant may be true (for example, that a certain particular individual [who is in fact Jones's gardener] mixed up the hats and coats)." For Grice, our responses to speakers' everyday use of expressions may not be the best guide to logic.  Grice was genuine in his desire to find out more about both logic and linguistics. His notes from the years immediately following the move to Berkeley reveal that, as well as setting himself the task of learning predicate calculus, he was reading current linguistic theory. Along with his own extensive notes on the subject, he kept a copy of Chomsky's 'Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation', in a version circulated by the Indiana University Linguistics Club early in 1969.1º He also had a number of articles on general semantics, on model-theoretic semantics, and on the semantics of children's language. The notes show him at work on the interface between semantics and syntax. There are tree diagrams and jottings of transformational rules mapping one diagram on to the next. There are sketches of phrase structure rules, such as 'NP → Art + N' and 'N → Adj + N', accompanied by the list 'N: boy, girl, tree, hill, dog, cat'." He seems to have been interested for a while in reflexive pronouns, listing verbs with which they were optional, or verb phrases from which they could be deleted ('shave myself'/'shave', 'dress myself'/'dress') and those from which they could not ('cut myself'/'cut', 'warm myself'/'warm'). He also dabbled in pho-netics, making notes to remind himself of words representative of the various vowel sounds, and drawing up a table of the distinctive features of the consonants Ip, lt and kJ.  Given this flurry of interest in linguistics, and his stated intention of putting himself into closer connection with practising linguists, it is striking that Grice does not seem to have sought any contact with linguists working at Berkeley. This is all the more surprising given that the interests of some Berkeley linguists at the time might be seen as corresponding remarkably closely to his own. If Berkeley was a hub of student uprising in 1967, it was to become a centre for a different, quieter revolution in the early 1970s. The generative semanticists were in revolt against what were now the orthodoxies of Chomskyan linguistics.  Chomsky was maintaining his hard line on the difference betweenlinguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. He argued that generative grammar was concerned with syntactic structure, and with semantic meaning to the extent that it depended on deep structure. It had nothing whatsoever to say about how speakers use language in context.  The generative semanticists argued that, if grammar really was to offer an account of the human mind, it should be able to explain all aspects of meaning, including the obvious fact that meaning is often indirect, or non-literal. Robin Lakoff has described how, in making such claims, linguists such as Paul Postal, George Lakoff, James McCawley and John Ross were seen as directly opposing Chomsky. Their attempts to find ways of incorporating various aspects of utterance meaning into a formal theory of language led to more and more complicated linguistic rules, and eventually to the failure of generative semantics as an enter-prise. Along the way, however, they picked up on work from ordinary language philosophy as 'the magic link between syntax and pragmat-ics'." Speech act theory offered a way of incorporating utterance function into grammar. Generative semanticists attempted to account for implicit performatives, where no overt performative verb is present, in terms of a 'performative marker' in deep structure.13 Grice's theory of conversation suggested possibilities for incorporating context-sensitive rules into grammar, and thereby explaining a wide range of non-literal or indirect meaning.14  However, there was little personal contact between Grice and the linguists who were making such enthusiastic use of his work. Programmes of the Berkeley linguistics colloquium, sent to Grice in the philosophy department, provided him with paper for his incessant jottings and list-ings, but were left unopened. McCawley's work on the performative hypothesis gets a mention in a handout for Grice's students from 1971, but references in his more public lectures and in his published work are always to philosophers rather than linguists. Aware of what linguists were doing, but not in active dialogue with them, he worried privately in his notes over whether logicians and linguists actually mean the same by their apparently shared vocabulary such as 'syntax' and 'semantics'.  T have the feeling', he confesses, 'that when I use the word "semantic" outside logical discussion, I am using the word more in hope than in understanding.'5  There are, perhaps, two explanations for Grice's silence on the topic of generative semantics in particular, and of linguistics more generally, although there is no evidence that Grice himself endorsed either of these. One is to do with the specific differences between Grice's enterprise and that of his contemporaries in linguistics, the other with themore general differences between linguistics and philosophy as disci-plines. Although one of Grice's central interests at the time was that of linking semantics and syntax into a coherent theory of language, he saw semantics as primary and syntax as derived from it. As he suggested in one talk on the subject:  What I want to do is in aid of the general idea that one could work out for a relatively developed language a syntax such that all the way down any tree which would terminate in the [sic] sentence of the language would be a structure to which a semantical rule was attached.17  His theory of meaning was the driving force behind his theory of lan-guage. The generative semanticists, on the other hand, took syntax as primary. Syntax, with a much more precise definition than Grice was using, was the governing factor in language. Their aim was to use it to explain as many aspects of meaning as possible.  More generally, as Robin Lakoff has pointed out, the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics have different expectations of a 'theory' of language and make different assumptions about the role of examples. 18 Linguists, at least those within a broadly 'Chomskyan' framework, are generally committed to the scientific validity of their theories. Examples are used to demonstrate a point and, in the face of counter-examples, the theory must be modified or in the worst case abandoned.  Philosophers in Grice's style are concerned with producing philosophically revealing accounts of the relevant phenomena, and examples are used to illustrate these accounts. Some of the more recent reactions to the theory of conversation from within linguistics highlight these different expectations. For instance, Paul Simpson has complained that  'Grice's own illustrations are all carefully contrived to fit his analytic model; as a result there emerge from the theory too few explicit criteria to handle the complexity of naturally occurring language.'' For Grice's purposes, the close fit of illustration and model is no problem; to a linguist it is a major fault.  In 1970, Grice gave a series of lectures and seminars at the University of Urbana under the uncompromisingly ambitious title 'Lectures on language and reality'. He explains at the start of these that his overarching theme will be reference, a topic that has interested him for some time. His interest follows on his belief that a clear account of reference is essential to a full understanding of many other central topics in the philosophy of language. More specifically and recently, he has come tosee its significance to the connections between grammar and logic, between syntax and semantics. In the first lecture he launches into an elaborately coded account of language, based on a pseudo-sentence invented by Rudolf Carnap. In the introduction to The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap presents a typically logical positivist account of the philosopher's reason for taking language seriously. A suitably rigorous language will provide the necessary tools for logical and scientific exposition. This language is to be a formal system, concerned with types and orders of symbols but paying no attention to meaning. 'The unsystematic and logically imperfect structure of the natural word-languages' makes them unamenable to such formal analysis, but in a 'well-constructed language' it is possible to formulate and understand syntactic rules. 20  For instance, given an appropriate rule, it can be proved that the word-series 'Pirots karulize elatically' is a sentence, provided only that 'Pirots' is known to be a substantive (in the plural), 'karulize' a verb (in the third person plural), and 'elatically' an adverb... The meaning of the words is quite inessential to the purpose, and need not be known.  Carnap does no more with his invented example, proposing instead to stick to symbolic languages.  Grice's approach and purpose in 'Lectures on language and reality' are very different from Carnap's, although he does not refer directly to these differences, and indeed mentions Carnap only in passing. Still at heart a philosopher of ordinary language, Grice is convinced that natural language is a worthwhile focus of philosophical investigation in its own right, and that its apparent logical imperfections are not insurmount-able. Moreover, it is philosophically important because of the purposes to which it is put, not because of its potential for logical expression.  Perhaps with an eye to the subversiveness of his undertaking, he borrows from Austin's paper 'How to talk: some simple ways' in suggesting that his programme might be subtitled 'How pirots carulize elatically: some simpler ways'.21  Grice uses Carnap's nonsense words, and others like them, to build up a fragment of a fantasy world. So his audience is treated to pieces of information such as 'a pirot a can be said to potch of some obble & as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble e, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o1 as being fid to one another'. 22 Some way into the first lecture he offers the audience the key to thiscode. Pirots are much like ourselves, and inhabit a world of obbles very much like our own world. To potch is something like to perceive, and to cotch something like to think. Feng and fang are possible descrip-tions, much like our adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles.  Part of the reason for the elaborate story of obbles, he suggests, is because:  it seems to me very important that, when one is considering this sort of thing, one should take every precaution to see that one isn't taking things for granted and that the concepts which one is going to use have, as their basis, concepts which will only bring in what is required for them to do whatever job it is that one wants them to do.  Carnap wanted to use semantically opaque forms to hint at how an analysis of syntax might proceed without reference to meaning. Grice's intention in borrowing his example is to consider what concepts might be necessary to the discussion of meaning and reference, freed from the normal preconceptions of such a discussion.  It is when the behaviour of pirots is considered, when a group of pirots in a particular gaggle interact together, that the notion of reference becomes important. Situations in which pirots want to communicate about obbles are when language 'gets on to the world'. In effect, Grice is encouraging the dispassionate consideration of what rational beings are likely to do with a communication system. The regularities of syntax are based on language's function of referring to the world; the types of meanings the pirots need to express determine the structures of the language. A successful language is one able to offer true descriptions of the world. The business of language, its driving force, is com-munication. Grice may appear to have moved rather a long way from the ideals of ordinary language philosophy, in constructing an artificial code, or language fragment. However, he emphasises that he see this as a necessary simplification, as a way of modelling and defamiliarising natural language in order to study it more clearly. His interest remains with the issue of how language maps on to reality: how it exists principally as a system for communicating about the world shared by a community of speakers. He is interested in the workings of natural language rather than the regularities of the constructed, purified language of logic. The transcriptions of the Urbana seminars show one participant asking him whether it would not be better to stick to a logical lan-guage, with its simple, familiar structures: 'why bother with ordinarylanguage?' Grice's simple reply is 'I find ordinary language more interesting. 23  Grice returns to the debate between Russell and Strawson over denoting expressions that fail to refer in the fourth Urbana lecture, the only one to be published (some years later, as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature'). Here again, his inclination is in favour of Russell's theory of descriptions to account for examples such as 'the king of France is bald', and to find alternative explanations for the 'presuppo-sitional' effects associated with them. Characteristically tentative, Grice does not explicitly endorse the Russellian position, but proposes to investigate it and test the extent of its applicability. This time, he states explicitly that he will apply the 'dodge' of implicature.  On Russell's interpretation of 'the King of France is bald', both the unique existence and the baldness of the king of France are logical entailments of the sentence; 'the king of France is not bald' is ambigu-ous, with both entailments of the positive sentence equally possible candidates for denial. Strawson objected that a person who utters 'the king of France is not bald' will generally be taken to be committed to the existence of the king and to be denying his baldness. The supposed ambiguity is rarely if ever a feature of the use of such an expression.  Grice concurs with Strawson's suggestion that the commitment to existence seems to be shared by the assertion and its denial. However, he argues, it is not necessary to assume that the commitment is of the same order, or to the same degree, in both cases. If Russell's interpretation is retained, it follows that the denial must be semantically ambiguous between a negation with scope over the whole sentence, and negation with scope simply over the baldness. The latter does, whereas the former does not, retain semantic commitment to the existence of the king of France. On this interpretation the existence of the king of France is an entailment of the positive assertion, and of one (strong) reading of the denial. However, 'without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of "the king of France is not bald" as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of the king of France.'2 In response to this, it is possible to argue that on the weak reading of the denial the commitment to the existence of the king, although not a logical entail-ment, arises as a conversational implicature in use.  The implicature envisaged by Grice in this latter case is a generalised conversational implicature; it arises by default when the expression is used, unless cancelled explicitly or by features of the context. It is present because of the speaker's choice of the form of expression. For this reason Grice proposes to explain it in terms of the general categoryof Manner. In his original account of this category he suggested four maxims, and hinted that it might be necessary to add more. Here, he suggests one such addition, namely the maxim 'Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appro-priate', or 'Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply' 25 It is reasonable to expect that conversational contributions will be expressed in a manner conducive to the most likely possible reply or range of replies.  The facilitation of likely responses is also advanced to counter another of Strawson's objections to Russell. On Russell's account, an utterance of 'the king of France is bald' is simply false. Yet, Strawson observes, our most likely response on hearing it uttered would not be to say 'you're wrong' or 'that's false', but to be in some sense lost for an answer.  According to Grice, the speaker in such a situation has not framed the utterance in a way that makes a reply easy. One possible likely response to a statement is a denial. In a conversational contribution entailing several pieces of information it is possible that any one of these pieces may be denied, but some particular aspect is often a most likely candi-date. If all pieces of information are equally likely to be denied, the most cooperative way of phrasing the utterance would be as a simple conjunction of facts. The speaker would be expected to utter something close to the Russellian expansion, something such as 'there is one unique king of France, and this individual is bald'. In producing the contracted form 'the king of France is bald', however, the speaker is apparently assuming that possible responses do not include the denial of the unique existence of the king of France. Grice suggests that it is generally information with 'common-ground' status that is not considered a likely basis for denial. This may be because the information is commonly known, and known to be commonly known between speaker and hearer. But this explanation will not always serve:  For instance, it is quite natural to say to somebody, when we are discussing some concert, My aunt's cousin went to that concert, when we know perfectly well that the person we are talking to is very likely not even to know that we have an aunt, let alone know that our aunt has a cousin. So the supposition must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that we would expect the hearer to take from us (if he does not already know). That is to say, I do not expect, when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin went to a concert, to be questioned whether I have an aunt and, if so, whether my aunt has a cousin.This is the sort of thing that I would expect him to take from me, that is, to take my word for. 6  The king of France is bald' presents the baldness as available for discussion, as possibly controversial. The existence, however, is not treated as something likely to be challenged. This explains the difficulty encountered by anyone who does in fact want to challenge it. Similarly, the negative statement is interpreted as a challenge to some actual or potential statement in which the baldness, not the existence, of the king of France is at issue. This explains why it is generally taken to commit the speaker to the belief that the king of France exists, even if it does not in fact logically entail this.  Grice's treatment of presuppositional phenomena in 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' is sketchy and partial. He offers a fairly detailed account of examples containing definite descriptions, but his rapid survey of other types of presuppositional phenomena suggests that his account may not be easily extendable. The paper offers a further example of an attempt to apply the phenomenon of conversational implicature to a philosophical problem of long standing, and in particular to preserve a classical account of logic in the face of apparently intractable facts of language use. In considering the link between grammatical structure and the status of information, it draws on Grice's general interest in ways in which meaning may drive syntax. He does not generalise from the particular consideration of referring expressions in this paper. However, an unpublished paper from much later in his life does suggest the directions in which his thoughts may have devel-oped. In 1985, Grice was seeking to reconcile the Oxford school of philosophy with Aristotle's idea that philosophy is about the nature of things, rather than language. He proposes to adopt the hypothesis that opinion is generally reflected in language, with different 'levels' representing different degrees of commitment. Some aspects of knowledge receive the deepest level of embedding within syntax, residing in what Grice describes as the 'deep berths' of language. It is not possible for a speaker even to use the language without being committed to these.  The deepest levels are at a premium, so it is in the interests of speakers to reserve these for their deepest commitments. People might challenge these, Grice suggests, but it would be dangerous to do so. If we subscribe to this account, we might be tempted to argue that first principles of knowledge are to be found in the syntactic structure, rather than the vocabulary, of language: 'how we talk ought to reflect our most solid, cherished and generally accepted opinions 2 In this discussion of whatis presented as uncontroversial and what as available for denial, Grice might be described as interested in the ways in which different syntactic devices available for conveying information bring with them different existential and ontological commitments.  The fourth Urbana lecture, taken on its own, offers an account of how a possible addition to the category of Manner suggests a new approach to the problems posed by Russell's theory of descriptions. In the somewhat abridged form in which it was published as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' this is, of course, how it is generally read.  In the context of the Urbana lectures as a whole, however, it can also be seen as part of a much more ambitious project to describe how lan-guage, as a system to serve the communicative needs of rational beings,  'gets on to' the world, or functions to refer and describe. In this context, it is also apparent that Grice saw the question of the nature of reference as central to the philosophy of language, and particularly to his current interest in the division between syntax and semantics, or logic and grammar. Ultimately, it might be hoped that the structure of language could be shown to be revealing of the structure of human knowledge, precisely because language is dependent on knowledge.  The theory of reference was not the only topic in the philosophy of language to which Grice returned during the early 1970s. His new interest in the relationship between semantics and syntactic form, and hence in the expression of human thought, also prompted him to revisit the topic of intention. He had been elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, and in the summer of 1971 he made one of his rare return visits to England in order to give an Academy lecture. For his topic, he chose to return to the themes of his discussion paper 'Intentions and dispositions' some 20 years earlier. In the mean time, Hampshire and Hart had published their 'Decision, intention and certainty'. Gilbert Harman has repeated the rumour that this paper, containing a similar idea to that in 'Intentions and dispositions', 'prompted Grice to develop his alternative analysis'28 In his British Academy lecture, 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice refers rather vaguely to 'an unpublished paper written a number of years ago', and a thesis advanced in it that he now wants to criticise. He reformulates his original two-pronged account as a three-pronged one by making independence from empirical evidence into a separate criterion. 'X intends to do A' can truthfully be used only in cases where X is ready to take any preparatory steps necessary to do  A. Further, such a statement implies or suggests that X is not in any doubt that X will in fact do A. Finally, this certainty on the part of the speaker must be independent of any empirical evidence. Drawing onthe old ordinary language technique of devising a dialogue as context for a particular word, Grice offers the following illustration:  I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. You will enjoy that. I may not be there. I am afraid I don't understand. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Then you should have said to begin with, 'I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like, 'I should probably be going', or, 'I hope to go', or, 1 aim to go', or, 'I intend to go if I can'. Grice seems unconcerned by the highly artificial nature of this 'con-versation', compared to the structure and flow of naturally occurring talk. He comments that 'it seems to me that Y's remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained. 2 His point is that it seems legitimate to object to a use of 'I intend.' in cases where the speaker is not sure that it will be possible to fulfil the intention. The omission of such an addition as '... if I can' is possible only in cases where the doubt is perfectly obvious to both speaker and hearer, as when the speaker is making plans to keep ducks in extreme old age, or to climb Everest.  Grice's criticism of his own earlier analysis focuses on the implication that an intention is a type of belief, and the secondary notion that it is a belief independent of evidence. He argues that there are simply no parallels to be found for this type of belief; neither a hunch nor a memory will fit the bill. A belief such as an intention would have to be  - one that could not be true, false, right or mistaken - simply does not properly bear the title of belief at all. This means that intention lacks a clear definition, leaving it open to a sceptical attack challenging the coherency of ever saying 'I intend.. To use the statement 'I intend to do A' is to involve oneself in some degree of factual commitment and there must be something giving one the right to do this. Usually that something is evidence, but in the case of intention it has been established that there is nothing that would count as adequate evidence.  Grice responds to this possible sceptical position by rejecting the assumption that in stating an intention one is involved in a factual com-mitment. Characteristically, he develops this objection by means of a careful analysis of language. He suggests that there is a difference between two uses of the 'future tense' in English, a difference notmarked linguistically, or marked only in careful use in the distinction between 'I will..' and 'I shall ... In most normal uses, 'I will ..! can be used either with a future intentional or a future factual meaning.  Strictly speaking, if we intend to go to London tomorrow, we can only honestly use the expression 'I will go to London tomorrow' in its future intentional meaning; to do otherwise would be to suggest that it is somehow beyond our control. And for these future intentional statements it is simply not legitimate to ask for an evidential basis, any more than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!'. In each case to ask for evidence would be 'syntactically' inappropriate.  Having drawn attention to this distinction, Grice ponders the links it suggests between intending and believing with respect to a future action. He proposes the term 'acceptance' as one that can express 'a  generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief'.3° Using the notion of acceptance in the original three-pronged analysis might, he suggests, rescue it from the criticisms based on its reliance on belief as central to intention. In the case of intention but not of belief, X accepts that X will do A and also accepts that X doing A will result from that acceptance. No external justification is required.  In the case of belief, however, some external justification, or evidence, is needed for the acceptance.  At the start of 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice acknowledges a debt to Kenny's concept of 'voliting'. He does not refer directly to Kenny's work, but its influence appears in relation to the notion of 'acceptance'.  Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher who was President of the British Academy, had published a collection of essays entitled Action, Emotion and Will since Grice's first attempt at analysing intention.  Kenny argues that expressions of desire and of judgement both display a similar complexity; both take as object not a thing but a state of affairs, despite surface appearances to the contrary. 'Wanting' always specifies a relation to a proposition; so, for instance 'wanting X' is in fact  'wanting to get X'. For this reason, we might 'expect that an analysis of a report of a desire should display the same structure as the analysis of a report of a judgement' 3' Kenny introduces the artificial verb 'volit' to generalise over the range of attitudes a speaker can adopt to a proposition that express approval, whether this be approval of actual states, as in 'x is glad that p' or of possible states as in 'x wishes that p'. This positive attitude distinguishes 'voliting' verbs from simple judgement, which may be neutral or even disapproving. Kenny's 'volition' also covers intention. Later, Kenny proposes to borrow Wittgenstein's term  'sentence-radical' to describe the propositional form that can serve asthe object of any verb of 'voliting'. So 'You live here now' and 'Live here now!' share the same sentence-radical as a common element of meaning, and it is necessary to distinguish this from the 'modal com-ponent, which indicates what function the presentation of this state of affairs has in communication' 32 By means of this idea, Kenny is able to identify a connection between his verbs of volition a nd those of judgement.  There is some relation which holds between a man's Idea of God and his Idea of England no matter whether he judges that God punishes England or he wants God to punish England. Any theory of judgement or volition should make this common element clear.33  In 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice employs Kenny's notion of  'voliting' in drawing a connection between intention and willing, but he does not make much use of Kenny's analysis in terms of 'sentence-radicals'. This clearly influenced his thinking in this area, however, and its effects can be seen in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', a paper written and circulated in 1972, but never published. The connection between probability and desirability, or at least between probability statements and desirability statements, had been discussed by Donald Davidson in a paper Grice heard at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina in the autumn of  1967. Davidson was another of the highly formal American philosophers of logic and language influential on Grice's thinking and methodology at this time. In this paper, eventually published in 1970, Davidson uses pr and pf, qualitative operators with scope over pairs of propositions that express attitudes of the probable and the obligatory respec-tively. Thus, 'pr (Rx, Fx)' can be instantiated as 'That the barometer falls probabilizes that it will rain', or, more naturally 'If the barometer falls, it almost certainly will rain'. A moral judgements such as lying is wrong' is to be understood, again as a relation between two proposi-tions, as something such as 'That an act is a lie prima facie makes it wrong'. This can be symbolised as 'pf (Wx, Lx)'.34  Grice considers attitudes towards probability and desirability in terms of the functions they serve in human cognition. This is reminiscent of his work in 'Indicative conditionals' on the purpose of logical connectives such as 'v' and 's' in terms of their roles in reasoning processes.  Here, he argues that probabilistic argument functions in order to reach belief in a certain proposition. Moreover:The corresponding function of practical argument should be to reach an intention or decision; and what should correspond to saying 'P', as an expression of one's belief, is saying 'I shall do A', as an expres. sion of one's intention or decision. 35  Going further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability are not merely analogous; they can both be replaced by more complex structures containing a common element.  Grice proposes two types of operators, Op^ and Op". In combination, these replace Davidson's pf and pr. The operators grouped together as Op® represent moods close to ordinary indicatives and imperatives. They can be divided into two types: Op", and Op", corresponding to t and ! respectively. A-type operators, on the other hand, represent some degree or measure of acceptability or justification. They can take scope over either of the B-type operators, yielding 'Op^ + Op", + p', or 'Op^, +t + p' for an expression of 'it is probable that p' and 'Op", + Op" + a', or 'Op+! + p' for an expression of 'it is desirable that a'.  Moving on from operators to consider the psychological aspect of rea-soning, Grice proposes two basic propositional attitudes: J-acceptance and V-acceptance, to be considered as more or less closely related to believing and wanting. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol 'V', he proposes 'X y' [p]' for J-accepts and 'X y? [pl' for V-accepts. There are further, more complex attitudes y and y*. These are reflexive: attitudes that x can take to J-accepting or V-accepting. y is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either J-accepting [p] or J-accepting [-pl; x wants to decide whether to believe p or not. y* is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either x V-accepts [p] or x V-accepts I-pl; x wants to decide whether to will p or not. On the understanding that willing p gives an account of intending p, this offers a formalisa-tion of intending.  Grice notes that for each attitude there are two further subdivisions, depending on whether the attitude is focused on an attitude of x or of some other person. Therefore 'x y', Ipl' is true just in case 'x y? [x y'  [p] or x y' I-pll' is true; 'x y's Ipl' is true just in case 'x V-accepts (y}) ly V-accepts (y*) [x J-accept (y') [p] or x J-accept (v') [-p]ll' is true. Grice suggests an operator, Opa, corresponding to each particular propositional attitude y', where 'i' is a dummy taking the place of either 1, 2, 3, or 4, and where 'a' is a dummy taking the place of either 'A' or 'B'.  He now has four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets of propositional attitudes, which he describes as follows:Op'a Judicative  (A cases Indicative, B cases Informative)  Op a Volitive  (A cases Intentional, B cases Imperative)  Op a Judicative Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Imperative)  Op*a Volitive Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Inquisitive)  For all 'moods' except the second, the syntax of English does not reflect the distinction between the A and B cases. Grice notes that 'in any application of the scheme to ordinary discourse, this fact would have to be accommodated'. This suggests that he was thinking of his scheme as at least in principle applicable to an analysis of everyday language. For present purposes, he proposes to concentrate on the simple judicative and volitive operators. This is presumably because these express his basic psychological categories of J-accepting and V-accepting. He has, however, established that it is possible to discuss more complex opera-tors, and therefore more complex psychological attitudes, a topic to which he was to return. The attitudes expressed by t, and by the pair and !'s and ! ('I shall do A' and 'Do A') can be expressed by a general psychological verb of 'accepts'. So, for instance, 'x J-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts [-pl' and 'x V-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts l'ap!'.  Grice makes it clear that, in discussing meaning, he is still describing a way of speaking, a type of procedure for achieving a goal. The semantic characterisation of the operators consists in specifying the associated procedures.  This position has an obvious kinship with views of Searle; one place where we differ is that I am not prepared to treat as primitive the notion of rule (whether constitutive or otherwise), nor that of convention (indeed I am dubious about the relevance of the latter notion to the analysis of meaning and other semantic concepts). The notion of a rule seems to me extremely unclear, and its clarification would be one result which I hope might be obtained, ultimately, from the line of investigation which I am pursuing in this paper.  The written dialogue between Davidson and Grice continued. In 1978 Davidson published a paper entitled simply 'Intending', part of whichhe devoted to a response to Grice's 'Intention and uncertainty'. Like his earlier paper, 'Intending' was the result of various drafts and conference papers, including one presented at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy in October 1974. There, Davidson has commented,  'it  received a thorough going over by Paul Grice.36 In 'Intending', Davidson suggests, or rather presupposes, that it is reasonable to 'want to give an account of the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science' 37 He sees a problem here in accounting for 'pure intending', a type not accompanied by any observable be-haviour or consequence. He proposes instead a definition, or a path towards a definition, in terms of beliefs and attitudes that can be taken as rationalising an intention. Davidson acknowledges Grice's point that intentions are often conditional on certain issues, and that the conditions are often not expressed, or not articulated, for various reasons. He quotes Grice's dialogue about the fact that X might miss the concert by being in prison. His argument is that, however misleading X's original statement of intention may have been, it was not strictly incorrect. It is not inaccurate to say 'I intend to go to the concert' when you know that there may well be a reason why you cannot go, anymore than it is contradictory to say 'I intend to be there, but I may not be there'.  Indeed, stating every condition that might prevent the fulfilment of an intention is not practicable, even if it were desirable. 'We do not necessarily believe we will do what we intend to do, and ... we do not state our intentions more accurately by making them conditional on all the circumstances in whose presence we think we would act.'38 Davidson considers intention in terms of wanting, but not as a subclass of wanting. Indeed, he argues that it is possible for someone to say that he wants to go to London next week, but he does not intend to go because there are other things he wants to do more. Rather, both intending and wanting are separate sub-parts of a general psychological pro-attitude, and they are expressed by value judgements.  Grice's 'thorough going over' of Davidson's paper was never pub-lished, but it was tape recorded and subsequently transcribed. In it he outlines the position he took in Intention and uncertainty'. X intends to do A' entails that X believes X will do A; X's belief depends on evi-dence, but the relevant evidence derives from X's own psychological state. For Davidson the relationship between intention and belief is not one of entailment, but rather by saying 'I intend..' in certain circumstances you suggest that you believe you will do it. Grice wonders whether it might be possible to explain Davidson's position in terms ofa conversational implicature from 'I intend..' to 'I believe ... But he comments wryly that 'I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing alleged entailments by implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoeuvre is appropriate in this case.'39  Grice builds his case around a distinction between extensional and non-extensional intentions. In effect, a non-extensional intention is one that the subject in question would recognise. This is the one most commonly considered in discussions of intention, Grice argues. If 'The Dean intends to ruin the department (by appointing Snodgrass chair-man)' is true on a non-extensional reading, then the Dean would, if forced, be in a position to aver 'I intend to ruin the Department'. If the Dean says 'I shall ruin the Department' he is expressing, rather than stating his intention. It would, contra Davidson's claim, be inconsistent for the Dean to say 'I shall ruin the Department, but maybe I won't in fact ruin it'. The apparent counter-examples can be explained in terms of 'disimplicature'. In effect, context sometimes means that normal entailments are suspended. If we say that Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore, in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailment that Hamlet's father was in fact on the ramparts. In such a context, the speaker 'disimplicates' that Hamlet's father was on the ramparts. In the same way, when context makes it quite apparent that there may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are not committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it. A speaker who says 'Bill intends to climb Everest next week' disimplicates that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved.  The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation, but it does not seem to be one to which he returned. As it is presented in 'Logic and conversation', and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said': to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature, Grice appears to be conceding that the meaning conveyed by a speaker in a context may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used. In the cases under discussion, there is some particular element, some entailment,  that is 'dropped' in  context. However, he also hints that disimplicature can be 'total, as in  "You are the cream in my coffee"'. This remark appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting that, in a context which makes the whole of 'what is said' untenable, it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning. The mechanismsof disimplicature are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in terms of the assumption that the speaker is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality. If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimpli-cature is total, the hearer is forced to seek a different interpretation of the utterance.  There are undoubtedly problems inherent in the notion of disimpli-cature, which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea. In a 1971 article, Jonathan Cohen suggests a 'Seman-tical Hypothesis' as an alternative explanation of the phenomena of logical particles that Grice explains by means of his 'Conversationalist Hypothesis'. Cohen's suggestion is that some natural language expres-sions, such as 'either... or', differ from their apparent logical counter-parts. In this particular case, 'either... or' differs from 'V' by entailing, as part of its dictionary meaning, that there is indirect evidence for the disjunction. In examples such as 'The prize is either in the garden or in the attic, but I'm not going to tell you which', however, this meaning does not survive. This is because 'it is deleted or cancelled in certain con-texts, just as the prefixing of "plastic" to "flower" deletes the suggestion of forming part of a plant.'40 The idea of 'disimplicature' seems remarkably close to Cohen's looser notion of 'deletion', laying open the possibility that the very natural language expressions Grice was seeking to explain might after all differ semantically from their logical equivalents.  In his reply to Davidson, as in his earlier unpublished paper, Grice considers the role of intentions in actual everyday cognition. 'First we are creatures who do not, like the brutes, merely respond to the present; we are equipped to set up, in the present, responses in the more remote future to situations in the less remote future. Grice pictures our view of the future as an appointment book in which various entries are inscribed. We are aware of a distinction between entries we have no control over (inscribed in black) and those that are there by our control, or depend on us for their realisation (inscribed in red). These latter entries are intentions. If we can foresee an unpleasant consequent of such entries, we will try to avert it if we can by deleting a red entry. The Dean derives the conclusion from the existing entries that 'Early December Dean gets fired'. He is understandably unhappy about this, but is in a position to do something about it if he can find that one of the entries from which he drew the conclusion is in red. He is able to delete, for instance, 'Dean appoints Snodgrass' inscribed in red in mid-November.  The conclusion Grice draws from this is:that we need a concept which is related to that of being sure in the kind of way which I have suggested intending is related to being sure; and if we need such a concept we may presume that we have it.  This sentence contains a large leap in the argument, but the recording of his original presentation reveals that Grice got a big laugh from the audience at this point. He presents this conclusion gleefully, provocatively 'trying it on', suggesting that 'intend' seems to him a good candidate for the name of the concept in question. This was, however, to prove a serious manoeuvre in his methodology. In the field of philosophical psychology in particular, he was to argue that the need for a particular concept in rational creatures was good enough reason to assume its existence, or at least posit it for the purpose of theorising.  Grice challenges Davidson's views on wanting, describing his picture of a person's mental life as one of a series of wants competing to be assigned the status of intention. For Grice this is just too neat and organ-ised to be plausible. It does not even reflect how the matter is described in ordinary language. There is in fact a vast range of terms in the  'wanting-family' of verbs, and these demand careful attention. Contra Davidson's claim, we would be very unlikely to say 'I want to go to London next week but I don't intend to because there are other things I want more'. We are far more likely to use some phrase such as 'I would like to go to London but... In the following elaborately extended metaphor, Grice expresses his unease with the notion of a series of competing wants, arguing that rationality is necessary to impose some order or restraint on pre-rational emotions and impulses:  It seems to me that the picture of the soul suggested by D's treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one might almost say, com-puterised. It is a picture of an ideally decorous board meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the stand-point of their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action; normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another over-impressed with the presentations made by some particular member. My soul doesn't seem to me, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout, won't listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the chair-man, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since some-times the meeting breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.  In the final section of his reply, Grice returns to the discussion of methodology. He takes issue with Davidson's aim of avoiding the mysterious and the unexplained in accounting for intention. On the con-trary, in philosophy of mind, 'a certain kind of mysteriousness' is to be prized. A concept is useful to the extent that it can explain behaviour, and this consideration outweighs some degree of opaqueness in the concept itself, as in the case of Grice's J-accepting and V-accepting. A psychological theory will be more or less rich, depending on the complexity of the behaviour, and therefore of the necessary psychological states, of the creature under investigation.  In the seven years from the time of his move to America, Grice had developed his interest in the philosophy of language to include the relationship between semantics and syntax. This had involved him in considerations of how the structure of language may mirror the structure of thought, which had in turn led him back with new insights to some old interests, including the nature of intention, and the role of psychological concepts such as this in linguistic meaning. Interest in how language is used to express thought about the world prompted a consideration of psychological concepts and ultimately a return to a topic from much earlier in his career: the philosophical status of rationality.In 1975 Grice was made full professor at Berkeley, and in the same year he was elected president of the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association. Now in his sixties, there was no apparent diminution in his restless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He travelled frequently to speak at conferences, deliver lecture series and lead discussions, mainly within the United States. His reputation benefited from this exposure, and also from the wider dissemination of his work on implicature. He finally published the second and third William James lectures belatedly and apparently reluctantly during the 1970s, under the titles 'Logic and conversation' and 'Further notes on logic and conversation'!'  Meanwhile, Grice was cutting an increasingly striking figure around the Berkeley campus. He was always a large man and, apparently unmoved by California's growing interest in healthy eating, he had recently been putting on weight. In his youth he had been proud of his blond curls, but now his hair was thinning and whitish, and grew down over his collar. His clothes were chosen for comfort and familiarity rather than for style or fashion. He was most offended, however, when it was once suggested that his trousers were held up by a piece of string.  Wasn't it obvious, he demanded, that he was using two old cricket club ties? Grice did not, perhaps, deliberately cultivate his image as an eminent but eccentric Englishman abroad, but he does seem to have taken some pleasure in the effect he produced. Drinking one evening in Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, he was approached by a total stranger who wanted to know who he was: I don't recognise you, but I'm sure you must be someone distinguished.' Perhaps more telling than the anecdote itself is the fact that Grice was immensely pleased by the stranger's comment.Grice's chaotic untidiness extended from his person to his immediate surroundings. His desks at home and on campus were piled high with an apparent miscellany of notes, manuscripts and correspondence. He drove a series of old cars, all bought cheaply and constantly breaking down, a particular problem for Grice who had neither ability nor inclination to fix them. His disregard for appearances may have been the result of preoccupation or absent-mindedness, but it did not represent an embracing of the laissez-faire, or 'hippy' attitude of his students' gen-eration, as has sometimes been suggested. In fact, Grice seems to have been wary of the values this represented. Very early in the 1970s he jotted down an extensive list, apparently simply for his own benefit, of opposing 'good' and 'bad' values in this new ethos. The list headed  'Good Things' includes 'doing your own thing (self-expression)', 'inde-pendence (cf. authority)', 'new (unusual) experiences (self-expansion)' and 'equality'. The 'Bad (or at least not good) Things' include '(self) dis-cipline',  loyalty (except political)', tolerance (except towards what we favour)' and 'culture (except popular)'. Some items on the list are marked with as asterisk, which Grice annotates as 'some v. bad'. These include 'discrimination', 'getting unfair advantage' and 'authority'. 3  There is no mistaking Grice's disapproval for the new ethos, which may seem strange in the light of his own affectionate reminiscences of 'pinko Oxford', with its avowed dislike of discipline and authority. In fact, the rebelliousness of Grice's Oxford contemporaries was, as he himself half admits in those reminiscences, more a pose or a show of dissent than a real revolt. It drew on a lifestyle that depended on privilege maintained by the status quo. Grice was made uneasy by the more businesslike rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, with its challenge to authorities, political, social and intellectual.  If Grice was somewhat wary of his students' values, this did not diminish his enthusiasm and success in teaching them. He was exceptionally bad at the paper work and administration accompanying his teaching duties. Repeated requests from administrative staff for course reading lists went unanswered and sometimes unopened, course descriptions in student handbooks were often brief to the point of evasion, and lists of grades were submitted late or not at all. However, he seems to have taken the business of teaching itself much more seriously. Those who have heard him generally agree that he was not a talented lecturer.* Tapes of his lectures bear this out; they are full of hesitations, false starts and labyrinthine digressions. However, the few surviving tapes of Grice's seminars suggest that his approach lent itself more naturally to this form of teaching. A tape from 1978 of a seminaron theories of truth records him patiently drawing out responses from his students, encouraging even faltering attempts to form answers.  Above all, he was interested in nurturing sensitivity to philosophical method, and in reinforcing students in the habit of forming their own judgements. In the same seminar, as he helps along the discussion of truth, he draws out the significant steps in the argument: consider what criticisms might be made of our position, then think about how we might get out of them.' In teaching, he still emphasised linguistic intui-tion. Former student Nancy Cartwright has recalled a seminar on metaphysics in the mid-1970s in which Grice encouraged his students to consider the theoretical claims of physics by determining where they would incorporate 'as if'. A note from a graduate student from the late 1970s includes the comment, 'I'd say that you've already increased my belief in paying attention to our linguistic intuitions." As a supervisor he was encouraging and attentive. Judith Baker, one of Grice's doctoral students at this time, has commented that, 'When we discussed my thesis, Grice completely entered into my research and questions. He had a great gift for looking at what another philosopher wished to understand.8  It does seem that, despite his rather cavalier attitude to some of his professional duties, Grice was genuinely concerned about the welfare of his Berkeley students. Some of his notes for the Urbana lectures are written on the back of a draft letter in which he contributes to a faculty discussion of 'Graduate Programme Revision'. Recycling a favourite piece of terminology, he suggests a series of 'desiderata' for the graduate programme. These are concerned not so much with syllabus content as with the more general student experience. They include comments about increasing student access to faculty, as well as points such as  'reduce or eliminate 3rd year doldrums' and 'foster a sense of personal adequacy, together with the idea that philosophy can be an exciting and enjoyable activity'. He makes a final and particularly impassioned point about 'financial discrimination', interesting in the light of his rather wary attitude to new notions of equality. 'A pass at QE should not be nullified by poverty', he argues 'and the added anxiety would be bad in itself, and bad for student harmony and for the flow of applications for admission to the program."  As well as a growing academic reputation, and popularity among his students, Grice enjoyed at Berkeley productive intellectual friendships of the sort he had valued at Oxford. These were largely formed with younger philosophers such as George Myro, Richard Warner and Judith Baker. He collaborated with them in teaching and in writing, but aboveall he enjoyed long, informal discussions. He seemed to find it easier to put together and explore his own ideas in conversation with others than in solitude. These discussions often took place at the house in the Berkeley hills, with Kathleen on hand to cook whatever meal was appropriate to the time of day. Grice commented:  To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.lº  Perhaps the most significant collaboration of this period was that with Judith Baker. They produced copious notes on ethics, particularly  drawing on Kant and on Aristotle. They completed a book-length manuscript called 'Reflections on morals', credited to 'Paul Grice & Judy Baker or Judy Baker & Paul Grice' and planned and partly wrote another called 'The power structure of the soul'." These were intended for publication, but have not yet appeared. I The only published work to result from their long collaboration was one article, 'Davidson on  "Weakness of the will"', in which they return to some of the themes discussed by Grice in the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. 13  Grice's chief solo interest during the 1970s was not very far removed from the themes of his collaborative work with Judith Baker. Nor, typically, did it represent a completely new direction in his thinking.  Throughout his philosophical career, Grice's choices of topic tended to follow on from and build on each other, rather than forming discreet units. In this case, he returned to ideas that had interested him at least since his early work towards the William James lectures, namely the psychological property of rationality, its status as a defining feature of human cognition, and its consequences for human behaviour. Grice suggested that he drew out, and perhaps saw, the significance of rationality to his theory of conversation more clearly in later commentary on the work than in his original formulation of it.' He did mention rationality in the William James lectures, insisting that to follow the Cooperative Principle was to do no more than behave rationally in relation to the aims of a conversation. However, looking back over his work at the end of his life, he goes further, remarking on the essentially psychological nature of his theory of conversation. It was aimed not atdescribing the exact practices and regularities of everyday conversation, but at explaining the ways in which people attribute psychological states or attitudes to each other, in conversation or in any other type of interaction. Crucially, it saw conversation, an aspect of human behav-iour, as essentially a rational activity, and sought to explain this ratio-nality. Grice defends himself against criticisms that his theory overlooks argumentative, deceitful or idle conversations: 'it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess.'5 Properties of rationality, he argues, can legitimately be abstracted away from more specific conversational details.  Some of Grice's notes from the year or so immediately preceding the William James lectures suggest that even at that time he was concerned with the analysis of reason for its own sake. The back of a letter about the 1966 AGM of the North Oxford Cricket Club, for instance, is devoted to an imaginative weighing up of the respective pros and cons of spending July teaching philosophy at the University of Wigan, and of spending it on a cricket tour. Grice is looking for an analysis of  'reasons for doing', perhaps for the type of language in which people usually express such arguments. On the same paper he tries out different uses of the modal verb 'should'. I In other notes from the same year he starts considering the distinction between 'reasons for' and 'reasons why'! There seems then to have been a break in this line of thought;  Grice did little with the idea of reason during the time of his move to America, while he was concentrating on syntax and semantics.  However, he returned to the topic in the early 1970s, somehow finding the earlier notes in his idiosyncratic filing system and annotating and extending them. Returning to the distinction between 'reasons for..' and 'reasons why..!, he adopts a distinctively  'ordinary language  philosophy' approach as he tries out different uses and occurrences of the phrases. One note is actually headed 'botanizing' and lists, under the heading 'Reasons (practical)', such phrases as 'the reason why he d'd (action) was..!', 'there was (a) reason to @', 'there was (a) reason for him to q (action, attitude: fire x, distrust x)', 'he had reason to q',  'he had a reason for q-ing', 'his reasons for @-ing'. Grice makes notes on the distinction between the reason why x... was that p' and 'x's reason for ... was that/so that/to p'. He notes that for Aristotle:  Reasons for believing, if accepted, culminate in my believing something (where what I believe is the conclusion of the argument asso-ciated with these reason). Reasons for doing, if accepted, culminate in my doing something, where what I do is the conclusion of the  'practical' aspect associated with these reasons. i.e. the conclusion of a practical argument is an action. 18  Grice presented the results of these deliberations in a series of lectures called 'Aspects of reason', as the Immanuel Kant lectures at Stanford in  1977. In 1979 he used them again as the John Locke lectures in Oxford, this time adding an extra lecture to the series. The lectures were eventually edited by Richard Warner and published in 2001. The invitation to present the John Locke lectures was the occasion of one of Grice's rare trips to England. He made conscientious and surprisingly neat packing lists, including careful reminders to himself of the notes and books he would take with him to work on when not lecturing. His list of notes includes 'Kant notes - Aristotle notes - Incontinence - Ethics (Judy) - Presupposition'. The books he was packing represent some heavy, if predictable, reading: 'Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, Russell'. Perhaps less predictably, the list starts with the anomalous and unspecified  'Zoology'. Grice's interest in the study and classification of living beings was to show itself faintly in the lectures on reason, and more clearly in the work to follow.  At the start of the John Locke lectures, Grice comments on his pleasure at being back at Oxford:  I find it a moving experience to be, within these splendid and none too ancient walls, once more engaged in my old occupation of  rendering what is clear obscure. I am, at the same time, proud of my mid-Atlantic status, and am, therefore, delighted that the Old World should have called me in, or rather recalled me, to redress, for once, the balance of my having left her for the New.!9  He was no doubt highlighting the distinction between Old and New World for rhetorical effect. But there was something genuine in his claim to 'mid-Atlantic status'; just as he was always too prominently British fully to integrate into Californian life, he was no longer comfortably at home in Oxford. Notes sent and received at the time, inevitably covered with scribbled jottings to do with reason, indicate that he stayed in his old college, St Johns, and arranged to meet many of his former colleagues for drinks and dinners.  But he had to re-  accommodate to the formalities of Oxford. The back of a programme of a match between Oxford University Cricket Club and Hampshire showshim reminding himself to order 'dress shirt, black tie'. He also needs to remember 'shoe polish/brushes OR get cleaned' and 'button, needle, thread'. He poses himself a question that would not have troubled him for some years: 'gown or not gown?' There is no doubt that Grice knew the rituals of Oxford life well enough. However, the act of readapting to them seems to have involved him in some deliberate and rather strained effort after more than a decade in the very different social milieu of Berkeley. Some of his attitudes had changed as radically as his dress, although these changes were more carefully concealed from his former colleagues. Some years previously, soon after his move to America, he had confided in Kathleen that he had discovered that very few of the students at Berkeley knew any Greek; most read Aristotle in translation. Further, and rather to Kathleen's surprise, he expressed himself quite happy with this state of affairs; there were now some very good translations available. Kathleen was well aware that he would never have admitted to such an opinion in the presence of any of his former Oxford colleagues.21  The first of the John Locke lectures is titled 'Reasons and reasoning'.  Grice describes his desire to clarify the notion of reason, a notion deemed worthy of attention by both Aristotle and Kant. Typically cir-cumspect in his proposal, he suggests that such a clarification may make some interesting philosophical conclusions possible, but that the actual conclusions are beyond the scope of these lectures. He prefaces his con-sideration of the technicalities of reasoning with a fairly lengthy dis-cussion of a rather more abbreviated notion. This is the definition of reasoning with which most ordinary people are familiar. It is tempting here to see a parallel with Grice's theory of conversation. The study of the literal meanings of words is crucially important, and shows up the striking parallels between natural language and logic, but it does not tell us everything about how people actually use words. In the same way, the logical processes of reason are of supreme philosophical impor-tance, but nevertheless need to be seen as distinct from people's everyday experience of reasoning. Introspection is of limited use in establishing the processes of reasoning because people frequently take short cuts and make inferential leaps in their thinking. To do so is often beneficial in terms of the time and energy saved, and indeed might con-stitute a definition of 'intelligence'. 22 In his treatment of reason, Grice draws on and develops the line of argument from the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. The earlier paper was circulated in mimeograph, although far less widely than 'Logic and conversation' 23 It may have been at leastin part because much of it was subsumed into these lectures that it was not itself published. Grice's method of examining and clarifying the notion of reason is one Austin would have recognised and approved He presents the results of the dusting down of the methods of linguistic botanising apparent in his notes from the previous few years. He considers different ways in which the word 'reason' is used, classifies these uses into different categories, and illustrates these categories with examples. A sentence such as 'The reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane' exemplifies what he describes as 'explanatory reasons'.2 The same type of meaning is conveyed by variants such as 'the reason for the collapse of the bridge was that..! and 'the fact that the girders were made of cellophane was the reason why the bridge collapsed'. In all such examples the fact about the girders is offered as an explanation, or a causal account, of the collapse of the bridge. They are elaborate versions of Grice's original 'reason for' cate-gory. Such examples are 'factive' with respect to both events; the speaker implies the truth of both the fact about the bridge and the fact about the girders.  Second, there are 'justificatory reasons', exemplified by 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for thinking that the bridge had collapsed' and 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for postponing the conference. There are many possible variants on these patterns, including 'he had reason to think that ... (to postpone ...) but he seemed unaware of the fact' and 'the fact that they were so late was a reason for wanting to postpone the meeting'. These are all variations of Grice's original category of 'reason why'. They offer some support, although not inevitably necessary or sufficient justification, for a psychological state ('thinking', 'wanting') or an action ('postponing').  Such examples are factive with respect to the reason given, but do not guarantee the truth of the other event (the collapse of the bridge, the postponement of the conference).  Grice labels the third type of use of 'reason' 'Justificatory-Explanatory', because of their hybrid nature; they draw on aspects of both the preceding classes. 25 Examples include 'John's reason for thinking Samantha to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog' and 'John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself against recurrent metamorphosis'. These reasons are relative to a particular person. As the examples illustrate, they may be introduced by either 'that..!' or 'to.... In the first case, the resulting sentence is doubly factive unless 'X thought that' is inserted before the reason. In the second case, the sentence is only singly factive. In each case, if therelevant individual believes that the reason gives sufficient justification for the attitude ('thinking') or action ('denouncing') then the reason can be seen as an explanation for that attitude or action. Grice in fact suggests that this type of reason is a special case of explanatory reason;  'they explain, but what they explain are actions and certain psychological attitudes' .26  Having spent considerable time and gone into some complexity in distinguishing these classes of 'reason', both in the published lectures and in his preparatory notes, Grice appears to drop them rather abruptly. He turns to a consideration of practical and non-practical, or alethic reasons: in effect the reasons to do and reasons to believe that had concerned him in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'.  Grice does little to smooth the transition between these two topics, but does mention in passing that he will be concentrating exclusively on justificatory reasons. In seems that concentrating on 'reasons to' would enable him to look at the bases for intentional actions and for psychological attitudes. These two aspects of human psychology had provided an underlying thread in his work at least since 'Meaning'.  Grice refers to Kant's theory that there is one faculty of reason, a faculty that manifests itself in a practical and a non-practical aspect. For Grice, the nature and identity of a faculty is prohibitively difficult to investigate in itself. The language used to describe reason, however, is amenable to rigorous analysis. He therefore proposes to approachKant's theory by addressing the question of whether 'reason' has the same meaning or different meanings in 'practical reason' and 'non-practical reason'. He notes that a variety of ordinary language expressions used in reasoning can apparently describe both. The word 'reason' itself is one example, but so too are 'justification', modal verbs such as 'ought' and 'should', and phrases such as 'it is to be expected'. In effect, he is seeking to apply his Modified Occam's Razor to the vocabulary of reason by avoiding systematic ambiguities between separate meanings for such a range of natural language vocabulary. In doing so, he draws on his own earlier response to Davidson's suggestion of the operators 'pr' and 'pf'. He proposes that all reasoning statements have a common component of underlying structure, as well as an indication of the semantic subtype to which they belong. He posits as the common component a 'rationality' operator, which he labels 'Acc', and for which he suggests the interpretation 'it is reasonable that'. This is then followed by one of two mood-operators, symbolised by 'I' for alethic statements and '!' for practical statements. These two operators precede, and have scope over, the 'radical' ('I'). So the structure for 'John shouldbe recovering his health now' is 'Acc + t + I', while the structure for 'John should join AA' is 'Acc +! + I'.?? Grice suggests that the mood-operators be interpreted as two different forms of acceptance, technically labelled 'J-acceptance' and 'V-acceptance', but informally equated with judging and willing, or with 'thinking (that p)' and wanting (that p)'.  The mood-operators place conditions on when it is appropriate for a speaker to use a reasoning statement, in other words when speakers feel justified in expressing acceptance of a proposition. This raises the question of what is to count as relevant justification. Alethic statements are clearly justified by evidence. We have reason for making a statement about our knowledge or belief of a certain proposition just in case we have evidence for the proposition. Ideally, we are justified in using such statements if the proposition in question is true. But truth is not a possible means of validating statements of obligation, command, or inten-tion. To use some concrete examples (which Grice does not do), 'That must be the new secretary', interpreted alethically, would be optimally legitimate in a context where its radical', namely that is the new secretary', is true. The legitimacy of 'You must not kill', interpreted practically, however, cannot be assessed in terms of the truth of 'you don't kill'. There must be some other grounds on which such statements can be judged.  Grice's suggests that, in reasoning generally, we are interested in deriving statements we perceive as having some sort of 'value'. Truth, cer-tainly, is one type of value, and alethic reasoning is aimed at deriving true statements.  But in practical reasoning we are concerned with  another type of value, which might be described as 'goodness'. Grice's own summary of this difference, in which he implicitly links the two types of reasoning to his two broad psychological categories of mood operator, runs as follows:  We have judicative sentences ('t'-sentences) which are assigned truth (or falsity) just in case their radicals qualify for radical truth (or radical falsity); and we have volitive sentences ('!'-sentences) which are assigned practical value (or disvalue) just in case their radicals qualify for radical goodness (or badness). Since the sentential forms will indicate which kind of value is involved, we can use the generic term 'satisfactory' 28  In his discussion of practical value, Grice is drawing on themes he presumably expects to be familiar to his audience from Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, although he does not make any explicit reference. Grice himself was well versed in this work, which was a particular focus for his old tutor W. F. R. Hardie, and on which he himself worked collaboratively with Austin. Aristotle identifies rationality as a defining characteristic of human beings, distinguishing them from all other life forms. The rational nature of human beings ensures that all their actions are aimed at some particular end or set of ends. Although these ends differ depending on the specific field of activity, 'if there is any one thing that is the end of all actions, this will be the practical good'. Similarly, Grice considers practical value (he says very little more about 'goodness' here) as an end for which people strive in what they wish to happen, and therefore in what they choose to do. Here, again, he returns to the type of rationality he discussed in the William James lectures. Rational beings have an expectation that actions will have certain consequences, and are therefore prepared to pursue a line of present behaviour in the expectation of certain future outcomes. They are prepared to conform to regularities of communicative behaviour in the expectation of being able to give and receive information. This, however, is just one type of a much more general pattern of human behaviour. All actions are ultimately geared towards particular ends.  The extra lecture Grice added to the series at Oxford is 'Some reflections about ends and happiness', originally delivered as a paper at the Chapel Hill colloquium in 1976. Here too he draws on Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, this time more explicitly. Aristotle suggested that the philosopher contemplating the range of different ends for different actions is confronted with the question of the nature of the ultimate end, or the 'supreme good' to which all actions aim. The answer is not hard to find, but the significance of that answer is more complex. ' "It is happiness", say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.3 For ordinary people, however, living well involves something obvious such as wealth, health or pleasure. For the philosopher the nature of happiness is much more complex, and is linked to the proper function of a man. Individual men have different specific functions, and are judged according to those specific functions; a good flautist is one who plays the flute well and a good artist one who paints well. More generally, a good man is to be defined as one who performs the proper functions of a man well. Because rationality is the distinguishing feature of mankind, the function of a man is to live the rational life, and a good man is one who lives the rational life well. Therefore the good for man, or that which results in happi-ness, is 'an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are morekinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and more perfect kind. 31  For Grice, happiness is a complex end; that is, it is constituted by the set of ends conducive to happiness. The precise set of ends in question may vary from individual to individual, but they can be seen a conducive to happiness if they offer a relatively stable system for the guidance of life. Grice finishes on a leading but inconclusive note. It seems intuitively plausible that it should be possible to distinguish between different sets of ends in respect of some external notion. Otherwise it would, uncomfortably, be impossible to choose between the routes to happiness selected 'by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentle-man' 32 Grice's cautious proposal of the basis for a notion of 'happiness-in-general', abstracted from individuals' idiosyncrasies, draws on the essential characteristics of a rational being. He concludes his lecture series with the following, highly suggestive outline:  The ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abundance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.  As Richard Warner indicates in a footnote, the original Chapel Hill lecture ends with the further comment: 'But I have now almost exactly reached the beginning of the paper which, till recently, you thought I was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of ethical princi-ples. It is a pity that I have used up my time.'  The rather enigmatic reference to a 'creature-constructor', and the link to ethics with which Grice tantalised his Chapel Hill audience, draw on ideas developed over a number of years but not discussed in these lec-tures. Grice was working on the notion of a 'creature-constructor' back in the mid-1960s. He in fact originally planned to include discussion of this topic in the William James lectures. Papers from Oxford from 1966 include a jotted note entitled 'Provisional Grand Plan for James Lectures and Seminars'. There are two bullet points:  1. Use 'God' as expository device. Imagine creature, to behaviour of which 'think', 'know', 'goal', 'want', 'purpose' can be applied. But nocommunication. Goals continuation of self (or of species). Imagine God wishing to improve on such creatures, by enabling them to enlarge their individual worlds and power over them, by equipping them for transmission of beliefs and wants (why such change  'advance'; because of decreased vulnerability to vicissitudes of nature).  2. Mechanisms for such development. Elements in behaviour must in some way 'represent' beliefs and wants (or their objects) or rather states of the world which are specially associated with them.33  Grice's private note in fact contains the germs of most of his complex  'creature-constructor'  programme, and of the topics to which he  attempted to link it throughout the rest of his life. It also explains his interest in zoology. He was studying life in terms of the structures into which it has been classified. His idea was that it might, theoretically at least, be possible to devise a ladder or hierarchy of creatures, such that each rung on the ladder represents a creature incorporating the capacities of the creature on the lower rung, and adding some extra capacity.  As a presentational convenience, Grice proposes an imaginary agent or designer of this process, the expository device 'God' of his early notes.  In later notes, and certainly in all published work, he prefers 'creature-constructor' or 'Genitor'. The Genitor's task is to decide what faculties to bestow on each successive creature so as better to equip it to fulfil its ends. The chief end of all life forms is to ensure their own continued survival, or the survival of the species to which they belong. Grice's hierarchy could be seen as an extension of Aristotle's division of living creatures in the Nicomachean Ethics into those that experience nutrition and growth (including plants), those that are sentient (including horses and cattle) and those that sustain 'practical life of the rational part' (only human beings).34 Grice does not mention this, or indeed Locke's discussion of personal identity, familiar to him from his work on the topic more than 30 years earlier. Locke posited a hierarchy of living beings, with the identity of beings at each stage depending on the fulfilment of functions necessary to the continued existence of that being. Grice would presumably have assumed that the philosophical pedigree of his ideas would be transparent to his audience. He goes much further than Locke by employing the hierarchy of beings in a mental exercise to assess the status and function of human rationality.  In order to describe, or to represent, the place of human beings on the ladder of existence, Grice recycles the 'pirots' that had appeared in the 'Lectures on language and reality'. There, pirots had branched outfrom carulising elatically in order to model the psychological processes of communication. Now, they stand in for human beings in the Genitor's deliberations. They appeared in this guise as early as 1973 when Grice was teaching a course at Berkeley called 'Problems in philosophical psychology'. One of his students took the following notes in an early seminar in this series: 'one of the goals of the pirot programme is to discover what parallels, if any, emerge between the laws governing pirots and human psychology' 35 Grice was returning to his earlier interest in psychological states. He had addressed these back in the early 1950s when he had considered the best way of describing intentions.  In 'Dispositions and intentions' he had criticised dispositional accounts that described intentions in terms of dispositions to act. In particular he saw Ryle's version of this as coming dangerously near to behav-iourism and the denial of any privileged access to our own mental states.  His attitude seems to have softened somewhat in the intervening twenty years. The student's notes describe the pirot programme as an 'offspring of dispositional analyses of metal states from Ryle C of M. But behav-iourists unable to provide conditions for someone being in particular mental state purely in terms of extensionally described behaviour.' The pirot programme was designed to offer the bridge behaviourism could not provide, by describing underlying mental states derived from, but ontologically distinct from, observable behaviour. It was a functional account, in that each posited mental state was related to a specific function it played in the creature's observable behaviour; 'in functional account, functional states specified in terms of their relation to inner states as well as to behaviour'. Further, the student noted, 'a functional theory is concerned not only with behavioral output and input of a system, but of [sic] the functional organization of inner states which result in such outputs!'  'Philosophical psychology', then, was Grice's label for the metaphysical enquiry into the mental properties and structures underlying observable human behaviour. In contrast to a purely materialist position such as that of behaviourism, Grice was arguing in favour of positing mental states in so far as they seemed essential to explaining observable behaviour. Such explanatory power was sufficient to earn a posited mental property a place in a philosophical psychology. This openness to the inclusion of mental phenomena in philosophical theories was apparent in his earlier work on intentions, and also in the William James lectures. He was later to describe such an approach as  'constructivist'. The philosopher constructs the framework of mental structure, as dictated by the behaviour in need of explanation. Thephilosopher is able to remain ambivalent as to the reality or otherwise of the posited mental state, so long as they are explanatorily successful.  In fact, the ability to play an active role in explaining behaviour is the only available measure of reality for mental states. In the pirot pro-gramme, the fiction of the Genitor provided a dramatised account of this process, with decisions about what mental faculties would promote beneficial behaviours playing directly into the endowment of those faculties.  Grice had presented some of his developing ideas along these lines in a lecture delivered and published before the John Locke lectures, but in which the place of rationality in 'creature-construction' is more fully developed. 'Method in philosophical psychology' was Grice's presidential address to the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association in March 1975. In general, the lecture is concerned with establishing a sound philosophical basis for analysing psychological states and processes. He sums up his attitude to the use of mental states in a metaphor: 'My taste is for keeping open house to all sorts of conditions and entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework' 3 In keeping with this policy of tolerance towards useful metaphysical entities, Grice proposes two psychological primitives, chosen for their potential explanatory value. These are the predicate-constants J and V which, as he was to do in the John Locke lectures, he relates loosely to the familiar notions of judging, or believing, and willing, or wanting. Concentrating on V, we can see ways in which positing such a mental state can help explain simple behaviour in a living creature. An individual may be said to belong to class T of creatures if that individual possesses certain capacities which are constitutive of membership in T, as well perhaps as other, incidental capacities.  These constitutive capacities are such that they require the supply of certain necessities N. Indeed the need for N in part defines the relevant capacity. Prolonged absence of some N will render the creature unable to fulfil some necessary capacity, and will ultimately threaten its ability to fulfil all its other necessary conditions. Such an absence will therefore threaten the creature's continued membership of T. In these cir-cumstances, we can say that the creature develops a mental attitude of V with respect to N. This mental attitude is directed at the fulfilment of a necessary capacity; its ultimate end is therefore the continued survival of the creature.  A concrete example of this process, a simplified version of the one offered by Grice, is to think of T as representing the class 'squirrel' and N as representing 'nuts'. One necessary condition for a creature to be asquirrel is, let us say, its capacity to eat nuts. This capacity is focused around its own fulfilment; it is manifested in the eating of nuts. If the creature experiences prolonged deprivation of nuts, its ability to fulfil this capacity, and indeed all other squirrel-capacities, will be threatened (it will be in danger of death by starvation). In such a situation, it is legitimate to say that the squirrel wants nuts. This posited mental state explains the squirrel's behaviour (it will eat nuts if it can find them) in relation to a certain end (survival).37  A metaphysical theory that offers a model of why a squirrel eats nuts may not seem particularly impressive, but it is a necessary first step in modelling behaviour in much more complex creatures: ultimately, in describing human psychology. In making this transition Grice draws on the notion of 'creature-construction'. The genitor is bound by one rule; every capacity, just like the squirrel's capacity to eat nuts, must be useful or beneficial to the creature, at least in terms of survival. This rule is sufficient to ensure that any mental properties introduced into the system are there for a reason, fulfilling Grice's criterion of the usefulness of metaphysical entities. It also, perhaps, allows Grice to imply that such mental capacities might be evolutionarily derived, without having to commit to this or any other biological theory. The final stage in the mental exercise is to consider what further, incidental features may arise as side-effects of these capacities for survival.  Grice argues that it is not unreasonable to suggest that, in designing some of the more complex creations, the genitor might decide to endow creatures with rationality. This capacity would qualify as having survival benefits. For creatures living in complex, changing environments, it is more beneficial to have the capacity to reason about their environment and choose a strategy for survival, than to be endowed with a series of separate, and necessarily finite, reflex responses. Just as with the more primitive capacity of eating, it is necessary for the complex creature to utilise the capacity of reason in order to retain continued use of it, and indeed of the set of all its capacities. But once the creature is reasoning, the subjects to which it applies this capacity will not be limited to basic survival. A creature with the capacity to hypothesise about the relationship between means and end will not stop at deciding whether to hide under or climb into a tree, for instance. A creature from the top of the scale of complexity will be able to consider the hypothetical processes of its own construction. That creature will assess how each capacity might be in place simply to promote survival, and might confront a bleak but inevitable question: what is the point of its own continued survival?The creature's capacity for reason is exactly the property to help it survive this question. Rather than persuading the creature to give up the struggle for survival, the capacity is utilised to produce a set of criteria for evaluating ends. These criteria will be used to attribute value to existing ends, which promote survival, and to further ends that the creature will establish. The creature will use the criteria to evaluate its own actions and, by extension, the actions of other rational creatures The justification the creature constructs for the pursuit of certain ends, dependent on the set of criteria, will provide it with justification for its continued existence. Thus the capacity of rationality both raises and answers the question 'Why go on surviving?'38 Grice hints at the possible beginnings, and status, of ethics, when he suggests that the pursuit of these ends might be prized by the collective rational creatures to such an extent that they are compiled into a 'manual' for living. The creatures' purposes in existing are no longer just survival, but following certain prescribed lines of conduct. Grice tantalisingly ends the section of his lecture on 'creature construction' with a nod at some possible further implications of this idea.  Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).39  Somewhat at odds with his more specific usage elsewhere, Grice has here been using the term 'pirot' to refer to any creature on the scale.  The 'very intelligent rational pirots' are the psychologically most complex of such creatures. In adopting this term, which is added in the margin of his preparatory notes, Grice would appear to be making a pun on Locke's 'very intelligent rational parrot', the imaginary case used to argue that bodily form must have some bearing on personal identity.40 Other than this knowing reference, Grice does not make any attempt to link his work on creature construction to Locke, or to his own earlier interest in personal identity. Richard Warner has criticised Grice for ignoring the connections between rationality, happiness and personal identity, arguing that a notion of self will determine what counts as an essential end for an individual. If, he suggests,  we are to pursue Grice's strategy - and it is a promising one - of replacing Aristotle's 'activity in conformity with virtue' with 'suit-ability for the direction of life', I would suggests that an appeal tothe notion of personal identity should play a role in the explication of suitability. 41  As Grice's reference to a list of 'rules for living' suggests, the next direction in which he explored these ideas was in the area of philosophical ethics. He did not, however, return to the implications of his pun on  'manual' and 'Immanuel'. It is possible that he was referring to Immanuel Kant, whose work on reason was central to his own thinking on this subject. But the pun may also contain a hint towards an explanation of religious morality, and perhaps even religious belief, as facts of human existence, necessary consequences of human nature. In his own notes on the subject this aspect of the 'Immanuel' figures more prominently. In general, the plausibility of explaining religion within philosophical psychology seems to loom larger in Grice's thinking than his published work of the time would suggest. For instance, on the back of an envelope from the bank, in faint, almost illegible hand he wonders: 'perhaps Moses brought other "objectives" from Sinai, besides 10 comms'. Here he may be thinking about other systems for living, suggesting that 'perhaps we might... "retune" them'. In the same notes he seems to be pondering the differences between 'God' and  'good', between 'conception' and 'reality'. Perhaps, he speculates, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be treated along these lines; 'real or pretend doesn't matter provided... does explanatory job'.42  Grice seems here to be experimenting with the idea of 'construc-tivism' as a general philosophical method, not just as an approach to philosophical psychology. An entity, state or principle is to be welcomed if it introduces an increase in explanatory power. Beyond that it is not suitable, and indeed not possible, to enquire into its 'reality'. A system of explanations is successful entirely to the extent that it is coherent, relatively simple, and explains the facts. It is not hard to discern the influence of Kant in this epistemology, and his notion that 'things in themselves' are inevitably unreachable, but that our systems of human knowledge can nevertheless seek to model reality.  In his final decade, Grice turned such a philosophical approach in the direction of his interest in metaphysics, in philosophical psychology and, derived from this, in ethics. Anthony Kenny suggests that since the Renaissance the main interest from philosophers in human conduct has been epistemological:  Moral philosophy has indeed been written in abundance: but it has not, for the most part, been based on any systematic examination ofthe concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. the concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. Grice retired from his post at Berkeley in 1980, at the age of 67. There was no question, however, that he would cease full-time philosophical activity. He continued to teach, both part-time at Berkeley and, for a few years in the early 1980s, as a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also continued to work on new ideas, to write and, increasingly, to publish. His reluctance ever to consider a piece of work finished or ready for scrutiny had meant that only 12 articles had been published during a career of over 40 years. And in almost all cases he had been either effectively obliged to include a paper in the volume of proceedings to which it belonged, or otherwise cajoled into publish-ing. It had, however, long been agreed that the William James lectures would be published in full by Harvard University Press and now finally Grice began to take an active interest in this process. He perhaps realised that it was not feasible to continue delaying the revisions and reformulations that he considered necessary. Perhaps, also, the enthusiasm with which his ideas were received in Berkeley, and the frank admiration of students and colleagues, had slowly worn away at his formidable self-doubt. Writing in Oxford, Strawson has suggested that Grice's inhibiting perfectionism was 'finally swept away by a warm tide of approbation such as is rarely experienced on these colder shores'.! Cer-tainly, he began to draw up numerous lists of papers on related themes that he would like to see published with the lectures. These included previously published articles such as 'The causal theory of perception', but also a number that still remained in manuscript form, such as  'Common sense and scepticism', and 'Postwar Oxford philosophy'.  This planned volume was focused on his philosophy of language, but Grice was also turning his attention to publishing in other areas. After a visit to Oxford in 1980, the year in which he was made an HonoraryFellow of St John's College, he received a letter from a representative of Oxford University Press. This followed up a meeting at which Grice had clearly been eager to discuss a number of different book projects. The letter refers to 'the commentary on Kant's Ethics which you have been working on with Professor Judy Baker', and suggests that this might be the project closest to being in publishable form. However, the publisher expresses the hope that work on this 'will not deflect you from also completing your John Locke lectures on Reason', and a further work on Ethics.? Grice's desire to see some of his major projects through publication coincided with his retirement, and so could not have been driven by the demands of his post. Rather, it reflected a wish for some of the strands of his life's work to reach a wider audience than the select number of students and colleagues who had attended his classes and heard his lectures.  Grice's interests in reason and in ethics increasingly absorbed him during the 1980s. They were prominent in his teaching at Seattle and at Berkeley. He himself summarised this change of emphasis as a move away from the formalism that had dominated his work for a decade or more. The main source of the retreat for formalism lay, he suggested,  'in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attention to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language'? Certainly, the discussion of reason and, particularly, of ethics in Grice's later work takes a more metaphysical and discursive tone than that of some of the linguistic work from his early years in America. However, the break with the philosophy of language was not absolute; both new topics draw on questions about the correct analysis of various sentence types. In Grice's treatment of reason, close attention to the use of certain key terms led him to posit a single faculty of rationality, yielding both practical and non-practical attitudes. From there, his discussion of expressions of practical reasoning led to the question of the appropriate type of value to serve as the end point of such reasoning, analogous to alethic value in non-practical reasoning. A simplistically defined notion of a system for the direction of life raised the awkward suggestion that it might be impossible to discriminate between a wide variety of modes of living.  People are generally in agreement that the actions of Grice's 'well-balanced, kindly country gentleman', for instance, are to be afforded greater value than those of his 'unwavering egotist', but an account of value based simply on reasoning from means to ends seems unable to account for this.  The study of ethics has long included analysis of statements of value.  Sentences such as 'stealing is wrong' appear to draw on moral concepts;it can therefore be argued that an accurate understanding of the meaning of such sentences is fundamental to any explanation of those moral concepts. Very broadly, there are two positions on this question: the objectivist and the subjectivist. One objectivist approach to ethics argues that moral values exist as ontologically distinct entities, external to any individual consciousness or opinion. Human beings by nature have access to these values, although perceptions of them may be more or less acute, observance of them more or less rigorous, and understanding of their implications more or less perceptive. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this moral objectivism was Kant, who described ethical statements as categorical imperatives; they are to be observed regardless of personal preference or individual circumstance. These he distinguishes from hypothetical imperatives, also often expressed in terms of what one 'should' do, but dependent on some desired goal or end.  A canonical subjectivist position is that there are no moral absolutes; expressions of value judgements are always particular to subject and to context. Perhaps the most extreme version of this position was that put forward by A. J. Ayer, who followed his verificationist programme through to its logical conclusion by arguing in Language, Truth and Logic that sentences such as 'stealing money is wrong' have no factual meaning. Although apparently of subject/predicate form, they do not express a proposition at all. They merely indicate a personal, emotional response on the part of the speaker, much the same as writing 'stealing money!!', where 'the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed'. A less reductionist, but equally subjectivist position, is to analyse such statements as in fact having the form of 'hypothetical imperatives'  '. That is, moral statements attempt to  impose restrictions on behaviour, but do so in relation to certain actual or potential outcomes. They stipulate means to reach certain ends.  These ends may be made explicit, as in sentences such as 'if you want to be universally popular, you should be nice to people'. Often, however, they are suppressed, but can be understood as stipulating a general condition of success or advancement. So 'stealing is wrong' is hypothetical in nature, but this is hidden by its surface form. It can be interpreted as something such as 'if you want to get on in life, you should not steal'.  In his work on this subject, Grice draws particularly on two subjectivist analyses of statements of value as hypothetical imperatives:  Philippa Foot's 1972 essay 'Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives' and J. L. Mackie's 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.These choices are not surprising; Grice knew both Foot and Mackie personally from Oxford. In discussing the view that morality consists of a system of hypothetical imperatives, not of absolute values, Foot considers its implications for freedom and responsibility. Dispensing with absolute value raises the fear that people might some day choose to abandon accepted codes of morality. Perhaps this fear would be less, she suggests, 'if people thought of themselves as volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression' rather than as being bound to conform to pre-existing moral imperatives."  Mackie concedes that objectivism seems to be reflected in ordinary language. When people use statements of moral judgements, they do so with a sense that they are referring to objective moral values. More-over, 'I do not think that it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional meanings of moral terms.' However, he argues that this in itself is not sufficient to establish the existence of objective value. The question is not linguistic but ontological. Mackie rehearses two fairly standard arguments to support the break with common sense he is proposing: the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity draws attention to the variety of moral codes and agreed values that have existed at different times in human history, and exist now in different cultures. This diversity, Mackie suggests, argues that moral values reflect ways of life within particular societies, rather than drawing on perceptions of moral absolutes external to those societies. However, he sees the argument from queerness as far more damaging to the notion of absolute value. It draws attention to both the type of entity, and the type of knowledge, this notion seems to demand. Objective values would be 'entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe', while knowledge of them 'would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'? The supporter of objective value is forced to advocate types of entity and types of knowledge of a 'queer' and highly specific kind.  Despite Mackie's concession that a commitment to objective value is apparent in ordinary language, it was far from necessary that a philosopher of ordinary language would take an objectivist stance on ethics.  Indeed, at least one of Grice's Oxford contemporaries who published on the topic presented a subjectivist argument. In 1954 P. H. Nowell-Smith published Ethics, the book in which he advanced rules of 'contextualimplication' that foreshadowed some of Grice's maxims. Grice does not refer to this book in his own writings either on conversation or on value.  Nowell-Smith defends a subjectivist account of moral value, enlisting the argument described by Mackie as 'the argument from queerness'. In the tradition of post-war Oxford philosophy, Nowell-Smith employs different uses of words, and even fragmentary conversational 'scripts' to support his arguments. The meanings of individual words, he argues, often depend on the context in which they occur. For Nowell-Smith, this observation strengthens his subjectivist position. Since words do not remain constant, but are always changing their meanings, there can be no sentences that are true simply because of the meanings of the words they contain; in effect there can be no analytic sentences. Hence statements of moral value cannot be necessarily, but only contingently  In 1983, Grice was working on another major lecture series, which he entitled 'The conception of value'. He notes in the introductory lecture that the title is ambiguous, and deliberately so. The lectures are concerned both with 'the item, whatever it may be, which one conceives, or conceives of, when one entertains the notion of value', and with  'the act, operation, or undertaking in which the entertainment of that notion consists'' In effect, they address the two areas in which Mackie argues objectivism introduces 'queerness'. Grice suggests that the nature and status of value are of fundamental philosophical importance, while the way in which people think about value, their mental relationship to it, is deeply and intrinsically linked to the very nature of personhood.  Value, as suggested in the John Locke lectures, is the ultimate end point and the measure of rationality. The value of any piece of alethic reasoning is dependent on the facts of the matter. The value of practical reasoning, however, is dependent on a notion of goodness. Grice does not state his plan for addressing this issue, or for linking it to an account of ethics. However, as the lectures progress it becomes clear that he is supporting a means-end account of practical reasons, and of assigning some motives and systems for living higher value than others. This, indeed, seems a necessary corollary of his account of reasoning in terms of goals, and of the theory of the derivability of ethical principles hinted at in the closing remark of 'Some reflections on ends and happiness'.  However, in one of his more flamboyant heresies, Grice proposes to retain the notion of absolute value. This notion, generally associated with Kant's idea that moral imperatives are categorical, is canonically seen as being in direct conflict with an account of value concerned with goals, or with reasoning from means to ends.'The conception of value' was written for the American Philosophical Association's Carus lecture series, which Grice was to deliver in the same year. Progress was slow, particularly on the third and final lecture, in which his account of objective value was to be presented and defended. Grice had always preferred interaction to solitary writing, and as he got older he relied increasingly on constructive discussion and even on dictation. Unlike in earlier years, he produced very few draft versions of his writings during the 1980s; the papers that survive from this period consist only of very rough notes and completed manuscripts.  Now, finding composition even more laborious than usual, Grice enlisted the help of Richard Warner. Warner, who was then working at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a vivid account of the process:  To work on the Carus lecture, I drove up from LA on Friday arriving at noon. We began work, drinking inexpensive white wine as the afternoon wore on; switched to sherry as we broke off to play chess before dinner; had a decent wine from Paul's wine cellar with dinner and went back to work after eating. We worked all day Saturday with copious coffee in the morning (bread fried in bacon grease for break-fast) and kept the same afternoon and evening regime as the previous day. Paul did not sleep at all on Saturday night while he kept turning the problems over in his head. After breakfast on Sunday, he dictated, without notes, an almost final draft of the entire lecture. 1º  The result of this process was the third Carus lecture, 'Metaphysics and value'. Grice addresses the properties common to the two types of value by which alethic and practical arguments are assessed, and the centrality of both types to the definition of a rational creature. In this extremely complex but also characteristically speculative discussion, he returns to the idea that every living creature possesses a set of capaci-ties, the fulfilment of each of which is a necessary condition for the continued possession of that capacity, and indeed of all others. Here, the results of Grice's interest in biology are apparent. On the plane on the way to Oxford in 1979 he had been reading books on this topic. In 1981 he made a note to himself to 'Read "Selfish Gene", "chimp" lit'."1 In other notes from this period he lists 'mandatory functions', including 'Reproduction, Ingestion, Digestion, Excretion, Repair, Breath (why?), Cognition'.12 In 'Metaphysics and value', these thoughts are given a more formal shape as Grice considers again the distinction between essential and accidental properties of creatures. Essential prop-erties establish membership of a certain class of creature: 'the essential properties of a thing are properties which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).13 He speculates that rationality is in fact an accidental, rather than an essential property for the class of human being. However, as he argued in  'Method in philosophical psychology', once endowed with rationality, the creature will use the capacity to consider questions not just about how ends are to be achieved, but about the desirability of those ends The creature in possession of rationality, the human being, is endowed with a concern that its attitudes and beliefs are well grounded, or validated. Grice speculates that, as a result of the possession of this property, the human being performs a process of 'Metaphysical Tran-substantiation' on itself. It endorses this concern for validation with the status of an end in itself, and it transforms itself into a creature for whom this is the purpose: into a person. The properties of the human being and the person are the same, but they are differently distributed.  Crucially, for this metaphysically constructed entity 'person', but not for the human being, rationality is an essential property.  There is an unacknowledged link back to the work of John Locke in this suggestion, particularly to the work Grice drew on in his early article  'Personal identity'. Locke proposed a distinction between 'man' and  'person' to take account of the fact that people, as essentially rational beings, are uniquely distinguished from other life forms by something like self-awareness or consciousness. For Locke, the identity of a person depends on the continuation of a single consciousness, while the identity of a man, like that of any living creature, depends on unity of function. Grice's suggestion is similar to Locke's in its metaphysical distinction between 'man' or 'human being' and 'person'. However, he goes beyond Locke in attributing the distinction to the operation of rational creatures themselves, and in the link he proceeds to make between the transformed creature and the nature of value.  For Grice, the rational creature is able to devise and evaluate answers to the questions about value it is raising. This will initially take the form of comparing different possible answers in terms of effectiveness and coherence. By means of raising questions about the justification of ends, and assessing possible answers to those questions, the person takes on the function of attributing value. A rational creature becomes a creature that, by metaphysical definition, has the capacity to attribute value.  Value, even the type of value known as 'goodness', can be discussed objectively, because a creature uniquely endowed with, and indeed defined by, the capacity to judge it, exists. The creature is 'a being whoseessence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value. 1 Values exist because valuers exist. By means of this status afforded to the nature of personhood, it is perhaps possible to reassess Grice's sketchy reference in 'Aspects of reason' to the devising of systems for living. People devise systems for living from the applica-tion of the capacity of reason and the resultant ability to ascribe value to certain courses of action and withhold it from others. The develop-ment and maintenance of basic moral principles can therefore be seen as a necessary product of rational human nature.  In this way, Grice constructs his account of value as being dependent on analyses from means to ends, yet at the same time having objective existence. The process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation operates pri-marily to turn human beings into people and therefore valuers, but it thereby makes value viable. The process, and therefore the existence of valuers and value, derives from the capacity, incidentally present in human beings, for rationality. Neither value itself nor the process of valuing depend on any novel or 'queer' properties or processes. The nature of value, and the apprehension of value, can both be explained in terms of rationality, a phenomenon with an acceptable philosophi-cal pedigree of its own, and one used in other areas of explanation. In Grice's terms, value is embedded in the concept of people as rational creatures; 'value does not somehow or another get in, it is there from  the start'. 15  In the years following the delivery of the Carus lectures, Grice began to justify his claim that the study of value could have illuminating and far-reaching consequences in different areas of philosophical investiga-tion. He had already considered the implications of value for his own account of meaning in the paper 'Meaning revisited'. As so often with Grice's work, the date of publication is misleading. It was published in 1982 in the proceedings of a colloquium on mutual knowledge held in England, but an earlier version of part of the paper had been delivered at a colloquium in Toronto in March 1976. Grice offers a tantalisingly brief suggestion of what might happen if the very intelligent rational creature began to speak: an outline of an account of meaning within the framework of creature-construction to which, it seems, he did not return. If the creature could talk it would be desirable, and judged so by the creature, that its utterances would correspond with its psychologi-cal states. This would enable such beneficial occurrences as being able to exchange information about the environment with other creatures;  it would be possible to transmit psychological states from one creatureto the next. Further, the creature will judge this a desirable property of the utterances of other creatures; it will assume, if possible, that the utterances of others correspond with their psychological states.  In a sentence that is at once complex, hedged and vague, Grice pro-poses to retain some version of an intentional account of meaning:  It seems to me that with regard to the possibility of using the notion of intention in a nested kind of way to explicate the notion of meaning, there are quite a variety of plausible, or at least not too implausible, analyses, which differ to a greater or lesser extent in detail, and at the moment I am not really concerned with trying to adjudicate between the various versions.16  In an addition to the 1976 paper for the later colloquium he suggests that intentional accounts of meaning, including his own, have left out an important concept. This is heralded at the start of the article as 'The Mystery Package', and later revealed to be the concept of value. Grice hints that he has firm theoretical reasons for wanting to introduce value as a philosophical concept. Many philosophers regard value with horror, yet it can answer some important philosophical problems. It makes possible a range of different expressions of value in different cases.  Grice suggests the word 'optimal' as a generalisation over these differ-ent usages. This offers solutions to some problem areas in the inten-tional account of meaning, most significantly to the supposed 'infinite regress' identified by critics such as Schiffer. Grice expresses some scep-ticism over whether any such problem can in fact be found, but allows that it could at least be argued that his account entailed that 'S want A to think "p, because S want A to think 'p, because S wants...!"'. In effect, this demands a mental state of S that is both logically impossi-ble, because it is infinite, and yet highly desirable. Grice argues that just because it cannot in practice be attained, this mental state need not be ruled out from philosophical explanation. Indeed, 'The whole idea of using expressions which are explained in terms of ideal limits would seem to me to operate in this way', a procedure Grice links to Plato's notion of universal Ideals and actual likenesses."7  The state in which a speaker has an infinite set of intentions is optimal in the case of meaning. This optimal state is unattainable; strictly speak-ing S can never in fact mean p. Nevertheless, actual mental states can approximate to it. Indeed, for communication to proceed successfully other people can and perhaps must deem the imperfect actual mentalstate to be the optimal state required for meaning. Grice uses the story of the provost's dog to illustrate the notion of 'deeming'. It is a story of which he was apparently fond; he used it again in his later paper  'Actions and events'. The incoming provost of an Oxford college owned a dog, yet college rules did not allow dogs in college. In response, the governing body of the college passed a resolution that deemed the provost's dog to be a cat. I suspect', suggests Grice, that crucially we do a lot of deeming, though perhaps not always in such an entertaining fashion.'18  In the second version of the paper the 'mystery package' seems to be the focus of Grice's interest, but commentators at the colloquium on mutual knowledge were more interested in the possible 'evolutionary' implications of his ideas: the suggestion that non-natural meaning might be a descendant of natural meaning. This is not an idea that Grice seems to have pursued further. However, Jonathan Bennett had already postulated a possible Gricean origin for language, although carefully not committing himself to it.2°  Grice revisited 'Meaning', but not 'Logic and conversation'. Others, however, have drawn connections between rationality, value and coop-eration. Judith Baker has suggested that, 'when we cooperate with other humans on the basis of trust, our activity is intelligible only if we conceive of ourselves and others as essentially rational. 2 Marina Sbisa has gone further, making a more explicit link between Grice's notions of  'person' and of 'cooperative participant' and arguing that 'we might even envisage Metaphysical Transubstantiation as an archetypal form of ascription of rationality on which all contingent ascriptions of coop-erativity are modelled. 22 Richard Grandy, tackling the question of why a hearer might conclude that a speaker is being cooperative, suggests tentatively that Grice 'would have argued that the Cooperative Principle ought to be a governing principle for rational agents' and that such agents would follow it 'on moral, not on practical or utilitarian grounds!23 However, writing long before the publication of Grice's work on rationality and value, Asa Kasher suggested that the Cooperative Principle should be replaced by a more general and basic rationality principle. He argues that the individual maxims do not display any clear connection with the Cooperative Principle, but that they follow from the principle that one should choose the action that most effectively and efficiently attains a desired end. In this way the maxims 'are based directly on conclusions of a general rationality principle, without mediation of a general principle of linguistic action'.2 Further, in interpreting an utterance, a hearer assumes that the speaker is a rational agent.It might be that the discussion of value in Grice's later work offers a new way of interpreting the rather problematic formulation of his earlier work. Rationality and mutual attribution of rationality may be better descriptions of the motivation for the maxims described in the William James lecturers than is 'cooperation'. Speakers follow the rules of conversation in pursuit of particular communicative ends. On the assumption that other speakers are also rational creatures, the maxims also offer a good basis for interpreting their utterances. As rational crea-tures, speakers attribute value to ends that are consistent and coherent.  An implicature may be accepted as the end point of interpretation if it accords with the twin views that the other speaker is a rational being, and that their utterances correspond to their psychological states.  On this view, the Cooperative Principle and maxims are not an autonomous account of conversational behaviour precisely because they follow from the essential nature of speakers as rational creatures.  Cooperation is, in effect, just one manifestation of the much more general cognitive capacity of rationality. Further, introducing the notion of 'value' into the theory of conversation offers a defence against the charge of prescriptivism. The maxims are not motivated by a duty to adhere to some imposed external ethical code concerned with 'helpful-ness' and 'considerateness'. Their imperative form belies the fact that they are a freely chosen but highly rational course of action. Like moral rules they are means towards certain ends: ends that are attributed value by creatures uniquely endowed to do so. Both the tendency to adhere to the maxims and the tendency to prize certain courses of action as  'good' follow as consequences of the same essential property of people as rational beings: the property, indeed the necessity, of attributing value. As such, the theory of conversation can be argued to be one component in Grice's overarching scheme: a description of what it is to be human.  The allocation of time and the completion of projects became a pressing concern for Grice as the 1980s wore on because his health was failing. He had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life, and tape recordings from the 1970s onwards demonstrate that his speech was frequently interrupted by paroxysms of coughing. In response he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to Kathleen that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house, but he never touched it. This drastic action was taken, as he himself was in the habit of commenting, too late. In December 1983 he gave a farewell lecture at the end of his time at the University of Washington, in which he referred to 'my recent disagreement withthe doctors'. Even before this had taken place, he explains, he had decided to offer this talk as a thank you on his and Judith Baker's behalf,  'for making the time spent by us here such fun'.? Whether or not the doctors in question were insisting that Grice finish his demanding shuttle between Berkeley and Seattle, they certainly seem to have been recommending that he slow down. It was around this time that he was first diagnosed with emphysema, the lung condition that was presenting him with breathing difficulties and was to cause increasing ill health over the following years.  If his doctors were urging him to burden himself with fewer com-mitments, they did not check his enthusiasm for work. Stephen Neale, then a graduate student at Stanford, spent a day with Grice in Berkeley in 1984. He found that Grice 'was already seriously weakened by illness, but he displayed that extraordinary intellectual energy, wit, and eye for detail for which he was so well known, and I left his house elated and exhausted' 2 Grice's response to his illness seems to have been if anything an increased impetus towards advancing the projects then in hand, and a renewed drive towards seeing his many unpublished works into print. Early in 1984 he began making lists of things to do. Some of these include private and financial business which, mixed in with academic matters, have survived with his work papers; there was, by this time at least, no real distinction between the personal and the philosophical. He planned to 'collect "best copies" of unpublished works and inform "executors" of their nature and location and of planned "editing"'?7 On the same list appears the resolution to 'go through old letters and dispose'.  In the mid-1980s, then, Grice was looking back over the work of more than four decades. This was prompted partly by his concern to tie up loose ends and partly by the demands of selecting the papers to appear along with the William James lectures in the projected book from Harvard University Press. There was also another spur to this retrospective reflection. Richard Grandy and Richard Warner were collecting and editing the essays eventually published as Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. They were themselves writing an introductory overview of Grice's work. Grice called his response to this 'Reply to Richards', fusing, as he puts it, the editors into a multiple personality. In this he develops some of the themes of his current work. But he begins with a short philosophical memoir: 'Life and opinions of Paul Grice'. The paper he offered at the end of his time in Seattle was, it seems, a preliminary sketch for this. The original, informal title was 'Prejudices and predilec-tions. Which becomes life and opinions'.One consequence of this enforced nostalgia was a renewed interest in the practices of ordinary language philosophy. Grice looked back at the influence of Austin with the amused detachment afforded by a distance of over 20 years, or perhaps more accurately with fond memories of the amused detachment with which he viewed Austin at the time. He was earnest, however, in the guarded enthusiasm with which he recounted the art of linguistic botanising'. He had never fully abandoned the practice in his own philosophy. For instance, in his notes on psychological philosophy, he had started making a list of 'lexical words' relevant to the topic. These included 'Nature, Life, Matter, Mind, Sort, End, Time'.  Perhaps catching himself in the act, next to this list he had posed the self-mocking question '"Going through Dictionary"??'28 In 'Reply to Richards', he suggests that this method has merits that might recommend it even to contemporary philosophers: 'I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing. This was a theme he repeated, often rather more forcefully, in a number of other papers, talks and informal discussions at that time. Nevertheless, Grice was well aware of how far he had moved away from Oxford philosophy in taking on metaphysical topics such as value. In 1978, in the introductory seminar to his course 'Metaphysics', he explained to his students that not very long before the word itself could be used as a term of abuse. At Oxford in the 1950s, metaphysics was viewed as 'both non-existent and disgust-ing'. Oxford philosophers, he suggests, would have said: 'All we need is tasteful and careful botanising and we'll have all any gentleman needs to know'. Twenty-five years later, Grice admitted, he was convinced that a more systematic treatment of philosophy was needed. 30  Grice's enthusiasm for the old-fashioned method of linguistic botanis-ing was accompanied, and perhaps reinforced, by a strong dislike and distrust of technology. This attitude applied to attempts to use technological tools or analogies in philosophy itself, and extended into the more personal domain. He was scathing about what he saw as attempts to 'reduce' the understanding of human beings to the understanding of computers. He may have had in mind recent debates about the possibility and nature of Artificial Intelligence, although he does not refer to them explicitly. In 1985, he wrote an overview of his earlier work on the philosophy of language, titled 'Preliminary valediction' and presumably serving as an early draft of the retrospective that appeared in Studies in the Way of Words. In this he makes an explicit link between his philosophical interest in ordinary language and his dislike oftechnological explanations in philosophy. In a single sentence, perfectly well formed, but long even for him, he tackles the need for a carefully considered argument to justify attention to ordinary language:  Indeed it seems to me that not merely is such argument required, but it is specially required in the current age of technology, when intuition and ordinary forms of speech and thought are all too often forgotten or despised, when the appearance of the vernacular serves only too often merely as a gap-sign to be replaced as soon as possible by jargon, and when many researchers not only believe that we are computers, but would be gravely disappointed should it turn out that we are, after all, not computers; is not a purely mechanical existence not only all we do have, but also all we should want to have?31  In arguing for the centrality of consciousness, that is in arguing against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Grice was again affirming his commitment to the significance of psychological concepts to rationality in general and to meaning in particular. The processes of the interpretation and production of meaning are significant for a human being in ways that are perhaps mysterious, but crucially cannot be observed in computers. Personally, too, Grice would have nothing to do with computers. When he retired from his full-time post at Berkeley he lost the secretarial support he had always relied on and was forced to get a PC at home. But it was Kathleen who learnt to use the computer and mastered word processing. Grice could never get beyond his horror of the spell checker which, he complained, rejected 'pirot' and questioned  'sticky wicket'.  Grice was not just looking back, reflecting on the philosophy of earlier decades and planning the publication of his manuscripts. He was also working on new projects. His obsession with these was such that even his interest in his own health seemed to be predicated on the desire to have time to finish them. Cancelling a lecture he had been scheduled to give in 1986, he wrote 'my doctor has just advised me that I am taking on too much and that unless I reduce my level of activity I shall be jeop ardising the enterprises which it is most important to me to complete.'32 From the notes and the work plans he was making at the time, it seems that Grice had two main enterprises in mind: producing a finished version of his lectures on value, and developing a project these had prompted. This new project was characteristic of the pattern of Grice's work in two ways. It was daringly ambitious, in that he foresaw for it a wide range of implications and applications. But it was also not entirelynew, in that the ideas from which it developed had long been present in his work. In effect, it was nothing less than the foundations of a theory to encompass the whole of philosophy, with all its apparent branches and subdivisions. Grice was working on a metaphysical methodology to explain how the theories that make up human knowledge are constructed. Or, in one of his own favourite phrases from this time, he was doing 'theory-theory'.  Grice had long been of the opinion that the division of philosophy into different fields and disciplines was an artificial and unproductive practice. This opinion was certainly reflected in the course of his own work, in which he followed what seemed to him the natural progression of his interests, without regard for the boundaries he was crossing between the philosophies of mind and of language, logic, metaphysics and ethics. In 1983, he recalled with some pride a mild rebuke he had received years earlier from Gilbert Harman, to the effect that when it came to philosophy, 'I seemed to want to do the whole thing myself' 33 To some extent, especially in the latter part of his career, Grice had actually defined his own philosophical interests in these terms. He contributed a brief self-portrait to the Berkeley Philosophy Department booklet in 1977, in which he described himself as working recently chiefly in the philosophy of language and logic; 'takes the view, however, that philosophy is a unity and that no philosophical area can, in the end, be satisfactorily treated in isolation from other philosophical areas'.34 He comments further on this attitude in his 'Reply to Richards':  When I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy' (or in 'Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.  Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in phi-losophy, namely all of them.35  Grice's distrust of subdivisions and labels extended to the classification of different schools of thought or philosophical approaches. Labelling philosophers according to the style of their subject and their approach to it was, he felt, unhelpful and even stultifying. In preparatory note for 'Reply to Richards' he lists some of the 'cons' of philosophy as being  'fads'  ', 'band wagons', 'sacred cows' (the 'pros' are simply 'fun' and 'col-laboration'). He then goes on to produce a list of '-isms' that might bear out his objections, including 'naturalism', 'phenomenalism', 'reduc-tionism', 'empiricism' and 'scepticism'. In a later note, he worked out a series of nicknames for the dedicated followers of different schools of thought. 'Constructivists' were 'Egg-heads'; 'Realists' were 'Fat-heads';  'Idealists' were 'Big-heads'; 'Subjectivists' were 'Hard-heads' or 'Nut-heads'; and 'Metaphysical Sceptics' were 'No-heads', or 'Beheads' 37 It is not clear whether Grice intended these jottings for any purpose other than his own amusement. It seems that he made public use of only one of these labels, when speaking to the American Philosophical Associa-tion, and drawing attention to his own belief in the crucial connection between value and rationality:  To reject or to ignore this thesis seems to me to be to go about as far as one can go in the direction of Intellectual Hara-Kiri; yet, I fear, it is a journey which lures increasingly many 'hard-headed' (even perhaps bone-headed) travellers.38  In 'Reply to Richards', and elsewhere, Grice is characteristically cagey about the exact consequences of his views on the entirety of philoso-phy. He is certain, however, that progress is to be made through his view of metaphysics as essentially a constructivist enterprise, in which categories and entities are added if they are explanatorily useful. In 'Method in philosophical psychology' he used the metaphor of offering houseroom to even unexplained conditions and entities if they were able to help with the housework. In the Carus Lectures, arguing that any account of value should be given metaphysical backing, he suggests that the appropriate metaphysics will be constructivist, not reductionist. In another arresting metaphor, he tells his audience that, unlike reductionist philosophers, 'I do not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware! The world is rich and complex, and the philosopher should offer an explanation that retains these qualities. The constructivist would begin with certain elements that might be seen as metaphysically primary, and would then 'build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical theory or concatenation of theories'.39 First, it would be necessary to define the suitable form for any theory to take, to engage in theory-theory. Grice does not here enter into a discussion of theory-theory itself, but it seems that his account of value is an example fitting the general constructivist approach he has in mind Th  e simple psychological attitudes of J-accepting and V-accepting areposited, together with the programme of creature construction, as primary elements in the theory. Grice's elaborate account involving rationality as a non-essential property of human beings, the process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation, the creation of people as value-givers and the derivation of absolute value, are built up from these starting points.  There is no finished written account of metaphysical constructivism and theory-theory, although they are outlined in 'Reply to Richards'.  Grice never wrote the work 'From Genesis to Revelation (and back): a new discourse on metaphysics', which he seems to have contemplated. 40  Probably the fullest record of his thoughts on this matter is a lengthy taped conversation from January 1983, in which he talks to Judith Baker and Richard Warner, setting out the ideas he hopes to have time to develop. The discipline of theory-theory, he explains, can be discussed in both general and applied terms. In general terms, it is concerned with examining the features any adequate theory would have to exhibit: with laying out the ground rules of theory construction. In its more applied aspect, it is concerned with detailing the theories formed by these rules, and with classifying them into types. Theory-theory includes in its scope, but is not restricted to, philosophical theory.  From this starting point, Grice goes on to suggest a hierarchical structure of theories, the scope and subject matter at each level being successively more restricted and specific. He offers an example of a theory from each of these levels; in effect each theory is a component of the one before. If philosophical theory is one type demarcated by theory-theory, then metaphysics is the pre-eminent form of philosophical theory. Concerned as it is with the fundamental questions of what there is, and how it is to be classified, it deserves the title of 'First Philoso-phy'. General theory-theory is concerned with specifying the appropriate subject matter and procedures of metaphysics, while applied theory-theory is concerned with the specific categories needed to delineate the subject matter, with investigating what kind of entities there are. Within metaphysics, each sub-branch has its own general and applied theory-theory. One such branch that particularly interests Grice is philosophical psychology. General theory-theory is concerned with the nature and function of psychological concepts, applied theory-theory with finding a systematic way of defining the range of psychological beings. Rational psychology is a special case. Here, general theory-theory is concerned with the essence of rational beings. Applied theory-theory widens the scope to consider features or properties other than the essential. In this way, it leads to the characterisation of a prac-tical theory of conduct, in part an ethical system. Finally, and rather briefly, Grice comments that philosophy of language is to be seen as a sub-theory of rational psychology.  Grice is even more tentative about the operation of metaphysical construction itself, in other words the procedures of metaphysics specified in general theory-theory. The relevant principles, he insists, are not fully worked out, but two ideas about the forms they might take have been with him for some time. The first idea he calls the 'bootstrap principle', in response to the realisation that a theory constructed along the lines he is describing must be able to 'pull itself up by its bootstraps', or rely on its own primitive concepts to construct potentially elaborate expla-nations. A metaphysical system contains both its primitive subject matter, and the means by which that subject matter is discussed and explained. The means are meta-systematic. In constructing the theory, it must be possible to include in the meta-system any materials that are needed. The only restriction on this, introduced in the interests of economical conduct, is that any ideas or entities used in the meta-system should later be introduced formally into the system. The legitimate routines or procedures for construction include 'Humean projection' and  'nominalisation'. First, if a particular psychological state is central to a theory, it is legitimate to use the object of those states in the meta-system. The objects of psychological states are the 'radicals' of thought described in Grice's work on rationality, Second, it is legitimate to introduce entities corresponding to certain expressions used in the relevant area of investigation.  The second general idea does not have a specific name, but can be summarised by saying that the business of metaphysics in any area of investigation is not just the production of one theory. Grice maintains that he wants to be free to introduce more than one metaphysical theory, because the production of different systems of explanation may be differently motivated. This principle, he observes, 'fits in nicely with my ecumenical tendencies'. A metaphysical system does not have to be unitary or monolithic. In fact, Grice doubts the existence of 'a theory to be revealed on The Day of Judgement which will explain everything'.  Rather than aiming at some ultimate truth, or correct version, Grice sees any theory as crucially a revision of some prior theory, or, if there is no such precedent, as building on common sense and intuition. Asked by one of his colleagues as to whether it is legitimate to reject a previous theory, or the prompting of common sense, once it has been revised, Grice expresses himself strongly opposed to the idea. The best understanding of some entity comes from an appreciation of all the guises inwhich it appears during the development of systems. The most appropriate theory on any given occasion is not always the most elaborate one available.  Grice referred to his metaphysical interests in some of the articles he wrote, or at least completed, during these final but productive years. In  'Actions and events', published in 1986, he responds to Donald Davidson's logical analysis of action sentences that included actions in the category of entities.4l The question relates, he argues, to the fundamental issue of metaphysics: the question of what the 'universe' or the  'world' contains. Grice is inclined to agree with Davidson over this act of inclusion, but to do so from a very different metaphysical position.  He suggests that Davidson, like Quine, is a 'Diagnostic Realist'; the actual nature of reality is unavailable for inspection, but the job of philosophers is to make plausible hypotheses about it. Grice's own metaphysical approach, however, is one of constructivism, of building up an account from primitives, rather than of forming theories consistent with scientific explanations. 'One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis. 42  'Actions and events' brings together many of Grice's apparently disparate philosophical interests into one article of broad scope and remarkable complexity. Still not recognising traditional philosophical boundaries, he moves from metaphysics, intention and language to rationality and the status of value. In a few concluding paragraphs, Grice turns to what he sees as the essential link between action and freedom. The link is treated briefly and cautiously in this published work, but was in fact a major concern in his thinking about value.  Grice's notes from the early 1980s show him applying the familiar techniques of 'linguistic botanising' to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as 'alcohol-free', 'free for lunch' and 'free-wheeling', and listed many possible definitions, including 'liberal', 'acting without restriction' and 'frank in conversation'43 Richard Warner has commented that their discussions in preparation for the third Carus lecture were concerned almost exclusively with freedom as a source of value, and that he himself encouraged Grice to pursue this line of enquiry rather than that of creature construction as being the more interesting and productive. * Essentially, Grice saw in the nature of action a means of justifying the problematic concept of freedom, and from this a defence of his objective conception of value. He introduces a classification of actions that is reminiscent of his hierarchy of living creatures.  Some actions are caused by influences external to a body, as is the casewith inanimate objects. Next, actions may have causes that are internal to the body but are simply the outcome of a previous stage in the same process, as in a 'freely moving' body. Then there are causes that are both internal and independently motivated. Actions provoked by these causes may be said to be based on the beliefs or desires of the creature in question and as functioning to provide for the good of the creature.  Finally, there is a stage exclusive to human creatures at which the creature's conception of something as being for its own good is sufficient to initiate the creature in performing an action. 'It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. '45  The particular nature of human action suggests the necessity of freedom. That is, humans act for reasons. These reasons may be more than mere desires and beliefs motivated by ones own survival; they may be freely adopted for their own sake. This in turn suggests that people must be creatures capable of ascribing value to certain ends, independent of external forces or internal necessity. In Grice's terms, the particular type of freedom demanded by the nature of human action  'would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are freely adopted or pursued by me'.* In this way, a consideration of action suggests the necessity of freedom, and freedom in turn offers an independent justification for people as ascribers of value. If people are inherently capable of ascribing value, then value must have an objective existence. Independent of the programme of creature construction, the concept of freedom may offer another version of the argument that value exists because valuers exist.  In 'Metaphysics, philosophical escatology and Plato's Republic' completed in 1988 and published only in Studies in the Way of Words, Grice suggests a distinction between 'categorial' and 'supracategorial' meta-physics. The first is concerned with the most basic classifications, the second with bringing together categorially different items into single classifications, and specifying the principles for these combinations.  This second type of metaphysics, closely related to his informal account of constructivism, he tentatively labels 'Philosophical Escatology'. 47 The study of escatology, or of last or final things, belonged originally to Christian theology. Grice is laying claim to an exclusively philosophical version of this discipline, and thereby linking metaphysical definitions to finality, or purpose.  The paper 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being' was published in 1988, but there is evidence that he had been working on it at least since the late 1970s. Alan Code mentions a paper 'Aristotle on being andgood' that Grice read at a conference at the University of Victoria in 1979, and that sounds in many ways similar to the published version. 48 Grice offers an explicit defence of metaphysics, contrasting it particularly with the rigid empiricism of logical positivism:  A definition of the nature and range of metaphysical enquiries is among the most formidable of philosophical tasks; we need all the help we can get, particularly at a time when metaphysicians have only recently begun to re-emerge from the closet, and to my mind are still hampered by the aftermath of decades of ridicule and vilification at the hands of the rednecks of Vienna and their adherents.49  Grice saw the 'revisionary character' of metaphysical theorising as a topic to which he would need to return. In fact, it is closely linked to another late area of interest, a topic he often described as 'the Vulgar and the Learned'. In this terminology, and indeed in the ideas it described, it seems likely that Grice was borrowing from Hume, one of the 'old boys' of philosophy he particularly admired. Hume had written about the relationship between philosophical terminology and everyday understanding in the following terms:  When I view this table and that chimney, nothing is present to me but particular perceptions, which are of a like nature with all other perceptions. This is the doctrine of philosophers. But this table, which is present to me, and that chimney, may and do exist sepa-rately. This is the doctrine of the vulgar, and implies no contradic-tion. There is no contradiction, therefore, in extending the same doctrine to all perceptions.50  Grice argued in his account of theory-theory that pre-theoretical intu-itions, or common-sense accounts, are often used as the foundations of metaphysical theories. In later notes he was particularly preoccupied by the role of such 'everyday' or 'vulgar' understanding in metaphysical construction. Very generally, he urges that theorists of metaphysics are well advised to take account of common-sense understanding. It is not that common sense is 'superior' to metaphysical accounts, or can replace them. The complex accounts offered by philosophers serve a different function from those of everyday life, and can coexist with them because they are appropriate to different purposes.  In his notes from around this time, he compares the vulgar and the learned with reference to what he calls 'Eddington's table' and 'thevulgar table'. Grice's reference here is to Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, first published in 1928. Eddington begins his book, originally delivered as a series of lectures, with the assertion that as he sat down to write he was confronted with not one table but two. There is the ordinary, familiar table: 'a commonplace object of that environ-ment which I call the world'. There is also a scientific table, an object of which he has become aware only comparatively recently. Whereas the ordinary table is substantial, the scientific table is mostly emptiness, while 'sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself'. Eddington argues that the two different descriptions of the table are discreet and serve distinct purposes. Although they might ultimately be said to describe the same object, the scientist must keep the two descriptions separate, in effect ignoring the 'ordinary table' and concentrating only on the  'scientific table'. Grice's brief notes suggest that he is happy to accept both the vulgar and the learned description of the table. There is, he notes, 'no conflict... Scientific purposes and everyday purposes are distinct'.52  Grice was advocating philosophical respect for common sense, and as such aligning himself with a philosophical tradition stretching back through Moore and Berkeley to Aristotle. Although he developed this position explicitly only towards the end of his life it is clear that, as so often in his work, he was returning to a theme, and to a philosophical outlook that had been with him for many years. It is not difficult to relate this idea to Austin's respect for ordinary language, and the indi-cation of everyday concepts and distinctions it contains. Indeed, notes from much earlier in Grice's career show that, while he was still at  Oxford, he was linking a philosophical interest in common sense to a respect for ordinary language. His jotted 'Aspects of respect for vulgar' include 'protection against sceptic', 'proper treatment of Folk Wisdom',  'protection of speech from change and impropriety' and, perhaps most tellingly 'proper position treatment of ordinary ways of speech (speech  phenomena)'.53  The same form of respect can also be detected, although more prob-lematically, in his later work on value. Subjectivists such as Mackie had suggested that they were themselves necessarily arguing against common sense, rejecting the idea apparent in ordinary language that values 'exist' as objective topics of knowledge. Grice himself rather irrev-erently sums up a position such as Mackie's in his notes from this periodas follows: 'value-predicates (e.g. "good", "ought") signify attributes which ordinary chaps ascribe to things. It is however demonstrable, on general grounds, that these attributes are vacuous. So position attribution by the vulgar are systematically false' S4 According to this account, in upholding objective value, Grice would be maintaining a straight for-wardly common-sense position. In fact Grice himself does not accept this simple identification of objectivism with common sense. He argues in the Carus lectures that 'it seems to me by no means as easy as Mackie seems to think to establish that the "vulgar valuer", in his valuations, is committed to the objectivity of value(s).5 In the taped conversation he suggests that the need to work on the status of common sense, intuition and pre-theoretical judgement is particularly acute for anyone who wants to take a constructivist approach to a topic such as value. It is not that the philosopher should simply take on board all 'vulgar' pronouncements on such a topic, but rather that a constructivist should attempt at least to use them as a starting point for any theory of value.  Grice's 'common sense' philosophy is, therefore, a more sophisticated approach than one relying simply on the understanding apparent in everyday language. Years earlier he defended common sense but attacked Moore's simplistic application of it in 'G. E. Moore and philosophers' paradoxes'. In the later work, he argues that although common sense may be the starting point, exactly how a theory is to be constructed from there is a matter for theory-theory: 'Moore-like proclamations cut no ice.'  Grice was also turning his attention to another loose end in his work: the study of perception. In particular, he returned to the area in which he had worked with Geoffrey Warnock 30 or more years before, planning a 'Grice/Warnock retrospective'. He sketched out a number of topics for this, but it does not appear to have progressed beyond note form. The first topic was to be 'The place of perception as a faculty or capacity in a sequence of living things'. Thinking about the old issue of perception in relation to his more recent interest in creature-construction, he wondered: 'at what point, if any, is further progress up the psychological ladder impossible unless some rung has previously been assigned to creatures capable of perception?'56 He dwells on the advantages of perception in terms of survival, the crucial factor for adding any capacity during creature-construction, and assesses the possible support this might offer for common sense against philosophers of sense data. If perception is to be seen as an advantage, providing knowledge to aid survival in a particular world, 'the objects revealed byperception should surely be constituents of that world'. It might be possible to say that sense data do not themselves nourish or threaten, but constitute evidence of things that do.  However, Grice notes that he is more tempted by an alternative expla-nation. 'Flows of impressions' do not so much offer evidence of what is in the world, as 'prompt, stimulate or excite certain forms of response to the possibility that such states of affairs do obtain'. These responses may be either verbal or behavioural. Both types of response suggest commitment on the part of the responding creature to the state of affairs in question. Here again, Grice seems to be offering a defence of a common sense approach to philosophical questions, but a more sophisticated one than that of simple realism. The existence of the material object is indicated not by the sense impressions themselves, but by the responses these elicit in the perceiving creature.  From the middle of the 1980s onwards, Grice was increasingly preoccupied with various publishing projects, mainly with book plans. His notes from the time suggest an explosion of energy in this area. A list from 1986 includes '"Method: the vulgar and the learned" with ?OUP.  "From Genesis to Revelations" ?HUP'. Other notes are uncompromisingly labelled 'work program', and show him carefully dividing up time by year, by month or even by day, including the injunction that he should set aside part of December 1986 to 'CATCH UP on prior topics'. 57 For most of Grice's potential audience, however, it was the William James lectures that were most eagerly awaited. With the exception of the few lectures already published, these remained as ageing manuscripts in Grice's idiosyncratic filing system. Even with his new enthusiasm for publishing, it took some persuasion from Harvard University Press, and from Kathleen, to revisit these. It is clear that he was not averse in principle to publishing the lectures; his flurry of lists from the early 1980s testify to this. But he had set himself an exacting programme of revising and adding to the them.  Grice was adamant from the start that, whatever else the book con-tained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publisher he wrote, 'the link between the two main topics of the James lectures is not loose but extremely intimate. No treatment of Saying and Implying can afford to omit a study of the notion of Meaning which plainly underlies both these ideas!58 Before the book had a name, he was planning that it should contain a Part A entitled 'Logic and conversation'. It seems that this was to include a number of postscripts to the lectures. Part B was provisionally entitled 'Other essays on language and related matters', andwas to contain a number of further postscripts and reassessments. Of all the proposed postscripts, only 'Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy', concerned mainly with revisiting the themes of 'Postwar Oxford philosophy', was ever written. The inclusion of 'In defence of a dogma' in Part B was a matter of some debate, Grice remaining resolutely in favour. When a reader for the publisher questioned this, Grice responded with a robust defence: 'the analytic/synthetic distinction is a crucially important topic about which I have said little in the past thirty years, and must sometime soon treat at some length.' In his original plan the book was also to include a transcription of a talk on this same topic between himself, George Myro, Judith Baker, George Bealer and Neil Thomason. Indeed, Grice suggested initially that Studies in the Way of Words should be published as authored by Paul Grice with others'.  Grice revisits the analytic/synthetic distinction in the 'Retrospective epilogue'. He introduces a number of inhabitants of 'philosophical Never-Never-Land', M*, A*, G* and R*, the fairy godmothers of Moore, Austin, Grice and  Ryle. These fairy godmothers are useful to philo-  sophical discussion because they hold explicitly all the views that their godchildren hold, without regard for whether these views are explicit or implicit in their actual work. R* suggests that the division of statements of human knowledge into 'analytic' and 'synthetic' categories, far from being an artificial and unnecessary complication by philoso-phers, is in fact an insightful attempt by theorists to individuate and categorise the mass of human knowledge. This view offers a particular challenge to Quine's attack on the distinction, with which Grice had taken issue in his joint article with Strawson over 30 years earlier. It is in tacit reference to this that Grice concludes his epilogue:  Such consideration as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A* and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day.59  It is tempting to read a note of wistful resignation into the manner in which Grice chose in 1987 to conclude Studies in the Way of Words.  However, letters he was writing at the time, which affirm his intention to revisit these topics at length, argue that he at least in part believed he had time to do so. Moreover, he submitted applications for Faculty Research Grant support for both the academic years 1986-7 and 1987-8,for a project on 'Metaphysical foundations of value and the nature of metaphysics'. Kathleen recalls that he was never successful in his bids for such research grants. Despite this, he does not seem to have made much effort to accommodate to the demands of the application process.  In answer to a question about the significance of his research project and the justification of the proposed expenditure, he wrote in 1986 'I hope the character of the enterprise will be sufficient evidence of its sig-nificance.' In 1987 he offered an even more terse account of his plans:  'their importance seems to me to be beyond question'. 6 He was applying for funding to cover the expenses of secretarial support in transcribing tapes on to which he had been dictating his notes and typing up manuscripts, and for duplication, supplies and mailing. His intention was to produce two books for Oxford University Press, one a revised version of the Carus lectures and one on 'Methodology in Metaphysical Theory', a study to include a consideration of 'the nature and degree of respect due from metaphysical theorists towards the intuitions and concerns of the common man'. The plan was to complete at least first drafts during 1987-8.  Whatever his official predictions, Grice was aware that his condition was worsening and that the prognosis was not good. In the summer of 1987 he underwent eye surgery in an attempt to rescue his failing sight, and by the end of the year he needed a hearing aid. In addition, his mobility became further restricted. The entrance to his house, and the balcony on which he loved to sit, were on the first floor over the garage; a further flight of stairs led to the second floor. By early in 1988, a stair lift was needed. Even so, Grice was effectively housebound, and received visits from publishers, colleagues and even students on his balcony.  From there he also continued to work on new ideas, apparently with a sense of urgency that was only increased by his condition. He jotted on the back of an envelope, Now that my tottering feet are already engulfed in the rising mist of antiquity, I must make all speed ere it reaches, and (even) enters, my head." He dealt with the business of seeing Studies in the Way of Words to completion. Lindsay Waters from Harvard University Press, who worked with Grice throughout the preparation of the book, has commented on the determination with which he did this, suggesting that 'He knew the fight with the manuscript editor was his last.'62  Paul Grice died on 28 August 1988, at the age of seventy-five. He had, perhaps, as many projects on the go as ever. Studies in the Way of Words was on the way to press; Grice had gone over the final changes with the manuscript editor just days before. His 'work in progress' was still onhis desk, and included notes on 'the vulgar and the learned' that indicate that he was turning his thoughts back to the topic of perception in relation to this idea. The causal theory of perception could, the notes suggest, be seen as a natural way of reconciling the vulgar and the sci-entific. Perceptions could be connected either with scientific features or with vulgar descriptions, as they were in his article 'The causal theory of perception'. The causal theory explains the way things appear on the basis of the way they are. It rules out the account from sense data theory, which explains the way things are on the basis of the ways things appear. Scientific theory, Grice had noted 'cuts us off from objects'.63 The proofs of 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being', an article he had at one point considered including in Studies in the Way of Words, were posted to him on August 17 and remained untouched.  Studies in the Way of Words, containing the long-awaited complete William James lectures and Grice's other most influential papers in the philosophy of language, was published by Harvard University Press in  1989. A number of reviewers took the opportunity, before engaging with the details of Grice's philosophy, to pay tribute to him. Peter Strawson described his 'substantial and enduring contribution to philosophical and linguistic theory' 6 Tyler Burge praised his 'wonderfully powerful, subtle, and philosophically profound mind'.6 Charles Travis argued that, 'H. P. Grice transformed, often deeply, the problems he touched and, thereby, the terms of philosophical discussion. Robert Fogelin suggested that 'even if Grice was one of the chief and most gifted practitioners of OLP, he was also, perhaps, its most penetrating critic. As Fogelin notes, Meaning revisited', with its enigmatic reference to The Mystery Package' cannot be fully interpreted without reference to Grice's work on values and teleology. When Grice died, the Carus lectures were still in manuscript form, and he had asked Judith Baker to see them through publication with Oxford University Press. She prepared the lectures for publication, together with part of the 'Reply to Richards' and 'Method in philosophical psychology'. The Conception of Value appeared in 1991. Reviewers were generally ambivalent, welcoming the contribution to debate, but expressing some reservations as to the details of Grice's position. For instance, Gerald Barnes describes Grice's defence of absolute value as 'unconventional, richly suggestive, often fascinating, and, by Grice's own admission, incomplete at a number of crucial points'.68 The John Locke lectures had to wait a further decade before they, too, appeared from Oxford University Press, edited and introduced by Richard Warner under the title Aspects of Reason. Again, reviewers had reservations. A. P. Martinich declaredhimself unconvinced by the appeal to the ordinary use of expressions such as 'reason', and criticised Grice's style of presentation for containing 'too many promissory and subjunctive gestures'. The body of published work, and the legacy of his teaching and collaborations, formed the basis of Peter Strawson and David Wiggin's assessment of Grice for the British Academy:  Other anglophone philosophers born, like him, in the twentieth century may well have had greater influence and done a larger quantity of work of enduring significance. Few have had the same gift for hitting on ideas that have in their intended uses the appearance of inevitability. None has been cleverer, or shown more ingenuity and persistence in the further development of such ideas.?º  Perhaps an even more succinct summary of Grice's philosophical life is the one implied by a comment he himself made as it became clear to him that he would not recover his failing health. Despite the indignities of his illness and treatment, he confided in Kathleen that he did not really mind about dying. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life, and had done everything that he wanted to do. Grice's career was charac-terised by years of self-doubt, by almost ceaseless battles with the minutiae of philosophical problems, and by a final frenzied struggle to finish an ever-multiplying list of projects. Yet it seems that, when he reviewed the effort in comparison with the results, he was content with the deal.By all the obvious measures of academic achievement, the big success story for Grice has been the response in linguistics to his theory of conversation. The 'Logic and conversation' series, particularly the individual lecture published under that title, has been cited widely and frequently from the first. Beyond frequency of reference, perhaps the greatest accolade is for a writer's name to be coined as an adjective, a process with few precedents in linguistics. There is 'Saussurian linguis-tics', the 'Chomskyan revolution' and 'Hallidayan grammar'. From the mid-1970s on, linguists could be confident that a set of assumptions about theoretical commitments could be conveyed by the phrase  'Gricean pragmatics'. The term has been used as a label for a disparate body of work. It includes relatively uncritical applications of Grice's ideas to a wide range of different genres, as well as attempts to identify flaws, omissions or full-blown errors in his theory. It also includes a variety of attempts to develop new theories of language use, based to varying degrees on Grice's insights.  These different types of work do not all agree on the efficacy of the Cooperative Principle, on the exact characterisation of the maxims, or even on the nature of conversational implicature itself. What they have in common, qualifying them for the title 'Gricean', is an impulse to distinguish between literal meaning and speaker meaning, and to identify certain general principles that mediate between the two. The latter is perhaps Grice's single greatest intellectual legacy. Stephen Neale has suggested that 'in the light of his work any theory of meaning that is to be taken at all seriously must now draw a sharp line between genuinely semantic facts and facts pertaining to the nature of human interaction." Grice's understanding that linguistic meaning and meaning in use may differ was shared with a variety of previous philosophers and indeedwith common sense. But he went much further in his claim that the differences were amenable to systematic, independently motivated explanation, and in his ambitious proposal to provide such an expla-nation. Whatever its flaws, imprecisions and even errors, the theory of conversation has provided a definite starting point for those interested in discussing the relevant layers of meaning. Stephen Levinson has gone so far as to suggest that 'Grice has provided little more than a sketch of the large area and the numerous separate issues that might be illuminated by a fully worked out theory of conversational implicature!?  The success of the theory of conversation was achieved despite its publication history. Demand was such that copies of the William James lectures were in fairly wide circulation around American and British universities soon after 1967 in the blurred blue type of a mimeograph, and many early responses to them refer directly to this unpublished version.  Some commentators did not have even this degree of access to the lec-tures. In an article published in 1971, Jonathan Cohen comments that he is responding to 'the oral publicity of the William James Lectures' 3 When the lectures began to appear in print, they were scattered and piecemeal. 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' appeared in Foundations of Language in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in The Philosophical Review in 1969. 'Logic and conversation', the second in the original lecture series, appeared in two separate col-lections, both published in 1975. Its publication was clearly the source of some confusion, with both sets of editors claiming to offer the essay in print for the first time. The Logic of Grammar, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, seems to have been Grice's preferred publication, and was the one he always cited. There, his lecture appears alongside essays by past and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Tarski and Quine. The editor's introduction places Grice in a tradition of philosophers interested in the application of traditional theories of truth to natural language. In Speech Acts, the third volume in the series Syntax and Semantics, on the other hand, 'Logic and conver-sation' is placed in the context of contemporary linguistics. Accompanying articles by, for instance, Georgia Green and Susan Schmerling discuss conversational implicature itself. The editors, Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, hail the first publication of 'the seminal work on this topic'.* It is rumoured that Grice signed the contract for his lecture to appear in this linguistics series while at a conference at Austin, Texas, and only after a long evening spent in the bar. Peter Cole included  'Further notes on logic and conversation' in Volume 9 of the same series in 1978.One catalyst for the emergence of pragmatics, and Gricean pragmat-ics in particular, was the interest in Grice's work from within generative semantics, the movement fronted by the young linguists working just across campus from Grice in the years immediately following his move to Berkeley. Attempting to integrate meaning, including contextual meaning, into their study of formal linguistics, these refugees from transformational orthodoxy discovered what they saw as a promising philosophical precedent in 'Logic and conversation'. Asa Kasher has suggested that Grice opened a 'gap in the hedge', allowing linguists to see the possibilities of 'extra-linguistic' explanations." Gilles Fauconnier has found a more startling metaphor; at a time when linguistics was largely concerned with syntax, and with meaning only in so much as it related to deep grammatical structure, 'Grice unwittingly opened Pandora's box'. 6 When linguists working within transformational grammar replied to the generative semanticists' accusation that they were artificially ignoring meaning and context, they too drew on 'Logic and conversation'.  In effect, they cited Grice's characterisation of 'what is said' and 'what is implicated' as a licence to draw a sharp distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic. In this way, they argued that it was legitimate and indeed necessary for a linguistic theory such as transformational grammar to be concerned with meaning only in terms that were insensitive to context. Features of context were to be dealt with in a separate, complementary theory, perhaps even by Grice's theory of conversation itself. Writing in the mid-1970s, transformational grammarians Jerrold Katz and Thomas Bever accuse the generative semanticists of a form of linguistic empiricism more extreme than Bloomfield. By attempting to fit every aspect of interpretation, however specific to context, into linguistic theory, the generative semanticists were failing to distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical regularities: failing to respect the distinction between competence and performance. Katz and Bever commend Grice's account of conversational implicature by way of contrast, as an example of a type of meaning properly and systematically handled outside the grammar by independently motivated cognitive principles? In the same volume, Terence Langendoen and Thomas Bever praise Grice for correctly distinguishing between grammatical acceptability and behavioural comprehensibility. Even Chomsky himself put aside his worries about behaviourism to draw on Grice's work. In a 1969 conference paper concerned with defending his version of grammar against criticisms from generative semanticists he suggests that if certain aspects of meaning  'can be explained in terms of general "maxims of discourse" (in theGricean sense), they need not be made explicit in the grammar of a particular language'!  In the 1970s, then, the theory of conversation was seen by some as a potential means of incorporating contextual factors into grammatical theory, and by others as a reason for refusing to do so. Generative semantics eventually failed, perhaps a victim of its own ambition, and of the increasingly complex syntactic explanations needed to account for contextual meaning. Former generative semanticist Robin Lakoff has attributed its eventual decline to a growing realisation that syntax was not in fact the place where meaning could best be explained; they came to understand that to deal with the phenomena we had uncovered, the relationships between form and function that our work had made manifest and unavoidable, we needed to shift the emphasis of the grammar from syntax to semantics and pragmatics.''' Generative semantics had succeeded in putting the discussion of contextual meaning on the formal linguistic map, and had paved the way for the emergence of pragmatics as a separate discipline. The sheer size of Grice's impact on this discipline makes anything approaching a comprehensive survey prohibitive, but a few key collections can provide a representative overview. By the end of the decade, pragmatics had its own international conference. In the proceedings of the 1979 conference held at Urbino Grice is cited, or at least alluded to, in 15 of the 37 papers." These papers range over topics such as language acquisition, second language comprehension, rhetoric and intonation, as well as theories of meaning, reference and relevance.  In 1975, Berkeley Linguistics Society, a student-run organisation, began hosting an annual conference, bringing together linguists from across America. At the first meeting, Grice's work formed the basis of two very different papers. Cathy Cogan and Leora Herrmann tackled colloquial uses of the phrase 'let's just say', arguing that it 'serves as an overt marker on sentences which constitute an opting out' from straightforward observance of the maxims. At the same conference, Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters presented a much more formal paper on conventional implicata, arguing that they could be used to explain various so-called presuppositional phenomena.13 Since then, meetings of the society have included an ever-increasing number of papers on Gricean topics. In 1990 a parasession at the annual meeting was devoted to papers on 'The Legacy of Grice'. In effect, the delegates all interpret this title in relation to the theory of conversation, which they applied to topics as diverse as the language of jokes, the grammaticalisation of the English perfect between Old English and Modern English, the teach-ing of literacy, and the forms of address adopted by mothers and fathers towards their children.' By the time the The Concise Encyclopedia of Prag-matics was published in 1998, Grice's work had earned mention in entries on 29 separate topics, including advertising, cognitive science, humour, metaphor and narrative. Again, the majority of these references are to 'Logic and conversation', and in her entry on 'conversa-tional maxims' Jenny Thomas comments that 'it is this work - sketchy, in many ways problematical, and frequently misunderstood - which has proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics."s The Journal of Pragmatics, which began in the mid-1970s, has included numerous articles with Gricean themes, and in  2002 published a special focus issue entitled 'To Grice or not to Grice'.  In his introductory editorial, Jacob Mey argues that the range of articles included, both supportive of and challenging to Gricean implicature, form 'a living testimony to, and fruitful elaboration of, some of the ideas that shook the world of language studies in the past century, and continue to move and inspire today's research'. 16  Nevertheless, Kenneth Lindblom suggests that the importance and implications of the theory of conversation tend to be underestimated, because it has been used by scholars in a range of fields with significant methodological differences.' Certainly, Gricean analysis has appeared in discussions of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, taking it well beyond the confines of its 'home' discipline of pragmatics. For instance, the relationship between Grice's theory and literary texts has long been a source of interest to stylisticians. As early as 1976, Teun van Dijk suggested that the maxims 'partially concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called "stylistic" , 18 He argues that a set of principles different from, but analogous to Grice's Cooperative Principle and maxims are needed to explain literature. For Mary Louise Pratt, however, the most successful theory of discourse would be one that could explain literature alongside other uses of language. In the case of literature, where the Cooperative Principle is particularly secure between author and reader, 'we can freely and joyfully jeopardize it'. l' Flouting and conversational implicatures are therefore particularly characteristic of literary texts but do not set them apart as intrinsically different from other types of language use. Other commentators have concentrated on Gricean analyses of discourse within literary texts, such as soliloquies in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello and dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Finnegans Wake.20  Conversational implicature has also proved suggestive in historical linguistics as an explanation for a variety of meaning shifts. The basicpremiss of this research is that meaning that is initially associated with a word or phrase as an implicature can, over time, become part of its semantic meaning. Peter Cole describes this process as 'the lexicaliza-tion of conversational meaning' 2 Elizabeth Traugott's work in this area has drawn on a wide range of historical data. For instance, in a 1989 paper she traces a general trend in the history of English for changes from deontic to epistemic meanings; both words and grammatical forms  ten in he ton or math 10g  that started out as weakly subjective become strongly subjective. For instance,  'you must go' changes its meaning from permission in Old  English to expectation in Present Day English. This process she describes as 'the conventionalising of conversational implicature' based on 'prag-matic strengthening' and derived ultimately from Grice's second maxim of Quantity22 Debra Ziegeler has followed up this study by suggesting that another process of conventionalisation can account for the hypothetical and counterfactual meanings associated with some modal verbs in the past tense, such as would, this time a process explained by the first maxim of Quality.23  It would be wrong to suggest that Grice's presence in linguistics has been greeted with constant, or universal, enthusiasm. The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is representative here, too. As well as the albeit modified praise from Thomas, the encyclopaedia includes an entry on  'Discourse' in which Alec McHoul accuses Grice of idealising conversa-tion. According to McHoul, Grice 'attempted to generalise from how he thought conversation operated', and ended up giving 'an ideal-rational version of socially pragmatic events so that it seems virtually irrelevant that the objects of analysis... constitute a form of social action'.24 McHoul is far from being a lone voice. The theory of conversation has frequently been accused of presenting an unrealistic picture of human interaction, and even of attempting to lay down rules of appropriate conversational etiquette. For instance, Dell Hymes suggests that Grice's account of conversational behaviour incorporates a tacit ideal image of discourse',25 and Sandra Harris identifies in it 'prescriptive and moral overtones' 26 For Rob Pope, an individual's willingness to accept the maxims as an accurate account of communication is dependent on 'the problem of how far you and I, in our respective world-historical posi-tions, find it expedient or desirable to espouse a view of human interaction based on consensus and/or conflict'? Geoffrey Sampson even claims that 'it would be ludicrous to suggest that as a general principle people's speech is governed by maxims' such as those proposed in the theory of conversation. However, he rather undermines his own argu-ment by presenting the observation that 'people often manifestly flout his maxims' as if it were a problem for Grice's theory.  A number of linguists have been quick to defend Grice from the suggestion that his maxims prescribe 'ideal' conversation. For instance, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson explain that the maxims 'define for us the basic set of assumptions underlying every talk exchange. But this does not imply that utterances in general, or even reasonably fre-quently, must meet these conditions, as critics of Grice have sometime thought'.2 Robin Lakoff argues that strict adherence to the maxims is not usual and that in many cases: 'an utterance that fails to incorporate implicature when it is culturally expected might be uncooperative and so liable to misunderstanding, hardly "ideal" 130  There are a number of features of the presentation of the theory, particularly read in isolation from the rest of the lectures, that may contribute to the accusation of idealising conversation. First, Grice never defines what he means by 'conversation'. It is clear from his earlier, unpublished writings that he adopted this term simply as a label for language in context, or as a reminder to his Oxford students that utterances do not generally occur in isolation from each other. However, in linguistics the term has acquired a much more specific and technical use. During the early 1970s, just as Grice's theory was becoming widely known, work by linguists such as Harvey Sacks was revealing the characteristics and regularities of naturally occurring casual conversation, dwelling on features such as turn taking and topic organisation." Linguists familiar with this work have perhaps been taken aback by Grice's apparently cavalier, unempirical generalisations. Second, Grice introduces the theory of conversation as an approach to specific philosophical problems, but his own enthusiasm for the particular conversational explanations to which it extends obscures this purpose. In the single lecture 'Logic and conversation' in particular, casual conversational examples appear to be the main focus. Further, Grice expresses both the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims as imperatives.  Despite his intention of generalising over the assumptions that participants bring to interactive behaviour, this grammatical choice gives his  'rules' a prescriptive appearance.  Perhaps most damagingly of all, Grice does not comment on his own methodology and purpose in 'Logic and conversation'. He does,  however, give some indication of these in the earlier, unpublished lectures on language and context, for instance when he defends his method of working with as few 'cards on the table' as possible, in theknowledge that this will result in certain deliberate simplifications. In another lecture, proposing to address some questions put to him in a previous discussion about the nature of his undertaking, he suggests how he would like his ideas to be evaluated. His theory building is dif ferent from his methodology in 'Meaning', which proceeded through the description of specific cases.  I am here considering what is (or may be) only an ideal case, one which is artificially simplified by abstracting from all considerations other than those involved in the pursuance of a certain sort of conversational cooperation. I do not claim that there actually occur any conversations of this artificially simplified kind; it might even be that these could not be (cf frictionless pulleys). My question is on the (artificial) assumption that their only concern is cooperation in the business of giving and receiving information, what subordinate maxims or rules would it be reasonable or even mandatory that participants should accept as governing their conversational practice? Since the object of this exercise is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why it is that a particular implicature is present, I would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be a) can it be used to construct explanations of the presence of such implicatures, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any  rival [I have tried to make a start on the first part of a)] b) Are the no doubt crude, pretheoretical explanations which one would be prompted to give of such implicatures consistent with, or better still favourable pointers towards, the requirements involved in the model?32  Grice's idealisations are of the scientific type, necessary to establish underlying principles of the subject matter, rather than of the type specifying that it always does, or should, conform to certain optimal standards.  Another criticism of Grice's theory that seems off-beam in the light of his unpublished justification, but registers a legitimate concern for linguists, is that it works for only one particular discourse type: roughly for conversations between social equals who are mutually interested in exchanging information on a particular topic. Some of the earliest commentaries on the theory of conversation to consider the social and institutional contexts of language were, perhaps surprisingly, from philosophers rather than from linguists. In a 1979 edition of The Philo-sophical Quarterly, David Holdcroft and Graham Bird contribute to a discussion of whether the Cooperative Principle is best seen as applying to all sequences of speech acts, or simply to informal conversations.  Holdcroft argues that the Cooperative Principle is not unproblemati-cally universal across all sequences; in cases where participants do not  'have equal discourse rights' the maxims do not straightforwardly apply.33 He offers the examples of the proceedings of a court of law and a viva exam, suggesting that different sets of maxims are accepted by participants in different cases. Bird argues that situations in which participants have unequal rights do not pose the problems to Grice that Holdcroft envisages; maxims may be suspended by mutual agreement without offering counter-examples to the theory. 34  These ideas were later addressed by linguists using actual conversational data rather than theorised 'types' of sequences. Norman Fair-clough pioneered critical discourse analysis, an approach concerned with relating the formal properties of texts to interpretation and hence to their relationship to social context. He suggests that mainstream discourse analysis 'has virtually elevated cooperative conversation between equals into an archetype of verbal interaction in general'.35 He holds Grice at least in part responsible for this because his emphasis on the exchange of information assumes equal rights to contribute for both parties. Fairclough analyses conversational extracts from police interviews of a woman making a complaint of rape and of a youth suspected of vandalism to argue that many interactions do not conform to this model. He notes that Grice's own proviso that in some types of conversation influencing others may be more important has too often been overlooked. Other critical discourse analysts offer qualified support for Grice, for instance arguing that the theory of conversation need not be limited to casual conversation, but can be generalised to explain discourse in institutional contexts only once it has been made to take account of societal factors. John Gumperz uses a variety of data to argue that interactions such as cross-examinations, political debates and job interviews demonstrate that 'conversational cooperation becomes considerably more complex than would appear on a surface reading of the Cooperative Principle.' William Hanks echoes many of the criticisms of the theory of conversation familiar to ethnolinguists, but argues that it should not be abandoned altogether within this discipline because 'some parts of Grice's approach are of telling interest to ethnog-raphy', in particular the active role assigned to the hearer in attributing conversational meaning. For Grice, as for sociolinguists, 'meaning arises out of the relation between parties to talk'.38If it is to some extent contrary to Grice's abstract, philosophical intentions that his theory should be applied to real language data, it is perhaps even more incongruous that it should be subjected to clinical testing. Nevertheless, the theory of conversation has generated much interest in the area of clinical linguistics, in particular the branch sometimes described as 'neuropragmatics'. Chomsky was interested in the theory of conversation because it suggested to him a principled way of distinguishing between centrally linguistic meaning that might be described as belonging to a speaker's competence or semantic ability, and context-dependent meaning belonging to performance or prag-matics. Clinical linguists have looked for evidence of a neurological basis for such a distinction. Many such studies have concentrated on patients with some degree of language impairment, in an attempt to discover whether semantics and pragmatics can be selectively impaired.  For instance, Neil Smith and lanthi-Maria Tsimpli, working within a broadly Chomskyan framework, have studied an institutionalised brain-damaged patient with exceptional linguistic abilities. Their findings suggest that his 'linguistic decoding' is as good as anyone else's but that he is unable to handle examples such as irony, metaphor and jokes, a distinction that they suggests points to a separation between linguistic and non-linguistic impairment.3º Such a suggestion seems to be supported by findings from researchers with a more clinical and less linguistic interest, who have suggested that core linguistic functions might be controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain while 'pragmatic', context-dependent meaning, together with emotions, is controlled by the right. 40  Other clinicians have adopted a more overtly Gricean framework. Elisabeth Ahlsén uses the Cooperative Principle as a tool for describing aphasic communication in which, she argues, 'implicatures based on the maxims of quantity and manner cannot be made in the same way as in the case of nonaphasic speakers.'* The theory of conversation has also been used as a tool for describing more general communication dis-orders. 42 Ronald Bloom and a group of fellow-experimenters argue that  'Gricean pragmatics has provided a theoretically meaningful framework for examining the discourse of individuals with communication disorders' 43 Clinicians using Gricean analyses tend to be reluctant to draw definite conclusions about the division of labour between the hemi-spheres. This is argued perhaps most explicitly by Asa Kasher and his team, who have investigated the processing of implicatures by using an 'implicature battery' for both right brain-damaged and left brain-damaged stroke patients. They use both verbal implicatures and non-verbal implicatures based on visual images, and conclude that 'both cerebral hemispheres appear to contribute to the same degree to processing implicatures.'* This scepticism about the localisation of pragmatic processing in the right hemisphere is shared by Joan Borod and others, who use a series of pragmatic features, including some based on Gricean implicature, to test language performance in right-hand brain-damaged, left-hand brain-damaged and normal control subjects. They conclude that 'deficits in pragmatic appropriateness are shared equally by both brain-damaged groups.'45 Elsewhere, Kasher has argued explicitly against the tendency to make sweeping generalisations over pragmatic phenomena that locate them all in the right hemisphere.  Implicature, he argues, is part of a larger competence, 'hence it would be implausible to assume that some domain-specific cognitive system produces conversational implicature' 46 As Kasher's position illustrates, the positing of a separate pragmatic faculty, to which implicature belongs, is not dependent on the faculty being physically autonomous.  It can be impaired selectively from language, an observation that in itself legitimises the hypothesis of a physical basis in the brain.  Another field in which the theory of conversation has been used enthusiastically is Artificial Intelligence, a striking application given Grice's personal animosity to computers. Computer programmers have realised that formal linguistic theories can go a long way towards specifying the rules that make up grammatical sentences, but have little to say about how those sentences can be used to form natural-sounding conversations. For instance, Ayse Pinar Saygina and Ilyas Ciceki are not impressed by the pragmatic skills of computers. They analyse the output of various programmes entered for the Loebner Prize, an annual competition to find the programme closest to passing the Turing Test, in which a computer is deemed to be intelligent if a human observer cannot distinguish its participation in a conversation from that of a human. Saygina and Ciceki argue that pragmatic acceptability, rather than the simple ability to generate natural language, is the biggest challenge to such programmes. Moreover, the programmes that are the most successful are those that adhere most closely to Grice's maxims, suggesting future applications for these, specifically that programmers will inevitably have to find ways of "making computers cooperate" ' 47  Various programmers have in fact made some attempts in this direc-tion. Robert Dale and Ehud Reiter consider an algorithm for natural-sounding referring expressions in computer-human interaction. They note that such an algorithm must produce expressions that successfully pick out the referent without leading 'the human hearer or reader tomake false conversational implicatures',48 Perhaps not surprisingly, they consider Grice's maxims to be 'vague' compared to the principles needed for computational implementation. Nevertheless, they base their algorithm on an interpretation of the maxims, claiming that the simpler interpretation produces a result that is 'faster in computational terms and seems to be closer to what human speakers do when they construct referring expressions'.4 Michael Young tackles the problem of intelligent systems designed to form plans to direct their own activities or those of others. 'There is a mismatch between the amount of detail in a plan for even a simple task and the amount of detail in typical plan descriptions used and understood by people' 5º In order to address this issue, Young proposes a computational model that draws on Grice's maxim of Quantity, which he labels the Cooperative Plan Identification architecture. He argues that this produces instructions that are much more successful in communicating a plan to a human subject than instructions produced by alternative methods.  Grice would have recognised discussion of irony and metaphor as more closely related to his work, although he would not necessarily have welcomed the form some of this debate has taken. The explana-tion of such 'non-literal' uses has generally been taken as a central task for the theory of conversation, and indeed Grice himself seems to encourage this view. In a rather hurried exegesis in the William James lectures, he explains irony and metaphor as floutings of the first maxim of Quality. 'X is a fine friend' said just after X has been known to betray the speaker cannot be intended to be taken as a true expression of belief.  Instead, the speaker must intend some other related proposition; 'the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward!»' Grice later restricts his definition of irony, claiming that it is 'intimately connected with the expression of a feeling, attitude or evaluation'.52 As an example of metaphor, 'You are the cream in my coffee' is also clearly false, but cannot be interpreted as meaning its simple opposite, which is a truism; 'the most likely sup-position is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance.'53  Some linguists working on such figures of speech have accepted an account along the lines suggested by Grice.5 Others, however, have taken issue with the apparent ease with which Grice's hearer in each case derives the interpretation. Their argument is that nothing within the Cooperative Principle or the maxims as they stand specifies why the hearer should reach that interpretation rather than some other. RobertHarnish wonders what tells us that the hearer in the irony example reaches the conclusion that 'X is a cad'; 'why should we suppose that the contradictory is the most obviously related proposition?' Similarly, if Grice's metaphor example is to be explained, 'we need some principles to guide our search for the correct supposition.'ss Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson argue that Grice's description of the process by which irony is interpreted 'is virtually free of rational constraints' 56 There is no reason why the negation of what is said should serve as the impli-cature, rather than some other closely related assumption. Wayne Davis worries about how a hearer is expected to identify accurately exactly what sort of interpretation is intended when, for instance, the maxim of Quality is flouted.s7  Some claim that experimental work also poses problems for Grice's account. Rachel Giora argues that the 'salient' meanings of metaphors and irony 'enjoy a privileged status: they are always accessed, and always initially, regardless of context'.58 Raymond Gibbs goes so far as to claim that 'the results of many psycholinguistic experiments have shown the traditional, Gricean view to be incorrect as a psychological theory'S His argument is that a figurative example does not require more processing time than a literal one; speakers often understand metaphorical or ironic meaning straight away without first having to analyse and reject literal meaning. Gibbs sees this as a threat to the whole distinction between the said and the implicated.  Not all experimental linguists would subscribe to Gibbs's conclusions.  Thomas Holtgraves points out that many metaphorical figures of speech such as 'he spilled the beans' have 'a conventional, nonliteral meaning that is comprehended directly' because in such cases 'the default meaning is clearly the nonliteral meaning' 6 Gerald Winer and his team compare the reactions of children and adults to a set of questions and observe that children tend to respond to literal but trivial meanings, adults to metaphorical interpretation. They argue that these findings are quite consistent with Grice's theory, which 'holds that people respond to the intended or inferred, rather than the literal, meaning of utter-ances'.61 Anne Bezuidenhout and J. Cooper Cutting suggest that experiments can never bear directly on the debate over the accuracy of Grice's theory because 'Grice was interested in giving a conceptual analysis of the concepts of saying, meaning, and so on, and not in giving a psychological theory of the stages in utterance processing. 2 They also express some concerns about the validity of results based on simple measurements of processing time, and the readiness of experimental linguists to reach generalised conclusions from these.Despite his own philosophical and analytical interests, then, Grice's theory has been debated in terms of its social application, its computational implementation and its psychological and even neurological plausibility. It has also been discussed by those whose studies extend across cultures, some of whom have criticised it as ethnocentric, as drawing unquestioningly on the mores of one society. In an echo of the accusations of elitism levelled at Austin and his 'empirical' approach to language, Grice has even been accused of concentrating on one privileged rank of that society. This particular criticism dates back to Elinor Ochs Keenan's article 'The universality of conversational postulates', first published in 1976. Keenan's basic tenet is that Grice's analysis is implicitly but inappropriately offered as applying universally. Her specific claim is that the maxims, in particular those of Quantity, do not hold among the indigenous people of the plateaus area of Madagascar.  Hence the maxims are culturally specific and the assumption that Grice's account demonstrates a pragmatic universal is flawed.  In Malagasy society, speakers regularly breach the maxim to 'be infor-mative', by failing to provide enough information to meet their interlocutor's needs. So if A asks B 'Where is your mother?', B might well reply 'She is either in the house or at the market', even when fully aware of the mother's location. Further, the reply would not generally give rise to the implicature that B is unable to provide a more specific answer because in that society 'the expectation that speakers will satisfy informational needs is not a basic norm' 63 Keenan suggests some reasons for this specific to Malagasy society. New information is such a rare commodity that it confers prestige on the knower, and is therefore not parted with lightly. Further, speakers are reluctant to commit themselves explicitly to particular claims, and therefore to take on responsibility for the reliability of the information. For these reasons, the expectations about conversational practice and the implicatures following from particular utterances are different from those assumed by Grice to be universal norms.  Keenan complains that 'the conversational maxims are not presented as working hypotheses but as social facts' and argues that much more empirical work on conversation must be conducted before true paradigms of conversational practice can be drawn up. Her criticism, then, is chiefly the familiar one that Grice has attempted to describe 'con-versation' without having considered the mechanics of any actual con-versation, with the added claim that such a consideration would reveal some significant variations between cultures. However, she welcomes Grice's attempt to posit universal conversational principles, because ofthe possibility it suggests for those engaged in fieldwork to move away from specific empirical observations 'and to propose stronger hypotheses related to general principles of conversation'. She suggests that the particular maxims may apply in different domains and to different degrees in different societies. In Malagasy society, determining factors include the importance of the information in question, the degree of intimacy between the participants, and the sex of the speaker. A number of linguists have defended Grice against Keenan's accusation. Georgia Green has suggested that even the discovery that a particular maxim did not apply at all in one society would not invalidate Grice's general enterprise. Since the maxims are individual 'special cases' of coopera-tion, 'discovering that one of the maxims was not universal would not invalidate claims that the Co-operative Principle was universal'. Robert Harnish argues that Grice nowhere claims that all conversations are governed by all the maxims; in many types of conversation, as in Keenan's examples, one or more of the maxims 'are not in effect and are known not to be in effect by the participants'. Geoffrey Leech points out that  'no claim has been made that the CP applies in an identical manner to all societies. '68  Keenan's criticisms of Grice, and indeed these responses to those crit-icisms, consider meaning as a social and interactive, rather than a purely formal phenomenon. This is a project shared to varying degrees by works that have attracted the title 'politeness theory'. Such works date back to the mimeograph days of 'Logic and conversation',  ', and indeed  can be seen as one area in which the newly emerging discipline of prag-matics took its inspiration and basic premisses from Grice. Looking back to the early 1970s, politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson comment that at that time the division of meaning into semantics and pragmatics was motivated chiefly by 'the basic Gricean observation that what is "said" is typically only part of what is "meant" the proposition expressed by the former providing a basis for the calculation of the latter. In studying politeness phenomena, linguists such as Brown and Levinson were seeking an explanation not so much of the mechanics of this calculation as of its motivation. John Gumperz observes in the foreword to Brown and Levinson's study that politeness theory concentrated on the social functions of language, thereby bringing Grice's work into the field of sociolinguistics for the first time.  Theorised conversational politeness, like cooperation, is neither a description of ideal behaviour nor a guide to etiquette. Indeed, politeness theorists are eager to stress that they are positing hypotheses about conventionalised and meaningful patterns of behaviour, rather thandescribing a general tendency in people to be 'considerate' or 'nice' to each other. The conventions of politeness are not accounted for in the maxims, and some have seen this as a weakness in Grice's account.  However, the tendency towards cooperation and that towards politeness are means towards different sets of ends: the former to informing and influencing and the latter to the maintenance of harmonious social relationships. Norms of politeness are therefore appropriate complements to, not subcategories of, norms of cooperation. This certainly seems to have been the view Grice himself took in his only reference to politeness in 'Logic and conversation':  There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as 'Be polite', that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve.?°  Those who have taken a closer interest than Grice in politeness have generally done so for one of two reasons. Some have given what for Grice are secondary purposes of conversation a more central impor-tance, arguing either explicitly or by implication that the maintenance of social relationships is at least as important a function of conversation as the 'rational' goals of informing and influencing. Others have seen in the phenomenon of politeness a possible answer to a question Grice has been criticised for never fully addressing: the question of why speakers convey meaning through implicatures at all, rather than through straightforward assertion. In other words, they have seen politeness not as a supplementary norm of conversation, but as a potential key to the operation of the Cooperative Principle itself.  Some of the earliest work in politeness theory came from Robin Lakoff. In common with other generative semanticists, she was dissatisfied with the tenet that judgements of grammaticality were autonomous and sufficient: that a fully successful transformational grammar would be able to legislate absolutely between 'good' and 'bad' strings. Rather, she argued, phenomena entirely dependent on context, and on aspects of context as specific as the relationship between two people, could effect such judgements and should be taken into account.  She has since argued that the notion of 'continuousness', the idea thatjudgements of acceptability must be arranged along a continuous scale rather than being binary and polar, is the single greatest contribution of generative semantics to the understanding of human language." In articles published in the early 1970s, Lakoff defended the importance of pragmatic explanations. In 'Language in context', for instance, she argues that transformational grammar had 'explicitly rejected' contextual aspects from consideration.?? Her particular claim is that certain features of English sentences can be explained only in terms of the relationship between the speaker and hearer. In this sense they are no different from, for instance, honorifics in Japanese; it is just that their context-bound nature is not immediately apparent because they are expressed using linguistic devices that have other, more centrally semantic, functions as well. So Lakoff discusses the use of modal verbs in offers and requests, considering why, for instance, 'You must have some of this cake' counts as a politer form than 'You should have some of this cake'. Their social meaning is often dependent not just on the form used but the implications this triggers. The verb 'must' implies, generally contrary to the facts of the case, that the hearer has no choice but to eat the cake, hence that the cake is not in itself desirable, and that the speaker is politely modest about the goods she is offering.  Lakoff draws an analogy between these politeness phenomena and some other conversational features 'not tied to concepts of politeness', such as those discussed in Grice's mimeograph. Like politeness phe-nomena, these features are not part of the grammar but can nevertheless have an effect on the form of utterances. Lakoff notes that expressions such as 'well' and 'why' may sometimes be labelled 'mean-ingless', but that they in fact have specific conditions for use. Because they can be used either appropriately or inappropriately, a linguistic theory needs to be able to account for them, yet the conditions governing their appropriateness are often dependent on a purely context-bound phenomenon such as the breaking of a conversational maxim.  They signal, respectively, that the utterance to follow is in some way incomplete, breaking the maxims of Quantity, and that a preceding utterance was in some way surprising, and so considered a possible breaking of the maxims of Quality. The attitudes of speakers to the information conveyed, just like their awareness of their relationships to each other, is sometimes communicated by the actual form of words used.  Therefore, any sufficient account of language must pay attention to contextual as well as syntactic factors.  In 'The logic of politeness', published the following year, Lakoff reiterates her belief in the necessity of contextual explanations to comple-ment syntactic ones, but this time goes further in arguing that prag-matics should be afforded a status equal to syntax or semantics. Ulti-mately, she would like to see pragmatic rules 'made as rigorous as the syntactic rules in the transformational literature (and hopefully a lot less ad hoc)'? The basic types of rules to be accounted for fall under two headings: 'Be clear' and 'Be polite'. These sometimes produce the same effect in a particular context and therefore reinforce each other, but more often place conflicting demands on the speaker, meaning that one must be sacrificed in the interests of the other. Grice's theory of conversation provides an account of the rules subsumed under 'Be clear'. It remains to be explained why speakers so often depart from these norms in their conversations and here, Lakoff implies, the second type of pragmatic rule comes into play. In cases when the interests of clarity are in conflict with those of politeness, politeness generally wins through. This is perhaps because: 'in most informal conversations, actual communication of important ideas is secondary to merely reaffirming and strengthening relationships.'75  Lakoff tentatively suggests three 'rules of politeness', analogous to the rules of conversation: 'don't impose', 'give options' and 'make A feel good - be friendly'? The first rule explains why people choose lengthy or syntactically complex expressions in apparent breach of clarity, such as 'May I ask how much you paid for that vase, Mr Hoving?' and 'Dinner is served'. The second rule explains the use of hedges ('Nixon is sort of conservative') and euphemisms (I hear that the butler found Freddy and Marion making it in the pantry'), expressions leaving hearers the superficial option of not interpreting an expression in a way they may find offensive. The third rule explains nicknames and particles expressing feeling and involving the hearer, particles such as like', 'y'know', '1 mean'. All these conversational features might appear to be in breach of one or more maxim; in effect the more powerful rules of politeness explain why and when the conversational maxims are breached. Lakoff even suggests that Grice's rules of conversation are perhaps best seen as  'subcases' of Rule 1; in other words that the tendency towards clarity is just part of a more general tendency not to impose on your addressee.  The other two types of politeness, particularly 'be friendly', take precedence over clarity when they come into conflict with it. For Lakoff politeness, perhaps including Grice's maxims, is a subsection of the more general category of 'cooperation'.  Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness is perhaps the most fully articulated and successful of the attempts to integrate sociolinguisticnotions of politeness with Grice's account of cooperation. The theory itself dates from just after the time when Lakoff was publishing on the need for linguistics to take account of contextual factors. Brown and Levinson first wrote up their ideas in the summer of 1974; these were eventually published as a long essay late in the 1970s, and in book form almost a decade later." They claim that their account is based on just the same basic premiss as Grice's: 'there is a working assumption by conversationalists of the rational and efficient nature of talk.'78 Brown and Levinson draw on sociology by introducing Erving Goffman's notion of 'face' into the discussion of politeness. In the 1950s, Goffman defined face as the positive social value a person claims, and argued that  'a person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participant'" Brown and Levinson refine Goffman's idea by distinguishing between 'positive' and 'negative' face. Participants in social situations are aware, both in themselves and in others, of the needs of both positive and negative face. Positive face is, generally, the desire to be liked, to be held in high regard by others. Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, to retain freedom of choice. Certain types of act can be classified as inherently impolite because they are threatening to one or other type of face for the addressee. Criticisms are inherently impolite because they threaten hearers' positive face by showing that they are in some way not held in high regard. Orders or requests are inherently impolite because they threaten negative face by seeking to impose the speaker's will on others and to restrict freedom of choice. In such circumstances the speaker has the option of producing the impolite act 'bald on-record'.80 That is, of producing it without any attempt to disguise it: to say 'You look fat in that dress', or 'Give me a lift to the station'. Brown and Levinson observe that in doing this, the speaker adheres precisely to Grice's maxims; 'You look fat in that dress' is clear, informative and truthful.  The speakers may be adhering to the maxims of conversation in these examples, but they are in breach of the rules of politeness prescribing maintenance of the other's face. Utterances such as 'That isn't the most flattering of your dresses' and 'I wonder if I could trouble you for a lift to the station' are less clear and less efficient than their 'on-record' coun-terparts. However, the very fact that speakers are putting more effort into producing these longer and more complex utterances ensures that they are seen to be striving to satisfy the hearers' face wants. Such ways of conveying meaning are very common in conversation, Brown andLevinson note. Successive commentators have been simply wrong in assuming that Grice specifies that utterances must meet the conditions of cooperation. Their purpose here, in fact, is 'to suggest a motive for not talking in this way' 81 Like Lakoff, they note that hedges are generally concerned with the operation of the maxims. They emphasise that cooperation is met, indicate that it may not be met, or question whether it has been met.82 Further, 'off-record' strategies are often accompanied by a 'trigger' indicating that an indirect meaning is to be sought. The individual conversational maxims determine the appropriate type of trigger.  Work on politeness in naturally occurring conversation has produced both supportive and more pessimistic responses to the Gricean frame-work. Susan Swan Mura draws on the transcriptions of 24 dyadic interactions to consider factors that might license deviation from the maxims. She concludes that for all the maxims the relevant factors provide for problem-free interaction in contexts where there is a threat of some sort to the coherence of the interaction. She concludes enthusiastically that 'this study also provides preliminary evidence that the Cooperative Principle represents a psychologically real construct, modeling the behavioural (in a non-Skinnerian sense of the term) basis for conversational formulation and interpretation.'83 Yoshiko Matsumoto, on the other hand, considers politeness phenomena in Japanese and notes that 'a socially and situationally adequate level of politeness and adequate honorifics must obligatorily be encoded in every utterance even in the absence of any potential face threatening act', arguing that this is a serious challenge to the universality of both Grice's and Brown and Levinson's theories.8  In his contribution to the literature on politeness, Geoffrey Leech draws together concepts from contemporary pragmatics and adds some of his own, to present what he describes as an 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' 85 He claims that the Cooperative Principle, although an important  account of what goes on in conversation, is not in itself sufficient to explain interpersonal rhetoric. Principles of politeness and also of irony must be added on an equal footing with cooperation; indeed, they can sometimes 'rescue' it from apparently false predictions. The result is a vastly more complex account of conversation than Grice had envisaged, as well as a more complex pragmatics in general. For example, Leech suggests that if, in response to 'We'll all miss Bill and Agatha, won't we?', a speaker were to say 'Well, we'll all miss BILL', thereby implicating that she will not miss Agatha, the speaker has apparently failed to observe the needs of Quantity. The speaker 'could have been moreinformative, but only at the cost of being more impolite to a third party: [the speaker] therefore suppressed the desired information in order to uphold the P[oliteness] P[rinciple]'.86  Leech's PP itself contains an elaborate list of additional conversational maxims. He initially describes these as comprising Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy, but later suggests that further maxims of politeness may prove necessary, including the Phatic maxim, the Banter maxim and the Pollyanna maxim.8 He seems, in fact to be prepared to add maxims in response to individual examples as they present themselves. This stance is open to the criticism that the choice of maxims becomes ad hoc, and the number arbitrary, significantly weakening the explanatory power of the theory. Indeed Brown and Levinson suggest that Leech is in danger of arguing for an 'infinite number of maxims', making his addition of the politeness principle in effect an elaborate description, rather than an explanatory account, of pragmatic communication.88  Leech's 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' is unusual among theories of politeness for advocating such a plethora of principles in addition to Grice's maxims of cooperation. It is certainly unusual in the more general framework of Gricean pragmatics. Here, the tendency in responses to the theory of conversation has been to attempt to reduce the number of maxims, to streamline the theory and therefore make it more powerfully explanatory and psychologically plausible. In their overview of the place of pragmatics in linguistics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Hartmut Haberlard and Jacob Mey criticise Leech for multiplying pragmatic principles and types, while most responses to Grice have been reductive in tendency. The general feeling that Grice's maxims need tidying up and clarifying is, they suggest, not particularly surprising 'if one considers the strong a priori character of Grice's maxims'. His main motivation in their choice and titles was to echo Kant's table of categories. Perhaps the most extreme of such theories was Relevance Theory (RT), developed by a number of linguists, but principally by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. It offered an account of communication and cognition drawing on Grice's theories of meaning and of conversation, especially on his distinction between what is said and what is meant, while at the same time departing from Grice sig-nificantly. From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, RT was perhaps the most influential school of thought in pragmatics and spawned a large number of articles, conference papers and doctoral theses, especially at its 'home' at University College, London. It was used as a framework for the analysis of various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in a varietyof languages, as well as an approach to texts as diverse as poetry, jokes and political manifestos.  In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson argue that Grice's account is too cumbersome and too ad hoc, consisting in a series of maxims each intended to account for some particular, more or less intuitive response.  Gricean pragmatics had for too long been bound by the outline provided by 'Grice's original hunches'? The dangers of this are apparent:  'It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for.'' Rather, the various maxims and submaxims can be subsumed into a suitably rich notion of relevance. This does not consist of a maxim, such as Grice's 'Be relevant', which speakers may adhere to or not, and which in the later case may lead to implicature. There is no place in Sperber and Wilson's theory for the notion of 'flouting' a rule of conversation. Rather, they posit a 'Principle of Relevance', a statement about communication; 'communicators do not "follow" the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to'. The principle applies 'without exception'. It is a fact of human behaviour explaining how people produce, and how they respond to, communicative acts. The principle states that every act of ostensive communication is geared to the maximisation of its own relevance; people produce utterances, whether verbal or otherwise, in accordance with the human tendency to be relevant, and respond to others' utterances with this expectation. Relevance is defined as the production of the maximum number of contextual effects for the least amount of processing effort. These notions are all entirely dependent on context; just as there is no place for flouting in Sperber and Wilson's theory, so there is no place for any notion of generalised implicature. Every implicature is entirely dependent on and unique to the context in which it occurs.  Sperber and Wilson take issue with Grice over what they see as his simplistic division of the semantic and the pragmatic, or the encoded and the inferenced. It is simply not possible, they argue, to arrive at a unique, fully articulated meaning from decoding alone: to produce a semantic form on which separate, pragmatic principles can then work.  In assuming that this was possible, Grice took an unwarranted step back towards the code model he so tellingly critiqued in his earlier article  'Meaning', returning to an outmoded reliance on the linguistic code to deliver a fully formed thought. He abandoned a 'common-sense' approach with psychological plausibility: the attempt to formalise and explain the notion that 'communication involves the publication and recognition of intentions'.' Cognitive principles such as relevance will be involved even at the stage of producing a Gricean 'what is said',determining features such as reference assignment and disambiguation.  Unlike  the Gricean maxims, the Principle of Relevance is not an autonomous rule applying after decoding has issued a unique linguistic meaning. Rather, both 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning rely on the Principle of Relevance. Sperber and Wilson argue, contra Grice, for the need to consider explicitness as a matter of degree.  Unlike the ethnologists and politeness theorists who claim common ground with Grice through an interest in social interaction, relevance theorists see their approach, and also Grice's maxims, as essentially cognitive in nature. For instance, Diane Blakemore has argued that RT responds to Grice's own dismissal of 'the idea that the maxims had their origin in the nature of society or culture on the grounds that this did not provide a sufficiently general explanation' and his warning that 'the key to a general, psychological explanation lay in the notion of relevance'.'4  There is some evidence that Grice was reluctant to be drawn on his views on RT. His only published comment is very brief and rather damning. In the retrospective overview of his own work in Studies in the Way of Words, he comments on the possible problem of the interdependence of his maxims, especially Quantity and Relation. However, he argues that Sperber and Wilson's account, far from clarifying this matter, in fact loses the significance of the link between relevance and quantity of information by considering relevance without specification of direction. The amount of information appropriate in any given context is determined by the particular aim of the conversation, or of what is deemed relevant to that aim. So success in conversation is not simply a matter of accumulating the highest possible number of contextual effects. Further, Grice argues that as well as direction of rele-vance, information is necessary concerning the degree of a concern for a topic, and the extent of opportunity for remedial action. In sum, the principle of relevance may well be an important one in conversation, but when it comes to implicature it might be said 'to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity'.9S This last suggestion seems to align Grice more with another branch of pragmatics, again one attempting to refine the notion of implicature and reduce the number of conversational maxims: the work of the so-called 'neo-Griceans'.  The term 'neo-Gricean' has been applied to a number of linguists, both American and British, and to a body of work produced since the early 1980s. Across the range of their published work, these linguists have revised their ideas many times, and used a sometimes bewildering array of terminology. Nevertheless, the work all remains located firmlywithin the tradition of Gricean pragmatics, seeking to elaborate a theory of meaning based on levels of interpretation. Neo-Griceans have tended towards two types of revision of Grice's theory of conversation, one much more radical than the other. First, very much in keeping with Grice's own speculations about the interdependence of Quantity and Relation, they have questioned the need for as many separate maxims as Grice originally postulated, and investigated ways of reducing these.  Second, and rather more at odds with Grice's own original conception, they have questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the levels of meaning. They have been concerned with what Laurence Horn has described as a problem raised by the Cooperative Principle, 'one we encounter whenever we cruise the transitional neighbourhood of the semantics/pragmatics border: how do we draw the line between what is said and what is implicated?'96  The neo-Griceans have upheld the importance of making some such distinction, but they have in various ways and with different terminologies challenged the viability of separating off entirely the 'literal' from the 'implied'. In this, they share the anxiety expressed by Sperber and Wilson in terms of the appropriate division between 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning. Sperber and Wilson argue that purely explicit meaning is generally not enough to render a full propositional form; implicit aspects of meaning must be admitted at various stages, leading to 'levels' of explicitness. Neo-Griceans have made similar claims,  leading them not actually to abandon the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, but to question the autonomy of the two, and the possibility of their applying to interpretation in series. The chief ways in which the neo-Griceans differ from relevance theorists, and stay closer to Grice, is in their maintenance of separate maxims of conversation that can be exploited and flouted, and the use they make of gen-eralised conversational implicatures (GCIs). These latter, rejected by RT because they take minimal account of context, are crucial to the devel-opment, and presentation, of much of the neo-Gricean literature.  In his 1989 book A Natural History of Negation, Laurence Horn comments that 'much of neo- and post-Gricean pragmatics has been devoted to a variety of reductionist efforts'!' He suggests that a premiss for him, and perhaps for many of the neo-Griceans, setting them apart from relevance theorists, is that 'Quality ... is primary and essentially unreducible.' What needs further to be said about conversation can be summarised in two separate, sometimes conflicting, driving forces within communication. These are, in general terms, the drive towards clarity, putting the onus on speakers to do all that is necessary to makethemselves understood, and the drive towards economy, putting the onus on hearers to interpret utterances as fully as necessary. Horn labels the principles resulting from these drives Q and R respectively (stand-ing for 'quantity' and 'relation', but with no straightforward correlation to Grice's maxims). He traces the development of this reductive model to early work by Jay Atlas and Stephen Levinson, and by Levinson on his own. But an important part of the account of 'Q-based implicatures' draws on work almost a decade earlier by Horn himself on the notion of 'scalar implicatures'.  Horn's development of the Gricean notion of Quantity to account for the interpretation of a range of vocabulary in terms of 'scalar implica-ture' is arguably one of the most productive and interesting of the expansions of 'Logic and conversation'. It is in many ways true to Grice's original conception of implicature, not least because it divides the  'meaning' of a range of terms into 'said' and 'implicated' components, removing the need to posit endless ambiguities in the language, and offering a systematic explanation of a wide range of examples. It is perhaps in keeping that such a thoroughly Gricean enterprise should remain in manuscript for many years, and then be published only partially (in A Natural History of Negation). The main source for Horn's account of scalar implicature remains his doctoral thesis, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, presented to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972.  In his later commentary on scalar implicatures, Horn describes them as the 'locus classicus' of GCIs based on his own notion of Quantity.98 Indeed, Grice himself seems to have seen examples of this type as particularly important, although he does not use the term 'scalar', or identify them as a separate category. In 'Logic and conversation', he introduces the notion of GCI as follows:  Anyone who uses a sentence of the form X is meeting a woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend. ... Sometimes, however, there would be no such implicature (T have been sitting in a car all morning') and sometimes a reverse implicature (I broke a finger yesterday'). I am inclined to think that one would not lend a sympathetic ear to a philosopher who suggested that there are three senses of the form of expression an X. ... [Rather] when someone, by using the form of expression an X, implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is presentbecause the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be assumed that he is no in a position to be specific.  This is a familiar implicature and is classifiable as a failure, for one reason or another, to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity."  The most easily identifiable type of GCI is based on the first maxim of Quantity, which calls for as much information as is necessary. In other words, it draws on Grice's earliest observation about the regularities of conversation: that one should not make a weaker statement when a stronger one is possible. Horn observes that there are many areas of vocabulary where similar apparent problems can be resolved by just such an analysis. A more general term often implicates that a more specific alternative does not apply, by means of the assumption that the speaker is not in a position to provide the extra information. Horn discusses this informativeness in terms of the 'semantic strength' of a lexical item. Such items can be understood as ranged on 'scales' of infor-mativeness, each scale consisting of two or more items.  In all cases, it is possible to describe the different meanings associated with a particular item in terms not of a semantic ambiguity, but of a basic semantic meaning and of an additional implicated meaning that arises by default, but can be cancelled in context. The first scale Horn discusses is that of the cardinal numbers. The numbers can be seen as situated on a scale, ranging from one to infinity: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...). Each item semantically entails all items to its left, and pragmatically implicates the negation of all items to its right. As Horn describes it:  Numbers, or rather sentences containing them, assert lower-  boundedness - at least n - and given tokens of utterances containing cardinal numbers may, depending on the context, implicate upper-boundedness - at most n - so that the number may be interpreted as denoting an exact quantity, 100  This explains the apparent ambiguity of a cardinal number in use.  'John has three children', for example, will generally be interpreted as meaning 'John has exactly three children', but is not logically incompatible with John's having four or more. Horn points to the fact that  'John has three children, and possibly even more' is acceptable, suggesting that 'no more than three' cannot be part of the semantic meaning of 'three'. If it were, this example should be simply logically contradictory. Rather than forcing the intolerable conclusion that allcardinal numbers are semantically multiply ambiguous, Horn's account allows that their semantic meaning is 'at least. but that they implicate 'at most..'. This is because, if the speaker were able to use an item further to the right on the scale, it would be more informative, hence more cooperative, to do so. Taken together, these two meanings give he interpretation 'exactly... Horn proposes similar scales fo vocabulary items from across the range of the lexicon, including adjec tives, (warm, hot), (good, excellent); verbs, (like, love), (dislike, hate); and quantifiers, (all, some). As Horn observes in his own later com-mentary, in all these examples 'since the implicature relation is context-dependent, we systematically obtain two understandings for each scalar value p ('at least p', 'exactly p') without needing to posit a semantic ambiguity for each operator'. 101  In this later work, Horn describes scalar implicatures as examples of Q-based implicatures, dependent on our expectations that speakers will seek to be as clear as possible. However, Q-based implicatures need to be balanced against R-based ones, drawing on the notion of economy.  The tension between these can offer a clear account of the issue to do with articles Grice originally identified:  Maxim clash, for example, arises notoriously readily in indefinite contexts; thus, an utterance of I slept in a car yesterday licenses the Q-based inference that it was not my car I slept in (or I should have said so), while an utterance of I broke a finger yesterday licenses the R-based inference that it was my finger I broke (unless I know that you know that I am an enforcer for the mob, in which case the opposite, R-based implicatum is derived). 102  There is some experimental support for the psychological plausibility of Horn's scalar implicatures, and hence for the Gricean framework on which they are based. Ira Noveck concludes from a number of experiments that although adults react to the enriched pragmatic meaning of scalars, young but linguistically competent children respond chiefly to their logical meaning. 'The experiments succeeded in demonstrating not only that these Gricean implicatures are present in adult inference-making but that in cognitive development these occur only after logical interpretations have been well established.'103  There have been some attempts to extend the range of Horn's notion of scalar implicature. Horn himself has offered a scalar analysis of the  'strengthening' of 'if' to mean 'if and only if', 104 Earlier, Jerrold Sadock sought to explain the meaning of 'almost' in terms of a semantic scale(almost p, p). Sadock observes that the argument for a relationship of implicature between the use of 'almost p' and the meaning 'not p' is considerably weakened by the difficulty of finding contexts in which it would be cancellable. His explanation is that this is because 'the context-free implicature in the case of almost is so strong'.10s In discussing the one example he does see as cancellable, he introduces a qualification that is again to do with the 'strength' of an implicature. Surely, Sadock argues, if a seed company ran a competition to breed an almost black marigold', and a contestant turns up with an entirely black marigold, it would be in the interests not just of fair play but of correct semantic interpretation to award him the prize. However, he cautions:  In the statement of the contest's rules, the word almost should not be read with extra stress. Stressing a word that is instrumental in conveying a conversational implicature can have the effect of emphasizing the implicature and elevating it to something close to semantic content. 106  Sadock does not go so far as claiming that an implicature can actually become part of semantic content, but his rather equivocal statement certainly suggests a blurring of what for Grice is a clearly defined boundary.  This blurring of the boundaries is more apparent, or more explicitly advocated, in other neo-Gricean work, initially from Gazdar and later from Atlas and Levinson. Gerald Gazdar is perhaps the least clearly  'Gricean' of the neo-Griceans, in that he departs most radically from Grice's bipartite conception of meaning. Nevertheless, he bases his pragmatic account at least in part on a conception of implicature drawing on 'Logic and conversation'. He proposes a 'partial formulization' of GCIs, drawing on Horn's original account, which he describes as 'basi-cally correct'.107 For Gazdar, the semantic representation of certain expressions carry 'im-plicatures', potential implicatures that will later become actual if not cancelled by context. The relationship between context, implicature and eventual interpretation is a formal process.  Stephen Levinson, sometimes in collaboration with other linguists, has developed a revised account of GCIs. Levinson's conception of the processes of interpretation is summarised in his exegesis of 'Logic and conversation' in his 1983 Pragmatics. He describes how the assumptions about conversation expressed in the maxims 'arise, it seems, from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language'. 10 These goals in conversation areclosely related to Horn's 'economy' and 'clarity', respectively, and in Levinson's work too they prompt the search for a reductive reformulation of the maxims. He is also concerned with developing an 'inter-leaved' account of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.  Along with RT, but differing overtly from it, Levinson's account offers perhaps the most developed alternative to the view of semantics and pragmatics operating serially over separate inputs.  In a joint article published in 1981, Atlas and Levinson lay claim to an explicitly Gricean heritage, but argue that 'Gricean theories need not and do not restrict their resources to Grice's formulations. 109 They argue that it is necessary to pay attention to semantic structure that exists above and beyond truth-conditions, and that in turn interacts with pragmatic principles to produce 'informative, defeasible implicata'. 110  This concern with layers of meaning not found in Grice's formulation has remained in Levinson's work. His 2000 book Presumptive Meanings is a sustained defence of the notion of GCI, based on Grice's original conception but reformulating and elaborating it. As in the defence from 20 years earlier, GCIs are seen as informative and defeasible. Their essential purpose is to add information to what is offered by literal meaning; as Levinson explains, they help overcome the problem of the 'bottle-neck' created by the slowness of phonetic articulation relative to the possibilities of interpretation. The solution, he suggests, takes the following form: let not only the content but also the metalinguistic properties of the utterance (e.g., its form) carry the message. Or, find a way to piggyback meaning on top of the meaning. "11  As part of this programme, Levinson offers a detailed characterisation of three separate levels of meaning in utterance interpretation. As well as 'sentence meaning' and 'speaker meaning', he argues the need for  'statement-meaning' or 'utterance-type meaning', intermediate between the two. It is at this level, he suggests, that 'we can expect the system-aticity of inference that might be deeply interconnected to linguistic structure and meaning, to the extent that it can become problematical to decide which phenomena should be rendered unto semantic theory and which unto pragmatics. 12 He places GCIs at this intermediate level; for him they are ambiguously located between semantics and pragmat-ics. Part of his argument here hinges on the idea, not dissimilar from that put forward by Sperber and Wilson, that the very first level is often not enough to give a starting point of meaning at all. Various factors in what Grice calls 'what is said' need to be determined with reference to precisely those inferential features described as GCIs. Levinson describes this process as 'pragmatic intrusion into truth conditions'. 113 Pragmaticinference plays a part in determining even basic sentence meaning, suggesting that pragmatics cannot be simply a 'layer' of interpretation applying after semantics. 114  Neo-Griceans have sometimes been described as engaging in 'radical pragmatics' because, as Levinson's model illustrates, they claim much richer explanatory powers for their pragmatic principles than is the case in traditional Gricean pragmatics. In 'Logic and conversation',  ', the layers  of meaning before the Cooperative Principle becomes effective are somewhat shady. Conventional meaning, always a problem area for Grice, is added to by various uninterrogated processes of disambigua-tion and reference assignment, to give 'what is said'. This may be enriched by conventional implicature, depending on the individual words chosen. It is only then that Grice's elaborate mechanism for deriving conversational implicatures is brought into play. For neo-Griceans such as Levinson, conventional meaning is a highly restrictive, although perhaps no less shady, phenomenon. It needs assistance from pragmatic principles before it can even offer a basis from which interpretation can proceed. In John Richardson and Alan Richardson's instructive extended metaphor:  Grice allowed himself considerable pragmatic machinery with which to try to bridge the gap between intuitive and posited meanings, whereas radical pragmaticians have been eagerly scrapping much of Grice's machinery while frequently allowing gaps between intuitive and posited meanings greater than anything Grice proposed - a geometrically more ambitious program. l1s  A number of recent articles reassess the claims that implicature must play a part in determining literal content. These generally take issue with linguists such as the relevance theorists and Levinson, and show a renewed interest in Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated, although they are by no means unanimously uncritical of his original characterisation of these. Kent Bach argues that 'what is said in uttering a sentence need not be a complete proposition'; if we observe what Bach sees as Grice's stipulation that 'what is said' must correspond directly to the linguistic form of the sentence uttered, it may be that what is said is not informationally complete. 16 However, this need not be a problem, because in the Gricean framework what is communicated is not entirely dependent on what is said but is derived from it by a process of implicature. Bach accuses some of Grice's commentators of confusing their intuitions about what is communicated, in whichimplicatures play a part, with judgements about semantic fact. Directly taking issue with RT, he argues that 'I have had breakfast' might be literally true even if the speaker had not had breakfast on the day of utter-ance; it is simply that intuitive judgements focus on a more limited interpretation. These intuitive judgements are not a good guide to the theoretical question of the constitution of 'what is said': 'the most natural interpretation of an utterance need not be what is strictly and literally said. 117  Mira Ariel has also dwelt on intuitive responses in her discussion of  'privileged interactional interpretation'. l18 What people respond to as the speaker's chief commitment does not always correspond either to Grice's 'what is said' or to some enriched form such as the relevance theorists' 'explicatures'. Jennifer Saul suggests that Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has been dismissed too hurriedly by his critics. To argue against Grice on the grounds of how people generally react to utterances is seriously to misrepresent his intention.  Further, within Grice's original formulation there is no reason why what is said needs to be a cooperative contribution recognised by either speaker or hearer: 'a speaker can perfectly well be cooperative by saying something trivial and implicating something non-trivial. 119  Grice's work was often characterised by the speculative and open-ended approaches he took to his chosen topics. At times the result can be frustratingly tentative discussions of crucial issues that display a knowing disregard for detail or for definitions of key terms. Ideas and theories are offered as sketches of how an appropriate account might succeed, or how a philosopher - by implication either Grice or some unnamed successor - might eventually formulate an answer. In the case of the theory of conversation, these characteristics are perhaps at least in part responsible for its success. Certainly, Grice offered enough for his description of interactive meaning to be applied fruitfully in a number of different fields across a vast range of data. But the sketchiness of some aspects of the theory, and the failure fully to define terms as central as 'what is said', have also indicated possibilities for theoretical adjustments and reformulations. There is something of an air of  'work in progress' about even the published version of 'Logic and con-versation' that indicates problems to be solved rather than simply ideas to be applied. Grice himself mounted a spirited defence of problems at the end of his own philosophical memoir:  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same oldproblems it would still not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up. 120  ready supply of problems is as valued by linguists as it is by philosc hers. The original, highly suggestive, but somehow unfinished natur of the lectures on logic and conversation is a telling example of a Gricean heresy, and one that may explain much of the story of their success.  Baker (1986: 277). Festschrift etc. H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Wittgenstein (1958: 43). See Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. In Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 516-17). E.g. Brown and Yule (1983: 31-3), Coulthard (1985: 30-2), Graddol et al. (1994: 124-5), Wardhaugh (1986: 281-4).  7. Respectively, Rundquist (1992), Perner and Leekam (1986), Gumperz (1982:  94-5), Penman (1987), Schiffrin (1994: 203-26), Raskin (1985), Yamaguchi  (1988), and Warnes (1990).  See, for instance, Grice (1987b: 339). Grandy and Warner (1986a: 1). Grice (1986a: 65, original emphasis). Grice (1986b: 10). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Misc. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47). Grice (1986a: 61). See, for instance, Burge (1992: 619). Grice (1986a: 61-2). See, for instance, Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Richard Warner, personal communication. Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Grice (1967b) in Grice (1989: 64). Handwritten version of Kant lectures, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Miscellaneous "Group" notes 84-85', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  25. 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  2 Philosophical influences  1. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1986a: 46). Quotation courtesy of the Old Cliftonian Society. Grice (1991: 57-8, n1). Grice (1986a: 46-7). Ibid. Quotations in this paragraph from Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Information from The Rossall Register, Rossall School, Lancashire. Martin and Highfield (1997: 337). Ayer (1971: 48). Rogers (2000: 144). 'Preliminary Valediction, 1985', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 48). 'Negation and Privation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Rogers (2000: 255). Rogers (2000: 146). Locke (1694: 37) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 38) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 39) in Perry (1975b). Ibid. Locke (1694: 47) in Perry (1975b). Reid (1785: 115) In Perry (1975b). Gallie (1936: 28). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 74). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 88). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 90). Perry (1975a: 155n). Perry (1975a: 136). Williamson (1990: 122). 3 Post-war Oxford  Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 10), Strawson in Magee (1986: 149). Grice (1986a: 48). Ryle (1949: 19). Rée (1993: 8). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 20). Pitcher (1973: 20). Grice (1986a: 58). Rogers (2000: 255). Manuscript: 'Philosophy and ordinary language', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 50). Frege (1892: 57). Russell (1905: 479). For instance, Magee (1986: 10). For instance in the introduction to Gellner (1979), written and first published in 1959. For instance Grice (1987b: 345). Moore (1925) reprinted in Moore (1959: 36). Grice (1986a: 51). Gellner (1979: 17, and elsewhere). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Rogers (2000: 254). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Williams and Montefiore (eds) (1966: 11). Wittgenstein (1922: 4.024). Wittgenstein (1958: 120). Ayer (1964). Austin (1962a: 3). Austin (1950) in Austin (1961: 99). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 130). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 137). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 138, original emphasis). Forguson (2001: 333 and n16). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 51), Grice (1987a: 181). Grice (1986a: 49). Quine (1985: 249). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 14). Notes for Ox Phil 1948-1970, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice (personal communication). Warnock (1973: 36). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 129, original emphasis). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Urmson et al. (1965: 79-80). 'Philosophers in high argument', The Times Saturday 17 May 1958. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Strawson in Magee (1986: 149), and Gellner (1979, passim) as examples of these two points of view. Russell (1956: 141). Gellner (1979: 23). Gellner (1979: 264). Mundle (1979: 82). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Grice (1986a: 51). Manuscript draft of 'Reply to Richards', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Ackrill (1963: vi). Strawson (1950: 326). Strawson (1998: 5). For instance, in Strawson (1952: 175ff). Strawson (1950: 344). Quine (1985: 247-8). Grice (1986a: 47). Grice (1986a: 49). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes for Categories with Strawson, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Quine (1953: 43). Grice and Strawson (1956) in Grice (1989: 205). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. 'The Way of Words', Studies in: Notes, offprints and draft material, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 54). Quinton (1963) in Strawson (1967: 126). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 37). Warnock (1973: 39). Perception Papers, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 30-1). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'More about Visa', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1955: 201). Grice (1961) and Grice (1962). Grice (1966). Warnock (1973: 39, original emphasis). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Quine (1985: 248). Grice (1958).   4 Meaning  Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Warnock (1973: 40). Grice (1957: 379). Stevenson (1944: 66). Stevenson (1944: 38). Stevenson (1944: 69). Stevenson (1944: 74, original emphasis). Grice (1957: 380). Stout (1896: 356). Notes on intention and dispositions - HPG and others in Oxford, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Dispositions and intentions', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ryle (1949: 103). Ryle (1949: 183). Stout (1896: 359). Hampshire and Hart (1958: 7). Grice (1957: 379). Peirce (1867: 1). Peirce (1867: 7). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1957: 382). Grice (1957: 385). Grice (1957: 386). Grice (1957: 387). Bennett (1976: 11). Schiffer (1972: 7). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962b: 149). Austin (1962b: 108). Austin (1962b: 114). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 155). Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 163). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 171-2). Searle (1986: 210). Searle (1969: 45). A similar point is made by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 25). Schiffer (1987: xiii). Schiffer (1972: 13). Schiffer (1972: 18-19). Cosenza (2001a: 15). Avramides (1989), Avramides (1997). Schiffer (1972: 3). Ziff (1967: 1, 2). Ziff (1967: 2-3). Malcolm (1942: 349). Malcolm (1942: 357, original emphasis). Grice (c. 1946-1950: 150). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 167). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 168). 5 Logic and conversation  See Quine (1985: 235). Grice (1986a: 59-60). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1973: 36). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chomsky (1957: 5). See Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 21). 'Lectures on negation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 12, 14a, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 13, 14b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 5, 2b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 10, 12a, in Ackrill (1963). Mill (1868:188). Mill's work in this area is discussed by Horn (1989), who refers to a number of other nineteenth and twentieth century logicians who made similar observations. Mill (1868: 210, original emphasis). Ibid.   16. 'PG's incomplete Phil and Ordinary Language paper'  ', H. P. Grice Papers,  BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California,    Berkeley.  17. Grice (1975a: 45-6).    18. Moore (1942: 541, original emphasis).    19. Bar-Hillel (1946: 334).    20. Bar-Hillel (1946: 338, original emphasis).    21. O'Connor (1948: 359).    22. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 224).    23. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 229).    24. Nowell-Smith (1954: 81-2).    25. Edwards (1955: 21).    26. Grant (1958: 320).    27. Hungerland (1960: 212).    28. Hungerland (1960: 224).    29. Strawson (1952: 178-9).    30. Grice (1961: 121).    31. Grice (1961: 152).    32. Grice (1961: 124).    33. Grice (1961: 125).    34. Grice (1961: 126).    35. Grice (1961: 132).    36. Warnock (1967: 5).    37. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    38. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 4, 1b, in Ackrill (1963).  39. Kant (1998: 212).    40. Kant (1998: 213).    41. Grice (1967a: 4).    42. Grice (1967a: 21).    43. Grice (1975a: 45).    44. Grice (1975a: 48).    45. Grice (1975a: 49).    46. Many of my students have pointed out to me that A could equally well  understand B as implicating that Smith is just too busy, with all the visits  he has to make to New York, for a social life at the moment. Green (1989:  91) argues that many different particularised conversational implicatures    are possible in this example.  Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47).  Ryle (1971: vol. II: vii).. Benjamin (1956: 318)0. Horn (1989), ch. 4. See also Levinson (1983), ch. 3 and McCawley (1981), ch. 8. This issue will be discussed in the final chapt 51. Martinich (1996: 1 52. Strawson (1952:   53. Strawson (1952:.    54. Strawson (1952: 83, 86, 891).  55. Strawson (1952: 36, 37, 85). 56. Grice (1967b: 58).  Grice (1967b: 60). Grice (1967b: 59). Grice (1967b: 77). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 88). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 93, 94, 95). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 99). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 117) Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 123, original emphasis). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 127). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 136, original emphasis). Grice (1967c: 139, original emphasis). Black (1973: 268). Grice (1987b: 349). Avramides (1989: 39). See also Avramides (1997). Loar (2001: 104). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 178). Chomsky (1976: 75). 6 American formalism  Grice (1986a: 60). All details from Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Strawson (1956: 110, original emphasis). Grice (1969b: 118). 'Reference and presupposition', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 119). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 143). Grice (1969b: 142). Later published in Chomsky (1972a). Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1989: 955). See, for instance, Sadock (1974). See, for instance, Gordon and Lakoff (1975). 'Notes for syntax and semantics', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Robin Lakoff for a very valuable discussion of the ideas in this paragraph. 'Urbana seminars', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1995: 194-5). Simpson (1997: 151). Carnap (1937: 2). Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The spelling 'carulize' may be Grice's own, a result of his not referring directly to Carnap, or may be simply an error of transcription; the typescript from which this quotation was taken was made from a recording of the lectures . Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Urbana seminars', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft  Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1981: 189). Ibid. Grice (1981: 190). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Harman (1986: 368). Grice (1971: 265). Grice (1971: 273). Kenny (1963: 207). Kenny (1963: 224). Kenny (1963: 229). Davidson (1970) in Davidson (1980: 37-8). 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Davidson (1980: vii). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 83). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 95). 'Reply to Davidson on "Intending"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cohen (1971: 66). 7 Philosophical psychology  Grice (1975a) and Grice (1978). For instance, although perhaps only semi-seriously, by Quine (1985: 248). 'Odd notes: Urbana and non Urbana', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For instance, the writer of Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Also Robin Lakoff and Kathleen Grice (personal communication). 'Tapes', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cartwright (1986: 442). 'Knowledge and belief', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker, personal communication. 'Urbana Lectures', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 62). 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Mackie (1977: 35). Mackie (1977: 38). For example, Nowell-Smith (1954: 79). Grice (1991: 23). Warner in Grice (2001: xxxvii, n). 'Odd notes Spring 1981', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Ban-  croft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 79). Grice (1991: 90). Grice (1991: 67, original emphasis). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 283). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 301). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 302). See Isard (1982), Cormack (1982). Bennett (1976: 206-10). Baker (1989: 510). Sbisa (2001: 204). Grandy (1989: 524). Kasher (1976: 210). 'Prejudices and predilections', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Neale (2001: 139). 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 58). Tape, 'PG seminar I Metaphysics S '78', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Preliminary valediction', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Course descriptions and faculty information, fall quarter 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 64). 'Festschrift notes (miscellaneous)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Recent work', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'PG's incomplete "Phil and ordinary language" paper', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 70).  'Miscellaneous notes '84-'85', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Davidson (1967). Grice (1986b: 3, original emphasis.). 'Notes with Judy', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Richard Warner (personal communication). Grice (1986b: 34). Ibid. Grice (1988b: 304). 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Michael (1999) 'Using Grice's maxim of Quantity to select the content of plan descriptions', Artificial Intelligence 115: 215-56.  Ziegeler, Debra (2000) 'The role of quantity implicatures in the grammaticalisa-tion of would', Language Sciences 22.1: 27-61.  Ziff, Paul (1967) 'On H. P. Grice's account of meaning', Analysis 28: 1-8. A number of people have made this book possible by giving generously of their time to talk about Paul Grice, his life and his work, whether by letter, by e-mail or in person. I would therefore like to thank the fol-lowing, in an order that is simply alphabetical, and in the hope that I have not omitted anyone who should be thanked: Professor Judith Baker; the staff at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, in particular David Farrell; Tom Gover of the Old Cliftonian Society; Kathleen Grice; Adam Hodgkin; Professor Robin Lakoff; The Rossallian Club; Michael Stansfield, college archivist at Corpus Christi and Merton colleges;  Professor Sir Peter Strawson; Professor Richard Warner. I am especially grateful to Kathleen Grice for permission to use the photograph on the front cover and to quote from manuscript material; and to the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, which gave permission to quote from their manuscript holdings.There is an inherent tension in writing about Paul Grice because two separate academic disciplines lay claim to his work, and do so with jus-tification. Those who know him as a philosopher may not be aware of the full significance of his role in the development of present day linguistics, while those whose interest in him originates from within linguistics may be unfamiliar with the philosophical questions that are integral to his work. Grice would not have considered himself to be anything other than a philosopher, so the title of this book might seem odd or even provocative. But I chose it in order to reflect the profound influence he has had on a discipline other than his own. Grice's work is of interest to philosophers and to linguists alike.  I myself belong to the second group. My first encounter with Grice's work was when I was introduced to his theory of conversation as a student, and was struck by the ambition and elegance of his proposed solution to a range of linguistic problems, as well as by the questions and difficulties it raised. I have since been pleased to recognise just these reactions to the theory in many of my own students. As I read more of Grice's work, I became intrigued by the question as to whether there was a unity to be found in his thought that would incorporate the familiar work on conversation into a larger and more significant philosophical picture. This book is my attempt to answer that question. I certainly hope that it will be of interest to readers from both philosophical and linguistic backgrounds, with the following words of caution to the former.  Grice's work draws on a range of previous writings that often go unac- knowledged, presumably because he assumed that his audience would be aware of its philosophical pedigree. The questions he is addressing can be less familiar to linguists, so on a number of occasions I have offered an overview of the history of an idea or an exegesis of a work.  I run the risk that these sections may appear to be superficial, or alternatively to be labouring the obvious, to readers well versed in philoso-phy, but I have offered the degree of detail necessary to enable those unfamiliar with the relevant background to follow Grice's arguments and appreciate the nature of his contribution. Further, my intention inthese sections is to sketch the relevant history of a philosophical debate, rather that to offer either a critique of or my own contribution to that debate. I can only ask for tolerance of these aspects of my book from readers already familiar with the relevant areas of philosophy.In 1986 Oxford University Press published a volume of essays drawing on the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, who was then 73. It was not formally described as a Festschrift, but Grice's name was concealed as an acronym of the title, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, and many of those who contributed to the volume took the opportunity of paying tribute to his work and influence. Among these, Gordon Baker revealed that what he admired most was Grice's  'skilful advocacy of heresies'.' In a similar vein, Grice's colleague Richard Grandy once introduced him to an audience with the comment that he could always be relied on to rally to 'the defence of the underdogma'.?  Given Grice's conventional academic career together with his current status in philosophy and, particularly, in linguistics, these accolades may seem surprising. His entire working life was spent in the prestigious universities of Oxford and Berkeley, making him very much an establishment figure. Much of his philosophy of language , particularly his theory of conversational implicature, has for a number of decades played a central role in debates about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, or meaning as a formal linguistic property and meaning as a process taking place in contexts and involving speakers and hearers. But the canonical status of Grice's ideas masks their unconventional and even controversial beginnings. As Baker himself ob-serves, Grice's heresies have tended to be transformed by success into orthodoxies.  In fact, Grice's work was often characterised by the challenges it posed to accepted wisdom, and by the novel approaches it proposed to established philosophical issues. The theory of conversational implicature is a good example. It is often summarised as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the fact, familiar to common sense, thatwhat people literally say and what they actually mean can often be quite different matters. In particular, the theory is concerned with some apparent discrepancies between classical logic and natural language.  More generally, it addresses the question of whether the meaning of everyday language is best explained in terms of formal linguistic rules, or in terms of the vagaries and variables of human communication.  Grice's theory developed against the background of a sharp distinction of approaches to these issues. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who saw logic as the appropriate apparatus for explaining meaning, dismissed the differences displayed by natural language as examples of its inherent imperfection. Everyday language was just too messy and imprecise to form an appropriate topic for philosophical inquiry.  The opposing view is perhaps best summed up by the slogan from Wittgenstein's later work that 'meaning is use'? Philosophers from this school of thought argued that if natural language diverges from logical meaning, this is simply because logic is not the appropriate philosophical tool for explaining language. Meaning in language is an important area of study in its own right, but can be considered only in connection with the variety of ways in which language is used by speakers.  Grice's approach to this debate was to argue that both views were wrong-headed. He proposed to think outside the standard disjunction of positions. Logic cannot give an adequate account of natural language, but nor is language simply a multifarious collection of uses, unamenable to logical analysis. Rather, logic can explain much, but not all, of the meaning of certain natural language expressions. More generally, formal semantic rules play a vital part in explaining meaning in everyday lan-guage, but they do not do the whole job. Other factors of a different but no less important type are also necessary for a full account of meaning. Most significantly, Grice argued that these other, non-semantic factors are not a random collection entirely dependent on individual speakers and contexts, but can be systematised and explained in terms of general principles and rules. The principles that explain how natural language differs from logic can also explain a wide range of other features of human communication.  In this novel attitude, Grice was certainly rejecting formal approaches, with their claim that the only meaning amenable to philosophical discussion was that which could be described in terms of truth-conditions, and could enter into truth-functional relationships. But also, and perhaps more surprisingly, he was rejecting a belief in everyday use as the chief, or indeed the only, location of meaning. This was a central tenet of philosophy at Oxford while Grice was developing his theory ofconversation, or at least of that subsection of Oxford philosophy known as the philosophy of ordinary language. Grice himself was an active member of this subsection and is often referred to as a leading figure in the movement. However, his use of formal logic in explaining conversational meaning demonstrates that his heretical impulse extended even to ordinary language philosophy itself. Indeed, the success of his theory of conversational implicature has been credited with the eventual demise of this movement as a viable philosophical approach.* Grice's readiness to question conventions, even those of his own subdiscipline, makes him hard to categorise in terms of the usual philosophical distinctions. He does not sit easily on either side of the familar dichotomies; he is neither exactly empiricist nor exactly rationalist, neither behaviourist nor mentalist. This makes synoptic discussions of his work difficult, as is perhaps entirely appropriate for a philosopher who readily expressed his dislike of attempts to divide philosophy up into a series of '-ologies' and '-isms'.  The theory of conversation is undoubtedly the best known of Grice's work. The particular, and often exclusive, emphasis on it can be explained perhaps in part by its intrinsic potential as a tool for linguistic analysis, and perhaps also, more accidentally, by the historical inaccessibility of much of his other writing. A notorious perfectionist, Grice was seldom happy that his work had reached a finished, or acceptable, state, and was therefore always reluctant to publish. Those who knew him have related this reluctance to the penetration of his own philosophical vision, turned as relentlessly on his own work as on that of others. His Oxford colleague Peter Strawson has suggested that this resulted in an uncomfortable degree of self-doubt:  I suspect, sometimes, that it was the strength of his own critical powers, his sense of the vulnerability of philosophical argument in general, that partially accounted, at the time, for his privately expressed doubts about the ability of his own work to survive criti-cism. After all, if there were always some detectable flaws in others' reasoning, why should there not be detectable, even though by him undetected, flaws in his own?  Certainly, Grice's account of conversation as an essentially cooperative enterprise is generally discussed, and frequently criticised, in isolation from the rest of this work, seen as a free-standing account of linguistic interaction. It is paraphrased, often in just a few pages, in most introductory text books on pragmatics and discourse analysis.' It hasbeen used or referred to in analyses of gendered language, children's language, code switching, courtroom cross-examination, the language of jokes, oral narrative and the language of liturgy, along with many other topics? However, it is only one aspect of a large and diverse body of work from a career of over four decades. In the context of this work, it can be seen as an intrinsic part of the gradual development of Grice's thinking on a range of philosophical topics. It also offers an analytic tool that Grice himself applied in his later work to a variety of philosophical problems, although never to the data of actual conversation.  To some extent, then, Grice's later use of the theory of conversation offers its own explanation of the significance, and the theoretical purpose, of that work. More than that, however, Grice's less-known work merits attention in its own right. It ranges over a wide range of topics: not just the philosophy of language but epistemology, per-ception, logic, rationality, ethics and metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a number of running threads, and some striking continuities of theme and approach, throughout this diverse oeuvre. Grice himself argued that the disparate themes and ideas of his career displayed a fundamental unity.® In general, however, as Richard Grandy and Richard Warner observe in their introduction to Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, 'the systematic nature of his work is little recognised'!'  Throughout his work Grice focused on aspects of human behaviour, linguistic or otherwise, and the mental processes underlying them.  Increasingly central in his work was the idea that an analysis of these processes revealed people to be rational creatures, and that this rationality was fundamental to human nature. In an overview of his own work, Grice himself suggested, with typical tentativeness, that: 'It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves. '° He also displayed a sophisticated respect for common sense as a starting point in philosophical inquiry. It is sophisticated in that he did not espouse the straightforward adoption of common sense attitudes and terminology into philosophy. Rather, he urged that the philosopher remain aware of how the themes of philosophical inquiry are usually understood by non-philosophers. In a large part, this meant paying serious attention to the language in which particular issues were ordinarily dis-cussed, or to what Grice once described as 'our carefree chatter'." In this focus at least he retained an approach recognisable from his background in ordinary language philosophy. However, he proved himself ready to go beyond the dictates of common sense where the complexity of the subject matter demanded. Philosophy, he argued, is a difficult subjectthat deals with difficult issues, and it is often necessary to posit entities not current in everyday thought: to construct theoretical, empirically unverifiable entities if they are explanatorily useful. Within these para-meters, as he once suggested, 'whatever does the job is respectable'. 12 He was certainly not a simple egalitarian in philosophy. In the early 1980s he noted down, apparently for his own edification, the following complaint:  It repeatedly astonishes me that people who would themselves readily admit to being devoid of training, experience, or knowledge in philosophy, and who have plainly been endowed by nature with no special gifts of philosophical intelligence should be so ready to instruct professional philosophers about the contents of the body of philosophical truths. 13  Despite his readiness to add entities to philosophical explanations when this seemed appropriate, Grice was concerned that such explanations should remain as simple as possible, in the philosophical sense of simplicity as drawing on as few entities as possible. In the lectures on conversation he endorsed 'Modified Occam's Razor', which he defined as 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'.I This philosophical parsimony was carried over into other areas of his work; he sought general explanations that would account for as wide a range of subject matter, for as few theoretical constructions, as possible. If he prized philosophical simplicity, Grice's ideas were often far from reductive in more general terms. In particular, he did not shrink from explanations that saw people as separate and different: different from animals, in terms of communicative behaviour, or from automata, in terms of rational thought.  More generally, Grice sustained an enthusiasm for the business of philosophy itself, accompanied by a conviction, unfashionable at the start of his career, that the works of philosophers from other schools of thought and different ages deserve thoughtful and continual re-analysis. His work reveals a belief that philosophical investigation and analysis are worthwhile ventures in their own right and a willingness to employ them to offer suggested approaches, rather than completed solutions, to philosophical problems. Further, Grice was always ready to hunt out and consider as many possible counter-arguments and refutations of his own ideas as he could envisage, often advancing some particular idea by means of a detailed discussion of an actual or potential challenge to it. These factors together lend a 'discursive' and at times afrustratingly tentative air to Grice's work. But despite the earnestness of Grice's interest in philosophy, and the rigour with which he pursued it, his tone was often playfully irreverent. This was, to some extent, the result of a deliberate policy that philosophy could, indeed should, be fun. 'One should of course be serious about philosophy', he argued, 'but being serious does not require one to be solemn.'5 Grice was not a gifted public speaker, given to elaborate divergences in exegeses, and to stuttering and even mumbling in presentation. l Nevertheless, his presentations could be entertaining occasions; tape recordings of him speaking about philosophy, both informally and formally, are often punctuated by laughter.  Grice himself suggested that his search for the fun, even the funny in philosophy was prompted by 'the wanton disposition which nature gave me'." But it had been reinforced 'by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect'. He had no time for those whose method of conducting philosophical debate was that of 'nailing to the wall everything in sight'. In his view, philosophy was best when it was a collaborative, supportive activity. This idea was, to some extent, inherent in his philosophical background; ordinary language philosophy was frequently undertaken as a group activity. However, it is an idea that was peculiarly suited to his person-ality. Grice could be extremely convivial; he was often surrounded by people, and preferred to develop his ideas by discussion rather than by solitary composition. He was no ascetic; he ate, drank and smoked copi-ously. But conviviality is not the same as affability. His delight in philosophical discussion often spilled over into an intense desire to 'win' the argument. He could be curt in response to points of view with which he was not in sympathy. On those occasions when he sought intuitive responses to his linguistic examples, he could be dismissive of those who got it 'wrong'. Moreover, those who know him have suggested that at times his tendency towards self-doubt could manifest itself in gloomi-ness, even moroseness. 18  Grice's tendency was to become entirely absorbed with whatever he was engaged in, if it interested him intellectually. Often this was some philosophical issue of substance or of composition. His wife Kathleen recalls that he frequently stayed up late into the night, often pacing up and down as he battled with some problem.l' Sometimes other people were caught up in this absorption. During his time at Oxford, he conducted a long collaboration with Peter Strawson. In later life, Gricehimself would recount how he was once phoned up by Strawson's wife who told him to stop bothering her husband with late night phone calls.20 This obsessiveness was characteristic of all the activities to which he devoted his considerable energies. Kathleen remembers that he was always engaged on some project; if it was not philosophy then it was playing the piano, or chess, bridge or cricket. These last two were more absorbing than mere hobbies. He played both bridge and cricket competitively at county level. Cricket, in particular, was an obsession that almost rivalled philosophy; he played for a number of different clubs and 'became an inelegant but extremely effective and prolific opening batsman'.2 During his Oxford career, he spent the large part of each summer on cricket tours.  Grice's immense energy in these different directions was undoubtedly aided by the amount of time he had at his disposal, in part the consequence of not having to concern himself too much with everyday prac-ticalities; according to Kathleen, from childhood onwards he always had, or found, people to look after him. He certainly pursued his interests to the exclusion of the mundane, often neglecting food and sleep if a particular problem, or game, had his attention. In those areas where he did have practical responsibility, Grice was legendarily untidy. He took little concern over his clothes, or his personal appearance gener-ally. His desk was constantly covered by huge and apparently unsorted piles of paper. However, he would not allow anyone else to touch these, claiming that he knew exactly where everything was. After he died, these papers were deposited in the Bancroft library at the University of California, Berkeley, as the H. P. Grice Papers. This archive, which amounts to 14 large cartons, contains whatever Grice had about himself at the end of his life, mainly heaped on his desk or crammed under his bed. It consists largely of papers from after his move to Berkeley in 1967.  But it also includes those papers from his Oxford days, dating right back to the 1940s, that had seemed important enough to him to take and keep with him.  The cartons contain a mixture of finished manuscripts, draft versions, lecture notes and odd jottings. These are often crammed with writing, but never with anything extraneous to the matter in hand; it seems that Grice never doodled. They offer some clue to at least one reason for Grice's reluctance to publish. Grice seems to have been more struck than most by the essentially inconclusive nature of his own work; no project was, for him, ever really completed, or ever separate from the work that preceded and followed it. So notes and manuscripts were stored along with those from decades earlier if they were perceived to be on a relatedtheme. Papers covered in Grice's cramped hand in faint pencil, characteristic of his work from Oxford, were annotated and added to by notes in ball-point made years later in Berkeley. Ideas generally associated exclusively with his late work, such as those relating to rationality and to finality, are explored in notes dating back to the 1960s. Work often remained in manuscript form for so long that it needed to be updated as the years went by. In the original version of 'Indicative conditionals', part of the William James lectures of 1967, Grice uses the example:  'Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M.'. At a later date 'MacMillan' has been crossed out and 'Heath' written over the top in a different coloured ink. This was the example used when the lecture was eventually published. 22  Above all, the H. P. Grice papers confirm that for Grice there was no real distinction between life and work. He was not in the habit of keeping regular hours of work, or of distinguishing between philosophical and private concerns. In the same way, his current philosophical preoccupation would spill over into his everyday life. Any piece of paper that came to hand would be covered in logical notation, example sentences, trial lists of words, invented dialogues, or whatever else was preoccupying him at that moment, all written in what Grice himself described as 'a hand which few have seen and none have found legible'.2 So the cartons contain not just the orthodox pages of ruled note paper, but also a miscellany of correspondence (often unopened), financial statements, menus, paper napkins, playing card boxes, cigarette packets and even airline sick bags that came to hand as ideas occurred to him during a flight. Some of these suggest that Grice's writing style was not as spontaneous as it may sometimes appear. Certainly the manuscripts of articles and the lecture notes, always written out in full, were produced in longhand with little significant revision.  But Grice was not averse to jotting down what he once described as  'useful verbiage' in preparation for these. In conjunction with some work on the place of value in human nature drawing on, but diverging from a number of previous philosophers including John Stuart Mill, he noted down the phrase: 'so as not to be just Grice to your Mill..!.24 While working on an account of value and freedom drawing on both Aristotle and Kant, he tried out possible hybrids: 'Ariskant? Kantotle?'. 25 This book considers Grice's work within a broadly chronological framework, following the course of his philosophical life. However, because Grice did not work on discreet topics in neat succession, it is sometimes necessary to group together strands of work on related topics even where they in fact extend over years or decades. Nevertheless, thechronological arrangement makes possible an understanding of the development, as well as the remarkable unity, of Grice's thinking. It also allows some scope for considering the impact on it of the work of other philosophers, and of the various personal associations he formed throughout his life. The final chapter is concerned with the impact of Grice's ideas on linguistics. It is concerned with the development of what has become known as 'Gricean pragmatics' and therefore concentrates on responses to the theory of conversation.In a conversation recorded in 1983, Grice commented that fairly early in his career he stopped reading current philosophy.' In the light of his constant engagement with the work of his contemporaries, this characteristically mischievous claim need not be taken at face value. Indeed, his own immediate elaboration somewhat modifies it. Instead of spending his time trying to keep up with all the philosophical journals, he concentrated increasingly on the history of philosophy, choosing his reading matter by strength of ideas rather than by date of composition.  To this it might be added that he also devoted a great deal of time to face-to-face discussion with those he chose as his philosophical col-leagues. Grice's exaggerated claim therefore draws attention to two constant influences on his own philosophy: debate and collaboration with others engaged in similar fields of enquiry, coupled with what in the same conversation he calls 'respect for the old boys'.  It is tempting to identify the emergence of this tension between old and new ideas, or perhaps more accurately this dialogue between orthodox and challenging ways of thinking, throughout Grice's early life.  Born on 15 March 1913, he was the first son of a wealthy middle-class couple, Herbert and Mabel (née Felton) Grice, and grew up in Harborne, an affluent suburb of Birmingham. He was named after his father, but preferred his middle name, and was from an early age known generally as Paul. His early publications were credited to 'H. P. Grice', and are sometimes still cited as such, but in later years he published as simply  'Paul Grice'  '. Herbert Grice is described in his son's college register as  'business, retd'. In fact he had owned a manufacturing business making small metal components that prospered during the First World War.  When the business subsequently began to fail, Mabel stepped in to save the family finances by taking in pupils. She included Paul and hisbrother Derek in this miniature school, meaning that the first few years of their education were conducted at home. This reversal of roles explains Herbert's early 'retirement'. After the failure of the manufacturing business, he did not attempt another venture, preferring instead to concentrate on his skills as a concert cellist. His musical talent was inherited by both his sons; Herbert, Paul and Derek would often perform domestically as a trio.  Family life at Harborne was punctuated not just by musical recitals, and by innumerable games of chess, but also by controversy and debate, although the topic was generally theological rather than philosophical.  Herbert had been brought up in a nonconformist tradition, while Mabel was a devout Anglo-Catholic. The third adult member of the household, an unmarried aunt, had converted to Catholicism. Grice recalled fondly the many doctrinal clashes he witnessed as a result of this mix, particularly those between his aunt and his father. He suggested that his father's self-defence in these circumstances awakened, or at least rein-forced, his own tendency towards 'dissenting rationalism'; this tendency stayed with him throughout life? It would seem from this that he lent more towards his father's way of thinking, but certainly by the time he reached adulthood he had abandoned any religious faith he may initially have held. He did not retain the Christianity with which he had been surrounded as a child, but he kept the enthusiasm for debate in general, and for the habits of questioning received wisdom and challenging orthodoxy on the basis of personal reasoning in particular.  When Grice was 13 his education was put on to a more formal footing when he went as a boarder to Clifton College in Bristol. This public school, exclusively male at the time, provided excellent preparation for Oxford or Cambridge for the sons of those wealthy enough to afford it, or for those who, like Grice, passed the scholarship examination. Boys belonged to one of a number of 'houses',  ', rather in the style of Oxbridge  colleges, and received the education in classics that would equip them for entry to university. It seems that Grice excelled at this; at the end of his Clifton career, in July 1931, he won a classical scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He had not concentrated exclusively on academic matters, however. He had been 'Head of School' during his final year, and had also kept up his musical interests. He performed a piano solo in the school's 1930 Christmas concert. Joseph Cooper, Grice's contemporary at Clifton who went on to become a concert pianist and then chairman of the BBC television programme 'Face the Music', played a piece by Rachmaninoff at the same concert. 'Weenjoyed Grice's playing of Ravel's "Pavane"', runs the school's report on the concert, 'its stateliness provided an effective contrast to the exuberance of the Rachmininoff.'3  Corpus Christi had a strong academic tradition, but was not as socially fashionable as some of the larger colleges. It therefore tended to attract students from more modest backgrounds than colleges such as Christ Church or Magdalen, where social success often depended on demonstrable affluence. However, despite such distinctions between individual colleges, Oxford in general was a place of privilege. Students were nearly all male, were predominantly from public schools, and were generally preparing to take their places as members of the establish-ment. Fashionable political opinions were left wing, and students of Grice's generation tended to see themselves as rebelling against nineteenth-century notions of responsibility and propriety. Such rebel-liousness, however, was of a very passive nature; it lacked the zeal and the active protest that was to characterise student rebellion in the 1960s.  It did little to affect the day to day life in Oxford, where the university was legally in loco parentis, and where all undergraduates lived and dined in college. Some 50 years later, Grice recalled the atmosphere of the time with amused but affectionate detachment:  We are in reaction against our Victorian forebears; we are independent and we are tolerant of the independence of others, unless they go too far. We don't like discipline, rules (except for rules of games and rules designed to secure peace and quiet in Colleges), self-conscious authority, and lectures or reproaches about conduct....  We don't care much to talk about 'values' (pompous) or 'duties' (stuffy, unless one means the duties of servants or the military, or money extorted by the customs people). Our watchwords (if we could be moved to utter them) would be 'Live and let live, though not necessarily with me around' or 'If you don't like how I carry on, you don't have to spend time with me.  Grice was at Corpus Christi for four years. Classics was an unusual subject in this respect; most Oxford degree programmes were a year shorter. At that time, philosophy was taught only as part of the Classics curriculum, and it was in this guise that Grice received his first formal training in the subject. The style was conservative, based largely on close reading of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. This seems to have suited Grice's meticulous and analytical style of thought well, as the tutorial teaching method suited his dissenting and combativenature. Although there were lectures, open to all members of the uni-versity, teaching was based principally at tutorial, therefore college, level. Students would meet individually with their tutors to read, and then defend, an essay. In reflecting on his early philosophical educa-tion, Grice always emphasised what he saw as his own good fortune in being allocated as tutee to W. F. R. (Frank) Hardie. A rigorous classical scholar and an exacting tutor, Hardie might not have been everyone's first choice, but Grice credited him with revealing the difficulty, but also the rewards of philosophical study. Grice also, it seems, relished the formalism that Hardie imposed on his already established appreciation of rational debate. Under Hardie's guidance, this appreciation developed into a belief that philosophical questions are best settled by reason, or argument:  I learnt also form him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).  Grice even recounts with approval, but reluctant disbelief, the story that a long silence in another student's tutorial was eventually broken by Hardie asking 'And what did you mean by "of"?' No doubt the contemporary detractors of ordinary language philosophy would have seen Grice's enthusiasm for this anecdote of the 1930s as a sign that he was perfectly suited to the style of philosophy that would flourish at Oxford in the following two decades. This was crucially concerned with minute attention to meaning and to the language in which philosophical issues were traditionally discussed.  Grice's admiration for Hardie was later to develop into friendship; they were both members of a group from Oxford that went on walking holidays in the summers leading up to the Second World War, and Hardie taught Grice to play golf. The friendship was based in part on a number of characteristics the two had in common. There was their shared rationalism; Grice found welcome echoes of his own approach in Hardie's 'reluctance to accept anything not properly documented'?  Moreover, Hardie never admitted defeat. Discussions with him, Grice later observed, never actually ended; they would simply come to a stop.  In response, Grice learnt to adopt a similar stance in philosophical argument, clinging tendentiously to whatever position he had set out to defend. Once, when Grice was taught by a different philosophy tutor for one term, the new tutor reported back to Hardie that his studentwas 'obstinate to the point of perversity'. To Grice's enduring delight, Hardie received this report with thorough approval.  However some may have judged his style of argument, Grice's undergraduate career was an indisputable success. Students took 'Modera-tions' exams five terms into their degree, before proceeding to what was popularly known as 'Greats',  , the stage in the degree at which philoso-  phy was introduced. Grice achieved First Class in his Moderations in  1933. In the summer of 1935 he took his finals, and was awarded First Class Honours in Literae Humaniores, as 'Greats' was officially called. His studies did not take up all of his time during these years, however, and he mixed academic success with extracurricular activities, particularly sporting ones. He played cricket, and in the summer of 1934 captained the college team. In the winter he followed up this success by becoming captain of the college football team. During this same period, he was president of the Pelican Philosophical Society and editor of the Pelican Record. Both took their name from the bird forming part of the Corpus Christi crest that had become the informal symbol of the college.  After Grice completed his undergraduate studies, there was a brief hiatus in his academic career. There were at that time few openings at Oxford for those graduates who had not yet gained a University Lectureship or been elected to a College Fellowship. For the academic year 1935-6 Grice left Oxford, but not the elite education system of which he had been part for the past decade, when he went as Assistant Master to Rossall in Lancashire. At a time when there were very few Universities in the country, an Honours degree, especially from Oxford or Cambridge, was regarded as more than adequate a qualification to teach at a public school such as Rossall. It was not at all uncommon for Assistant Masters to stay in post for just a year or two before moving on to a more permanent position or embarking on a career in some other field. Indeed, of the 11 other Assistant Masters appointed between 1933 and 1937 by the same headmaster as Grice, only four stayed for more than a year; none of the other seven went on to careers as school masters.® In Grice's case, his appointment at Rossall filled the time between his undergraduate studies and his return to Oxford in 1936. It was also in 1936, unusually a year after the completion of his studies, that Grice was willing, or perhaps able, to pay the fee necessary for con-ferment of his BA degree.  He was enabled to return to Oxford by two scholarships, both of which would have required him to sit examinations. First was an Oxford University Senior Scholarship, an award for postgraduate study at anycollege and in any subject. In the same year, Grice was awarded a Harmsworth Senior Scholarship, a 'closed' scholarship to Merton college. The Harmsworth Scholarships, funded by an endowment from former college member Sir Hildebrand Harmsworth, were a relatively new venture, aimed specifically at raising the profile of postgraduate achievement at the college. A history of Merton notes that the scheme  'brought to the college a succession of intelligent graduates from all col-leges. In that way a window was opened on to the world of graduate research at a time when there were few opportunities at that level in the university as a whole." The scholarships had been available only since 1931, and only three were awarded each year, across the range of academic subjects. Grice's contemporaries were Richard Alexander Hamilton, also from Clifton College, in sciences, and Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn in modern languages. Grice was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton between 1936 and 1938, but no award or higher degree resulted from his time there. He was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1939 but this was a formality, available seven years after initial matriculation to students who had received a BA, upon payment of a fee. Nevertheless, the time spent at Merton was an important period in Grice's philosophical development not least because it was during this time that he became aware of subjects and methodologies then current in philosophy, and indeed taking shape in Oxford itself. He added knowledge of contemporary and dissenting philosophy to his existing familiarity with established orthodoxy.  Grice's experiences of undergraduate study had been typical of the time. The philosophy taught and conducted at Oxford between the wars was extremely conventional, that is to say speculative and metaphysical in nature, with an almost institutionalised distrust of new ideas. The business of philosophy was centred on the exegesis of the philosophi-cal, and particularly the classical 'greats'. Indeed, until just before the Second World War, no living philosopher was represented on the Oxford philosophy syllabus. The picture was different at Cambridge.  From early in the century, Russell had been developing his analytic approach to issues of knowledge and the language in which it is expressed, arguing that suitable rigorous analysis can reveal the 'true' logical form beneath the 'apparent' grammatical surface of sentences.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus, first published in English in 1922, had taken these ideas further, arguing that such analysis could reveal many of the traditional concerns of philosophy to be merely 'pseudo-problems' However, such was the insularity of academic institutions at the time that Oxford had not officially, and barely in practice, been aware ofthese developments in Cambridge, let alone of those in other parts of Europe.  This isolation was fairly abruptly ended, at least for some of the younger philosophers at Oxford, during the period when Grice was at Merton. This change was due in a large part to A. J. Ayer, and to the publication of his controversial first book Language Truth and Logic in  1936. Ayer had himself been an undergraduate at Oxford between 1929 and 1932 but, unusually, had read many of Russell's works, as well as the Tractatus. He had been encouraged in this by his tutor, Gilbert Ryle, a socially conservative but intellectually progressive don, who had even taken Ayer on a trip to Cambridge where he had met Wittgenstein personally. Ayer was impressed by the methods of analytic philosophy in general, and in particular by Wittgenstein's ambitious claims that it could 'solve' age-old philosophical problems for good by analysing the language in which they were traditionally expressed. He was even more profoundly affected by the ideas with which he came into contact during a visit to Austria after finishing his studies. There he became acquainted with a number of members of the Vienna Circle, and attended several of their meetings. Then as now, this group of scientists and philosophers were referred to collectively as 'the logical positivists' They represented a number of separate interests and specialisms, but shared at least one common goal: the desire to refine and perfect language so as to make it an appropriately precise tool for scientific and logical discussion. They distinguished between meaningful statements, amenable to scientific study and discussion, and other statements, strictly meaningless but unfortunately occurring as sentences of imperfect everyday language. Their chief tool in this procedure was the principle of verification.  The logical positivists divided the category of meaningful statements into two basic types. First, there are those expressed by analytic, or necessarily true, sentences. 'All spaniels are dogs' is true because the meaning of the predicate is contained within the meaning of the subject, or because 'dog' is part of the definition of 'spaniel'. They added the statements of mathematics and of logic to the category of analytic sentences, on the grounds that a sentence such as 'two plus two equals four' is in effect a tautology because of the rules of mathematics. The second category of meaningful statements is those expressed by synthetic sentences, or sentences that might be either true or false, that are capable of being subjected to an identifiable process of verification. That is, there are empirically observable phenomena sufficient to determine the question of truth. All other statements, those neither expressed byanalytic sentences nor verifiable by empirical evidence, are meaning-less. This includes statements concerning moral evaluation, aesthetic judgement and religious belief. For the logical positivists, such statements were not false; they merely had no part in scientific discourse.  The doctrine of the Vienna Circle was radically empiricist and strictly anti-metaphysical.  When Ayer returned to Oxford in 1933 as a young lecturer, he set himself the task of introducing the ideas of logical positivism to an English-speaking audience. Language, Truth and Logic draws heavily on the ideas of the Vienna Circle, but also includes elements of the British analytic philosophy Ayer had found persuasive as an undergraduate. In the opening chapter, provocatively entitled 'The Elimination of Meta-physics', he outlines the views of logical positivism on meaning. He also offers his own formulation of the principle of verification:  We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. 10  In subsequent chapters, Ayer applies this criterion uncompromisingly to the analysis of statements such as those of ethics and theology, those of our perceptions of the material world, and those relating to our knowledge of other minds and of past events.  Language, Truth and Logic, which was widely read and discussed both within Oxford and beyond, tended to polarise opinions. Not surpris-ingly, many of the older, established Oxford philosophers reacted strongly against it and the explicit challenge it posed to philosophical authority. It dismissed many of the traditional concerns of philosophy on the grounds that they were based on the discussion of meaningless metaphysical statements; it proposed to solve many apparent philosophical problems simply by analysis of the language in which they were expressed and, of course, it rejected all religious tenets. However, to many of the younger philosophers it offered a welcome and exhilarating change for precisely these same reasons. Ayer became a central figure in a group of young philosophers who met to discuss various philosophical topics. The meetings took place in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College during term times for about two years from early 1937. Here Ayer first began to talk, and to disagree, with another young philosopher, J. L. Austin.In the decade immediately following the Second World War, Austin was to be instrumental in the development of ordinary language phi-losophy, which dominated Oxford, and was deeply influential on Grice personally. In the late 1930s, however, his philosophical position was yet to be fully articulated. Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, has suggested that Austin was initially very impressed by Ayer, who was the only member of the group to have published, but that 'during the course of the All Souls Meetings... Austin staked out, if not a set of doctrines, then an approach which was very much his own'." This approach brought him increasingly into conflict with Ayer. Initially their disagreements were amicable enough, but in later years their differences of opinion were to lead to an increasing and unresolved hostility.  Grice perhaps identifies what it was that Austin found increasingly unsatisfactory about Ayer's logical positivism when he observes in an unpublished retrospective that: 'between the wars, in the heyday of Philosophical Analysis, when these words were on every cultured and progressive lip, what was thought of as being subjected to analysis were not linguistic but non-linguistic entities: facts or (in a certain sense) propositions, not words or sentences'.12 Analytic philosophy, whether in terms of Russell's 'logical form', or of the verificationists' 'meaning-fulness'  ', was concerned with explaining problematic expressions by translating statements in which such expressions occur into more ele-mentary, logically equivalent statements in which they do not occur. It considered language as an important tool for the clarification of concepts and states of affairs, not as an appropriate target of analysis in its own right. Indeed language, as used in ordinary discourse, offered potential dangers that the philosopher needed to avoid; it could mislead the unwary into inappropriate metaphysical commitments.  The major advocates of philosophical analysis between the wars, Russell, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, all shared the conviction that everyday language was 'imperfect' and needed to be purified and improved before it could be ready for philosophical use. This disdain for ordinary language is at least in part the source of Austin's growing discontent with analytic philosophy in general, and with its spokesman Ayer in particular. Austin became increasingly convinced that ordinary language was a legitimate focus of philosophical enquiry. Not only was it 'good enough' as a tool for philosophy, it was also possible that the way in which people generally talk about certain areas of experience might offer some important insights into philosophically problematic concepts. For instance, there is the problem of our knowledge of other minds. For Ayer, statements about the mental states of others weremeaningless and unacceptable as they stood. A statement such as 'he is angry' was not amenable to any process of verification, and committed its speaker to the existence of unempirical concepts such as minds and emotions. To avoid the unpleasant prospect of having to dismiss all such statements as simply meaningless, Ayer insisted in Language, Truth and Logic that they must be translatable into verifiable statements.  Statements about others' mental states are most appropriately translated into statements about their physical states: about their appearance and behaviour. Such statements, which concern phenomena that can be directly perceived, are amenable to verification. Assumptions about mental states are merely inferences from these. Austin's defence of statements about other minds would run as follows. People use statements such as 'he is angry' all the time, with no confusion or misun-derstanding. Therefore, it seems appropriate to take such statements seriously: to analyse them as they stand rather than to treat them as being in some way 'really' about perceptions and inferences. Further-more, the fact that people ordinarily talk in this way might be seen as good grounds for accepting emotions and mental states as valid concepts.  Grice had a lot in common with the group meeting in All Souls. He was much the same age; of the main members of the group, Austin was two years older than him, Ayer three and Berlin five, while Stuart Hampshire was a year younger. Moreover, like both Ayer and Austin he had studied Classics at Oxford, and been introduced to the study of philosophy in 'Greats'. But college life was so insular that he was not aware of this group or party to its discussions. Merton was in many ways a similar college to Corpus Christi: small and relatively low in the social hierarchy of colleges. Indeed, it had a growing reputation for offering places to students without traditional Oxford credentials: to those from the Midlands and the North of England, and to grammar school pupils.  In contrast, Christ Church and Magdalen, where Ayer and Austin were respectively, were both large and prestigious colleges. All Souls was exclusively a college of Fellows, offering no places to undergraduate or postgraduate students. Grice was later to account for his own absence from the meetings by explaining that he was 'brought up on the wrong side of the tracks'. 13 He did read Language Truth and Logic, and like many of his contemporaries was extremely interested in the methodology it suggested for tackling philosophical problems. However, he recalled in later life that from the beginning he had certain reservations about Ayer's claims that were never laid to rest; 'the crudities and dogmatism seemed too pervasive'. 14Grice may have been unimpressed by some of Ayer's more sweeping claims, but they opened up to him analytic possibilities that affected his own style of philosophy. An early typescript paper on negation has survived. This was a topic to which Grice returned in a series of lectures in the early 1960s, but on which he never published. The paper is not dated, but the use of his parents' address in Harborne suggests that it was written before he obtained a permanent position at Oxford, therefore presumably before the Second World War. He tackles the epistemological problem posed by negative statements such as 'this is not red' or 'I am not hearing a noise'.  '. Such statements raise the question of how  it is that we become acquainted with a negative fact. Grice argues that knowledge of negative facts is best seen as inferential. We are confident in our knowledge of a negative because we have evidence of some related positive fact. So our knowledge that a certain object is not red might be derived by inference from knowledge that it is green, together with an understanding that being green is incompatible with being red.  The second example sentence is more problematic. It expresses a 'priv-ative fact', an absence. If the inferential account of negative knowledge is to be maintained, it must be possible to suggest a type of fact incompatible with the positive counterpart of the negative, that is with the sentence 'I am hearing a noise', for which the speaker can have adequate evidence. Grice's suggestion is that the incompatible fact offering a solution to this problem is the fact that the speaker entertains the positive proposition in question, without having an attitude of certainly to that proposition. If you think of a particular proposition, and are aware that you do not know it to be true, then you may be said to be inferring knowledge of a negative. If you entertain the proposition that you are hearing a noise, but do not know this proposition to be true, then you are in a position to assert 'I do not hear a noise'. More generally, to state 'I do not know that A is B' is in effect to state 'Every present mental process of mine has some characteristic incompatible with knowledge that A is B'. 15  Although Grice does not acknowledge any such influences, his paper can be placed very much within the analytic tradition, and its main proposal draws on verificationist assumptions. The problem it tackles is the issue of how we are 'really' to understand negative statements: how we are to translate them so that they do not contain the problematic term  'not'. Grice's proposed analysis can be subjected to a process of verifi-cation, on the understanding that perception though the senses (it is green') and introspection (every present mental process of mine...) are empirical phenomena.On completion of his Harmsworth studentship in 1938, Grice was appointed to a lectureship in philosophy at the third college of his Oxford career, St John's. In the complex social hierarchy of Oxford col-leges, this was definitely a step up; St John's was larger, more affluent and more prestigious than either Merton or Corpus Christi. More impor-tantly, it was a sign that Grice's career was progressing well. Although it carried a relatively high teaching load, and brought with it no benefits of college membership, a lectureship was a good position from which to impress the existing Fellows of the college, who had control over the appointment of new members. In fact, Grice was elected to the position of full Fellow, tutor and lecturer in philosophy after just one year. He was to hold this post for almost 30 years, but initially he stayed at St John's for only one because his career, like that of many of his con-temporaries, was interrupted by war service. Grice was commissioned Lieutenant in the Navy in 1940. Initially, he was on active service in the North Atlantic. Then in March 1942 he joined Navy Intelligence at the Admiralty, where he stayed until the war ended.  The war years saw the publication of Grice's first article, 'Personal Identity', in Mind. Neither the topic nor the journal were particularly surprising choices for a young Oxford philosopher at that time. Mind, edited by G. E. Moore, was one of the leading, indeed one of the few, journals of contemporary philosophy, and had reflected the interest in logical positivism of the 1930s. After the war, under the editorship of Gilbert Ryle, it would become the acknowledged organ for much of the work from the new school of Oxford philosophy.l The topic of personal identity was one of long-standing philosophical interest, and had received renewed attention during the 1930s; indeed, it was one of the topics discussed in the meetings at All Soul's. It is ultimately concerned with a question that was to underlie Grice's work throughout his life: the question of what it is to be a human being. Discussing personal identity means considering the relative importance of, and relationship between, physical and mental properties. Describing identity exclusively in terms of physical bodies presents problems, but so does describing it entirely in terms of mental entities. The former position would suggest that a single body must always be the location of a single iden-tity, or person, regardless of personality change, memory loss or mental illness. Moreover, it would seem to entail that, since the composition of a physical body does not stay the same throughout a lifetime, someone must be regarded as having separate identities, or being different people as, say, a baby, an adult, and an old man. An account of personal identity based exclusively on mental sameness, however,would force us to accept that one mental state transferred into another body, perhaps by surgery or reincarnation, should result in no change of identity. Philosophers wrestled with hypothetical 'problem cases'. If it were possible to take the brains out of two bodies and swap them over, would this be best described as a brain transplant or a body trans-plant? Ayer, Austin and their companions had concerned themselves with the status of Gregor Samsa from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis': 'was he an insect with the mind of a man, or a man with the body of an insect?'. 17  In attempting to negotiate between these two opposing, equally prob-lematic, accounts, Grice looks to 'memory theories' of personal iden-tity. In this, he draws on work produced almost 250 years previously by John Locke, while acknowledging some of Locke's critics and attempting to suggest a way of addressing them. In other words, Grice's first published work shows the characteristic combination of old and new ways of thinking. He draws on work from philosophical 'old boys', such as Locke and his eighteenth-century critic Thomas Reid. At the same time, he looks for solutions to their problems in a much newer style of philosophy, one in general terms analytic, and in more particular terms concerned with the close analysis of individual linguistic examples.  Locke argues that, unlike in the case of inanimate masses, the identity of living creatures must depend on more than bodily unity. As evidence he suggests the examples of an oak growing from a seedling into a great tree and then cut back, or a colt growing into a horse, being sometimes fat and sometimes thin; throughout these changes they remain the same oak, and the same horse. In search of an appropriate substitute for bodily sameness, he discusses what might be seen as a hierarchy of living beings, and considers where a notion of identity can be located in each case. In general, at each stage of the hierarchy, what is required is an account of function. The parts of a tree form a single entity not because they remain physically constant, but because they are arranged in such a way as to fulfil certain functions: the processes of nutrition and growth that together ensure the continued existence of the tree. In much the same way, the identity of an animal can be described in terms of the fulfilment of the functions that ensure its sur-vival. Even 'man' is no different in this respect; human identity consists in the collection of parts functioning together over the course of a lifetime, to ensure the growth, maturation and survival of the individual human being. Various different particles of matter form a single human at different points in time precisely because they all participate in a single, continued, life.Locke points out that this account of a man or human being, although it does not rely on simple bodily identity, does make necessary reference to the physical body. The parts of the body may change over time, but, united by common functions, they together form part of the definition of 'a man'  '. If we relied only on mental identity, or 'the  identity of soul', we would not be able to resist the idea that physically and temporally separate bodies might all belong to the same man. Locke suggests that an account based just on the soul could not rule out the unacceptable claim that the ill-assorted list: 'Seth, Ismael, Socrates, Pilate, St Austin, and Caesar Borgia, ... may have been the same man.'18 Furthermore, the form of a man is a necessary part of our understanding of the concept of a man, and of the meaning of the word 'man'.  Even if we were to hear a creature that looked like a parrot hold intelligent conversation and discuss philosophy, functions normally associated exclusively with people, we would hardly be tempted to say that it must be a man, but rather we would say that it was 'a very intelligent rational parrot'. 19  Locke's next move is to suggest a categorial distinction between 'man' and 'person'.  , a distinction he admits is at odds with normal under-  standing and speech. He offers a very specific definition of a person as  'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places' 20 The point of this distinction is to explain the 'extra' properties persons are generally seen as possessing, beyond those of animals.  It might be said variously to account for consciousness, self-awareness or the soul. The identity of a person, then, consists not just in the unity of functioning parts, the criterion that accounts alike for the identity of a plant, or an animal, or a 'man'. The identity of a person depends on the continuation of the 'reason and reflection' across a range of different times and places. In Locke's words, 'as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person'? Locke offers his own solution to what has come to be known as the 'brain transplant' problem, which he explains in terms of the transfer of souls. In Locke's fanciful illustration, the soul of a prince is transferred into the body of a cobbler, the cobbler's soul having been removed. We would say that what was left was the same person as the prince, since he would have the thoughts of the princeand the consciousness of the prince's past life. However, we would at this point be forced to acknowledge the distinction Locke is drawing between 'man' and 'person', by saying that this was the same man as the cobbler, as demonstrated by the continuity of bodily functioning.There is one fairly obvious problem with an account of identity dependent on the extension back in time of a single consciousness.  Locke in effect dismisses this problem by arguing that it is an error arising from a particular way in which language is generally used. The problem is concerned with memory loss. If he were completely and irrevocably to lose his memory, Locke suggests, we would still want to say that he was the same person as the one who performed the actions he has now forgotten. Yet on Locke's own account, if his consciousness could no longer be extended back to these past actions, he could not be the same person as the one who performed them. Locke suggests that our reluctance to accept this conclusion, our inclination to insist that he is still the same person, can be traced to a lack of reflection about the use of the pronoun 'I'. In this case, the amnesiac Locke would in fact be using 'I' to refer not to the person, but to the man. Locke does not himself offer any examples, but the following illustrates his point.  If, having lost his memory and then been instructed about his own past life, he were to state 'I was exiled by James Il', he would be using the pronoun to refer only to the same man, or living creature, as he is now, not to the same person. Our tendency to maintain that 'I' must in these examples stand for the same person is because of our failure to distinguish properly between 'man' and 'person': our habit of conflating the two. Once this conflation is recognised for what it is, the problem can be resolved; it may be possible for a single man to be more than one person during his life. Indeed, although our use of the pronoun sometimes seems to miss this, elsewhere in the language it is apparently acknowledged:  when we say such a one is not himself, or is beside himself; in which phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or at least first used them, thought that self was changed; the selfsame person was no longer in that man.22  Grice's account of personal identity relies on Locke's theory, but draws more directly on two later philosophers. Thomas Reid, writing about a hundred years after Locke, produces a 'problem example'. Ian Gallie, just a few years before Grice, offers a more developed discussion of the use of the first person pronoun. Reid points out that the notion of consciousness extending back in time can only make sense if it is understood as memory; Locke's account can only be coherently understood as a memory theory of identity. Further, he cautions that although the expressions 'consciousness' and 'memory' are sometimes used inter-changeably in normal speech, it is important for philosophers not to confuse the two. 'The faculties of consciousness and memory are chiefly distinguished by this, that the first is an immediate knowledge of the present, the second an immediate knowledge of the past. 23 But if personal identity is dependent on knowledge of the past or on memory, the following case, which has become known as the 'brave officer' example, presents severe difficulties. A boy is whipped for stealing apples. When the boy grows up, he joins the army and, as a young officer, captures an enemy standard. In later life, the officer is made a general. It is perfectly possible that, when rescuing the standard, the officer was able to remember, even did actively remember, that he was whipped as a child. It is also possible that the elderly general can remember clearly the time when he captured the standard but, with memory fading, has forgotten all about being whipped as a boy. The memory is lost irrevocably; even if prompted about the incident, he cannot remember it. According to Locke's account, we would have to say that the young boy was the same person as the brave officer, and the brave officer was the same person as the old general, but that the old general was not the same person as the young boy. Not only does this offend against our intuitive notions of identity, it also runs counter to basic logic. If A is identical to B, and B is identical to C, then it follows that C must be identical to A.  In 'Personal identity', Grice acknowledges his considerable debt to Gallie's article 'Is the self a substance?', which was published in 1936, also in Mind. It is a revealing choice of inspiration, perhaps reflecting Grice's growing interest in the style of philosophy being practised by some of his Oxford contemporaries: the analysis of specific linguistic examples as a means of approaching more general philosophical prob-lems. Gallie does not directly discuss the memory theory of identity. He assesses the case for the existence of a 'self', a metaphysical entity or substance, remaining constant across a series of temporally different mental experiences. As an enduring ego it forms a mental unit of iden-tity, in addition to any purely physical phenomenon. From the outset, he proposes an account of 'self' in terms of 'a certain class of sentences in which the word "I" (or the word "me") occurs' 2 Such sentences can, he suggests, be grouped into two or perhaps three sets. The first of these is the set of sentences in which 'my mind' could be substituted for 'T'.  Gallie admits that in some cases the result may be 'unusual English', but maintains that it is enough that they would not be false. Examples include 'I feel depressed' and 'I see it is raining'. The second set of sentences is defined negatively; such substitution is impossible in examplessuch as 'I am under 6 feet in height' and 'I had dinner at 8 o'clock to-night'. Gallie acknowledges but dismisses from discussion a third but purely philosophical use of 'T'; expressions such as 'I hear a noise now' and 'I see a white expanse now' are concerned with facts of which the speaker has introspective knowledge, rather than with any claims about properties of longer duration. Gallie's starting point is the contention that examples from his first set offer evidence that the self must exist.  If we use T' in these cases, and use it legitimately, there must be something to which we are referring; there must be a mental property that endures across a range of temporarily distinct experiences.  Grice's article also starts with a discussion of 'I' sentences, but his analysis of them is rather more subtle than Gallie's, and his claims about their significance more ambitious. He divides Gallie's two basic categories into three, although he implicitly dismisses the idea that Gallie's  'philosophical' uses constitute a separate class. His starting point is not with minds but with bodies; the easiest sentences to define are those into which the phrase 'my body' can be substituted, sentences such as  'I was hit by a golf ball' and 'I fell down the cellar steps'.  . A second class,  one not distinguished by Gallie, seems to require something extra as well as a physical body to be involved. This includes sentences such as  'I played cricket yesterday' and 'I shall be fighting soon', in which substituting 'my body' for 'I' does not provide an exact or full paraphrase.  These sentences in turn are to be distinguished from a further class in which substitution of 'my body' is even less satisfactory, sentences such as 'I am hearing a noise' and 'I am thinking about the immortality of the soul'. Grice is not explicit about what would count as a suitable substitute for 'I' in these sentences. By implication, the 'I' of bodily identity is easier to paraphrase than the 'T' of mental identity, and Grice is not prepared as Gallie was to offer a paraphrase into 'unusual English' But he does suggest tentatively that, in the cricket and fighting sen-tences, reference to the physical body would need to be supplemented with 'something about the sort of thoughts and intentions and decisions I had.'25  Grice's ambitious claim is that the dispute about personal identity is really a disagreement about the status of certain 'I' sentences. Examples not concerned with bodily identity, sentences of the 'I am hearing a noise' category, are central to the type of identity philosophers have generally discussed. Philosophers over the centuries who have addressed the nature of personal identity have been concerned with the correct analysis of this type of 'I' sentence, whether they knew it or not. More-over, Grice argues, they have also been concerned with the correctanalysis of a class of sentences closely related to these but containing the word 'someone' instead of the word 'I'. An adequate account of personal identity must be able to offer an analysis both of 'I am hearing a noise' and of 'someone is hearing a noise'.  Grice's theory of personal identity is based on Locke's account, but attempts a modification to answer its critics. His analysis of the relevant  'I' and 'someone' sentences is in terms of a particular relationship between experiences divided by time and place. A series of such experiences can be said to belong to the same person. The relationship in question cannot be a simple one of memory, or possible memory, because this raises the 'brave officer' problem; a person having a particular experience may be quite incapable of remembering an earlier experience, but yet be the same person as the person who had that expe-rience. As a maneuver to avoid this problem, Grice introduces the phrase 'total temporary state' (t.t.s.), as a term of art to describe all the experiences to which an individual is subject at any one moment. These t.t.s.'s can occur in series, and describing a person means describing what it is that makes any particular series the t.t.s.'s of one and the same person. Grice's suggestion is that every t.t.s. in a 'person' series contains or could contain an element of memory relating it to some other t.t.s. earlier in the same series. In this way, the 'brave officer' problem is avoided. The t.t.s of the general contains a memory trace of the experience of the brave officer, and the t.t.s. of the brave officer contains a memory trace of the experience of the boy. The three t.t.s.'s are linked into a series and it does not matter that there is no direct link between that of the general and that of the boy.  Grice analyses 'someone hears a noise'  ', the example type he identi-  fied as central to personal identity, in terms of his notion of t.t.s.:  a (past) hearing of a noise is an element in a t.t.s. which is a member of a series of t.t.s.'s such that every member of the series either would, given certain conditions, contain as an element a memory of some experience which is an element in some previous member, or contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member; there being no subset of members which is independent from all the rest.26  Each t.t.s. contains at least one memory link, or potential memory link, either forward or backward in an appropriate series. Sentences containing the problematic 'I' and 'someone'  ', the 'I' and 'someone' that cannotbe paraphrased in terms of bodies, can be re-expressed in terms that remove the problem word and replace it with a suitably defined series of t.t.s.'s. Personal identity is shown to be a construction out of a series of experiences.  Grice considers various possible objections that might be raised to his analysis, including the objection that it is just too complicated as an account of a set of apparently simple sentences. He is himself unsure that this is a particularly damning objection, but argues that his analysis of 'self'-sentences is in any case:  probably far less complicated than would be the phenomenalist's analysis of any material object-sentence, if indeed a phenomenalist were ever to offer an analysis of such a sentence, and not merely tell us what sort of an analysis it would be if he did give it.?7  This is an interesting dig. Phenomenalism was most closely associated at this time with the logical positivists, and therefore at Oxford with Ayer. It was a form of scepticism, holding that we do not have direct evidence of material objects; we have evidence only of various 'sense data'  ', and infer the existence of material objects from these. In other words, phenomenalists claimed that statements about material objects need to be translatable into empirically verifiable statements about sense data. Grice's objection is that the appropriate translations were never actually offered, merely discussed; his complicated analysis of  'someone is hearing a noise', on the other hand, offered something def-inite. This is closely related to the type of objection Austin was raising to Ayer's method; his theories introduced technical terms such as 'sense data', but did not explain them in ordinary language.  In the light of Grice's sideswipe at sense data theories, it is perhaps surprising that John Perry, in his commentary, should find phenome-nalist tendencies in Grice's account of personal identity. His reason lies in the analytic approach Grice shares with phenomenalism. Both were concerned with analysing sentences that contain a problem expression (for the phenomenalists words referring to material objects, for Grice the relevant uses of 'I' and 'someone') in such a way that these expressions are removed and empirically observable phenomena are substi-tuted. Sense data and total temporary states are both available to introspection. For phenomenalists, material objects are logical constructions based on the evidence of sense data; they need to be recog-nised as such and the 'true' form of the sentences expressing them needs to be understood. For Grice, persons are logical constructions fromexperiences. Perry does, however, acknowledge an important difference between Grice's enterprise and that of other analytic philosophers, of whom he takes Russell to be a prime example:  In Russell's view, the logical construction was the philosopher's contribution to an improved conception of, say, a material object, free of the epistemological problems inherent in the ordinary conception.  So analysis, for Russell, does not preserve exact meaning. But Grice intends to be making explicit, through analysis, the concept we already have.28  In other words, Grice sees ordinary ways of talking as adequate and valu-able, if in need of clarification. For analytic philosophers such as Russell, ordinary language is simply not good enough; it needs to be purged of inappropriate existential commitments and vague terms before it can be a fit tool for philosophy or science.  Grice's account of personal identity has been generally well received in its field. Despite his reservations, Perry describes it as 'the most subtle and successful' attempt to rescue Locke's memory theory? Similarly, Timothy Williamson cites Grice's paper as the first in a succession of responses to the 'brave officer' problem in terms of a transitive relation between a set of spatio-temporal locations.3º In many ways it seems far removed from the work for which Grice is now best known. And indeed when he returned to philosophy after the war he was concerned with rather different topics. But this early article shows some of the traits that were to become characteristic of his work across a range of subjects, in particular a close attention to the nuances of language use. One theme in particular, the notion of what it is to be a person, and Locke's idea of an ontological distinction between 'man' and 'person' was to prove central to much of Grice's later philosophy.  The publication of 'Personal identity' meant that Grice's professional life was not entirely put on hold during the war years, and neither was his personal life. In 1943 he married Kathleen Watson. Kathleen was from London, but they had met through an Oxford connection. Her brother J. S. Watson had held a Harmsworth senior scholarship shortly after Grice and the two had become friends. James married during the war and, when his best man was killed on active service shortly before the ceremony, called on Paul at short notice to perform the duty. Paul and Kathleen met at the wedding. At the time of his own wedding, Paul still had two years of war service ahead of him, but it meant that when he returned permanently to Oxford he would not be living in St John's,as he had done briefly as a bachelor. There were no rooms for married Fellows in college; indeed, women were not permitted on the premises, even at formal dinners. Paul and Kathleen settled in a flat on the Woodstock Road rented from his college. His Fellowship at St John's was, of course, still open to him, as was the prospect of a closer involvement with the new style of philosophy taking shape in Oxford.The intellectual atmosphere of Oxford philosophy during the decade or so from 1945 was very different from that which Grice had known before the Second World War. As students and dons alike returned from war service, the process of change that had begun with a few young philosophers during the 1930s picked up momentum. Old orthodoxies and methods were overthrown as a host of new thinkers and new ideas took their place. The style of study was questioning, exploratory and cooperative. Many of the philosophers who were active in this period, such as Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson, have since testified to the spirit of optimism, enthusiasm and sheer excitement that predom-inated.' The reasons for these emotions were similar to those that had drawn A. J. Ayer to the work of the Vienna Circle just over a decade earlier. A new style of philosophy was going to 'solve' many of the old problems. Once again, this was to be achieved by close attention to and analysis of language. For logical positivists this involved 'translating' problematic statements of everyday language into logically rigorous, empirically verifiable sentences. For the new Oxford philosophers, however, no such translations would be necessary. A suitably rigorous attention to the facts of language was going to be a sufficient, indeed the only suitable, philosophical tool.  In retrospect, Grice suggested the following causes of the differences after the war:  the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene.?Gilbert Ryle, the tutor who had introduced Ayer to Wittgenstein and encouraged him to travel to Vienna, was a decade or more older than Grice and his contemporaries, having been born in 1900. However, his influence on Oxford philosophy during the 1940s and 1950s was con-siderable. His philosophy of mind, in particular, was widely known through his teaching, and was eventually published as The Concept of Mind in 1949. In this book, Ryle argues against the received idea of the mind as a mental entity separate from, but in some way inhabiting, the physical body: Descartes's 'ghost in the machine'. All that can legitimately be discussed are dispositions to act in a certain way in certain situations. The error of dualism can be attributed to the tendency to analyse minds as 'things' just as bodies are things. Taken together with a strict distinction between mental and physical, this gives rise to the error of defining minds as 'non-physical things'. This error stems from a basic category mistake involving the type of vocabulary used in discussions of minds. Differences between the physical and the mental have been 'represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of "thing", "stuff", "attribute", "state", "process"  "change"  ', "cause" and "effect"' 3 Only close attention to language  reveals this tendency among philosophers to extend erroneously terms applicable to physical phenomena, and thus to enter into unproductive metaphysical commitments. Ryle was keen to see this philosophical approach adopted more widely, and after he took over as editor of Mind in 1947, began what Jonathan Rée has described as a 'systematic cam-paign' to take control of English philosophy. He drew together some of the more promising young Oxford philosophers and 'by galvanising them into writing, especially about each other, in the pages of Mind, he gave English academic philosophy in the fifties an energy and sense of purpose such as it has never seen before or since."  The style of philosophy Ryle was deliberately promoting found resonances in the work of J. L. Austin, who was continuing to develop the notions about ordinary language with which he had confronted Ayer before the war. Ayer himself had returned to Oxford only briefly, before taking up a chair at University College London in 1946. The ideas of logical positivism were, in any case, losing their earlier glamour and appeal for younger philosophers, and Austin became the natural leader of the next wave of Oxford philosophy, both before and after his appointment as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. This promotion may seem surprising today; Austin had published just three papers by 1952, none of which were strictly about moral philosophy. It seems that credit was given to the importance of his ideas, and his rep-utation as an inspiring and charismatic teacher, a reputation achieved despite his rather austere personality. Few if any of his colleagues felt that they really got to know him personally. This was perhaps in part because, as Geoffrey Warnock has suggested, he was 'a shy man, wary of self-revelation and more than uninviting of self-revelation by others'. It may also have been in part because, unusually among his peers, he eschewed college social life, preferring to spend his time quietly at home with his family in the Oxfordshire countryside. Never-theless, most people who knew him had their favourite story to sum up what could be a formidable and confrontational, but also a humourous and humane personality. George Pitcher relates how Austin once attended a meeting at his college concerned with plans for the college buildings. The meeting got embroiled in a long and seemingly unrec-oncilable discussion about the President's Lodgings. When finally asked for his opinion, Austin's response was 'Mr President, raze it to the ground. Grice recalls how a colleague once challenged Austin with Donne's lines 'From the round earth's imagined corners,/ Angels your trumpets blow' as an example of non-understandable English. 'It is perfectly clear what it means,' replied Austin, 'it means "Angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth" "  Such anecdotes illustrate Austin's ability to cut through protocol and rhetoric and reveal the plain facts underneath: often to reveal that things are just as simple as they seem, and a lot more simple than they are made out to be. This was the spirit in which he approached philosophy. He was undoubtedly lucky in this project in the number of dedicated and talented young philosophers who, as Grice puts it,  'appeared' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early post-war years, undergraduates and new tutors were generally older than had been the tradition, and eager to study, their university careers having been postponed or interrupted by the war. Austin played an active role in spotting and encouraging talent, building up what quickly came to be seen as his own 'school' of philosophy. This development seems rather at odds with his views on discipleship. Ben Rogers has suggested that, unlike Wittgenstein, Austin 'discouraged anything like a cult of personality: he wanted to put philosophy on a collective footing' However, there is some evidence that Austin was at least in part predisposed to encourage, and even to enjoy, his status as leader. Grice reports that Austin was once heard to remark to a colleague, 'if they don't want to follow me, whom do they want to follow?"The style of philosophy developed and practised by Austin and his followers has been variously labelled as 'Oxford philosophy', linguistic philosophy' and 'ordinary language philosophy'. It is in fact far from uncontroversial that a single, identifiable approach united the philosophers working in Oxford at this time, even those in Austin's immediate circle. Grice himself denies this assumption in a number of published commentaries, such as the uncompromising claim that: 'there was no  "School"; there were no dogmas which united us.' Perhaps the only common position of the Oxford philosophers, certainly the only one Grice acknowledges, was a belief in the value, indeed the necessity, of the rigorous analysis of the everyday use of words and expressions. They worked on a wide range of philosophical problems, and even when addressing the same issue they often disagreed on analysis or conclu-sion. But in approaching these problems they were in agreement that careful attention to the words in which they were conventionally expressed was the best path to understanding, tackling and perhaps eliminating the problems themselves. The origins of this approach are controversial. Commentators have looked beyond Ryle and Austin to suggest Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and even Gotlob Frege as candidates for the title 'father' of ordinary language phi-losophy. There is certainly something in all these claims; each thinker was  influential in the development of the analytic tradition from which ordinary language philosophy emerged. But under Ryle's and Austin's guidance it developed in directions not envisaged, and in some cases explicitly not approved, by its putative mentors.  In the late nineteenth century Frege proposed analysis of language as a method for tackling philosophical problems. He was chiefly a math-ematician, but in the course of his work addressed the language of logical expressions, and the potential problems inherent in it. Frege's most influential contribution to the philosophy of language is his distinction between 'sense' and 'reference'. Any name, whether a proper name or a description, that points to some individual in the world, does so by way of a particular means of identifying that individual. A name therefore has both a reference, the individual it denotes, and a sense, the means by which reference is indicated. In this way, Frege explains statements of identity. If we attend only to reference, an example such as 'Sophroniscus is the father of Socrates' would have to be dismissed as uninformative; it would simply offer a logical tautology, stating of an individual that he is identical with himself. If, however, we attend to sense as well as reference, we can analyse this example as making an informative statement to the effect that the two names may differ insense but share the same reference. The example is significant because, although there is no difference between the denotation of the two names, there is nevertheless 'a difference in the mode of presentation of the thing designated'."  Russell proposed the 'translation'  account that became characteristic  of analytic philosophy. Suitably rigorous attention could reveal the logical structure beneath a grammatical form that was often misleading and imperfect. His main difference from Frege was in his analysis of descriptions. Russell observes in his 1905 article 'On denoting' that 'a phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; for example,  "the present king of France" 1 For Frege such examples posed no problem. It was perfectly possible to say that such an expression had a sense but no reference. But the consequences of this position are unacceptable to Russell because of their impact on logic. If 'the king of France' simply has no reference, then any sentence of which it is subject, such as Russell's famous example 'the king of France is bald', must also fail to refer to the world; in other words it must fail to be either true or false. For Russell this result is intolerable because it dispenses with clas-sical, two-valued logic, in which every proposition must be capable of being judged either 'true' or 'false'  . Classical logic states that if a propo-  sition is true then its negation must be false, and vice versa. But under Frege's analysis 'the king of France is bald' and 'the king of France is not bald' are indistinguishable in terms of truth value; both fail to be either true or false. Not only is this unacceptable, argues Russell, it also goes against the facts of the matter; 'the king of France is bald' is a simple falsehood.  Russell uses the label 'definite descriptions' for phrases such as 'the king of France', and claims that they are a particular type of expression demanding a particular type of analysis. Despite appearances, they are not denoting expressions, and they do not function as subjects of sentences in which they superficially appear to be in subject position. The subject/predicate form of a sentence containing a definite description, a sentence such as 'the king of France is bald', is misleading. That is, the logical structure of the sentence is at odds with its purely grammatical form; it is actually a complex of propositions relating to the existence, the uniqueness, and then the characteristics, of the individual apparently identified. Russell's rendition of this example can be paraphrased as: 'there exists one entity which is the king of France, and that entity is unique, and that entity is bald! Re-analysed in this way, it is possible to demonstrate that, in the absence of a unique king of France, one of these propositions is simply false. If it is not true thatthere is a present king of France, the first part of the logical form is false, making the sentence as a whole also false.  Russell's theory of descriptions has been seen as the defining example of analytic philosophy. Ayer often repeated his admiration for it in these terms. His close attention to language as well as to logic further caused Russell to be credited with inspiring ordinary language philosophy. 13 However, he would certainly not have been pleased by this latter acco-lade; he was still active in philosophy when the new approach was in the ascendant and he publicly and vociferously opposed it.' His own motivation in 'On denoting', and elsewhere, was not to describe natural language for its own sake, but to explain away the apparent obstacles it offered to classical logic. If every statement containing a denoting phrase could be explained as a complex proposition not involving a denoting phrase as a constituent, bivalent logic could be maintained.  Like Frege, Russell's first and primary philosophical interest was in mathematical logic. His interest in the analysis of language and therefore in meaning grew out of a concern for analysing the language in which the ideas of logic are expressed, and ultimately for refining that language.  Russell's Cambridge colleague and almost exact contemporary G. E.  Moore would perhaps have been less uncomfortable with being credited as genitor of ordinary language philosophy. Like many of the Oxford philosophers a generation later, he came to philosophy from a background in classics, and remained sensitive to details of meaning.  This was coupled with a rather leisured approach to philosophical enquiry; a private fortune enabled him to spend seven years at the start of his career away from all professional responsibilities, pursuing his own philosophical interests. Certainly, the result was a thorough and meticulous attention to the language in which philosophical discussion is couched. Another common feature between Moore and many ordinary language philosophers, one identified by Grice, was an anti-metaphysical, determinedly 'common-sense' approach to philosophical issues. 15  An illustration of both the rigorous analysis and the confidence in intuitive understanding can be found in Moore's article 'A defence of common sense', published in 1925. This was a forerunner of the infamous British Academy lecture of 1939 in which he held up his own hand as incontrovertible and sufficient 'proof' of the existence of material objects. In the published article, too, Moore addresses the question of the status of our knowledge of external objects, as well as our belief in the existence of other human beings, and indeed the viability of anyphysical reality independent of mental fact. In asserting such viability Moore is, as he explains, arguing against the sceptical view that all that we have access to are 'ideas' of objects, offered to us by means of our sense impressions, never the objects themselves. Such philosophical views were dominant in English philosophy when Moore himself was a young man, and were in part what he was reacting against in defending common sense. Moore's 'defence' rests almost entirely on his assertion of what he knows to be the case, by introspection based on the dictates of common sense. He knows with certainty of the existence and continuity of his own body, as well as its distinction from other, equally real physical objects. Not only that, but all other human beings have a similar, but distinct set of knowledge relating to their own bodies.  Further, to describe these as common-sense beliefs is actually to admit that they must be true, since the very expression 'common sense' implies that there is a set of other minds holding this belief and therefore that other minds, and other people, exist. Common sense should extend to analysis of the language of philosophy as well. In assessing the truth of a sentence such as 'The earth has existed for many years past', it is necessary to consider only 'the ordinary or popular meaning of such expressions'  '. Moore comments dryly that the existence of such  a unique, ordinary meaning 'is an assumption which some philosophers are capable of disputing'. This capacity, he suggests, has led to the erroneous argument that a statement such as this is questionable, and perhaps even false.  This insistence that philosophers attend to the ordinary use of the expressions with which they are dealing, together with the expression of bafflement that they should declare themselves unsure of the nature of such ordinary use, was to become as characteristic of Austin's work as it was of Moore's. Austin was widely known to be impressed by Moore's work, and inspired by his methodology, although he was less convinced that intuitive convictions and commonplace orthodoxies could be accepted at face value without further exploration. Grice recalls him declaring, with a characteristic combination of scholarly enthusiasm and school-boy jocularity: 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man.'" This pithy summary of his own philosophical influences introduces one of the most controversial issues concerning the origins of ordinary language philosophy: the impact of Wittgenstein. Some commentators have argued that Wittgenstein's later work was crucially important; Ernest Gellner, for instance, discusses 'linguistic philosophy' as if it were uncontroversially a product of Philosophical Investigations. 18 But in his biographical sketch of Austin, Geoffrey Warnock argues cat-egorically that Wittgenstein did not influence the philosophical method Austin promoted."' The issue is a difficult one to settle. Ben Rogers suggests that: 'Oxford philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s was more indebted to Wittgenstein than it liked to admit, 20 and it is certainly possible that his ideas informed discussion at the time, even if his intellectual presence was not directly acknowledged. Philosophical Investigations, presenting Wittgenstein's later work on language, was not published until 1953, but earlier versions of it were circulated and read in Oxford in the immediate post-war years. Other commentators, such as Williams and Montefiore, emphasise what they see as the striking differences between Wittgenstein and Austin. The two men's personalities, they suggest, were reflected in their different styles of philoso-phy: Wittgenstein's intense and introspective, Austin's scholarly and meticulous.22  Wittgenstein's early work had been inspired by his former tutor Russell. Although highly original, it was very much within Russell's formal, analytic tradition. Language operates by expressing propositions that may differ from apparent surface form but map on to the world by means of the basic properties of truth and falsity. 'To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true,' Wittgenstein suggests in his Tractatus, prefiguring the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle23 However, the work Wittgenstein produced when he returned to philosophy after a self-imposed break was notoriously different from that of his youth. It shows some striking similarities to ordinary language philosophy. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that language is better defined in terms of the uses to which it is put than the situations in the world it describes. Words are tools for use and, just as a tool may not always be used for the same function, meaning is not necessarily constant. Coining one of the most enduring metaphors in the philosophy of language, he argues that a word is best described as having a loose association of meanings that are essentially independent but may display certain 'family resemblances'  '. He argues  that apparent philosophical problems are in fact issues of language use; correct investigation of the language in which problems are posed reveals them to be merely 'pseudo problems'  '. Also, and perhaps even  more strikingly, he comments that, in philosophical discussion as else-where, 'When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day.'24  Whatever positive influences may have acted on Austin, it is certain that he was at least in part reacting against some other philosophical styles. In particular, he was taking issue with logical positivism, and withthe work of his old sparring partner A. J. Ayer. Soon after the war, Austin developed his response to Ayer on sense data. This was presented as a series of lectures, first delivered in 1947, and was published only posthumously, when Geoffrey Warnock edited the lecture notes under the title Sense and Sensibilia. Austin deals in detail and critically with Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, the book published in 1940 that expanded on and developed the implications of the verificationist account presented in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer had argued in the earlier book that the operation of the principle of verification for an individual is not directly dependent on the physical world, but relies on the data we receive through our senses. These 'sense data' are the only evidence we have available by which to subject sentences making statements about the world to appropriate processes of verification. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Ayer addresses the question of whether our knowledge is determined by material objects themselves or by our personal sense data. He develops a phenomenalist approach to this question, arguing that beliefs and statements about material objects are only legitimate if they are translated into beliefs and statements about our sense data. In this way, he maintains that discussion of the status of material objects is primarily a dispute about language. It is a dispute about the best way to analyse statements of experience. Sentences concerned with material objects and those concerned with sense data are simply uses of two different types of language. They refer to the same things in two different ways, rather than describing ontologically different phenomena.  25  Austin disliked the idea that philosophers need to 'see through' ordinary language before they can say anything rigorous about material objects. In his lectures on perception he argues that belief in sense data is an error into which philosophers have been led by the words they coin. The term itself is introduced artificially; ordinary people in everyday life find no need of it. Even the word 'perception' has an unnecessarily technical ring for Austin. People rarely talk about perceiving material objects, and still less frequently of experiencing sense data.  They do talk about seeing things, and so philosophers should attend to the suggestions this offers as to how the world works. The 'plain man' can cope perfectly well with distinguishing appearance from reality, with describing rainbows, or with commenting that ships on the horizon may appear closer than they are. Philosophers need only look to the actual use of words such as 'reality', 'looks' and 'seems' to understand this. Ordinary language has its own, perfectly adequate way of dealing with the difference between appearance and reality. Near thebeginning of his lectures, Austin sums up his response to sense data theorists:  My general opinion about this doctrine is that it is a typically scholastic view, attributable, first, to an obsession with a few particular words, the uses of which are over-simplified, not really understood or carefully studied or correctly described... Ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realised.26  In other work, Austin objects to the assumption he finds in logical positivism and elsewhere that the most important or the only philosophically interesting function of language is to make statements about the world. Philosophers concerned with questions of truth and falsity, and with determining meaning in terms of verification, overlook the many different ways in which speakers actually use language, and fall into the fallacy of seeing it as merely a tool for description. 'The principle of Logic that "Every proposition must be true or false" has too long operated as the simplest, most persuasive and most pervasive form of the descriptive fallacy.2 Only a careful consideration of the way in which people actually use language enables philosophers to dispense with this fallacy. Even when people do make statements of fact, it is often necessary to consider 'degrees' of success, rather than simple truth.  It is only with such a concept that we can make sense of various loose ways of talking, such as 'the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg', or explain why a statement may be true, but somehow 'inept' , such as saying 'all  the signs of bread' when clearly in the presence of bread.  Austin's approach, then, was based on a distrust of philosophical constructions and technical terminology, especially terminology he suspected of being unnecessary or poorly defined, but it was not entirely negative. He wanted to replace these with a serious and rigorous attention to the way in which any matter of philosophical interest is discussed in everyday language. He sets out these ideas particularly clearly and characteristically stridently in 'A plea for excuses' , a paper delivered  to the Aristotelian Society in 1956, which came to be seen almost as a manifesto for ordinary language philosophy. Philosophers have for too long conducted their discussion in real or feigned ignorance of the way in which key words and phrases are used in ordinary, everyday lan-guage. It is not just that the language of everyday is a worthy subject and adequate vehicle for philosophical enquiry. Rather, it is the only tool with a claim to being sufficient for philosophical purposes, honedas it is by generations of use to describe the distinctions and connections human beings have found necessary. These can reasonably be claimed to be more sound and subtle 'than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon - the most favoured alternative method'28 Meanings, including the meanings of philosophical terms, can only coherently be discussed with reference to the ways in which words are used in ordinary discourse.  More specifically in 'A plea for excuses', Austin is concerned with a rigorous examination of the circumstances in which excuses are offered, and the different forms they may take. For instance, excuses are only offered for actions performed freely. A consideration of the ordinary use of 'freely' to describe an action reveals that it does not introduce any particular property, but serves to negate some opposite, such as  'under duress'. It would be used only when there is some suggestion that the opposite could or might apply. There would be something strange about applying the term 'freely' to a normal action performed in a normal manner. Austin sums up this claim in the slogan 'no modification without aberration'? For many ordinary uses of many verbs, there is simply no modifying expression, either positive or negative that can appropriately and informatively be applied. The  'natural economy of language' dictates that we can only add a modifying expression 'if we do the action named in some special way or cir-cumstance'.30  Austin promoted his approach to philosophy through personal contact, including his own teaching, at least as much as through published papers such as 'A plea for excuses'. Lynd Forguson has studied undergraduate Oxford philosophy examination papers and observed that questions reflecting ordinary language philosophy began to appear as early as 1947, and were increasingly frequent throughout the 1950s.  For instance, students were asked: 'Is it essential to begin by deciding the meaning of the word "good" before going on to decide what things are good?'31 Perhaps most significantly Austin's ideas were disseminated through active collaboration in philosophy with his colleagues. This did not take the form of any co-authored papers or books. Indeed, both Grice and Stuart Hampshire have suggested that Austin's independent character and idiosyncratic style would have made him an awkward writing companion.32 His approach to collaboration in philosophy was to draw together the responses and insights of as many different informed observers of language use as possible. In the late 1940s, he instituted a series of 'Saturday Mornings'  ', meetings that ran in term time  and brought together a number of like-minded Oxford philosophers.Grice was present from the start. Other members included R. M. Hare, Herbert Hart, David Pears, Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson. Grice recalls how Austin described these meetings, perhaps semi-seriously, as a weekend break from the regular work of 'philosophical hacks', enabling them to turn their attention to less narrowly philosophical topics. Perhaps with this explanation in mind, Grice labelled the meetings 'The Play Group'. He seems to have been inordinately pleased with this name, and employed it in both spoken and written accounts of Oxford philosophy throughout his life. He used it at the time with some of his colleagues but never, it seems, with Austin himself. Austin was not the sort of man with whom to share such a joke. 34  The American logician W. V. O. Quine spent the academic year 1953-4 at Oxford as visiting Eastman professor. In his memoir of this period he passes on the rumour that attendance at Saturday Mornings was controlled by rules devised by Austin to preclude particular individu-als.35 There does not seem to be any explicit first-hand support from members of the group for this allegation. However, there is some evidence from them that Austin imposed criteria for attendance that would, in effect, have ruled out anyone older than himself who might prove a challenge to his leadership. Geoffrey Warnock remarks simply that attendance was 'restricted to persons both junior to Austin and employed as whole-time tutorial Fellows' 3 Many years later, when Grice was thinking back to the days of the Play Group, he jotted down a list of Oxford philosophers of the time. Interestingly, he divides his list into three categories: 'yes' (Austin, Grice, Hampshire, Strawson, Warnock...), 'no' (Anscombe, Dummett, Murdoch...) and 'overage' (Ryle, Hardie ...).37  Initially, at least, Austin seems to have stuck to his self-imposed remit.  The Play Group engaged not so much in philosophical debate as in intellectual puzzles and exercises pursued for their own sake. A favourite occupation was to analyse and categorise the rules of games, or to invent games of their own. Kathleen Grice recalls that one term they seemed to spend most of their time drawing dots on pieces of paper. Another term they decided to 'learn Eskimo' 38 However, they gradually turned their attention to more obviously philosophical occupations. Austin liked to pick a text per term for the group to read and discuss. However, some of the group did not find this a particularly fruitful philosophical method, largely because of Austin's preferred pace, which was painstakingly slow. 'Austin's favoured unit of discussion in such cases was the sentence', Warnock recalls, 'not the paragraph or chapter, still less the book as a whole. 39 At other times, the Play Group put into practiceAustin's views about the correct business of philosophers by engaging in 'linguistic botanising'.  Austin admired the sciences, and regretted that his own education had given him little real knowledge or expertise in them. His idea was to apply the same techniques of rigorous observation and attention to detail as would be used in a discipline such as botany to the material of linguistic use. The language, and the way in which it was ordinarily used, were there as empirical facts to be observed by those with the sensitivity to do so. Only in this way could its categories and fine distinc-tions, honed over generations, become available to the philosopher.  Examples of this philosophical method are to be found in many of Austin's own writings. For instance, in 'A plea for excuses', where he advocates philosophical attention to 'what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it', he suggests some of the words and phrases related to excuses that may shed light on its use: abstract nouns such as 'misconception', 'accident', 'purpose' and verbs such as  'couldn't help', 'didn't mean to', 'didn't realise'. 4º He proposes a philosophical methodology of 'going through the dictionary'; only such a rigorous analysis of the language will give a thorough and objective overview of the subject matter, which can then be subjected to a process of introspective analysis.  At the Play Group, linguistic botanising was no less painstaking, but it took a discursive, collaborative form. The members would, in effect, pool their linguistic resources in order to draw up lists of words related to the particular subject under discussion. They would then analyse the uses and nuances of these words, deciding which were suitable, and which unsuitable, in various different contexts. As Grice later explained it, they would examine a wide range of the relevant vocabulary, to 'get a list of "okes and nokes"'* J. O. Urmson has described the processes involved more fully:  Having collected in terms and idioms, the group must then proceed to the second stage in which, by telling circumstantial stories and constructing dialogues, they give as clear and detailed examples as possible of circumstances under which this idiom is to be preferred to that, and that to this, and of where we should (do) use this term and where that.... At [the next] stage we attempt to give general accounts of the various expressions (words, sentences, grammatical forms) under consideration; they will be correct and adequate if they make it clear why what is said in our various stories is or is not felic-itous, is possible or impossible.  42Austin argued that this process was both empirical and objective.  Several philosophers conferring together would avoid the possible distortions and idiosyncrasies that might skew the findings of a single researcher, as well as bringing together a wide range of different experiences and specialisms. At a conference in 1958, he was challenged to say what set of criteria was adequate for judging a philosophical analysis of a concept. He is reported as replying, 'If you can make an analysis convince yourself, no matter how hard you try to overthrow it, and if you can get a lot of cantankerous colleagues to agree with it, that's a pretty good criterion that there is something in it. '43 Their task was not just to list and to categorise areas of vocabulary, but to analyse the conceptual distinctions these indicated. Only after selecting relevant terms and discussing their usage was it legitimate to compare the findings with what philosophers had traditionally said. Despite his frosty demeanour and austere habits, Austin displayed huge enthusiasm and optimism, attitudes that infected the members of the Play Group. Grice has commented that Austin clearly found philosophy tremendous fun, although he 'would not be vulgar enough to say anything like that'. 4  If Austin's method attracted devotees, however, it also attracted critics. The practitioners of ordinary language philosophy saw it as an exciting new approach capable of overthrowing past orthodoxies and offering solutions to age-old problems, but its critics saw it as sterile and complacent, valuing lexicographical pedantry over real philosophical argument.4 Some of its more high profile opponents, such as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, targeted what they saw as the shallow insights, even the platitudes, to which the Oxford philosophers limited them-selves. Maintaining his position that ordinary language is simply not good enough for rigorous philosophical enquiry, Russell derided what he saw as the triviality of ordinary language philosophy; 'To discuss endlessly what silly people mean when they say silly things may be amusing but can hardly be important. Other critics targeted the practitioners more directly, characterising them as spoilt and snobbish, 'playing' at philosophy without feeling the need to justify their leisurely activities.  Ernest Gellner, a former student of Austin's, published a book in 1959 exclusively concerned with attacking the Oxford philosophers and their method. Gellner finds his own way of repeating Russell's mockery when he suggests that ordinary language philosophy suggests that 'the world is just what it seems (and as it seems to an unimaginative man at about mid-morning)' 4 This style of philosophy 'at long last, provided a philosophic form eminently suitable for gentlemen' because it demanded immense leisure and 'yet its message is that everything remains as itis'.48 C. W. K. Mundle argues that Austin's elitism mars his philosophy.  He detects prescriptivism beneath Austin's apparently descriptivist concern for 'what we should say'. 'In the name of ordinary language, he demands standards of purity and precision of speech which are extraordinarily rare except among men who got a First in Classical Greats.'49 There is undoubtedly some substance in the accusations of elitism.  The members of the Play Group shared an understanding that detailed analysis and meticulous enquiry were important ends in themselves, but also a certainty of leisure and means to pursue these ends. Their appointments did not carry the pressure to publish that to modern academics is a matter of course, a fact almost certainly crucial to the success of ordinary language philosophy. Linguistic botanising was often conducted self-consciously for its own sake, without expectations of spe-cific, publishable 'results'. Stuart Hampshire has admitted that Austin's method depended on a comparatively careless attitude to time and pub-lication: 'you're apt to get discouraged about publishing because you can't fit it all neatly into a journal article.  150  At the time, the Oxford philosophers were in general reluctant to argue their own case. Partly in response to this, Grice later took on the task of offering a first-hand account of ordinary language philosophy in defence against some of its critics. The subject clearly exercised him from the mid-1970s on; he talked, both formally and informally on the topic, and wrote copious notes about it. In a move that would have seemed to the critics to have confirmed their worst fears about snobbery and self-importance, he compares post-war Oxford to the Academy at Athens, with Austin by implication playing the role of Aristotle. In fact the comparison is not as pompous as it may first appear; Grice is not suggesting that mid-twentieth-century Oxford was as important to the history of philosophy as ancient Athens. Rather, he sees certain similarities between the two enterprises that gave ordinary language philosophy a philosophical pedigree its critics claimed it lacked. He sees reflections of Austin's method in what he describes as the 'Athenian dialectic': the interest in discourse ingeneral, and in the facts of speech in particular. The connection is summed up for Grice in the two aspects of the Athenian interest in ta Zeyoueva. The phrase can refer to 'what is spoken', both in the sense of ordinary ways of talking, and of generally received opinions. Both schools were concerned not just with the analysis of language, but with seeing the way people speak as a reflection of how they generally understand the world, a reflection of the  'common-sense' point of view. The difference is, Grice argues, that Austin and his school concentrated more closely on the first aspect;Aristotle and his on the second. Aristotle was concerned not so much with methodology as with picking out foundations of truth. Austin was interested in the 'potentialities of linguistic usage as an index of conceptual truth, without regard for any particular direction for the deployment of such truth.'51  Grice also addresses critics of ordinary language philosophy more directly, accusing them of simple misrepresentation. Gellner's book, in particular, he describes informally as 'a travesty'. In effect, he accuses the critics of inverted snobbery: of assuming that ordinary language philosophy must be trivial and elitist because it was practised by a socially privileged group of people in an ancient university. He admits that the style of philosophy came easiest to those who had received a classical, therefore a public school, education. Education in the classics had fitted the Oxford philosophers to the necessary close attention to linguistic distinctions: ordinary language philosophy involved 'the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage' 5 Grice's response is perhaps confused. At times he seems to accept the accusation of elitism but to argue against its derogatory implications. Why should high culture in philosophy be considered bad, he wonders, if it is prized in art, literature and opera? At other times, however, he seems simply to reject the accusation, arguing that anyone with suitably acute powers of observation could engage in this kind of analysis. This ambivalence is most apparent in some of his comments that did not make it into print. In a section of the handwritten draft of the 'Reply to Richards', but not of the published version, he comments on the accusation of elitism:  To this the obvious reply would seem to be that if it were correct that philosophy is worth fostering, and that proficiency demands a classical education, then that would provide additional strength to the case for the availability of a classical education. But I doubt if the facts are as stated; I doubt if 'linguistic sensitivity' is the prerogative of either the well-to-do or of the products of any particular style of education. 53  Grice's attitude to his social environment may have been, or have become, somewhat ambivalent, but during the 1940s and 1950s he was central to the ordinary language philosophy movement. He attended Austin's Saturday Mornings regularly and enthusiastically. Outside these meetings, he worked collaboratively with other members of the group.He even collaborated with Austin himself, although in teaching rather than writing. The two taught joint sessions on Aristotle. Grice later claimed that these were particularly easy teaching sessions for him because no preparation was necessary. They would simply arrive in class and Austin would start talking, freely and spontaneously. At some point Grice would find something with which he disagreed and say so, 'and the class would begin'* It seems that their style of teaching often rested on each holding fast to an opposing position. Speaking long after he had left Oxford, Grice recalled Austin's typical response when challenged on some point: 'Well, if you don't like that argument, here's another one.'55 Grice may have been amused by Austin's view of philosophy in terms of 'winning', but he himself was not likely to back down on a position once he had taken it up. However, this method had its successes. Their pupil J. L. Ackrill went on to become a Fellow of Brasenose College, and to publish his own translation of Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione in 1963. Among his acknowledgements to those who had helped him in understanding these works, he comments:  I am conscious of having benefited particularly from a class given at  Oxford in 1956-7 by the late J. L. Austin and Mr H. P. Grice.'56  For Grice himself, the most fruitful collaboration during this period was the joint work he undertook with Peter Strawson. Strawson had gone up to Oxford in 1939 and had been Grice's tutee. He later commented that: 'tutorials with [Grice] regularly extended long beyond the customary hour, and from him I learned more of the difficulty and possibilities of philosophical argument than from anyone else.'" Strawson's career also had been interrupted by the war, and he did not gain a permanent position until 1948, when he was appointed Fellow of University College. He was one of the younger members of the Play Group, but nevertheless a central figure in ordinary language philosophy, and unusually successful in completing work. In 1950 he published 'On referring', in which he offered a response to Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, an account that had been widely praised, and practically unchallenged, since it first appeared in 1905. Russell had argued that natural language can be misleading as to the structure of our knowledge of the world; Austin and his followers that, on the contrary, it is the best guide we have to that structure. Strawson suggests that, preoccupied with mathematics and logic, Russell had overlooked the fact that language is first and foremost a tool in communication. Russell had ignored the role of the speaker: '"mentioning", or "referring", is not something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do. Once an appropriate distinction is drawn between'a sentence' and 'a use of a sentence', it is possible to consider how most people would actually react on hearing the 'king of France' example (in which, for some reason, Strawson changes 'bald' to 'wise'). When used in 1950, or indeed in 1905, the example is not false. Rather, the question of whether it is true or false simply does not arise, precisely because the subject expression fails to pick out an individual in the world, and therefore the expression as a whole fails to say anything.  For Strawson, then, 'the king of France is wise' does not entail the existence of a unique king of France. Rather, it implies this existence in a 'special' way. In later work he uses the label 'presupposition' to describe this special type of implication. This was a term originally used by Frege in his discussion of denoting phrases and, like Frege, Strawson notes that presupposition is distinct from entailment because it is shared by both a sentence and its negation. Both 'the king of France is wise' and 'the king of France is not wise' share the presupposition that there exists a unique king of France, although their entailments contradict each other. On Russell's analysis, the negative sentence is ambiguous. Both the existence and the wisdom of the king of France are logical entailments, so either could be denied by negating the sen-tence. Strawson argues that Russell has attempted, inappropriately, to apply classical logic to what are in fact specific types of natural language use. 'Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language'; he concludes, 'for ordinary language has no exact logic.'60  Stawson and Grice taught together, covering topics such as meaning, categories and logical form. W. V. O. Quine, who attended some of their weekly seminars in the spring of 1954, paints a picture of these sessions:  Peter and Paul alternated from week to week in the roles of speaker and commentator. The speaker would read his paper and then the commentator would read his prepared comments. 'Towards the foot of page 9, I believe you said. Considered judgement was of the essence; spontaneity was not. When in its final phase the meeting was opened to public discussion, Peter and Paul were not outgoing.  'I'm not sure what to make of that question.' 'It depends, I should have thought, on what one means by .. 'This is a point that I shall think further about before the next meeting. '61  This style of debate was obviously not to Quine's taste, and there is certainly something reminiscent of Grice's former tutor W. F. R. Hardie in what he describes. Grice worked and talked very much within theformal and mannered social milieu of Oxford at the time. His lecture notes from the period, generall y written out in full, contain many references to what 'Mr Stawson proposed last week' or 'Mr Warnock has suggested'. But there is evidence also that the apparently prevaricating answers Quine ridicules were genuine responses to the complexity of the matter in hand. Grice often begins his lectures with a return to 'a question raised last week to which I had no answer'. Indeed, he later argued explicitly that philosophy works best not as a series of rapid retorts to impromptu questions, but as a slow and considered debate:  The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpov ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightening chess.  62  This slow, thoughtful style was carried over to the deliberation and composition of Grice and Strawson's writing and was, Grice later sug-gested, the reason why the collaboration eventually ceased. Strawson, who seems to have been much more interested in finished products than Grice was, eventually could no longer cope with the laborious process, in which complete agreement had to be reached over a sentence before anything could be written down. But it lasted long enough for Grice to be impressed by the 'extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport' they developed, such that 'the potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me.'63 One of their writing projects developed from their teaching on categories. Their topic dated back to Aristotle, and had also been discussed by Kant. It is a type of descriptive metaphysics, in that it involves analysis and classification towards an account of the very general notion of 'what there is'. In metaphysics, this account is offered in terms of the nature and status of reality, rather than in terms of the types of description of individual aspects of that reality to be found in the sciences. In particular, it is concerned with reality as reflected in human thought. Kant had argued that the study of human thinking is important precisely because it is the only guide we have to reality. The facts of 'things in themselves', aside from our human perceptions of them, are unknowable. For Aristotle, these questions had been closely linked to his interest in the study of language.  Human language is the best model we have available of human thought.  We structure our language to reflect the structure of our thought. So, for instance, the division of sentences into subjects and predicatesreflects the way we cognitively divide the world into things and attrib-utes, or particulars and universals.  Grice and Strawson's long, slow collaboration on this topic was not very productive, by modern standards at least, in that it resulted in no published work. But Grice himself valued it very highly, and commented late in his life that he had always kept the manuscripts with him. Unfortunately, only a fragment of these appears to have survived.  However, this is accompanied by rough notes indicating something of their working method. They apply a distinctively 'Austinian' approach to Aristotle's use of language, experimenting together to see which English words can successfully combine with which others, trying out combinations of possible subjects and predicates. Notes in Grice's hand record that 'healthy' can be applied to, or predicated of, 'person', 'place'  'occupation', or 'institution', while 'medical' can be applied to 'lecture'  'man', 'treatise', 'problem', 'apparatus', 'prescription', and 'advice'. 65 Grice notes that the neutral term 'employment' can cover the importantly different terms 'use', 'sense' and 'meaning', and that here it is perhaps most appropriate to say that the predicate has the particular range of 'uses'. This aspect of the work seems to take over Grice's attention at one point. The notions of 'sense', 'meaning' and 'use' need to be distinguished not just from each other, but between discussions of sentences and of speakers. 'Need to distinguish all these from cases where speaker might mean so-and-so or such-and-such, but wouldn't say that of the sentence' he notes, '"Jones is between Williams and Brown" either spatial order or order of merit, but doubtful this renders it an ambiguous sentence.'  The notes also explore the difference in grammatical distribution between substantial and non-substantial nouns. 'Mercy' can be both referred to and predicated, whereas 'Socrates' can only be referred to.  In other words, it seems that although both substantials and non-substantials can occupy subject position, substantials must be seen as the primary occupiers of this slot because they cannot occur as predi-cates. To demonstrate this point he distinguishes between establishing existence by referring to, and by predicating, expressions. The distinction is established by means of a comparison between two short dia-logues. The following is perfectly acceptable; evidence is successfully offered for the existence of a universal by predicating it of a particular:  Bunbury is really disinterested. Disinterested persons (real disinterestedness) does not exist. A: Yes they do (it does); Bunbury is really disinterested.In contrast descriptive statements do not guarentee the existence of their subjects, but rather stand in a 'special relation' to statements of existence. This special relation is, they note, elsewhere called 'presup-position'; it seems that at this stage at least, Grice was prepared to endorse Strawson's response to Russell. The following is 'not linguistically in order :  Bunbury is really disinterested. There is no such person as Bunbury. A: Yes there is, he is really disinterested.  Producing a sentence in which something is predicated of a substantial subject is not enough to guarentee the existence of that subject. They note that the situation would be quite different if 'in the next room' were substituted into A's response. Here A's choice of predicate does more than just offer a description of Bunbury; it points to a way of verifying his existence. Our use of language, then, very often presupposes the existence of substantial objects. Furthermore, substances are in a sense the basic, or primary objects of reference. Grice and Strawson admit that they have no conclusive proof of this latter claim, but they offer their own intuitions in support, presumably drawn from their experiments with substantial and non-substantial subjects. Further, substances are, in general, what we are most interested in talking about, asking about, issuing orders about; 'indeed the primacy of substance is deeply embedded in our language'  Grice later suggested that the closest echoes of this joint work in published writing were in Strawson's book Individuals, subtitled 'An essay in descriptive metaphysics', published in 1959. In this Strawson considers in much more detail the implications of various kinds of descriptive sentences for the theory of presupposition. But there were also resonances of the joint project in various aspects of Grice's own later work. Two points from the end of the manuscript fragment, one a non-linguistic parallel and one a consequence of their position, indicate these. The parallel comes from a consideration of the basic needs for survival and the attainment of satisfaction people experience as living creatures. Processes such as 'eating', 'drinking', 'being hurt by', 'using',  'finding', are entirely dependent on transactions with substances. Grice and Strawson suggest that it is not entirely fanciful to consider that the structure of language has developed to reflect the structure of these most basic interactions with the world.The relevant consequence of their position relates to a familiar target for ordinary language philosophers: the theory of sense data. Their argument is in essence a version of the argument from common sense, although they do not explicitly acknowledge this. If substances are a primary focus of interest, and if this fact is reflected in the language, then this offers good evidence that the world must indeed be substantial in character. If the proponents of sense data were correct, if all we can accurately discuss are the individual sensations we receive through our sense, then 'substantial terminology would have no application'. Of course, this argument is fundamentally dependent on faith in ordinary language. In effect it claims that, since people talk about, and indeed focus their talk on, material objects, we have adequate grounds for accepting that material objects exist.  The second major collaboration between Grice and Strawson, which produced their only jointly published paper, was composed uncharacteristically rapidly. It was written in the same year as Quine observed their joint seminars, and indeed was in direct response to his visit.  Quine introduced to Oxford an American style of philosophy. This had its roots in logical positivism, but had developed in rather different directions. In particular, Quine's empiricism took the form of an extreme scepticism towards meaning. He argued that it was legitimate to look at meaning in terms of how words are used to refer to objects in the world, but not to discuss meanings as if they had some existence independent of the set of such uses. In an essay published in 1953 he argues that the error of attributing independent existence to meaning explains the tenacity of the doctrine of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, even in empirical philosophies where it should have been abandoned.  Quine argues that, although it is a basic doctrine of many empirical theories, the analytic/synthetic distinction is inherently unempirical. It relies on the notion that words have meaning independent of individ-ual, observable instances of use. The sentence 'no bachelor is married' can be judged analytic and therefore necessarily true only on the assumption that 'bachelor' is synonymous with 'unmarried man'. Yet such an assumption depends on a commitment to abstract meaning. It is legitimate only to consider the range of phenomena to which the two terms are applied, a process that must inevitably be open-ended. In other words, we are committed to the truth of so-called analytic sentences for exactly the same reason that we are committed to the truth of certain synthetic sentences, such as 'Brutus killed Caesar'  Our past  experience of the world, including our experience of how the words ofour language are applied, has led us to accept them as true. However, our belief in any statement established on empirical grounds is subject to revision in the light of new experience. We may find it hard to imagine what experience could lead us to abandon belief in 'no bachelor is married', but that is simply because of the strength of our particular empirical commitment to it. The difference between analytic and synthetic statements, then, is not an absolute one, but simply a matter of degree. The distinction reflects 'the relative likelihood, in practice, of choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience'.66  One weekend during Quine's 1953-4 visit, Grice and Strawson put together their response to this argument, to be presented at a seminar on the Monday. In 1956 Strawson revised the paper on his own and sent it to The Philosophical Review, where it was published as 'In defence of a dogma'. Their defence is exactly of the type that Quine might have expected to encounter in Oxford in the 1950s; it rests on the way in which some of the key terms are actually used. The terms 'analytic' and  'synthetic' have a venerable pedigree. Generations of philosophers have found them useful in discussions of language and, moreover, are generally able to reach consensus over how they apply to novel, as well as to familiar examples. But the argument does not end with philosophical usage. Grice and Strawson argue that closely related distinctions can be found in everyday speech. The notion of analyticity rests, as Quine had noted, on the validity of synonymy. The expression 'synonymous' may not be very common in everyday speech, but the equivalent predicate 'means the same as' certainly is. Borrowing an example from Quine's essay, Grice and Strawson note that 'creature with a heart' is extensionally equivalent to 'creature with kidneys'; it picks out the same group of entities in the world precisely because all creatures with a heart also have kidneys. However, Grice and Stawson argue that the relationship between these two expressions is not the same as that between  'bachelor' and 'unmarried man'. Many people would be happy to accept that '"bachelor" means the same as "unmarried man"' but would reject  '"creature with a heart" means the same as "creature with kidneys"'.  In effect, Grice and Strawson are defending the existence of exactly the type of meaning Quine dismisses. The element distinguishing the second pair of terms, but not the first, cannot be anything to do with the objects in the world they are used to label, because in this they are exactly equivalent. Rather, there must be some further notion of  'meaning' that people are aware of when they deny that 'creature with heart' and 'creature with kidneys' mean the same. It is this notion ofmeaning, which forms part of the description of the language but does not directly relate to the world it describes, that Quine rules inadmissi-ble. This also allows for the existence of analytic sentences. 'A bachelor is an unmarried man' is analytic precisely because its subject means the same as its predicate. This can be confirmed by studying just the lan-guage, not the world. In much the same way, the meaning of some sentences makes them impossible in the face of any experience. That is, we just cannot conceive of any evidence that would lead us to acknowledge them as true. Grice and Strawson contrast 'My neighbour's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types' with 'My neighbour's three-year-old-child is an adult. The first may well strike us as impossible, but we can nevertheless imagine the sort of evidence that would force us, however reluctantly, to change our mind and accept it as true. But in the second case, unless we allow that the words are being used figuratively or metaphorically, there is just no evidence that could be produced to lead us to change our minds. The impossibility of the second example is entirely dependent on the meanings of the words it contains.  It is clear that the nature of analytic and synthetic sentences, and of our knowledge of them, exercised Grice a good deal both at this time and later. Kathleen Grice recalls that, during the 1950s, he delighted in questioning his children's playmates about 'whether something can be red and green all over'  ', and enjoyed their subsequent confusion, insist-  ing that spots and stripes were not allowed. As he observes in his own notes, 'Nothing can be red and green all over' is a supposed candidate for a statement that is both synthetic and a priori. Grice was presumably amusing himself by testing this claim out on some genuinely naive informants. In later years, he expressed himself still committed to the validity of the distinction between synthetic and analytic sentences, and indeed as seeing this as one of the most crucial of philosophical issues.  However, he had grown unhappy with his and Strawson's original defence of it. In particular, he no longer felt that it was enough to argue that the distinction is embedded in philosophical conscience. The argument indicates that the distinction is intelligible, in that it is possible to explain what philosophers mean by it, but not that it is theoretically necessary. In other words, 'the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny'? Certainly their case in defence of the distinction may seem rather weak as a piece of ordinary language philosophy. Austin had rejected other terms, such as 'sense data', precisely because theiruse seemed to be restricted to philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, philosophers as distinguished as Anthony Quinton found their argument against Quine compelling, paraphrasing them as saying that: 'An idea does not become technical simply by being dressed up in an ungainly polysyllable.' Grice never really returned to the task of mounting a new defence for the distinction, although he maintained that it was important and, crucially, 'doable'. 72  Grice's other major collaboration of the 1950s was with Geoffrey Warnock, a regular member of the Play Group, and later Principal of Hertford College. As with Strawson, Grice's collaboration with Warnock grew out of a joint teaching venture, and again this took the form of a series of evening lectures at which they alternated as speaker and com-mentator. The pace was leisurely and exploratory; a single topic might be developed over the course of a term, or even over successive years.  Their theme was perception, the subject of Austin's Sense and Sensibilia lectures. In these, Austin had applied his method of trying out examples to investigate shades of meaning for some of the relevant termi-nology. For instance, he argued that the terms 'looks', 'appears' and  'seems', which Ayer had assumed to be as good as synonymous, in fact displayed some striking differences in meaning when considered in a set such as 'the hill looks steep', 'the hill appears steep', 'the hill seems steep'73  Warnock has commented that, perhaps because of the intense treatment in these lectures, the vocabulary of perception was never discussed on Saturday mornings.* However, this was an omission that he and Grice made up for in private; their surviving notes are full of lists of words and usages by means of which they hoped to discover the understanding of perception embedded in the language. For instance, they draw up a list headed 'Syntax of Illusion', considering the various constructions in which the word 'illusion' can appear, and the shades of meaning associated with these. 'Be under the illusion (that)' and 'have the illusion (that)' are grouped together, presumably as predicates that can attach to people. 'Gives the illusion (that)' and 'creates the illusion (that)' are listed separately, with the note that these might 'apply exclusively to cases where anyone might be expected, in the circs, to handle the illusion'. The example 'it is an illusion' is accompanied by the unanswered question 'what is it?"7s  Grice and Warnock are concerned here with the so-called 'argument from illusion'. This had been put forward by a number of philosophers in support of the need to explain perception in terms of sense data. Austin spends a considerable proportion of Sense and Sensibiliaattacking Ayer over exactly this issue, although he acknowledges that Ayer's commitment to it is tentative. The argument draws on the fact that in a number of more or less mundane situations things appear to be other than they in fact are. For instance, a stick placed partially in water has the appearance of being bent, even though it is perfectly straight. When you look at your reflection in the mirror, your body appears to be located several feet behind the mirror when in fact it is located several feet in front of it. In these cases, the argument goes, there must be something that looks bent, or behind the mirror, that is distinct from the material object in question. The term 'sense data' is necessary in order to discuss this; the individual receives sense data that are distinct from the material object in question. From here, the argument is extended to cover all perception, even when no such illusions are involved. Seeing these types of illusion does not feel like a qualitatively different experience from seeing things as they actually are, hence it would be bizarre to maintain that the object of perception is of one kind in the cases of illusion and of another kind in other cases. It must be the case that all we ever do perceive are sense data, not material objects themselves.  Austin spends several lectures addressing these issues, arguing that it is an unnecessary imposition to claim that there must be one type of object of perception. Ayer and others have illegitimately assumed that optical illusions, such as the ones discussed, along with dreams, mirages, hallucinations and various other phenomena can all be explained in the same way. Rather, we see a whole host of different entities in different situations. These different types of experience are in fact generally fairly easy to distinguish, as any reflection on the language available to discuss them will reveal. People ordinarily are quite capable of saying that 'the stick looks bent but it is really straight'; it is philosophical sophistry to claim that there must be something, distinct from the stick itself, which has the 'look' in question. With typical bluntness, Austin dismisses the question of what you see when you see a bent stick as 'really, completely mad'. And with perhaps some sleight of hand he dismisses the mirror example by arguing that what actually is several feet behind the mirror is 'not a sense datum, but some region in the adjoining room'.76  In their lectures on perception, Grice and Warnock take up the question of whether or not it is legitimate to talk of any intermediary between material objects and our perceptions of them. They notice an asymmetry between the senses, or at least the vocabulary that describes them. The verbs 'hear', 'smell' and 'taste' can all take objects that donot describe material phenomena. It is possible to 'hear a car', but is equally possible to 'hear the sound of a car'  . In a similar way, it is pos-  sible to describe the 'smell of a cheese' or the 'taste of a cake'. This is not the case for the other two senses. The objects of touch are always material and not, or not primarily, the 'feeling' of material things.  Feeling, they note, perhaps entails having sensations, but it is not the case that these sensations are what we feel. Furthermore, there is no word at all to occupy this intermediary place in the case of sight. Certainly there is no general word analogous to 'sounds'. This conclusion was not reached lightly. Notes in Grice's hand on the back of an envelope try out a list of words in an attempt to find a suitable candidate for the role, but all are rejected. The following types of objects, he notes, fail to fit the bill because they are not universal objects of seeing;  'surface, colour, aspect, view, sight, gleam, appearance...' can all be used, but only in special circumstances. In most cases, we simply talk of seeing the object in question.  In response to this lack of a word analogous to 'sound', Grice and Warnock do something rather surprising for philosophers of ordinary language; they make one up. They introduce the word 'visa' to describe the non-material intermediaries between material objects and sight.  Commenting later on this enterprise, Grice was keen to point out that ordinary language philosophy did not in fact rule out the introduction of jargon, so long as it was what he rather enigmatically describes as  'properly introduced'." Their manoeuvre was rather different from that of introducing a technical term such as 'sense data',  ', and then basing a  philosophy around the existence of sense data. Instead, they were giving a name to what they had discovered to be a gap in the language in order to explore the language itself: to consider why no such word, and therefore presumably no such concept, was necessary. Their suggestion is that sight and touch are the two essential senses. That is, they are the senses on which we rely most closely to tell us about the material world. Touch is primary. Material objects are most essentially present to us through touch, and this is the sense we would be least ready to disbelieve.  However, because our capacity to touch material objects at any one time is limited, we rely to varying degrees on our other senses. Of these, sight correlates most closely with touch. It offers us the best indication of what an object would feel like. It is also more constant; an object capable of being heard may sometimes fail to produce its distinctive sound, but an object capable of being seen cannot fail to produce its  'visum'. For precisely this reason, the word 'visum', to describe something separate from the object producing it, does not exist.There are two possible accounts of the absence of a word such as  'visum'. The stronger account is that there is no space in the language for such a word; it could not exist. The weaker claim is that such a word could exist, but there is simply no need for it, because we never need to talk about the perceptions of sight without talking about material objects themselves. Warnock held to the stronger view and Grice to the weaker. This difference seems to have been rather a fraught one; Grice begins one lecture with the following extended metaphor.  I begin with an apology (or apologia). Last week it might well have appeared to some that W. was doing the digging while I was administering the digs. I should not like it to be thought that I am not in sympathy with his main ideas about 'visa'; the only question in my mind is precisely what form an answer on his general lines should take; and if I am busier with the awl than with the spade, the reason (aside from ineptitude with the latter instrument) is that I am pretty sure that he is digging in the right place.  78  It seems that the previous week Warnock had argued that if there were a word 'visum'  ', then, analogous to sound, it would have to be possible  to say that a material object could be 'visumless', but that this would not fit into our existing conceptual framework. Grice's argument is that if we want to use such a word, we can always make use of one of his suggestions, such as 'colour expanse'. It is probably correct to say that whenever we see a material object we see a colour expanse, but such an expression is reserved for those occasions when appearance and reality differ. It would not be strictly false to use them on other occasions, but:  'it would be unnatural or odd to employ this expression outside a limited range of situations, just because the empirical facts about perception mentioned by W. ensure that normally we are in a position to use stronger and more informative language! Grice's implication is that if a speaker is in a position to say something more informative, the less informative statement would not be used.  There was no joint publication for Grice and Warnock. On his own, Warnock did publish in this general field, although he did not make direct use of the notion of 'visa'. His 1955 paper to the Aristotelian Society, 'Seeing', is chiefly concerned with a close examination of 'the actual employment of the verb "to see"' 79 Warnock considers the implications of the various categories of object that the verb commonly takes.  In a footnote he acknowledges his general debt to 'Mr H. P. Grice'. Grice himself made even less direct use of their joint project in his own laterwork, although in the early 1960s he published two papers concerned with general questions about the status of perception. Later in that same decade he wrote a reflection on Descartes, although this was not published for more than 20 years.81 Descartes's scepticism leads Grice to reconsider the claims of phenomenalism, and to argue for a clearer distinction between 'truth-conditions', 'establishment-conditions' and  'reassurance-conditions' for statements about material objects.  It is evident that in drawing on the vocabulary of perception, Grice and Warnock were not just dutifully following Austin's lead; both were enthusiastic about the enterprise, and impressed by its results. Warnock recalls that at one point during this process Grice exclaimed, 'How clever language is!', and goes on himself to gloss this remark by explaining:  'We found that it made for us some remarkably ingenious distinctions and assimilations.'8 At this stage at least, Grice was committed to the close study of ordinary language as a productive philosophical enter-prise, and to Austin's notion of 'linguistic botanising' as a philosophical tool. He was very much a part of the social, as well as the philosophical, milieu of 1950s Oxford. He and Kathleen still lived on the Woodstock Road with their children Karen and Tim, born in 1944 and 1950. However, he took a full and active role in the life of St John's College which meant dining there frequently. Kathleen remembers the college as a distant, hierarchical institution. Women were permitted to enter college only once a year, when the porters and college servants arranged a Christmas party for the wives and children of Fellows.83 Quine's thumbnail sketch of his impressions of Grice in 1953, unflattering in the extreme, suggests that his concern for college proprieties was even stronger than his disregard for personal appearance:  Paul was shabby... His white hair was sparse and stringy, he was missing some teeth, and his clothes interested him little. He was vice-president of St John's college, and when I came as guest to a great annual feast there I was bewildered to encounter him impeccably decked out in white tie and tails, strictly fashion-plate.84  The vice-presidentship in question was a one-year appointment, and seems to have been largely social in nature, concerned with the organ-isation and running of college events. However, Grice's academic standing was also rising; in 1948 he was appointed to a University lectureship in addition to his college fellowship. This meant giving lectures open to all members of the university, in addition to the tutorial teaching duties at St. John's. Grice was also making a growing number of visitsaway from Oxford to give lectures and seminars. Most significantly, he began to make fairly frequent trips to America, where he was invited to speak at various universities. He was in fact one of the few to talk about ordinary language philosophy outside Oxford at that time, giving the lecture later published as 'Post-War Oxford Philosophy' at Wellesley College, Massachusetts in 1958.8 However, during this time he was gradually moving away from some of the strictures and dogmas of that approach. In many ways, Grice never fully abandoned ordinary language philosophy; his notes testify to the fact that he frequently returned to it as a method, in particular using 'linguistic botany' to get his thinking started on some topic. However, his philosophy began to diverge from it during this period in some highly significant ways that were to make themselves manifest in his best known work.G rice's growing unease with ordinary language philosophy brought him into conflict with J. L. Austin. Speaking long after leaving Oxford, he mentioned that he himself had always got on well with Austin, at least  'as far as you can get on with someone on the surface so uncosy'! But he clearly found that engaging with him in philosophical discussion could be a frustrating enterprise. Austin would adopt a stance on some particular aspect of language, often formed on the basis of a very small number of examples, and defend his position against a barrage of objections and counter-examples, however obvious. His tenacity in this would be impressive; Grice knew he himself had won an argument only on those occasions when Austin did not return to the topic the following week.  There is something in this reminiscent of the criticisms of obstinacy levelled against Grice himself as an undergraduate. However, it seems that there was more to Grice's frustration than simply encountering someone even less ready to back down in an argument than he was himself. He was becoming increasingly unhappy with the methodology supporting Austin's hasty hypothesis formation: the absolute reliance on particular linguistic examples. It is not that Grice lost faith in the importance of ordinary language or the value of close attention to differences in usage. However, along with some of Austin's harsher and more outspoken critics, Grice came to regard his approach as unfocused and even trivial. In his reminiscences of Oxford, he complained that Austin's ability to distinguish the philosophically interesting from the mundane was so poor that the Saturday morning Play Group sometimes ended up devoting an inordinate amount of time to irrelevant minu-tiae. They once spent five weeks trying to discern some philosophically interesting differences between 'very' and 'highly', considering why, forinstance, we say 'very unhappy' but not 'highly unhappy'. The result was 'total failure'. On another occasion, Austin proposed to launch a discussion of the philosophical concept of Pleasure with a consideration of such phrases as I have the pleasure to announce..!. Stuart Hampshire remarked to Grice that this was rather like meeting to discuss the nature of Faith, and proceeding to discuss the use of 'yours faithfully'.  In a similar vein, Grice was far from convinced that Austin's trusted method of 'going through the dictionary' had much to offer in the way of philosophical illumination. Speaking publicly in the 1970s, he commented that he once decided to put this method to the test by using it to investigate the vocabulary of emotions. He started at the beginning of a dictionary in search of words that could complement the verb 'to feel'. He gave up towards the end of the Bs, on discovering that the verb would tolerate 'Byzantine', and realising that 'the list would be enor-mous'? He never found any satisfactory way of narrowing such a list so as to include only philosophically interesting examples, and clearly believed that Austin had no such method either. Grice did not hesitate to explain his views to Austin, whose reply was typical of both his commitment to his methodology, and his intransigent response to opposi-tion. Grice reports himself as commenting that he, for one, 'didn't give a hoot what the dictionary says', to which Austin retorted, 'and that's where you make your big mistake. 3  The differences between Austin and Grice were not simply matters of personality or even of methodology. They reflected some important ways in which the two philosophers disagreed over what was appropriate in an account of language. Grice was increasingly convinced of the necessity for explanations that took the form of general theories, rather than the ad hoc descriptions that were Austin's trademark. He believed that Austin should be prepared to go further in drawing out the theoretical implications of his individual observations. Indeed, it has been suggested that Austin was suspicious of broad theories, generally supposing them to be over-ambitious and premature.* Grice also differed from Austin in his growing conviction that a distinction needed to be recognised between what words literally or conventionally mean, and what speakers may use them to mean on particular occasions. This conviction is not present in his earliest work. In 'Personal identity', for instance, he writes of 'words' and of 'the use of words' interchangeably.  However, the distinction is the subject of the long digression in his notes for the 'Categories' project with Strawson. It was to play an increasingly prominent part in his work, and to set him apart mostsharply from the orthodoxies of ordinary language philosophy. For Austin, as for Wittgenstein in his later work, use was the best, indeed the only, legitimate guide to meaning. The privilege afforded to use left no room for a distinction between this and literal meaning. Grice did not claim that actual use is unimportant. Indeed, in many of his writings he studied it with as much zeal as Austin. Rather, he saw it as a reliable guide just to what people often communicate, not necessarily to strict linguistic meaning.  Both the general interest in explanatory theories and the more particular focus on the distinction between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning are apparent in 'Meaning', a short but hugely influential article first published in 1957. It is tempting to trace the development of Grice's ideas through his work during the 1950s, but in fact this is ruled out by the article's history. Grice wrote the paper in practically its final form in 1948 for a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society but, as usual, he was hesitant to disseminate his ideas more widely. Almost a decade later, Peter Strawson was worried that the Oxford philosophers were not sufficiently represented in print. Unable to convince Grice to revise his paper and send it to a journal, he persuaded him to hand over the manuscript as it stood. Strawson and his wife Ann edited it and submitted it to the Philosophical Review. The paper therefore dates in fact from before Grice's collaborations with Warnock and with Strawson, from before Austin's development of speech act theory, and before even the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind.  'Meaning' offers a deceptively straightforward-looking account of meaning, apparently based on a common-sense belief about the use of language. In effect, Grice argues that what speakers mean depends on what they intend to communicate. However, his project is much more ambitious, and its implications more far-reaching, and also more prob-lematic, than this suggests. First, he introduces hearers, as well as speak-ers, into the account of meaning. The intention to communicate is not sufficient; this intention must be recognised by some audience for the communication to succeed. Hence the speaker must have an additional intention that the intention to communicate is recognised. More sig-nificantly, Grice proposes to broaden out his account to offer a theory of linguistic meaning itself. Linguistic meaning depends on speaker meaning, itself explained by the psychological phenomenon of inten-tion; conventional meaning is to be defined in terms of psychology.  In the opening paragraphs of 'Meaning', Grice does something Austin seems never to have attempted. He focuses the methodology of ordinary language philosophy on the concept of meaning itself, consider-ing and comparing some different ways in which the word 'mean' is used. His conclusion is that there are two different uses of 'mean' reflecting two different ways in which we generally conceive of meaning. The first use is exemplified by sentences such as 'those spots mean measles' and 'the recent budget means that we shall have a hard year'. The second includes examples such as 'those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full' and 'that remark, "Smith couldn't get on without his trouble and strife", meant that Smith found his wife indispensable'. Grice draws up a list of five defining differences between these sets of examples, differences themselves expressed in terms of linguistic relations. For instance, the first, but not the second set of examples entail the truth of what is meant. It is not possible to add 'but he hasn't got measles', but it is possible is to add 'but the bus isn't in fact full - the conductor has made a mistake'. Further, the examples in the first set do not convey the idea that anyone meant anything by the spots or by the budget. It is, however, possible to say that someone meant something by the rings on the bell (the conductor) and by the remark (the original speaker). And only in the second set of examples can the verb 'mean' be followed by a phrase in quotation marks. So 'those three rings on the bell mean "the bus is full"' is pos-sible, but not 'those spots mean "measles"'.  Grice characterises the difference between his two sets of uses for  'mean' as a difference between natural and non-natural meaning. The latter, which includes but is not exhausted by linguistic meaning, he abbreviates to 'meaningn'. In pursuing the question of what makes  'meaning' distinctive, he considers but rejects a 'causal' answer. He offers the following as a summary of this type of answer, paraphrasing and partly quoting C. L. Stevenson:  For x to meann something, x must have (roughly) a tendency to produce in an audience some attitude (cognitive or otherwise) and the tendency, in the case of a speaker, to be produced by that atti-tude, these tendencies being dependent on 'an elaborate process of conditioning attending the use of the sign in communication'.  This account makes the causal answer look very much like be-haviourism, with its notion of meaning as, in effect, the tendency for certain responses to be exhibited to certain stimuli. However, in the work from which Grice quotes, a book called Ethics and Language published in 1944, Stevenson is careful to distance himself from straightforwardly behaviouristic psychology. He argues that such an accountwould be too simplistic to explain a process as complex as linguistic meaning because it could refer only to overt, observable behaviour.  Rather, meaning is a psychologically complex phenomenon. The  'responses' produced will include cognitive responses, such as belief and emotion. Therefore, any account in terms of responsive action must be allowed 'to supplement an introspective analysis, not to discredit it'.  Stevenson, like Grice after him, draws attention to a distinction between two ways in which 'mean' is used, although he does so only in passing. He, too, defines one class of meaning as 'natural', a class he illustrates by suggesting that 'a reduced temperature may at times  "mean" convalescence'? He contrasts these uses of 'mean' with linguistic meaning which, he argues, is dependent on convention. The ways in which speakers use words on individual occasions may vary considerably, but conventional meaning must be seen as primary and relatively stable, underlying any of the more specific meanings in context. A word may be used in context to 'suggest' many things over and above what by convention it 'means'.  '. So, for instance, the sentence  'John is a remarkable athlete' may have a disposition to make people think that John is tall, 'but we should not ordinarily say that it "meant" anything about tallness, even though it "suggested" it'. The connection between 'athlete' and 'tall' is not one of linguistic rule, so tallness cannot be part of the meaning, however strongly it is suggested. What is suggested can sometimes be even more central, as in the cases of metaphors. Here, a sentence is 'not taken' in its literal meaning, but can be paraphrased using an 'interpretation' that 'descriptively means what the metaphorical sentence suggests'?  Grice's critique of the 'causal' theory of meaning includes a response to Stevenson's 'athlete' example. He argues that, in declaring 'tallness' to be suggested rather than meant, Stevenson is in effect pointing to the fact that it is possible to speak of 'nontall athletes': that there is no contradiction in terms here. This argument, Grice claims, is circular. He does not elaborate this point, but he presumably means that in establishing the acceptability of this way of speaking we need to refer to the conventions of linguistic behaviour, yet it is these very conventions we are seeking to establish. Grice adds that, on Stevenson's account, it would be difficult to exclude forms of behaviour we would not normally want to regard as communicative at all. It may well be the case that many people, seeing someone putting on a tailcoat, would form the belief that that person is about to go to a dance, and that the belief would arise because that is conventional behaviour in such circum-stances. But it could hardly be correct to conclude that putting on a tail-coat means n that one is about to go to a dance. To qualify by stating that the conventions invoked must be communicative simply introduces another circle: 'We might just as well say "X has meaning. if it is used in communication", which, though true, is not helpful.'o As a solution to the problems inherent in the notion of conventional behaviour, Grice introduces intention, doing so abruptly and without much elaboration. However, the concept would probably not have been much of a surprise to his original audience in 1948, having had a long pedigree in Oxford philosophy. Grice later commented that his interest in intention was inspired in part by G. F. Stout's 'Voluntary action' Stout was a previous editor of Mind, and his article was published there in 1896. In it he argues that if voluntary action is to be distinguished from involuntary action in terms of 'volition', it is necessary to offer a unique account of volition, distinguishing it from will or desire. He suggests that in the case of volition, but not of simple desire, there is necessarily 'a certain kind of judgement or belief', namely that 'so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the attainment of the desired end'." Indeed, if there is any doubt about the outcome of the volition, expressed in a conditional statement, this must refer to circumstances outside our control. This explains the difference between willing something and merely wishing for it. However, there is another crucial distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. In the case of the former, the action takes place precisely because of the relevant belief; a voluntary action happens because we judge that we will do it. An involuntary action may be one we judge is going to take place, but only because other factors have already determined this.  Further light is shed on Grice's interest in intention by a paper called  'Disposition and intention' he circulated among his colleagues just a few years after he had first written 'Meaning'. The paper was never pub-lished, and has survived only in manuscript, accompanied by a number of written responses in different hands. Reading these, it is not hard to imagine how a writer who tended towards perfectionism and self-doubt could be further dissuaded from publication by the results of canvassing opinion. Oxford criticism might be couched in genteel terms, but it could be harsh. One commentary begins: 'What it comes to, I think, is this; it seems to me that there is something wrong with the way Grice  goes to work....  ^ In 'Dispositions and intentions', Grice declares that  his purpose is to consider the best analysis of 'psychological concepts', concepts generally expressed in statements beginning with phrases such as 'I like.., 'I want..!, I expect... Such statements present analytical problems because they seem to refer to experience that is essen-tially private and unverifiable. Grice proposes to compare two common approaches to this problem. One he labels the 'dispositional' account, whereby the relevant concept is seen as a disposition to act in certain ways in certain hypothetical situations. Thus a statement of 'I like X' could be seen as specifying that the subject would act in certain ways in the interests of X, should the situation arise. The alternative is to consider such statements as describing 'special episodes', in other words to concede that they can be understood as descriptive only of private sensations, directed simply at the individual concept in question. These sensations take the form of special and highly specific psychological entities, such as liking-feelings'. Grice is dismissive of a third pos-sibility, an explanation from behaviourism describing psychological concepts purely in terms of observable responses. He rejects such approaches as 'silly'.  Grice argues that although the dispositional account runs into difficulty in certain cases, such as 'I want..!, 'I expect..' and, signifi-cantly, T intend.., it is not appropriate simply to switch to the 'special episode' account. The problems for the dispositional account are connected to their analysis in terms of hypotheticals. It would seem reasonable in the case of any genuine hypothetical to ask 'how do you know?' or 'what are your grounds for saying that?'. But in the case of the psychological concepts mentioned above, no such evidence can generally be offered, or reasonably expected. Speakers cannot be expected to be judging such concepts from observation, not even from a special vantage point; they can only be judging from personal ex-perience. In Grice's metaphor, 'I am not in the audience, not even in the front row of the stalls, I am on the stage.'3 The 'special episode' account does not fare much better. Every case of wanting, for instance, must create a separate psychological episode. The system of explanation quickly becomes unwieldy; wanting an apple, for instance, must be a discrete phenomenon, different from wanting an orange or a pear or a banana.  The third alternative, any version of a behaviourist account, is simply doomed to failure in cases such as 'want'. Grice singles Gilbert Ryle out for criticism. Ryle's account of psychological concepts is at best not clearly distinguished from behaviourism because of its ambiguity over whether the evidential counterparts of dispositions can be private or must always be observable by other people. In The Concept of Mind, Ryle describes certain statements concerned with psychological concepts as acts characteristic of certain moods. This is in keeping with his refusal to distinguish between physical and mental entities or activities. Whenwe feel bored, we are likely to utter 'I feel bored' in just the same way as we are likely to yawn. We do not observe our own mood and then offer an account of it; we simply act in accordance with it. Thus the statement is not produced as a result of assessing the evidence, but may itself form part of that relevant evidence, even to the speaker. 'So the bored man finds out he is bored, if he does find this out, by finding that among other things he glumly says to others and to himself "I feel bored" and "How bored I feel" '14 In response to such statements, we may want to ask 'sincere or shammed?', but not 'true or false?'. This is because statements such as 'I feel bored', ' I want..!' or 'I hope ..! act not as descriptive statements about ourselves but as 'avowals': unreflective utterances that may be treated as pieces of behaviour indicative of our frame of mind. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of Russell's analysis of definite descriptions, Ryle argues that the grammatical form of such sentences 'makes it tempting to misconstrue [them] as self-descriptions'. 15 In fact they are simply things said in the relevant frames of mind. However, unlike other forms of behaviour, speech is produced to be interpreted.  Grice argues that the difference between speech and other forms of behaviour is much greater than Ryle allows. In particular, while it is possible to 'sham' behaviour such as yawning without being false, a  'shammed' statement of 'I feel bored' will be simply false. A statement of boredom is not of the same order as a yawn when it comes to offering information precisely because, as Ryle acknowledges, it is uttered voluntarily and deliberately. Grice adds another possible indicator of boredom into the comparison. When listening to a political speech, we might give an indication that we feel bored by saying 'I feel bored', by yawning, or indeed by making a remark such as 'there is a good play coming on next week'. This last remark is also voluntary and deliber-ate, but it does not offer anything like the same strength of evidence of our state of boredom as the alleged 'avowal', precisely because it is not directly concerned with our state of mind. Only 'I am bored' is a way of telling someone that you are bored. Furthermore, although it might be possible to some extent to sustain a theory of avowals or other behav-iour as offering information about the state of mind of others, it will hardly do for one's own state of mind. A man does not need to wait to observe himself heading for the plate of fruit on the table before he is a position to know that he wants pineapple.  Grice's suggested solution to the apparent failure of the 'dispositional' and the 'special event' accounts, together with the unsustainability of a behaviourist approach, rests on intention. When analysing manyverbs of psychological attitude used to refer to someone else, we can produce a straightforward hypothetical, saying 'if so and so were the case he would behave in such and such a way'. However, the same does not seem to be the case when talking about oneself. 'If so and so were the case I would behave in such and such a way' cannot really be understood as a statement of hypothetical fact, but as a statement of hypothetical intention, just so long as the behaviour in question can be seen as voluntary. Further, it is simply not possible to say 'I am not sure whether I intend.', in the way it is possible to doubt other psychological states. It might be possible to utter such a sentence meaning-fully, but only to express indecision over the act in question, as when someone replies to the question 'Do you intend... ?' by saying 'I'm not sure'  '. It cannot mean that the speaker does not know whether he or she  is in a psychological state of intending or not.  Grice argues that a correct analysis of intention can form an important basis for the analysis of a number of the relevant psychological con-cepts. He offers a twofold definition of statements of intention, which relies on dispositional evidence without divorcing itself completely from the privileged status of introspective knowledge. The first crite-rion, familiar from Stout's original paper, is that the speaker's freedom from doubt that the intended action will take place is not dependent on any empirical evidence. Grice's second stipulation is that the speaker must be prepared to take the necessary steps to bring about the fulfil-ment of the intention. There would be something decidedly odd about stating seriously, 'X intends to go abroad next month, but wouldn't take any preliminary steps which are essential for this purpose'. Grice's analysis of statements of intention ends his unpublished paper rather abruptly, without returning to the other psychological verbs discussed at the outset. Having established that a doubt over one's own intention is something of an absurdity, he offers a characteristically tantalis-ing suggestion that 'we may hope that this may help to explain the absurdity of analogous expressions mentioning some other psychological concepts, though I wouldn't for a moment claim that it will help to explain all such absurdities.' Although his analysis of psychological concepts is here incomplete, he has established two significant com-mitments. First, he has justified the inclusion of psychological concepts in analyses; they do not need to be 'translated' away into behavioural tendencies or observable phenomena. Second, he has established the concept of intention as primary; it offers an illustration of how a psychological concept may be described, and is also in itself implicit in the analysis of other such concepts.Grice was not the only Oxford philosopher to revisit the topic of intention in the mid-twentieth century. In 1958, Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart published 'Decision, intention and certainty'. This echoes Grice's earlier, unpublished paper in arguing that there is a type of certainty about future actions, independent of any empirical evidence, that is characteristic of intention. They distinguish between a 'prediction' of future action and a 'decision' about it. A statement of the first is based on considering evidence, but a statement of the second on considering reason, even if this is not done consciously. People who say 'I intend to do X' may reasonably be taken to be committed to the belief that they will try to do X, and will succeed in doing X unless prevented by forces outside their control. Hampshire and Hart's claims are similar to those of Stout, but there are interesting differences in approach and style, revealing of the distance between the philosophical methods characteristic of their times. Stout is representative of an older style of Oxford philosophy, complete with sweeping generalisations and moralistic musings. In discussing the tendency of voluntary determination to endure over time and against obstacles, he comments that: 'If we are weak and vacillating, no one will depend on us; we shall be viewed with a kind of contempt. Mere vanity may go far to give fixity to the will.16 After logical positivism, and after Austin's insistence on close attention to the testimony of ordinary language, such unempirical excesses would not have been tolerated. Hampshire and Hart stick to more sober reflections on the language of intention and certainty. They come very close to one of Austin's observations in 'A plea for excuses' when they comment that: 'If I am telling you simply what someone did, e.g. took off his hat or sat down, it would normally be redundant, and hence mis-leading, though not false, to say that he sat down intentionally."' They describe the adverb 'intentionally' as usually used to rule out the suggestion that the action was in some way performed by accident or mistake. Also like Austin, they do not dwell on the possible consequences of the inclusion of the 'redundant' material.  An interest in the psychological concept of intention, and a reaction against the behviouristic tendencies he identified in work by Stevenson and by Ryle, were not the only sources of inspiration for Grice's  'Meaning'. In the following brief paragraph from that article, he comments on theories of signs:  The question about the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning is, I think, what people are getting at when they display an interest in a distinction between 'natural' and 'conventional' signs.But I think my formulation is better. For some things which can mean. something are not signs (e.g. words are not), and some are not conventional in any ordinary sense (e.g. certain gestures); while some things which mean naturally are not signs of what they mean (cf. the recent budget example). 18  The mention of 'people' is not backed up by any specific references, but the unpublished papers Grice kept throughout his life include a series of lectures notes from Oxford in which he presents and discusses the  'theory of signs' put forward in the nineteenth century by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce. These suggest that Grice's account of meaning developed in part from his reaction to Peirce, whose general approach would have appealed to him. Peirce was anti-sceptical, committed to describing a system of signs elaborate enough to account for the classification of the complex world around us, a world independent of our perceptions of it, and available for analysis by means of those perceptions. His theory of signs was therefore based on a notion of categories as the building blocks of knowledge; signs explain the ways we represent the world to ourselves and others in thought and in language.  In a paper from 1867, Peirce reminds his readers 'that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it'l' Conceptions, and the signs we use to identify them, comprise our understanding of the world. Signs act by representing objects to the understanding of receivers, but there are a number of different ways in which this may take place. There are some representations  'whose relation to their object is a mere community of some quality, and these representations may be termed likenesses', such as for example the relationship between a portrait and a person. The relations of other representations to their object 'consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed indices or signs'; a weathercock represents the direction of the wind in this way. In the third case, there are no such factual links, merely conventional ones. Here the relation of representation to object 'is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed symbols'; such is the relationship between word and object.2º Peirce later extended the general term 'sign' to cover all these cases, and used the specific terms icon, index and symbol for his three classes of representation.  In his lectures and notes on 'Peirce's general theory of signs', Grice analyses Peirce's use of the term 'sign', and proposes to equate it witha general understanding of 'means'. His chief argument in favour of this equation is that Peirce is not using 'sign' in anything recognisable as its everyday or ordinary sense. In a piece of textbook ordinary language philosophy, he argues that 'in general the use (unannounced) of technical or crypto-technical terms leads to nothing but trouble, obscuring proper questions and raising improper ones'.?' Restating Peirce's claims about 'signs' in terms of 'means' draws attention to shared features of a range of items commonly referred to as having 'meaning', as well as highlighting some important differences between Peirce's categories of  'index' and 'symbol'. Grice does not seem to have anything to say about Peirce's 'icons'.  , perhaps because this type of sign is least amenable to  being re-expressed in terms of meaning.  Using his translation of 'is a sign of' into 'means', Grice reconsiders Peirce's own example of an index. He observes that the sentence 'the position of the weathercock meant that the wind was NE' entails, first, that the wind was indeed NE; and second, that a causal connection holds between the wind and weathercock. This feature, he notes, seems to be restricted to the word 'means'. You can say 'the position of the weathercock was an indication that the wind was NE, but it was actually SE'; 'was an indication that' is not a satisfactory synonym of 'means' because it does not entail the truth of what follows. The causal connection also offers an interesting point of comparison to different ways in which 'mean' is used. Grice draws on an example that also appears in 'Meaning' when he suggests a conversation at a bus stop as the bus goes. The comment 'Those three rings of the bell meant that the bus was full' could legitimately be followed by a query of 'was it full?'.  At this early stage in the development of his account of meaning, Grice was obviously troubled by the relationship between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and that between the meaning words have by convention and the full import they may convey in particular contexts. There is no fully developed account of these issues in the lec-tures, but there are a few rough notes suggesting that he was aware of the need to identify some differences between 'timeless' meaning and speaker meaning. At one point he notes to himself that the following questions will need answers: 'what is the nature of the distinction between utterances with "conventional" meaningn and those with non-conventional?' and 'nature of distinction between language and use language? (sic)'. Elsewhere, he ponders the difference between 'what a sentence means (in general; timeless means; if you like the meaning of (type) sentence)' and 'what I commit myself to by the use of a sentence (if you like, connect this with token sentence)'. It is not clear fromthis whether he is seeing 'non-conventional' aspects of meaning as separate from, or coterminous with, those aspects of meaning arising from particular uses in context. However, the first two questions suggest that  'non-conventional' and 'use' are at least potentially separate issues.  When Grice collected his thoughts on meaning into the form in which they were eventually published, he produced a definition dependent on a complex of intentions. In the case of straightforwardly informative or descriptive statements, meaning is to be defined in terms of a speaker's intention to produce certain beliefs in a hearer. It is also necessary that the speaker further intends that the hearer recognise this informative intention and that this recognition is itself the cause of the hearer's belief. This definition excludes from meaningn a case where 'I show Mr X a photograph of Mr Y displaying undue familiarity to Mrs X', but includes the related but crucially different case where 'I draw a picture of Mr Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr X'.22 In the former case, the effect would be produced in Mr X whether or not he paid any attention to the intention behind the behaviour. In the second example the recognition of this intention is crucial, and precisely this case would normally be seen as a piece of communication. A similar distinction can be made when the definition is extended to include communication intended to influence the action of others. A policeman who stops a car by standing in its way will produce his desired effect whether or not the motorist notices his intention. A policeman who stops a car by waving is relying on the motorist recognising the wave as intended to make him stop. The latter, but not the former, is an example of meaningnn. Avoiding the problem he identified in Stevenson's work, that of being unable to offer a full account of partic-ular, context-bound uses, Grice proposes to describe meaning in relation to a speaker and a particular occasion in the first place, and the meaningn of words and phrases as secondary, and derived from this.  He tentatively suggests that 'x means. that so-and-so' might be equated with some statement 'about what "people" (vague) intend (with qualifications about "recognition") to effect by x'.23  In the concluding paragraphs of his article, Grice alludes briefly to two further aspects of meaning that draw on the questions he was posing himself in his notes and that were to prove central to his later work. First, although he is dealing primarily with specific instances of meanings on particular occasions, his account of meaning is not intended to cover the total significance potentially associated with the use of an expression. He draws a distinction between the 'primary' intention of an utterance, relevant to its meaning, and any furtherintentions: 'If (say) I intend to get a man to do something by giving him some information, it cannot be regarded as relevant to the mean-ingen of my utterance to describe what I intend him to do.2 Even though conventional meaning is to follow from intention, Grice hints that some types of intention, possibly highly relevant to how an utterance is received, cannot properly be described as part of the meaningN of that utterance. In his published paper, Grice is noncommittal about the precise number of distinctions between 'levels' of significance needed, and his rough notes suggest that this was an area in which he was unsure. Second, the hearer may sometimes look to specific context to determine the precise intention behind an utterance; he may con-sider, for instance, which of two possible interpretations would be the most relevant to what has gone before, or would most obviously fit the speaker's purpose. Grice notes that such criteria are not confined to linguistic examples:  Context is a criterion in settling the question of why a man who has just put a cigarette in his mouth has put his hand in his pocket; relevance to an obvious end is a criterion in settling why a man is running away from a bull. 25  Grice's suggestion that conventional meaning can be defined in terms of intentions has been widely praised. The philosopher Jonathan Bennett suggests that the idea of meaning as a kind of intending was commonplace, but that 'Grice's achievement was to discover a defensible version of it.26 Grice's postgraduate student and later colleague Stephen Schiffer went further, describing 'Meaning' as 'the only published attempt ever made by a philosopher or anyone else to say precisely and completely what it is for someone to mean something'27 However, commentators were not slow to point out the problems they saw as inherent in such an account. Responses to 'Meaning' have been numerous, and ranged over more than 40 years, but some raising the most fundamental objections were from Oxford in the years immediately following its publication. Austin did not produce a formal response, and Grice has suggested that they never even discussed it informally. This, he suggests, was not at all unusual. Austin rarely discussed with Grice, or with other colleagues, views that had become established through publication. He preferred his conversations to be about new directions and new channels of thought. 28  To those Oxford philosophers who did discuss 'Meaning' in print, a comparison with Austin's account of 'speech acts' was almost inevitable.Austin's version of speaker meaning was developed during the 1940s and 1950s. Various versions of it appeared in lectures and articles during this period, but the most complete account was presented when Austin was invited to deliver the prestigious William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. An edited and expanded version of his notes from these was published posthumously as How to do Things with Words. Austin's ideas changed and developed over the course of time, and even during the lectures themselves, but some basic fundamental principles can be iden-tified. These drew on his notion of the 'descriptive fallacy', the idea that linguistic study is ill served by the traditional philosopher's focus on language as a tool for making statements capable of being judged to be either true or false. Throughout the development of speech act theory, Austin's assumptions were very different from Grice's working hypothesis in 'Meaning' that language is primarily used to make informative, descriptive statements. For Austin, making statements of fact was only one, and not a particularly significant one, of the many different things people do with words. He proposed to analyse the range of functions language can be used to perform.  Initially, Austin concentrates on explicit 'performatives' , statements  that appear to describe but in fact bring about some state of affairs, usually a social fact or interpersonal relationship. He considers ritualised performatives, which require a very particular set of circumstances to be successful, such as 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' (during the appropriate ceremony), 'I do' (at the relevant point in a marriage service) or 'I give and bequeath my watch to my brother' (in a will). He then expands his field to include more every day examples, such as 'I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow'  ', and 'I promise to...'. Charac-  teristically, Austin proposes 'going through the dictionary (a concise one should do) in a liberal spirit' in search of performative verbs.2 Later, however, he realises that even this could not give an exhaustive list of what people do with words. People do things with all sorts of different types of utterances. Someone who utters, 'Can you pass the salt?' may well succeed in making a request by means of apparently asking a question.  In response to his observations about the possible differences between the apparent form of an utterance and its actual function, Austin proposes to divide the analysis of meaning into three levels, or three separate acts performed in the course of a single utterance. The 'locutionary act' is determined by the actual form of words uttered, established by their sense and reference: '"meaning" in the traditional sense' sense'.3° At the level of 'illocutionary act', the notion of force becomes relevant. It isdetermined by the matter of how the locution in question is being used, of what is being done in saying what is said. This can be seen as at least in part dependent on the individual intentions of the speaker, but these in turn depend on, and follow from, certain conventions of language use. So, in the example above, we can understand that the speaker intends to request that the hearer pass the salt, but only because there are conventions of use determining that questions of ability can be used with this force. The illocutionary act is not a simple consequence of the locutionary, but is concerned with conventions 'as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance'. 31 Finally, and separately, it is necessary to consider the effect of the utterance. Austin is here perhaps making a concession to the 'causal' theories of meaning Grice considered but dismissed. Austin refers to the effect achieved by the utterance, but unlike Stevenson he sees this as just one component of meaning, not a sufficient definition. The 'per-locutionary act' is defined by this effect, which may coincide with what the speaker intended to bring about, but need not. The perlocutionary act, then, is not a matter of convention, and cannot be determined simply with reference to the words uttered.  It is no surprise that Grice's 'Meaning' should have been discussed in the light of Austin's speech act theory. The two seem in many ways to cover similar ground, in that both oppose much of the traditional philosophical literature on meaning by insisting on the roles of context and of speaker intention. In fact, some commentators have been tempted to read Grice's paper as an implicit response, or challenge, to speech act theory. As Grice himself has pointed out, there is no such direct link.  'Meaning' existed in almost its finished state before the ideas in How to do Things with Words were made public, or even in some cases devel-oped. As he became aware of Austin's ideas, Grice did recognise some connections to his own themes and preoccupations, but continued to find his own treatment of them more compelling. In particular, he remained convinced that an account of meaning needed to give prominence to psychological notions, and was unhappy with what he saw as Austin's excessive dependence on conventions; Austin was 'using the obscure to explain the obscure' 32 From this, it would seem that his main objection to speech act theory was that it did not offer much explanation of meaning. For Grice, the observable facts of the conventions of use are in need of explanation, and this is best done with reference to individual instances of intention. Austin, on the other hand, was seeking to explain these conventions simply by drawing attention to another, more complex level of conventions.Peter Strawson picks up on exactly this difference between Grice and Austin when he reflects on 'Meaning' in his 1964 article 'Intention and convention in speech acts'.  '. His chief concern is the validity of Austin's  notion of illocutionary act, based as it is on conventions, both the conventions of the language that define the locutionary act, and the further conventions of use that mediate between this and illocutionary force.  However, Strawson argues, there are many cases where the difference between locutionary and illocutionary act cannot be explained simply with reference to conventions. In certain circumstances, to say 'the ice over there is very thin' may well have the force of a warning, but there is no particular convention of language use specifying this. Similarly, the difference between an order and an entreaty may depend not on any identifiable convention, but on a range of factors concerned with the speaker's state of mind and consequent presentation of the utter-ance. Strawson looks to Grice's notion of non-natural meaning to explain this additional, non-conventional set of factors. His paraphrase of Grice's account, expressed in terms of three separate intentions, was to prove instructive to future commentators:  § non-naturally means something by an utterance x if S intends (i) to produce by uttering x a certain response (r) in an audience A and intends (iz) that A shall recognise S's intention (i) and intends (i3) that this recognition on the part of A of S's intention (i) shall function as A's reason, or part of his reason, for his response (r).33  On Strawson's interpretation, one of the defining intentions is focused on Grice's indication that the speaker provides the hearer with a 'reason' to think or act in a certain way. He proposes to modify Grice's account before enlisting it to explain the notion of illocutionary force, because of certain counter-examples to which it is subject as it stands. It is possible to envisage contexts in which S utters x with exactly the three intentions described above, but in which it does not seem appropriate to say that S was trying to communicate with A. Strawson does not illustrate this problem with a specific example, but he suggests a schematic outline. S may intend to get A to believe something, fulfilling (i). S may arrange fake evidence, or grounds for this belief, such that A can see the evidence, and indeed such that A can see S fabricating it. S knows that A will be perfectly aware that the evidence is faked, but assumes that A will not realise that S has this awareness. The intention behind this is for A to have the relevant belief precisely because he recognises that S intends him to have this belief; this is S's (i2). Further, it is S's intentionthat the recognition of (i) will be the reason why A acquires the belief; indeed, A will have no other reason to form this belief, knowing that the evidence for it is faked. This fulfils (i3). In effect, an intentional account of meaning would have to include an extra layer of intention, because for S to be telling something to, or communicating with A, S must be taken to intend A to recognise the intention to make A recog-nise the intention to produce the relevant belief in A. In other words,  § must have a further intention (4) that A should recognise intention (i2). If S's intention (i), and hence intention (i2) is fulfilled, then A may be said to have understood the utterance, a definition Strawson links to Austin's notion of 'uptake' !, and hence to the successful accomplishment  of illocutionary force. Strawson argues that the complex intention (i4) is the necessary defining characteristic of saying something with a certain illocutionary force. He hints that his additional layer of intention may not in fact prove sufficient, and that 'the way seems open to a regressive series of intentions that intentions should be recognised' 34 Grice's definition of meaning as determined entirely by speaker intention is at odds with, or according to Strawson can be complementary to, Austin's reliance on convention. But it also opposes him to the notion, common in philosophy and later in linguistics, that meaning is determined by the rules of the language in question, defined independently of any particular occasion of utterance. Austin does allow some space to this type of meaning, specifying that the usual sense and reference of the words uttered constitute the locutionary act. He does not, however, develop this notion, or explain its relationship to his more central concern with speaker meaning. Strawson seems to downplay the importance of linguistic meaning for  Austin when he places him on the same general side as Grice in what he describes elsewhere as the 'Homeric struggle' between 'the theorists of communication-intention and the theorists of formal semantics' 35 Unlike Austin, Grice's more extreme arguments that meaning is to be explained entirely in terms of 'communication-intention' do not presuppose any notion of semantic meaning. This is an aspect of Grice's theory on which other commentators, such as John Searle, have focused.  Searle was a student at Oxford during the 1950s, where he was taught by both Austin and Strawson. He completed a doctoral dissertation on sense and reference in 1959 before returning to his native America. Well versed in both the traditional philosophy of meaning and Austin's concentration on communication, he worked on the theory of speech acts, publishing a book on the subject in 1969 in which he classifies possible illocutionary acts into a restricted number of general categories. Healso introduces the notion of indirect speech acts, in which one illocu-tionary act is performed by means of the apparent performance of a different illocutionary act. Austin's example 'Can you pass the salt?' succeeds as a request both because the apparent act, that of asking for information about the hearer's ability, is not appropriate in the context, and because rules of language use specify that this form of words can be used to make a request. For Searle, language is essentially a rule-governed form of behaviour. It is centred on the speech act, the basic unit of communication, but its rules include the specific semantic properties of its words and phrases.  This particular point gives rise to Searle's objections to Grice's total reliance on individual speaker intention in explaining meaning. Searle does allow for intentions in his account; indeed he is interested in basing it on just such psychological concepts and proposes to develop Grice's account in order to do so. In a later discussion he comments that his analysis in Speech Acts 'was inspired by Grice's work on meaning' 36 However, like Austin before him, he sees semantic rules as underlying the range of intentions with which a speaker can appropriately produce any particular utterance. Searle is much more explicit than Austin in specifying that linguistic rules come first and restrict intentional possi-bility. Unlike Grice, he therefore singles out linguistic acts as separate from general communication; in the case of language, meaning exists independent of intention, or of occasion of use. Searle illustrates this with his own counter-example to Grice. An American soldier is captured by Italian troops in the Second World War. Neither the soldier nor his captors speak German, and the soldier speaks no Italian. The soldier wishes to make the Italian troops believe that he is German. He utters the only German sentence he knows, which happens to be 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', a line of poetry remembered from childhood that translates as 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. He hopes that his captors will guess that he must be saying 'I am a German soldier'. The soldier intends to get his captors to believe he is a German soldier. He intends that they should recognise his intention to get them to believe this, and that this recognition should serve as their reason for entertaining that belief. All the circumstances are in place for a case of Grice's meaningwn. Yet, Searle argues, it would surely be unreasonable to maintain that when the soldier says 'Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?', he actually non-naturally means 'I am a German soldier'. The rules of German do not allow this; the words mean 'Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?'. Searle concludes that Grice's account is inadequate as itstands because Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention. 37  Like Strawson, Searle proposes to amend Grice's intentional account in the light of his own counter-example. In effect, he argues that the notion of intention must be expanded to include convention. When speakers use words literally, part of their intention is that hearers recog-nise the communicative intention precisely because of the pre-existing rules for using the words chosen. Searle attempts to balance the twin effects of intention and convention in his account of meaning. The result is rather further removed from Grice than Searle acknowledges when he suggests that he is offering an 'amendment'. It returns to the traditional idea of conventional, or linguistic, meaning as the basic location of meaning on which intention-based speaker meaning is dependent.38 The magnitude of the consequences of Searle's attempt to introduce conventions into an intentional account is perhaps illustrative of the gulf between semantic and psychological approaches to meaning. It also highlights the scale of Grice's undertaking in producing an account of meaning relying entirely on the latter.  Stephen Schiffer was a graduate student in the 1960s when, as he has since described, he was 'much taken with Grice's program'39 He was impressed by what he saw as Grice's reduction of the semantic to the psychological, but also believed he had identified the inadequacies of this particular account of speaker meaning. In the 1972 book in which he attempted to develop and improve on Grice's account, he notes that it is not possible to claim priority for conventional meaning and at the same time define meaning in terms of intention. To maintain that speaker meaning, 'what S meant by x',  ', is primary, but also that speaker  meaning could be in any way dependent on the meaning of x would be simply circular. Schiffer does not see the exclusive concentration on intention as necessarily problematic, or at least not for this reason: 'To say this does not commit Grice to holding that one can say whatever one likes and mean thereby whatever one pleases to mean. One must utter x with the relevant intentions, and not any value of 'x' will be appropriate to this end: I could not in any ordinary circumstances request you to pass the salt by uttering "the flamingoes are flying south early this year".  '40 Schiffer's own response is that conventional meaning  does exist, but is secondary to intentional meaning, because it is built up in a speech community over time, resultant on the fulfilling of certain communicative intentions.  The problems Schiffer identifies for Grice are not problems with the notion that meaning is best given a psychological rather than a seman-tic definition, an assumption with which he agrees. Rather, Schiffer questions the adequacy of intention as the relevant psychological state.  He echoes Strawson's schematic counter-example to argue that it can be possible for all the intentions Grice defines to be in place, but for no act of communication to be achieved. Strawson's example indicated that another layer of intention (Strawson's i) must be added to the defini-tion. Schiffer argues explicitly for the consequence Strawson only sug-gested, namely that the need for regressive intentions will in fact prove to be infinite. He constructs a series of more and more elaborate counter-examples to show that the levels of intention necessary fully to define meaning can never be exhausted. In the first such example, § produces a cacophonous rendition of 'Moon Over Miami' with the intention of driving A out of the room. S's intention is that A will leave the room not just because A cannot stand the noise, but because A recognises that Sis trying to get rid of A. Further, S intends that A recognise the intention that A recognise the intention to get A to leave the room, because S wishes A to be aware of S's disdain. 'In other words'  ', Schiffer explains,  'while A is intended to think that S intends to get rid of A by means of the repulsive singing, A is really intended to have as his reason for leaving the fact that S wants him to leave.'41 In order to rule out the unacceptable suggestion that by singing 'Moon Over Miami' S meant that A was to leave the room, Schiffer proposes another level of intention. Further, more complex, examples call for further such layers. For Schiffer, the infinitely regressive series of intentions that intentions be recognised that this causes makes for an unacceptable definition of meaning.  For Schiffer the best hope for a psychological account of meaning lies in an appeal to a special type of knowledge. This type of knowledge occurs when two people are in the following relation to a piece of infor-mation, or to a proposition p. S and A both know that p; S knows that A knows that p; A knows that S knows that p; A knows that S knows that A knows that p; S knows that A knows that S knows that p; and so on without limit. Such a pattern also leads to an infinite regress but, Schiffer argues, a harmless one. It is just the sort of situation we do in fact find in everyday life, as when S and A are sitting facing each other with a candle in between. Schiffer coins the phrase 'mutual knowledge* for the recursive set of knowing he describes. S and A mutually know* that there is a candle on the table. Once Grice's account of meaning is adapted to refer to mutual knowledge*, the apparent counter-examples are all ruled inadmissible, and therefore no longer pose a problem. The intentions S has in producing an utterance must be 'mutual known* by S and A for a true instance of meaning to take place. Mutual knowl-edge* with its infinite regress, is missing in each of the counter-examples.  'Meaning' might appear to be offering a definition of the concept of meaning by proposing to substitute the concept of intention: in the vein of the logical positivists to be 'translating' problematic sentences into those that do not contain the problem term. This was certainly Schiffer's interpretation when he described Grice's account as 'reduc-tionist'. However, more recent commentators have been keen to defend Grice against this interpretation. For instance, Giovanna Cosenza has suggested that the analysis would be reductionist 'only if Grice had seriously considered speakers' intentions and psychological states as more fundamental, more basic, either epistemologically or metaphysically, than all the concepts related to linguistic meaning', and claimed that Grice did not hold this view.4 Anita Avramides has also argued that Grice's account of meaning need not be seen as reductionist. *3  Grice was certainly distancing himself from those accounts of what he would call 'non-natural meaning' in which the notion of convention was primary. However, he was somewhat tentative about the precise relation between the two central concepts; his belief that convention could be entirely subsumed within an intentional account is expressed more as a hope than as a conviction. He seems, further, to have been troubled by the exact relationships between the different messages potentially conveyed by a single utterance. Even if the definition of convention is to be dependent on intention, some messages are more closely or more obviously related to conventional meaning than others. He as yet had no formal account of how the 'full significance' of an utterance might be derived or calculated. Nor had he yet drawn a clear distinction between messages conveyed by the words uttered and messages conveyed by the very act of utterance. This is a distinction Schiffer describes by differentiating between 'S meant something by (or in) producing (or doing) x' and 'S meant something by x'.* A very similar point is made by Paul Ziff in his 1967 response to 'Meaning'.  Ziff is decidedly dismissive of Grice's 'ingenious intricate discussion' of meaning and the 'fog' to which it gives rise.* He argues that the meanings of words and phrases, and indeed the lack of meaning of nonsense  'words'  , are quite independent of any individual's intention. Like Schiffer, he argues that 'Grice seems to have conflated and confused "A meant something by uttering x" ... with the quite different "A meant  something by X"146  The responses and criticisms of his peers were to feed into Grice's own thinking about meaning over the following years. His published outputduring the 1950s was restricted to 'In defence of a dogma' and  'Meaning', hardly an impressive record even by the standards of the time. Peter Strawson was responsible for seeing both these papers into print, while those he left alone fell victim to Grice's perfectionism.  Some, like 'Intentions and dispositions' were never published, while others waited in manuscript for 30 or more years. Of these, 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes' and 'Common sense and scepticism' indicate a development in Grice's thinking on the need to distinguish between what our words literally mean and what we mean by using those words. They also suggest something of Grice's ambivalence towards the place of conventional meaning. Like much of his work, these papers developed from his teaching: the former from a lecture delivered in 1950 and the latter from joint classes with A. D. Woozley at the same time or even earlier.  Grice's project in these papers was a typically 'ordinary language' enterprise: the desire to tackle a familiar philosophical problem by means of a rigorous examination of the terms characteristically employed to discuss it. The problem in question was how to address scepticism. In response to G. E. Moore's 'defence from common sense' the American philosopher Norman Malcolm had suggested that Moore was in effect approaching the problem via an appeal to ordinary lan-guage, although apparently without knowing it. We use expressions to refer to and to describe material objects, and we do so in a 'standard' or 'ordinary' way. To claim, as some philosophers have done, that there are no material objects, is therefore to 'go against ordinary language'. 47 In effect, such philosophers are claiming that some uses of ordinary language are self-contradictory, or always incorrect, an inadmissible claim because 'ordinary language is correct language'. 48 Grice challenges Malcolm's interpretation of Moore. Malcolm draws an unwarranted polarity between 'ordinary' and 'self-contradictory' in language use, he suggests. The two properties need not be incompatible; people do routinely say things that are literally self-contradictory or absurd. Further-more, not every meaningful sentence would actually find a use in ordinary language. In 'Common sense and scepticism', he offers a striking example of what he means. 'It would no doubt be possible to fill in the gaps in "The — archbishop fell down the — stairs and bumped  —- like —," with such a combination of indecencies and blasphemies that no one would ever use such an expression', but we would not therefore want to treat the expression as self-contradictory. 4 In 'G. E. Moore and philosopher's paradoxes', he suggests that it is often necessary to acknowledge a difference between 'what a given expression means (ingeneral)' and 'what a particular speaker means, or meant, by that expression on a particular occasion. Figurative or ironic utterances, for instance, involve 'special' uses of language.  As a general definition, 'what a particular speaker means by a particular utterance (of a statement-making character) on a particular occasion is to be identified with what he intends by means of the utterance to get his audience to believe!»' For this intention to be successful, the speaker must at least rely on the audience's familiarity with 'standard' or 'general' use, even if individual occasion meaning is to differ from this. In this way Grice is able to offer his own challenge to the sceptic.  Faced with everyday statements about material objects, the sceptic is forced to claim either that, on particular occasions, people use expressions to mean things they have no intention of getting their audience to believe, or that people frequently use language in a way quite unlike its proper ('general') meaning, leaving the success of everyday communication unexplained. Although in general agreement with Malcolm's aim in refuting scepticism, Grice is unhappy with the apparent simpli-fications, and some of the implications, of his argument. He replaces it with his own more sophisticated argument from ordinary language, an argument depending in particular on a detailed examination of the nature of 'meaning'.As Grice's enthusiasm for ordinary language philosophy became increasingly qualified during the 1950s, his interest was growing in the rather different styles of philosophy of language then current in America.  Recent improvements in communications had made possible an exchange of ideas across the Atlantic that would have been unthinkable before the war. W. V. O. Quine had made a considerable impression at Oxford during his time as Eastman Professor. Grice was interested in Quine's logical approach to language, although he differed from him over certain specific questions, such as the viability of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Quine, who was visiting England for a whole year, and who brought with him clothes, books and even provisions in the knowledge that rationing was still in force, travelled by ship.' However, during the same decade the rapid proliferation of passenger air travel enabled movement of academics between Britain and America for even short stays and lecture tours. Grice himself made a number of such visits, and was impressed by the formal and theory-driven philosophy he encountered. Most of all he was impressed by the work of Noam Chomsky.  It may seem surprising that the middle-aged British philosopher interested in the role of individual speakers in creating meaning should cite as an influence the young American linguist notorious for dismissing issues of use in his pursuit of a universal theory of language. But Grice was inspired by Chomsky's demonstration in his work on syntax of how  'a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control'. Less for-mally, he expressed admiration for an approach that did not offer  'piecemeal reflections on language' but rather where 'one got a pictureof the whole thing' Chomsky's first and highly influential book Syntactic Structures was well known among Grice's Oxford contemporaries.  The Play Group worked their slow and meticulous way through it during the autumn of 1959. Austin, in particular, was extremely impressed.  Grice characterised and perhaps parodied him as revering Chomsky for his sheer audacity in taking on a subject even more sacred than phi-losophy: the subject of grammar. Grice's own interest was focused on theory formation and its philosophical consequences. Chomsky was taking a new approach to the study of syntax by proposing a general theory where previously there had been only localised description and analysis. He claimed, for instance, that ideally 'a formalised theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed'. Grice's aim, it was becoming clear, was to do something similar for the study of language use.  Meanwhile, ordinary language philosophy itself was in decline. As for any school of thought, it is difficult to determine an exact endpoint, and some commentators have suggested a date as late as 1970. However, it is generally accepted that the heyday of ordinary language philosophy was during the years immediately following the Second World War.  The sense of excitement and adventure that characterised its beginning began to wane during the 1950s. Despite his professed dislike of disci-pleship, Austin seems to have become anxious about what he perceived as the lack of a next generation of like-minded young philosophers at Oxford. It became an open secret among his colleagues that he was seriously contemplating a move to the University of California, Berkeley?  No final decision was ever made. Austin died early in 1960 at the age of 48, having succumbed quickly to cancer over the previous months.  Reserved and private to the last, he hid his illness from even his closest colleagues until he was unable to continue work. His death was certainly a blow to ordinary language philosophy, but it would be an exaggeration to say that it was the immediate cause of its demise. Grice, who seems to have been regarded as Austin's natural deputy, stepped in as convenor of the Play Group, which met under his leadership for the next seven years. Individuals such as Strawson, Warnock, Urmson and Grice himself continued to produce work with recognisably 'ordinary language' leanings throughout the 1960s.  Grice's interests at this time were not driven entirely by philosophical trends in Oxford and America; he was also turning his attention to some very old logical problems. In particular, he was interested in questions concerning apparent counterparts to logical constants in natural language. For instance, in the early 1960s he revisited a theme he hadfirst considered before the war, when he gave a series of lectures on  'Negation'  . In these, he concerns himself with the analysis of sentences  containing 'not', and with the extent to which this should coincide with a logical analysis of negation. Consideration of a variety of example sentences leads him to reject the simple equation of 'not' with the logical operation of switching truth polarity, usually positive to negative. He argues that 'it might be said that in explaining the force of "not" in terms of "contradictory" we have oversimplified the ordinary use of  "not"! In another lecture from the series he suggests that the lack of correspondence between 'not' and contradiction 'might be explained in terms of pragmatic pressures which govern the use of language in general'® Grice was hoping to find not just an account of the uses of this particular expression, but a general theory of language use capable of extension to other problems in logic. He would have been familiar enough with such problems. The discussion of some of them dates back as far as Aristotle, in whose work he was well read even as an undergraduate.  In Categoriae, Aristotle describes not just categories of lexical meaning, but also the types of relationships holding between words. To the modern logician, the use of terms in the following passage may be obscure, but the relationship of logical entailment is easily recognisable.  One is prior to two because if there are two it follows at once that there is one whereas if there is one there are not necessarily two, so that the implication of the other's existence does not hold reciprocally from one.'  The relationship between 'two' and 'one', or indeed between any two cardinal numbers where one is greater than the other, is one of asymmetrical entailment. 'Two' entails 'one',  ', but 'one' does not entail 'two'  A similar relationship holds between a superordinate and any of its hyponyms, or between a general and a more specific term. To use Aristotle's example: 'if there is a fish there is an animal, but if there is an animal there is not necessarily a fish.'º The asymmetrical nature of this relationship means that use of the more general term tells us nothing at all about the applicability of the more specific. Aristotle also considers the relative acceptability of general and specific terms, and in doing this he goes beyond a narrowly logical focus.  For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more informative and apt to give the species than the genus. For example,it would be more informative to say of the individual man that he is a man than that he is an animal (since the one is more distinctive of the individual man while the other is more general)."  Applying the term 'animal' to an individual tells us nothing about whether that individual is a man or not. Therefore, if the more specific term 'man' applies it is more 'apt', because it gives more information.  This same point arises in a discussion of the applicability of certain descriptions later in Categoriae. Aristotle suggests that: 'it is not what has not teeth that we call toothless, or what has not sight blind, but what has not got them at the time when it is natural for it to have them.'2 A term such as 'toothless' is only applied, because it is only informative, in those situations when it might be expected not to apply. Here, again, the discussion of what 'we call' things goes beyond purely logical meaning to take account of how expressions are generally used. Logically speaking a stone could appropriately be described as toothless or blind; in actual practice it is very unlikely to be so described.  Grice's self-imposed task in considering the general 'pragmatic pressures' on language use was, at least in part, one of extending Aristotle's sensitivity to the standard uses of certain expressions, and examining how regularities of use can have distorting effects on intuitions about logical meaning. He was by no means the first philosopher to consider this. For instance, John Stuart Mill, in his response to the work of Sir William Hamilton, draws attention to the distinction between logic and  'the usage of language', 13 He reproaches Hamilton for not paying sufficient attention to this distinction, and suggests that this is enough to explain some of Hamilton's mistakes in logic. Mill glosses Hamilton as maintaining that 'the form "Some A is B" ... ought in logical propriety to be used and understood in the sense of "some and some only" ' 14 Hamilton is therefore committed to the claim that 'all' and 'some' are mutually incompatible: that an assertion involving 'some' has as part of its meaning 'not all'. This is at odds with the observations on quantity in Categoriae and indeed, as Mill suggests, with 'the practice of all writers on logic'. Mill explains this mistake as a confusion of logical meaning with a feature of 'common conversation in its most unprecise form'. In this, he is drawing on the extra, non-logical but generally understood 'meanings' associated with particular expressions. In a passage that would not be out of place in a modern discussion of lin-guistics, Mill suggests that:If I say to any one, 'I saw some of your children to-day,' he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so.  15  Mill draws a distinction between what 'words mean' and what we generally infer from hearing them used. In what can be seen as an extension of Aristotle's discussion of 'aptness', he argues that it is a mistake to confuse these two very different types of significance. A more specific word such as 'all' is more appropriate, if it is applicable, than a more general word such as 'some'. Therefore, the use of the more general leads to the inference, although it does not strictly mean, that the more specific does not apply. 'Some' suggests, but does not actually entail 'not all'.  Besides his interest in logical problems with a venerable pedigree, Grice was also concerned with issues familiar to him from the work of recent or contemporary philosophers. In both published work and informal notes he frequently lists these and arranges them in groups.  Part of his achievement in the theory he was developing lay in seeing connections between an apparently disparate collection of problems and countenancing a single solution for them all. For instance, in Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that, although the expressions 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' appear to be simple opposites, they both require a particular condition for applicability, namely that the action in question is in some way reprehensible. If they were simple opposites, it should always be the case that one or other would be correct in describing an action, yet in the absence of the crucial condition, to apply either would be to say something 'absurd'. Similarly, although if someone has performed some action, that person must in a sense have tried to perform it, it is often extremely odd to say so. In cases where there was no difficulty or doubt over the outcome, it is inappropriate to say that someone tried to do something: so much so that some philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have claimed that it is simply wrong. Another related problem is familiar from Austin's work; it is the one summed up in his slogan 'no modification without aberration'. For the ordinary uses of many verbs, it does not seem appropriate to apply either a modifying word or phrase or its opposite. Austin was therefore offering a gen-eralisation that includes, but is not restricted to, Ryle's claims about  'voluntary' and 'involuntary'. For many everyday action verbs, the act described must have taken place in some non-standard way for anymodification appropriately to apply. Austin offers no theory based on this observation, and indeed Grice was unimpressed by it even as a gen-eralisation; he claimed in an unpublished paper that it was 'clearly fraudulent'. 'No "aberration" is needed for the appearance of the adverbial "in a taxi" within the phrase "he travelled to the airport in a taxi"; aberrations are needed only for modifications which are corrective qualifications. 16  Grice's general account of language, conceived with the twin ambitions of refining his philosophy of meaning and of explaining a diverse range of philosophical problems, gradually developed into his theory of conversation. Like his project in 'Meaning', this draws on a  'common-sense' understanding of language: in this case, that what people say and what they mean are often very different matters. This observation was far from original, but Grice's response to it was in some crucial ways entirely new in philosophy. Unlike formal philosophers such as Russell or the logical positivists, he argued that the differences between literal and speaker meaning are not random and diverse, and do not make the rigorous study of the latter a futile exercise. But he also differed from contemporary philosophers of ordinary language, in arguing that interest in formal or abstract meaning need not be abandoned in the face of the particularities of individual usage. Rather, the difference between the two types of meaning could be seen as systematic and explicable, following from one very general principle of human behaviour, and a number of specific ways in which this worked out in practice. In effect, the use of language, like many other aspects of human behaviour, is an end-driven endeavour. People engage in communication in the expectation of achieving certain outcomes, and in the pursuit of those outcomes they are prepared to maintain, and expect others to maintain, certain strategies. This mutual pursuit of goals results in cooperation between speakers. This manifests itself in terms of four distinct categories of behaviour, each of which can be sum-marised by one or more maxims that speakers observe. The categories and maxims are familiar to every student of pragmatics, although in later commentaries they are often all subsumed under the title  'maxims'  Category of Quantity  Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).  Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.  Category of Quality  Do not say what you believe to be false.  Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.  Category of Relation   Be relevant.  Category of Manner  Avoid ambiguity of expression.  Avoid ambiguity.  Be brief.  Be orderly.!7  Grice uses the simple notion of cooperation, together with the more elaborate structure of categories, to offer a systematic account of the many ways in which literal and implied meaning, or 'what is said' and what is implicated', differ from one another. In effect, the expectation of cooperation both licenses these differences and explains their usually successful resolution. Speakers rely on the fact that hearers will be able to reinterpret the literal content of their utterances, or fill in missing information, so as to achieve a successful contribution to the conversation in hand. The noun 'implicature' and verb 'implicate' (as used in relation to that noun) are now familiar in the discussion of pragmatic meaning, but they were coined by Grice, and coined fairly late on in the development of his theory. In early work on conversation he suggested that a 'special kind of implication' could be used to account for various differences between conventional meaning and speaker meaning. He ultimately found this formulation inadequate, together with a host of other words such as 'suggest', 'hint' and even 'mean', precisely because of their complex pre-existing usage both within and outside philosophy.    The difference between saying and meaning had an established philosophical pedigree, as well as a basis in common sense. A literature dating back to G. E. Moore, but largely concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s, offers a significant context to Grice's work. Little of this is now read and none of it attempts anything as ambitious as a generalising theory of communication. With typical laxness, Grice does not refer to this body of work in any of his writings on the topic, although he must have been aware of it; much of it originated from the tight circle of Oxford phi-losophy. Writing for his fellow philosophers, and in the conventions ofhis time, he was able to refer vaguely and generally to the debate in the expectation that the relevant context would be recognised  G. E. Moore had argued that when we use an indicative sentence we assert the content of the sentence, but we also imply personal commitment to the truthfulness of that content; 'If I say that I went to the pictures last Tuesday, I imply by saying so that I believe or know that I did, but I do not say that I believe or know this."8 This distinction was picked up by a number of philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel discussed the sense of 'imply' identified by Moore, proposing to describe it as 'pragmatical'. Bar-Hillel identifies himself as a supporter of 'logical empiricism' (he quotes approvingly a comment from Carnap to the effect that natural languages are too complex and messy to be the focus of rigorous scientific enquiry) and his article is aimed explicitly at rejecting philosophy of the 'analytic method' in general and of Moore in particular. However, he suggests that by using sentences that are 'meaningless' to logical empiricists, such as the sentences of metaphysics or aesthetics, 'one may nevertheless imply sentences which are perfectly meaningful, according to the same criteria, and are perhaps even true and highly important' 2º A full account of the pragmatic sense of 'implies' might, he predicts, prove highly important in discussing linguistic behaviour. A few years later D. J. O'Connor contrasted the familiar 'logical paradoxes' of philosophy with less well known 'pragmatic paradoxes'. O'Connor draws attention to certain example sentences (such as 'I believe there are tigers in Mexico but there aren't any there at all') which, although not logically contradictory or necessarily false, are pragmatically unsatisfactory. His purpose is to distinguish between logic and language and to urge philosophers to attempt to 'make a little clearer the ways in which ordinary language can limit and mislead us'. 21  The philosophical significance of implication was also discussed by those more sympathetic to ordinary language, in particular by members of the Play Group. Writing in Mind in 1952, J. O. Urmson acknowledged the 'implied claim to truth' in the use of indicative statements, but felt the need to clarify his terms: 'The word "implies" is being used in such a way that if there is a convention that X will only be done in circumstances Y, a man implies that situation Y holds if he does X.22 Urmson suggests the addition of an 'implied claim to reasonableness'; 'it is, I think, a presupposition of communication that people will not make statements, thereby implying their truth, unless they have some ground, however tenuous, for those statements. 23 Read with hindsight, Urmson's suggestion looks like a hint towards Grice's second maxim ofQuality. Another member of the Play Group, P. H. Nowell-Smith, appears to add something like a maxim of Relevance, a notion that Grice discusses as early as the original version of 'Meaning'. In his book Ethics, Nowell-Smith suggests that there are certain 'contextual implications' that generally accompany the use of words, but that are dependent on particular contexts. Without reference to Urmson, he phrases these as follows:  When a speaker uses a sentence to make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.... A speaker contextually implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his statement.... What a speaker says may be assumed to be relevant to the interests of his audience.24  For Nowell-Smith the contextual rules are primary, and do not operate with reference to logical meaning; in effect there is no 'what is said'. In fact, he specifies that logical meaning is a subclass of contextual impli-cation, because it is meaning we are entitled to infer in any context whatsoever. Other philosophers concerned with implication, however, did identify different levels of meaning. In The Logic of Moral Discourse, 1955, Paul Edwards distinguishes between the referent of a sentence (the fact that makes a sentence true or, in its absence, false: in effect the truth-conditions) and 'what the sentence expresses' (anything it is possible to infer about the speaker on the basis of the utterance).25  Some attempted syntheses of thinking about implication lacked much in the way of generalising or explanatory force. In his 1958 article 'Prag-matic implication', C. K. Grant's account of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena leads him to the claim that 'a statement pragmatically implies those propositions whose falsity would render the making of the statement absurd, that is, pointless.26 What is implied by a statement of p, he insists, is not just the speaker's belief in p, but some further proposition. Isobel Hungerland, writing in 1960, reviews the range of attempts to mediate between asserted and implied meaning and exclaims 'What a range of rules!'? Her suggestion of a generalisa-tion across these rules is that 'a speaker in making a statement contextually implies whatever one is entitled to infer on the basis of the presumption that his act of stating is normal. 28  Grice was working on his own generalisation, which was to link together the range of principles of language use into one coherent account, and to give this a place in a more ambitious theory of lan-guage. If the maxims of Quality and of Relation were familiar from con-temporary work in Ethics, those of Quantity and Manner drew on Grice's long-standing concern about stronger and weaker statements.  This was the idea that had interested him in his rough notes on 'visa' for his work on perception with Geoffrey Warnock. The earliest published indication appeared in 1952, in a footnote to Peter Strawson's Introduction to Logical Theory. In discussing the relationship between the statement 'there is not a book in his room which is not by an English author' and the assumption 'there are books in his room', Strawson draws attention to the need to distinguish between strictly logically relations and the rules of 'linguistic conduct' 29 He suggests as one such rule:  'one does not make the (logically) lesser when one could truthfully (and with equal or greater linguistic economy) make the greater, claim. It would be misleading, although not strictly false, to make the less informative claim about English authors if in a position to make the much more informative claim that there are no books at all. Strawson acknowledges that 'the operation of this "pragmatic rule" was first pointed out to me, in a different connection, by Mr H. P. Grice!  It was typical of Grice that he did not publish his own account of this pragmatic rule until almost ten years after Strawson's acknowledgement.  'The causal theory of perception' appeared in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, after Grice delivered it as a symposium paper at the meeting of the Society in Cambridge in July 1961. His main focus is his long-standing interest in the status of our observations of material objects. Grice offers tentative support for a causal account of percep-tion. Theories of this type date back at least to John Locke. They maintain that we directly perceive through our faculties of sense a series of information, given the title 'sense data' by later philosophers, and infer that these are caused by material objects in the world. For Locke, the inference was justifiable, but his account of perception, and causal theories ever since, had been dogged by accusations of scepticism. If we have no direct access to material objects, but only to the sense data they putatively cause, the way is left open to doubt the independent existence of such objects.  Grice's defence is tentative, even by his own circumspect standards.  He proposes to advance a version of the causal theory 'which is, if not true, at least not obviously false'.3° Some of the defence itself is presented in quotation marks, as a fictional 'opponent' argues with a fictional 'objector' to the causal theory, implicitly distancing Grice from the arguments on either side. This tentativeness might in part be explained by the extreme heresy of Grice's enterprise for a philosopher of ordinary language. Some of Austin's most strident remarks about ordi-nary language had appeared in his attack in Sense and Sensibilia on philosophical theories of perception, and their reliance on the obscure and technical notion of 'sense data'. Austin's chief target here had been phe-nomenalism which, in claiming that sense data are the essence of what we think of as material objects, is often seen as a direct competitor to the causal theory of perception. Although defending one of phenome-nalism's rivals, Grice was suggesting reasons for retaining Austin's particular bugbear, 'sense data', as a term of art. Indeed, he even goes so far as to hint that his own, speculative version of the causal theory 'neither obviously entails nor obviously conflicts with Phenomenalism'.31  Grice defends sense data because, as he argues, the sceptic who wants to question the existence of the material world needs to make use of them and the sceptic's position at least deserves to be heard. He defends it also because of his own ideas about language use. Indeed, his essay on perception seems at times in danger of being hijacked by his interest in language. This is not entirely out of keeping with the subject; through Locke and Berkeley to Ayer and Austin, the philosophy of perception had focused on the correct interpretation of sentences in which judgements of perception are expressed. However, Grice makes no secret of his hope that his interpretation of such sentences will fit with views of language and use motivated by other considerations. Much of the essay is taken up with a discussion of general principles governing the use of language. This is inspired by a standard argument for retaining  'sense data' as a technical term; it would appear to underlie ordinary expressions such as 'so-and-so looks @ [e.g. blue] to me'. In effect, a suitably rigorous account of the meaning of such expressions would need to include reference to something such as a sense datum that corresponds to the subjective experience described. A potential objector might point out that such expressions are not appropriate to all instances of perception; they would only in fact be used in contexts where a condition of either doubt or denial (D-or-D) as to the applicability of @ holds. 'There would be something at least prima facie odd about my saying "That looks red to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted by a British pillar box in normal daylight at a range of a few feet.'32  Grice considers two possible ways of explaining this oddity. It could be seen as 'a feature of the use, perhaps of the meaning' of such expressions that they carry the implication that the D-or-D condition is ful-filled. Use of such expressions in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a misuse, and would fail to be either true or false.Alternatively, such statements could be seen as true whenever the property @ applies but, in the absence of the D-or-D condition, severely mis-leading. Use in the absence of the condition would therefore constitute a more general error, because of 'a general feature or principle of the use of language' 33 Grice des cribes how until recently he had been undecided as to which of these two explanations to favour. He had, however, lent towards the second because it 'was more in line with the kind of thing I was inclined to say about other linguistic phenomena which are in some degree comparable.  934  Towards the end of his discussion, Grice hesitantly suggests a first attempt at formulating the general principle of language use: 'One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for so doing. 35 This is, of course, remarkably similar to the observation attributed to him by Strawson a decade earlier.  It seems that during the intervening years Grice had become increasingly impressed by how many different types of meaning this rule could explain, in other words by how general and simple an account of language use it suggested. In two interesting respects the formulation of the rule had changed. First, it had changed from a statement about what  'one does' in language use to what 'one should do'. This brought it nearer to the first maxim of Quantity it was eventually to become.  Second, the new formulation of the rule introduces possible exceptions, by alluding to 'good reasons' for breaking it. Again, Grice does not elaborate on this qualification, but the consideration of reasons for breaching the maxims, together with a discussion of the consequences of doing so, was to be vital to the subsequent development of his work.  It was what was to give it explanatory and generalising abilities beyond those of a simple list of 'rules' of linguistic behaviour.  Grice's claims about the use of language offer support to the defender of sense data. They allow the defender to describe statements of the  'so-and-so looks @ to me' type as strictly true regardless of whether the D-or-D condition holds. If such statements call for the use of sense data as a technical term to explain their meaning, then sense data are applicable to any description of perception. It is simply that in most non-con-troversial contexts such statements will be avoided because, although perfectly true, they will introduce misleading suggestions. Here, perhaps, was Grice's greatest heresy. Austin's rejection of sense data relied on an appeal to what people ordinarily say, together with an assumption that this is the best guide to meaning and truth. Grice's tentative support for it relies on a distinction between what people can truthfully say, and what they actually, realistically do say. Despite itsemphasis on linguistic use, 'The causal theory of perception' was well received as a contribution to the philosophy of perception. It was anthologised in 1965 in Robert Swartz's Perceiving, Sensing and Knowing.  In 1967, Grice's sometime collaborator Geoffrey Warnock included the essay in his volume on The Philosophy of Perception, singling it out for praise as an 'exceedingly ingenious and resourceful contribution'. 36  As was the case throughout his working life, Grice made no firm distinction between his teaching and the development of his own philosophical ideas. A series of lecture notes from the 1960s on topics relating to speaker meaning and context therefore provide an insight into the lines along which his thinking was developing, as do some rough notes from the same period. What his students gained from the fresh ideas in Grice's lectures, however, they paid for in his cavalier attitude to the topic and aims of the class. He begins one lecture, which is entitled simply 'Saying: Week 1':  Although the official title of this class is 'Saying', let me say at once that we are unlikely to reach any direct discussion of the notion of saying for several weeks, and in the likely event of our failing to make any substantial inroads on the title topic this term, my present intention is to continue the class into next term.37  Grice's interest in these lectures was in finding out what can be learnt about speaker meaning, specifically about what sets it apart from linguistic meaning, from close attention to its characteristics and circum-stances. The opening of another of the lectures, entitled 'The general theory of context', tells rather more of his purpose and method than is made explicit in much of the later, published work.  Philosophers often say that context is very important. Let us take this remark seriously. Surely, if we do, we shall want to consider this remark not merely in its relation to this or that problem, i.e. in context, but also in itself, i.e. out of context. If we are to take this seriously, we must be systematic, that is thorough and orderly. If we are to be orderly we must start with what is relatively simple. Here, though not of course everywhere, to be simple is to be as abstract as possible; by this I mean merely that we want, to begin with, to have as few cards on the table as we can. Orderliness will then consist in seeing first what we can do with the cards we have; and when we think that we have exhausted this investigation, we put another card on the table, and see what that enables us to do.It is not hard to discern Austin's influence here, in the insistence that a particular philosophical commonplace, if it is to be accepted as a useful explanation, must first be subject to a rigorous process of analy-sis. The call for system and order, however, is Grice's own. He had reacted against precisely the tendency towards unordered, open-ended lists in Austin's work. He argues in these lectures that thinking seriously about context means thinking about conversation; this is the setting for most examples of speaker meaning. He proposes, therefore, to compile an account of some of the basic properties common to conversations generally. His method of limiting his hand was to result in certain highly artificial simplifications, but he made these simplifications deliberately and knowingly. For instance, the relevant context was to be assumed to be limited to what he calls the 'linguistic environment': to the content of the conversation itself. Conversation was assumed to take place between two people who alternate as speaker and hearer, and to be concerned simply with the business of transferring information between them.  A number of the lectures include discussion of the types of behaviour people in general exhibit, and therefore the types of expectations they might bring to a venture such as a conversation. Grice suggests that people in general both exhibit and expect a certain degree of helpfulness from others, usually on the understanding that such helpfulness does not get in the way of particular goals, and does not involve undue effort. If two people, even complete strangers, are going through a gate, the expectation is that the first one through will hold the gate open, or at least leave it open, for the second. The expectation is such that to do otherwise without particular reason would be interpreted as deliberately rude.  The type of helpfulness exhibited and expected in conversation is more specific because of a particular, although not a unique, feature of con-versation; it is a collaborative venture between the participants. At least in the simplified version of conversation discussed in these lectures, there is a shared aim or purpose. However, an account of the particular type of helpfulness expected in conversation must be capable of extension to any collaborative activity. In his early notes on the subject, Grice considers  'cooperation' as a label for the features he was seeking to describe. Does  'helpfulness in something we are doing together'  ', he wonders in a note,  equate to 'cooperation'? He seems to have decided that it does; by the later lectures in the series 'the principle of conversational helpfulness' has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation'.  During the Oxford lectures Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regu-larities, or principles, detailing expected behaviour. The term 'maxim' to describe these regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.  Grice's initial choices of term are 'objectives', or 'desiderata'; he was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose of achieving the joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits two such desiderata: those relating to candour on the one hand, and clarity on the other. The desideratum of candour contains his general principle of making the strongest possible statement and, as a limiting factor on this, the suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead.  The desideratum of clarity concerns the manner of expression for any conversational contribution. It includes the importance of expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main import of an utterance be clear and explicit. These two factors are constantly to be weighed against two fundamental and sometimes competing demands. Contributions to a conversation are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the principle of Conversational Benevolence. The principle of Conversational Self-Love ensures the assumption on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble in framing their contribution.  Grice suggests that many philosophers are guilty of inexactness in their use of expressions such as 'saying', 'meaning' and 'use'  ', applying  them as if they were interchangeable, and in effect confusing different ways in which a single utterance can convey information. For instance, Grice refers back to the discussion at a previous class he had given jointly with David Pears, when the exact meaning of the verb 'to try' was discussed. This, of course, was one of the specific philosophical problems he was interested in accounting for by means of general principles of use. Stuart Hampshire had apparently claimed that if someone, X, did something, it is always possible to say that X tried to do it. This was challenged; in situations when there is no obvious difficulty or risk of failure involved it is inappropriate to talk of someone's trying to do something. Grice's answer had been that, while it is always true to say that X tried to do something, this may sometimes be a misleading way of speaking. If X succeeded in performing the act, it would be more informative and therefore more cooperative to say so. Therefore, an utterance of 'X tried to do it' will imply, but not actually say, that X did not succeed.  In his consideration of the desiderata of conversational participation, Grice initially compiles a loose assemblage of features. By the later lectures these appear in more or less their final form under the categories Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner (or, sometimes, Mode). Inarranging the desiderata in this way, Grice was presumably seeking to impose a formal arrangement on a diverse set of principles. But it seems that he had other motives: semi-seriously to echo the use of categories in such orthodox philosophies as those of Aristotle and Kant, and more importantly to draw on their ideas of natural, universal divisions of experience. The regularities of conversational behaviour were intended to include aspects of human behaviour and cognition beyond the purely linguistic. Grice's collaborative work with Strawson had been concerned with Aristotle's division of experience into 'categories' of substances.  Aristotle's original formulation of the list of such properties allows that they can take the form of 'either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected'.38 He concentrates mainly on the first four, and these received most attention in subsequent developments of his work. They were the starting-point for Kant's use of categories to describe types of human experience, and his argument that these form the basis of all possible human knowledge. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes to divide the pure concepts of understanding into four main divisions:  'Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his although very distinct from it in execu-tion. '39 These are categories 'Of Quantity', 'Of Quality', 'Of Relation' and  'Of Modality', with various subdivisions ascribed to each. Kant's claims for both the fundamental and the exhaustive nature of these categories are explicit:  This division is systematically generated from a common principle, namely the faculty for judging (which is the same as the faculty for thinking), and has not arisen rhapsodically from a haphazard search for pure concepts, of the completeness of which one could never be certain.  40  Kant goes so far as to suggest that his table of categories, containing all the basic concepts of understanding, could provide the basis for any philosophical theory. These, therefore, offered Grice divisions of experience with a sound pedigree and an established claim to be universals of human cognition.  Early in 1967, Grice travelled to Harvard to deliver that year's William James lectures, the prestigious philosophical series in which Austin had put forward his theory of speech acts 12 years earlier. Grice's entitled his lectures 'Logic and conversation'. He was presenting his current thinking about meaning to an audience beyond that of his students andimmediate colleagues and was clearly aware of the different assumptions and prejudices he could expect in an American, as opposed to an Oxford, audience. 'Some of you may regard some of the examples of the manoeuvre which I am about to mention as being representative of an out-dated style of philosophy', he suggests in the introductory lecture, 'I do not think that one should be too quick to write off such a style.'41 Addressing philosophical concerns by means of an attention to everyday language was still a highly respectable, even an orthodox approach in Oxford. In America it was seen by at least some as belonging to an unsuccessful, and now rather passé, school of thought. In pleading its cause, Grice argues that it still has much to offer: in this case, the possibility of developing a theory to discriminate between utterances that are inappropriate because false, and those that are inappropriate for some other reason. Despite the difficulties inherent in such an ambitious scheme, and the well-known problems with the school of thought in question, he does not give up hope altogether of 'system-atizing the linguistic phenomena of natural discourse'.  Grice's ultimate aim in the lectures is ambitious and uncompromis-ing; his interest 'will lie in the generation of an outline of a philosophical theory of language' 4 He argues for a complex understanding of the significance of any utterance in a particular context; its meaning is not a unitary phenomenon. Conventional meanin g has a necessary, but by no means a sufficient role to play. Indeed conventional meaning is itself not a unitary phenomenon. Some aspects of it involve the speaker in a commitment to the truth of a certain proposition; this is  'what is said' on any particular occasion. Other aspects may be associated by convention with the words used, but not be part of what the speaker is understood literally to have said. The examples 'She was poor but honest' and 'He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave' convey more than just the truth of the two conjuncts, more than would be conveyed by 'She was poor and honest' or 'He is an Englishman and he is brave'.  '. An idea of contrast is introduced in the first example and one of consequence in the second. These ideas are attached to the use of the individual words 'but' and 'therefore', but do not contribute to the truth-conditions of the sentences. We would not want to say that the sentences were actually false if both conjuncts were true, but we did not agree with the idea of contrast or of consequence. We might, rather, want to say that the speaker was presenting true facts in a misleading way. These examples demonstrate implicated elements associated with the conventional meaning of the words used, elements Grice labels  'conventional implicatures'There is another level at which speaker meaning can differ from what is said, dependent on context or, for Grice, on conversation. In 'con-versational implicatures' meaning is conveyed not so much by what is said, but by the fact that it is said. This is where the categories of conversational cooperation, and their various maxims, play their part.  The onus on participants in a conversation to cooperate towards their common goal, and more particularly the expectation each participant has of cooperation from the other, ensures that the understanding of an utterance often goes beyond what is said. Faced with an apparently uncooperative utterance, or one apparently in breach of some maxim, a conversationalist will if possible 'rescue' that utterance by interpreting it as an appropriate contribution. In this way, Grice offers a more detailed account of the idea he explored in 'Meaning', and in his notes from that time: that there are three 'levels' of meaning, or three different degrees to which a speaker may be committed to a proposition. His model now includes, 'what is said', 'conventional meaning' (including conventional implicatures) and 'what is conversationally implicated'.  The presentation of the norms of conversational behaviour in the William James lectures is rather different from Grice's handling of them in his earlier work. The maxims, or the categories they fall into, are no longer presented as the primary forces at work. Instead, all are assumed under a general 'Principle of Cooperation'. The principle appeared late in the development of Grice's theory. It enjoins speakers to: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.'43 The name 'Cooperative Principle' was even later; it was added using an omission mark in a manuscript copy of the second William James lecture. Grice may well have been attempting to give a name, and an exact formulation, to his previously rather nebulous idea of cooperation or 'helpfulness'. However, the effect was to change what was presented as a series of 'desiderata', features of conversational behaviour participants might expect in their exchanges, to something looking like a powerful and general injunction to correct social behaviour.  In the development of his theory of conversation, Grice was much exercised by the status of the categories as psychological concepts. He questioned whether the maxims were the result of entering into a quasi-contract by engaging in conversation, simply inductive generalisations over what people do in fact do in conversation, or, as he suggested in one rough note, just 'special cases of what a decent chap should do'.  He remained undecided on this matter throughout the development ofthe theory, content to concentrate on the effects on meaning of the maxims, whatever their status. By the time of the William James lectures, however, he seems to be closer to an answer. He is 'enough of a rationalist' to want to find an explanation beyond mere empirical generalisation.  4 The following suggestion results from this impetus:  So I would like to be able to show that observation of the Cooperative Principle and maxims is reasonable (rational) along the following lines: that anyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation/communication (such as giving and receiving information, influencing and being influenced by others) must be expected to have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges that will be profitable only on the assumption that they are conducted in general accordance with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims.45  This is a wordy explanation, and also a troublesome one. It seems to create a loop linking the aim of explaining cooperation to an account of conversation as dependent on cooperation, a loop from which it does not successfully escape. The link between reasonableness and cooperation is far from explicit. Nevertheless, this passage offers Grice's account of his own preferences in seeking an answer to the question over the status, and hence the motivation, for the Cooperative Principle. His preference, particularly his reference to 'rational' behaviour, was to prove important in the subsequent development of his work.  However derived, the maxims operate to produce conversational implicatures in a number of different ways. In many cases, they simply  'fill in' the extra information needed to make a contribution fully coop-erative. A says 'Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days' and B replies, 'He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately'. B's remark does not, as it stands, appear relevant to the preceding remark.  But it is easy enough to supply the missing belief B must hold for the remark to be relevant. B conversationally implicates that Smith has, or may have a girlfriend in New York.46  In other cases the speaker seems to be far less cooperative, at least at the level of 'what is said'. In order to be rescued as cooperative contributions to the conversation, such examples need to be not so much filled out as re-analysed. Because of the strength of the conviction that the speaker will, other things being equal, provide cooperative contri-butions, the other participant will put in the work necessary to reach such an interpretation. In perhaps his most famous example of con-versational implicature, Grice suggests the case of a letter of reference for a candidate for a philosophy job that runs as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc! The information given is grossly inadequate; the writer appears to be seriously in breach of the first maxim of Quan-tity, enjoining the utterer to give as much information as is appropri-ate. However, the receiver of the letter is able to deduce that the writer, as the candidate's tutor, must know more than this about the candidate.  There must be some reason why the writer is reluctant to offer the extra information that would be helpful. The most obvious reason is that the writer does not want explicitly to comment on Mr X's philosophical ability, because it is not possible to do so without writing something socially unpleasant. The writer is therefore taken conversationally to implicate that Mr X is no good at philosophy; the letter is cooperative not at the level of what is literally said, but at the level of what is impli-cated. In examples such as this a maxim is deliberately and ostentatiously flouted in order to give rise to a conversational implicature; such examples involve exploitation.  These examples, and others Grice discusses in the second William James lecture, are all specific to, and entirely dependent on, the individual contexts in which they occur. Grice labels all such example  'particularised conversational implicatures'. There are other types of conversational implicature in which the context is less significant, or at least can operate only as a 'veto' to implicatures that arise by default unless prevented. These are implicatures associated with the use of particular words. Unlike conventional implicatures, they can be cancelled: that is explicitly denied without contradiction. These 'generalised conversational implicatures' account for many of the differences between the logical constants and the behaviour of their natural language counterparts. In effect, Grice claims that there simply is no difference between, say '', 'n', 'v' and 'not', 'and', 'or' at the level of what is said.  The well-known differences are generalised conversational implicatures often associated with the use of these expressions, implicatures determined by the categories and maxims he has established.  Part of Grice's motivation for this proposal was the desire for a simplification of semantics. The alternative to such an account was to posit a semantic ambiguity for a wide range of linguistic expressions. Grice argues against this, proposing a principle he labels 'Modified Occam's Razor', which would rule against it in decisions of a theoretical nature.  The principle states that 'senses are not to be multiplied beyond neces-sity' 47 Grice's reference was to William of Occam, or Ockham, thefourteenth-century philosopher credited with the dictum 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. This is known as 'Occam's razor' although it is not clearly attributable to any of his writings, and it is not at all uncommon for philosophers to discuss it in isolation from Occam's actual work. It is taken as a general injunction not to complicate philosophical theories; the best theory is the simplest theory, invoking the fewest explanatory categories. The preference for simple philosophical theories that do not add complex and potentially unnecessary categories was one with an obvious appeal to philosophers of ordinary language. Indeed, when Gilbert Ryle published his collected papers in 1971, he commented on the 'Occamising zeal' particularly apparent in the earlier articles. Another contemporary philosopher to draw on an Occam-type approach to discussions of meaning was B. S.  Benjamin, whose article 'Remembering' is referred to in the first William James lecture. He does not draw an explicit comparison to Occam's razor, but he does pose himself the question of whether the verb  'remember' should be analysed as multivocal or univocal. For Benjamin, a 'universal core of meaning is preserved in its use in different contexts'.49  Grice himself did not develop the connection between conversational implicature and the logical constants in any great depth, either in the William James lectures or elsewhere. This is perhaps surprising, given that he introduces his theory in terms of the question of the equiva-lence, or lack of equivalence, between certain logical devices and expressions of natural language. The implications of this question, together with the specific answers offered by conversational implicature, are treated in detail by others.5° A. P. Martinich has suggested that the initial concentration on, and subsequent abandonment of, the logical particles is a serious flaw in the construction of the second, and most widely read, of the William James lectures. In a book aimed at describing and promoting good philosophical writing, Martinich identifies this as 'one of the greatest articles of the twentieth century', but argues that the more general theory of 'linguistic communication' ought to have been made the focus from the outset. He comments that on first reading Grice's article he was unimpressed by what he saw as an unacceptably complex mechanism to solve a very particular logical problem: 'Once I realised that the solution was a minor consequence of his theory I was awed by its elegance and simplicity.'51  Grice's discussion of logic is mainly restricted to the fourth William James lecture, which he later labelled 'Indicative conditionals' after the chief, but not the only, logical constant it discusses. Indicative condi-tions had been a central theme of some lectures on logical form Grice delivered at Oxford while working on his theory of conversation. There he had commented extensively on Peter Strawson's treatment of this topic in his 1952 book Introduction to Logical Theory. Grice does not mention Strawson at all in this fourth William James lecture. He does, however, discuss the views of what he calls a '"strong" theorist', views that accord with Strawson's in the insistence that the logical implica-tion, 'po q' is different in meaning from various expressions in natural language, most notably 'if p then q'. Strong theorists, Grice suggests, have tended to stress the difference between what he calls natural or ordinary language conditionals and 'artificial' conditionals, defined by logic and determined by truth-conditional properties.  Strawson argues that, while logical conditionals can be given a full definition in terms of a truth table involving the two simple propositions involved ('p' and 'q'), such an account will not be sufficient for natural language expressions such as 'if p then q'. The logical account specifies that if p is true, q must also be true. If p is false, however, nothing can be predicted about the truth value of q; a false antecedent coupled with a false consequent is assigned the overall value 'true', but so is a false antecedent coupled with a true consequent. This truth-conditional account seems insufficient as a definition of natural language 'if ... then ...' in at least two ways. There is a suggestion in most actual instances that there is some causal connection between the antecedent and the consequent. One of Strawson's own examples is: 'If it rains, then the party will be a failure!' Such examples, he notes, are not about linguistic elements or logical relations: 'they suggest connections between different things in the world, discovered by experience of these things 52 Later, he comments that most examples of the 'if ... then .. construction would suggest either that the truth of the antecedent is in some doubt, or that it is already known to be false. It is only in such cases that we would be likely to label the resulting statement true, or perhaps 'reasonable'. Strawson's suggestion is that 'if p then q' entails its logical counterpart 'P > q'. However, 'a statement of the form "p > q" does not entail the corresponding statement of the form "if p then 9" 153 There are aspects of the meaning of 'if p then q' that go beyond, and are not included in, the meaning of the logical conditional.  In his Oxford lecture notes, Grice singles Strawson out as an example of a philosopher who has not paid sufficient attention to the different ways in which a natural language expression can convey significance when it occurs in context. For Grice, this oversight has serious consequences for an understanding of the meaning of various crucial exam-ples. Certainly, as well as discussing the 'meaning' of particular expres-sions, Strawson writes, apparently without distinction, of the 'use'  'employment', 'sense' and 'implication' of 'if ... then ...' statements.54 He describes the speaker's relation to the relevant meaning as one of  'suggesting', 'using', 'indicating', 'saying' and even 'making' 55  Grice's contention, although not explicitly expressed in 'Indicative conditionals', is that there is a great deal of difference between the members of the sets that Strawson uses interchangeably. In particular, sufficient attention to the difference between saying and implicating can explain away the apparent differences between 'p> q' and 'if p then q'. He begins the fourth William James lecture uncompromisingly enough by proposing to consider the supposed divergence between 'if' and 's' and to demonstrate that 'no such divergence exists'. He suggests that 'if p then q' is distinguished from 'p> q' by the 'indirectness condition' associated with it: the commitment to some causal or rational link between p and q. Grice's claim, in effect, is that the literal meaning of 'if p then q', 'what is said' on any particular occasion of utterance, is simply equivalent to the logical meaning of 'p > q'. The indirectness condition is a generalised conversational implicature. Like all generalised conversational implicatures, it can be cancelled without contradiction, either by circumstances in the context or by explicit denial. In a game of bridge: 'My system contains a bid of five no trumps, which is announced to one's opponents on inquiry as meaning "If I have a red king, I also have a black king" !5 Here, Grice suggests, the indirectness condition simply does not arise because it is blocked by the context. There is no suggestion that having a black king is causally linked to having a red king, and the meaning is the same as that of the logical condition. To say 'if Smith is in the library he is working' would normally suggest the indirectness condition. But it is perfectly possible to say I know just where Smith is and what he is doing, but all I will tell you is that if he is in the library he is working', in a situation where the speaker had just looked in the library and seen Smith there working. In such a case also, the indirectness condition is not attached to the use of the expression.  Grice suggests what he describes as two separate possibilities as to how the indirectness condition might be produced as an implicature, although it is not in fact clear that these are necessarily mutually exclu-sive. The first relies on his original 'general principle' about the tendency towards stronger rather than weaker statements, and the first maxim of Quantity that results from it. It is less informative to say 'if p then q' than it is to say 'p and q', because the former does not givedefinite information about the truth values of p and q. Therefore, any utterance of 'p> q' will, unless prevented by context, give rise to the implicature that the speaker does not have definite information about the truth values of p and q. The same explanation can be extended to utterances of the form 'p or q'. These too seem to differ systematically from the apparently equivalent logical disjunction, 'p v q'. The truth-conditional meaning of logical disjunction states simply that at least one of the simple propositions involved must be true. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, for both propositions to be true. Yet in natural language there is something distinctly odd about saying 'p or q' if you know for certain that both p and q are true. In Grice's terms, 'p or q' shares the logical meaning of 'p v q', but in addition carries a gener-alised implicature that they are not both true. If the speaker were in a position to offer the more informative form 'p and q', then it would be conversationally more helpful to do so.  Grice's second suggestion is that implicated meanings of such expressions may follow from their role in conversation, and in human interaction and thought more generally. The familiar logical constants enable people to work out the problems presented to them by everyday life. In particular, disjunction enables people to consider alternatives and eliminate the untenable. It enables people to give partial answers to 'Wh'-questions such as 'Who killed Cock Robin?'. The most helpful answer would be a single subject ('the sparrow', 'the wren'), but if the speaker is not in a position to offer one, a series of disjuncts is a way of setting out the possibilities. Conditionals, on the other hand, enable people to ponder the consequences of certain choices. They are, there-fore, necessary to the successful operation of reasoning beings. It would simply not be rational to use a conditional in certain contexts: contexts where there is no doubt about the truth of the antecedent, for instance.  For this reason, on the assumption that our interlocutors are rational beings, we tend to interpret a conditional as indicating that a simple coordination will not do. Similarly, it would not be rational to use a disjunction in a context where we know that one of the disjuncts is true; we would in effect be attempting to solve a problem that had already been solved. Grice suggests, with typical tentativeness, that:  It might be that either generally or at least in special contexts it is impossible for a rational speaker to employ the conditional form unless, at least in his view, not merely the truth-table requirements are satisfied but also some strong connection holds. In such a case a speaker will nonconventionally implicate, when he uses theconditional form in such a context, that a strong connection does hold.  59  Grice offers this account in terms of the behaviour of a 'rational' speaker in at least potential opposition to an account drawing on the first maxim of Quantity. Elsewhere, however, he discusses the maxims as describing individually rational forms of behaviour. It is therefore conceivable that it might be possible to integrate the two suggestions, seeing conditionals as used rationally to introduce the implication of strong connection, precisely because their 'tentative' state does not offer the information that would be cooperative if available.  In the later 'Logic and conversation' lectures, Grice continues his pro-gramme for a philosophical theory of language by returning to older preoccupations, particularly to the problems identified in, and raised in response to, 'Meaning'. In effect, the theory of conversation offers a much fuller account of the notion of speaker meaning than had been developed in 'Meaning', together with a principled system linking this to conventional meaning. When first introduced in the second lecture, conventional meaning itself receives rather cursory treatment. Grice suggests that 'what is said' can be roughly equated with conventional meaning, including assigning of reference to referring expressions and any necessary disambiguation. He almost immediately complicates this definition by stipulating that some aspects of conventional meaning can be implicated. Grice returns to the notion of 'what is said' in the fifth William James lecture, later published under the title 'Utterer's meaning and intentions'  Grice's contention is still that intentions on individual occasions must be the primary criteria in determining meaning. However, simply referring to what some individual meant by some action on some particular occasion is not sufficient to arrive at an account of 'what is said'. It does not rule out a host of examples that have nothing at all to do with saying, such as flashing your headlights to indicate that the other driver has right of way. Grice's solution is in effect to do something close to the manoeuvre suggested by Searle in Speech Acts. He proposes to import into the definition of 'meaning' a specification that the utterer's action must constitute a unit in some linguistic system that has, or contains, the meaning intended by the utterer. In other words, 'U did something x which is an occurrence of a type S part of the meaning of which is  "p" 16 Furthermore, he introduces a notion of what U 'centrally meant' in doing x, in order to distinguish a core meaning from other aspects of what may be conveyed by an utterance, in particular from its con-ventional implicatures. In effect, Grice is introducing the notion of conventional meaning into utterer meaning, making it serve as part of the definition of what a speaker can legitimately intend by an utterance, while still maintaining that individual speaker intention is the primary factor in meaning. Grice extends his discussion of the different 'levels' of meaning to allow for four separate levels, labelled 'timeless meaning',  'applied timeless meaning', 'occasion meaning of utterance type' and  'utterer's occasion meaning'.  In the same lecture, Grice responds to some of the criticisms of  'Meaning'  '. Most of these, such as Schiffer's identification of an unten-  able infinite regress, were not published at the time. Grice is replying to objections put to him 'in conversation'. His response to Schiffer is, in effect, that the mental exercises required in recognising the infinite regress in intentions quickly become 'baffling'. Whatever they may demonstrate in theory, they are impossibly complex for any real-life situation:  At some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of A by U will be impracticably difficult; and I suspect the limit was reached (if not exceeded) in the examples which prompted the addition of a fourth and fifth condition. So U could not have the intention required of him in order to force the addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations he would be requiring of A too difficult, but it would be impossible for U to find cues to indicate to A that the calculations should be made, even if they were within A's compass. So one is tempted to conclude that no regress is involved.  62  Searle's 'American soldier' counter-example was already published in article form, and Grice responds to it by arguing that Searle is unjustified in claiming that the soldier did not mean 'I am a German officer'.  Regardless of what the utterance conventionally meant in German (the question about lemon blossom), if the soldier used it with the intention of getting his captors to believe that he was a German officer, this was what he meant by the utterance. Grice offers a revised definition of his account of meaning. Intention is still the central notion, which Grice discusses in terms of 'M-intentions', emphasising the importance of the speaker's desire for some response from the audience.  The remaining two lectures in the 'Logic and conversation' series develop further this notion of M-intending. At the start of the penultimate lecture, published under the title 'Utterer's meaning, sentencemeaning and word-meaning', Grice displays a typical mixture of caution and ambition. He is concerned with the relationship between what a particular person meant on a particular occasion, and what a sentence or word means. What he has to say about this 'should be looked upon as an attempt to provide a sketch of what might, I hope, prove to be a viable theory, rather than as an attempt to provide any part of a finally acceptable theory' 63 Speakers may have one of two attitudes to an utterance, which will determine their M-intentions. They may wish to get hearers to believe something, or they may wish to get hearers to do something. These two attitudes, or moods, relate to indicative or assertive utterances and to imperative utterances. The two moods are represented by the symbols + and ! respectively. Grice proposes that the symbol * stand as a 'dummy operator' in the place of either of these.  Thus a general statement of the form 'Jones meant that *p' could be filled out using a specific mood operator and an indicative sentence to give either 'Jones meant that + Smith will go home' or 'Jones meant that ! Smith will go home'.  • A further expansion, substituting a clause in indi-  rect speech, yields 'Jones meant that Smith will go home' and 'Jones meant that Smith is to go home',  ', both instantiations of the original  formula.  M-intentions in relation to imperative types are now defined as the intention that hearers should intend to do something, rather than the earlier, simpler definition that they should do something. The M-intended effect of an indicative-type utterance is no longer necessarily that the hearer should believe something 'but that the hearer should think that the utterer believes something'6 The effect of these two changes, particularly the first, is that all possible M-intentions are defined in terms of some psychological notion. Grice explicitly defends his use of what he calls 'intensional' concepts: those defining meaning not just in relation to how language maps on to the world, but also to how it relates to individual minds. Psychological concepts should not be ruled out, he argues, if they have something explanatory to offer to a theory of language. In this lecture, Grice indicates an account of how timeless meaning in a single idiolect may develop to become timeless meaning for a group. In effect, he is arguing that individual speaker meaning can, over time, yield conventional meaning. The exact status of this conventional meaning is perhaps still uncertain. Meaning is best explained in terms of the practices of a group; drawing on this, conventional meaning comes from 'the idea of aiming at conformity'. 65 Grice recognises a tension, or an 'unsolved problem' in the relationship between these two types of meaning. Briefly, 'linguistic rules' can beidentified such that our linguistic practice is 'as if we accepted those rules and conscientiously followed them'. But the desire to see this as an explanation rather than just an interesting fact about our linguistic practice leads us to suppose that there is a sense in which 'we do accept these rules'. This then leaves the problem of distinguishing ontologically between acceptance of the rules and existence of the practice.  In the final William James lecture, Grice attempts a restatement of his position on meaning. To say that someone, U, means something, p, by some utterance of C, is to talk about 'U's disposition with regard to the employment of C'. This disposition 'could be (should be) thought of as consisting of a general intention (readiness) on the part of U; U has the general intention to use C on particular occasions to means that p' (Grice is here using 'mean,' for 'speaker meaning'). Although he still wants to claim that all meaning is ultimately dependent on intention, Grice is no longer claiming that all meaning is derived from speaker meaning, therefore specifically from M-intentions. His extensive modifications of his theory of meaning have themselves been the subject of criticism. In 1973 Max Black, responding to the lectures so far published, commented on Grice's 'almost unmanageable elaborations' of his own theory. He likens the tenacity with which Grice clings to the original idea to the latter fate of the Principle of Verifiability', with its numerous qualifications and reservations in the face of counter-examples.  Employing an accusation that had long haunted Grice, he suggests that this tenacity goes beyond 'an admirable stubbornness' , amounting to  'something that might be called a "philosophical fixation"'.  The exact nature of conventional meaning and its relation to the more central notion of speaker's meaning are perhaps the least well resolved aspects of the William James lectures. They are, however, crucial to Grice's central programme. A fully integrated philosophy of language relating abstract linguistic meaning to what individual speakers do in particular contexts needs at least a clear account of the status of linguistic meaning. Grice seemed uncomfortable with its pres-ence, but increasingly to be aware of his need to account for it. Towards the end of his life, he commented that the relationship between word meaning and speaker meaning was the topic 'that has given me most trouble'. However, some later commentators have been more optimistic on his behalf. Anita Avramides has argued that it is possible to reconcile a psychological account of meaning with a conventional account, urging that 'Grice's work on meaning is, I believe, of a hearty nature and can endure alteration and modification without becoming obsolete.' Brian Loar has dismissed possible criticisms that Grice's account of speaker meaning must always presuppose linguisticmeaning, claiming that 'the basic illumination shed by Grice's account of speaker's meaning does not depend on such precise conceptual explication.'1  The problems surrounding conventional meaning prompted some of the earliest published responses to the William James lectures, perhaps in part because the last two lectures in the series, both concerned with this general topic, were the first to appear in print: 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in 1969. In 'Meaning and truth', his discussion of the  'Homeric struggle' between formal semanticists and communication-theorists, Strawson suggests that the latter must always acknowledge that in most sentences 'there is a substantial central core of meaning which is explicable either in terms of truth-conditions or in terms of some related notion quite simply derivable from that of a truth-condition.' Strawson singles out Grice's 1968 article as an example of a communication theorist implicitly making such as acknowledgement.  Another published response to these early articles came from Chomsky. It is clear from his 1976 book Reflections on Language that Grice's admiration for his work was not reciprocated. Chomsky detects a return to behaviourism in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning'. This is rather surprising, given Grice's own explicit rejection of behaviourism, and given his spirited defence of the need to allow psychological concepts into the theory of language. Chomsky picks up on Grice's reliance on having 'procedures' to produce certain effects as an account of timeless meaning for a particular individual.  Such an account, Chomsky argues, simply cannot explain the creativity of language use: the ability of speakers to produce and hearers to interpret an infinity of new sentences. He is uncomfortable with the loose ends and pointers to unresolved problems typical of Grice's work.  In particular, and not surprisingly, he picks up on Grice's discussion of the status of linguistic rules. This question, Chomsky insists, is 'the central problem, not a marginal one' 73 His own answer is, of course, that speakers really do follow linguistic rules in constructing utterances, and that these rules can tell us everything about the linguistic meaning of an utterance, and nothing about what an individual speaker meant in producing the utterance. In this book, as elsewhere, Chomsky is advocating a complete divorce between the discussion of linguistic meaning and the study of communication. Communication, he argues, is not the only, and by no means a necessary, function of language. Here is the source of the ultimately irresolvable difference between Chomsky and Grice. For Grice, communication is primary; the best chance for explaining language is by way of explaining communication.Grice returned to Oxford after the William James lectures, but only for one term. In the autumn of 1967 he took up an appointment at the University of California, Berkeley. The move was permanent; during the rest of his life he was to make only a handful of brief return visits to England. It was also in many ways incongruous. A thoroughgoing product of the British elite educational system, Grice delighted in the rituals and formalities of college life. And even Kathleen was amazed that he was ready to turn his back on cricket, concluding that it was only because at 54 he was too old to play for county or college that he was prepared to move at all. But there was no reluctance in Grice's acceptance of his new appointment. In fact, he engineered the move himself. While at Harvard, he had made his interest known generally in the American academic community. When the offer came from Berkeley he had accepted it enthusiastically and, somewhat naively, without negotiation.  Grice's only published comment on the reasons for his move to America is in the philosophical memoir in his Festschrift, part of his description of the development of the theory of conversation:  During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed, the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States.'  Certainly, the later William James lectures show an increasing formal-ism. For instance, in 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning and word-meaning' Grice uses symbols to generalise over variables and producegeneric logical forms to be instantiated in particular utterances. He had found this way of working with language appealing on his earlier visits to America, and two of his major philosophical influences at this time, Chomsky and Quine, were American.  There were other, more personal reasons for the move. Grice had become a confirmed admirer of all things American. He appreciated the comparatively relaxed social mores; the informality of the 1960s, which had not yet fully penetrated the Oxford colleges, suited his own disregard for personal appearance. He loved the Californian sunshine. And he was enthusiastic about the ready availability of what he saw as the most important commercial commodities. Asked by one colleague what was attracting him away to America he replied, 'Alcohol is cheap, petrol is cheap, gramophone records are cheap. What more could you want?' Perhaps above all, he liked the openness and warmth of American society. One incident in particular, from a few years earlier, had strengthened him in this opinion. He had recently returned to Oxford after a stay of several months in Stanford. He ran into a relatively close colleague, who followed up a platitudinous declaration that they must meet up some time with the comment, 'I don't seem to have seen you around. Have you been away?' For Grice, this was indicative of a certain coldness and distance in British, or at least Oxford, society that contrasted poorly with his recent experiences in America. Certainly, he took to his new lifestyle with ease and enthusiasm. Soon after the move he bought  a house in the Berkeley Hills, with a balcony overlooking San Francisco Bay. Kathleen, who had stayed in England to oversee their two children's university entrances, moved to Berkeley only in 1969, by which time the matter of the house was all settled. She took a job teaching children with special needs, and would often return after a day's work to find every window sill covered with dirty glasses, some covered in paint smudges. Grice was in the habit of extending his hospitality to every visitor to the house, whether colleague, student or decorator, but not of tidying up afterwards.?  Berkeley in 1967 was a centre for the anti-Vietnam War movement, for the student protests and for the associated questioning of social and political orthodoxy. However, such challenges were not necessarily felt within the institution of the university itself. The philosophy department had maintained a sharp hierarchical distinction between faculty and students, even at graduate level. Grice, who specified that he would teach only graduate students, had an impact on this. For all its formality and traditionalism, the Oxford college tutorial system had the effect of promoting regular contact, and free exchange of ideas, between tutorsand students. Grice had greatly benefited from this, first as a student of  W. F. R. Hardie, and later as a tutor to younger philosophers such as Peter Strawson. At Berkeley he taught his students in small groups, and encouraged them to talk to him outside class times about philosophical ideas, including their own. At his instigation, the weekly philosophy research seminars were followed by an evening for both faculty and students in a local restaurant or at his house. In turn, he was a regular and enthusiastic attender of student parties. His motives were, of course, a mixture of the intellectual and the social, but the effect was to offer students an unprecedented access to the time and ideas of a member of faculty.  Just as he retained a distinctly 'Oxford' ethos in his teaching, despite his enthusiasm for his new post, so Grice remained unmistakably British, and more specifically old-school British establishment. Perhaps even more strikingly after 1967 than before, his supposedly 'everyday' linguistic examples were peopled by majors, bishops and maiden aunts, set at tea parties and college dinners. He continued to produce manuscripts in British English spelling, to be painstakingly changed to American spellings by the copy editors. And in tape recordings even from 20 years after the move, his conservative RP accent stands out in sharp contrast to those of his American colleagues. Nor did Grice entirely leave behind the methods and orthodoxies of Oxford philosophy when he moved to Berkeley to be in closer contact with American formalism. Commentators on twentieth-century philosophy have drawn attention to the different ways in which analytic philosophy developed in America and in Britain. For instance, writing in 1956, Strawson describes the American tradition as turning away from everyday language in order to concentrate on formal logic, a tendency he sees represented in the work of Carnap and of Quine. This he contrasts with the British, or rather English, tradition, exemplified by Austin and Ryle, with its continued close attention to common speech. He sees the former approach as representing a desire to create something new, and the latter a desire to understand what already exists; he even goes so far as to suggest that these 'national preferences' are indicative of 'a characteristic difference between the New World and the Old'.3 Grice could be seen as making a strong statement of academic intent by moving to America, but even in the work he produced immediately after that move, perhaps the most formal work of his career, he retained a distinctively 'Old World' sensitivity to ordinary language.  Grice's first publication after the move, apart from the two William James lectures that appeared in print in the late 1960s, was 'Vacuousnames', published in 1969. This was firmly located in a formalist tra-dition, appearing in a volume of essays responding to the work of Quine and including contributions by linguists and logicians such as Chomsky, Davidson and Kaplan. It was concerned with issues of refer-ence, in particular the question of how best to analyse sentences containing names that fail to refer, sentences such as 'Pegasus flies'. Grice had in fact been working on reference for some time, both before and after his move. He was lecturing on the topic in Oxford in October 1966, and gave a paper closely related to 'Vacuous names' at Princeton in November 1967. He comments at the start of the published paper on his own inexperience in formal logic: 'I have done my best to protect myself by consulting those who are in a position to advise me; they have suggested ideas for me to work on and have corrected some of my mistakes.* It seems that he had undertaken, quite self-consciously, to educate himself in predicate logic, so as to be in a position to answer the question in which he had become interested. The quantity of notes that survive from this period, and the wide range of materials they cover, testify to the perseverance, and also the relentlessness, with which he pursued this end. Tiny, scrawled logical symbols cover headed note-paper from both St John's College and the Berkeley department, and envelopes addressed to Grice both at Woodstock Road and at various temporary addresses from his early months in Berkeley.  In some of the notes from early in his Berkeley career, Grice devotes a lot of attention to the way in which expressions such as 'reference' and 'referring' are used in everyday language. He considers expressions such as 'in saying p, S was making a reference' and 'in what S said p occurred referentially'. Such locutions, he notes to himself, are 'princi-pally philosophical in character; ordinary chaps don't often say this sort of thing'.' Instead, he investigates expressions that do occur in ordinary language, such as the phrase 'when he said... he was referring to .., for instance 'when he said "The Vice President has resigned" he meant/was referring to the secretary'. People do regularly use the expression 'refer' to describe not just what phrases literally denote, but what people intend to pick out, or point to. Grice tackles the apparent paradox introduced by such an example. If what the speaker meant was that the secretary (Jones) had resigned, and it is true that the secretary had resigned, what he said is true. However, what he said entails that there is (was) a vice-president. In a situation where it is not true that there is (was) a vice-president, what is said is not true. It seems at least possible that the speaker's remark must be both true (because the secretary has resigned) and not true (because there is no vice-president) atthe same time. Grice notes that the 'truth of what is said (in suitable cases) must turn not only on denotation but also on reference': on what the speaker intends to pick out as well as on what the words literally indicate.  In 'Vacuous names'  ', Grice declares himself keen to uphold if possible  a number of intuitively appealing dogmas. These should ideally inform the construction of a predicate calculus to explain the semantics of natural language. The dogmas include a classical view of logic, in which if Fa is true then ~Fa must be false, and vice versa. They also include the closely related claim that 'if Pegasus does not exist, then "Pegasus does not fly" (or "It is not the case that Pegasus flies") will be true, while  "Pegasus flies" will be false'." If these truth relations hold, 'Pegasus flies' logically entails that Pegasus exists. In this, Grice is proposing to sustain a Russellian view of logic. This may seem like an unexpected or contradictory proposal from a philosopher of ordinary language who had collaborated with Strawson and employed his 'presuppositional' account of such examples in their joint work on categories. However, Grice had been moving away from a straightforwardly presuppositional account for some time. As early as the notes for the lectures on Peirce from which 'Meaning' developed, he had pondered the idea that examples Strawson would describe as presuppositional might provide illustrations of the difference he was investigating between sentence meaning and speaker meaning? Grice does not argue that Strawson's account of presupposition does not work, or does not explain accurately how people understand utterances in context. But he suggests that it is not necessary to use Strawson's observation as an explanation of sentence logic as well as speaker meaning.  In the years since he made these notes, he had of course refined this notion in much more detail, developing in the William James lectures the idea that logical form may be quite different from context-bound interpretation, with general principles of language use mediating between the two. He adopts this approach in 'Vacuous names'  '. He con-  siders two different uses of the phrase 'Jones's butler' to refer to an indi-vidual. On one occasion, people might say 'Jones's butler will be seeking a new position' when they hear of Jones's death, even if they do not know who the butler is; they might equally well say 'Jones's butler, whoever he is, will be seeking a new position'. On a different occasion, someone says 'Jones's butler got the hats and coats mixed up', describing an actual event, but mistakenly applying the name 'Jones's butler' to a person who is actually Jones's gardener; Jones does not in fact have a butler. In effect Grice wields Modified Occam's Razor, although he doesnot name it, when he insists that there is no difference in the meaning of the descriptive phrase in these two instances, only in the use to which it is put. I am suggesting that descriptive phrases have no relevant systematic duplicity of meaning; their meaning is given by a Russellian account.' So in the second case, when 'Jones's butler' fails literally to refer, 'What, in such a case, a speaker has said may be false, what he meant may be true (for example, that a certain particular individual [who is in fact Jones's gardener] mixed up the hats and coats)." For Grice, our responses to speakers' everyday use of expressions may not be the best guide to logic.  Grice was genuine in his desire to find out more about both logic and linguistics. His notes from the years immediately following the move to Berkeley reveal that, as well as setting himself the task of learning predicate calculus, he was reading current linguistic theory. Along with his own extensive notes on the subject, he kept a copy of Chomsky's 'Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation', in a version circulated by the Indiana University Linguistics Club early in 1969.1º He also had a number of articles on general semantics, on model-theoretic semantics, and on the semantics of children's language. The notes show him at work on the interface between semantics and syntax. There are tree diagrams and jottings of transformational rules mapping one diagram on to the next. There are sketches of phrase structure rules, such as 'NP → Art + N' and 'N → Adj + N', accompanied by the list 'N: boy, girl, tree, hill, dog, cat'." He seems to have been interested for a while in reflexive pronouns, listing verbs with which they were optional, or verb phrases from which they could be deleted ('shave myself'/'shave', 'dress myself'/'dress') and those from which they could not ('cut myself'/'cut', 'warm myself'/'warm'). He also dabbled in pho-netics, making notes to remind himself of words representative of the various vowel sounds, and drawing up a table of the distinctive features of the consonants Ip, lt and kJ.  Given this flurry of interest in linguistics, and his stated intention of putting himself into closer connection with practising linguists, it is striking that Grice does not seem to have sought any contact with linguists working at Berkeley. This is all the more surprising given that the interests of some Berkeley linguists at the time might be seen as corresponding remarkably closely to his own. If Berkeley was a hub of student uprising in 1967, it was to become a centre for a different, quieter revolution in the early 1970s. The generative semanticists were in revolt against what were now the orthodoxies of Chomskyan linguistics.  Chomsky was maintaining his hard line on the difference betweenlinguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. He argued that generative grammar was concerned with syntactic structure, and with semantic meaning to the extent that it depended on deep structure. It had nothing whatsoever to say about how speakers use language in context.  The generative semanticists argued that, if grammar really was to offer an account of the human mind, it should be able to explain all aspects of meaning, including the obvious fact that meaning is often indirect, or non-literal. Robin Lakoff has described how, in making such claims, linguists such as Paul Postal, George Lakoff, James McCawley and John Ross were seen as directly opposing Chomsky. Their attempts to find ways of incorporating various aspects of utterance meaning into a formal theory of language led to more and more complicated linguistic rules, and eventually to the failure of generative semantics as an enter-prise. Along the way, however, they picked up on work from ordinary language philosophy as 'the magic link between syntax and pragmat-ics'." Speech act theory offered a way of incorporating utterance function into grammar. Generative semanticists attempted to account for implicit performatives, where no overt performative verb is present, in terms of a 'performative marker' in deep structure.13 Grice's theory of conversation suggested possibilities for incorporating context-sensitive rules into grammar, and thereby explaining a wide range of non-literal or indirect meaning.14  However, there was little personal contact between Grice and the linguists who were making such enthusiastic use of his work. Programmes of the Berkeley linguistics colloquium, sent to Grice in the philosophy department, provided him with paper for his incessant jottings and list-ings, but were left unopened. McCawley's work on the performative hypothesis gets a mention in a handout for Grice's students from 1971, but references in his more public lectures and in his published work are always to philosophers rather than linguists. Aware of what linguists were doing, but not in active dialogue with them, he worried privately in his notes over whether logicians and linguists actually mean the same by their apparently shared vocabulary such as 'syntax' and 'semantics'.  T have the feeling', he confesses, 'that when I use the word "semantic" outside logical discussion, I am using the word more in hope than in understanding.'5  There are, perhaps, two explanations for Grice's silence on the topic of generative semantics in particular, and of linguistics more generally, although there is no evidence that Grice himself endorsed either of these. One is to do with the specific differences between Grice's enterprise and that of his contemporaries in linguistics, the other with themore general differences between linguistics and philosophy as disci-plines. Although one of Grice's central interests at the time was that of linking semantics and syntax into a coherent theory of language, he saw semantics as primary and syntax as derived from it. As he suggested in one talk on the subject:  What I want to do is in aid of the general idea that one could work out for a relatively developed language a syntax such that all the way down any tree which would terminate in the [sic] sentence of the language would be a structure to which a semantical rule was attached.17  His theory of meaning was the driving force behind his theory of lan-guage. The generative semanticists, on the other hand, took syntax as primary. Syntax, with a much more precise definition than Grice was using, was the governing factor in language. Their aim was to use it to explain as many aspects of meaning as possible.  More generally, as Robin Lakoff has pointed out, the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics have different expectations of a 'theory' of language and make different assumptions about the role of examples. 18 Linguists, at least those within a broadly 'Chomskyan' framework, are generally committed to the scientific validity of their theories. Examples are used to demonstrate a point and, in the face of counter-examples, the theory must be modified or in the worst case abandoned.  Philosophers in Grice's style are concerned with producing philosophically revealing accounts of the relevant phenomena, and examples are used to illustrate these accounts. Some of the more recent reactions to the theory of conversation from within linguistics highlight these different expectations. For instance, Paul Simpson has complained that  'Grice's own illustrations are all carefully contrived to fit his analytic model; as a result there emerge from the theory too few explicit criteria to handle the complexity of naturally occurring language.'' For Grice's purposes, the close fit of illustration and model is no problem; to a linguist it is a major fault.  In 1970, Grice gave a series of lectures and seminars at the University of Urbana under the uncompromisingly ambitious title 'Lectures on language and reality'. He explains at the start of these that his overarching theme will be reference, a topic that has interested him for some time. His interest follows on his belief that a clear account of reference is essential to a full understanding of many other central topics in the philosophy of language. More specifically and recently, he has come tosee its significance to the connections between grammar and logic, between syntax and semantics. In the first lecture he launches into an elaborately coded account of language, based on a pseudo-sentence invented by Rudolf Carnap. In the introduction to The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap presents a typically logical positivist account of the philosopher's reason for taking language seriously. A suitably rigorous language will provide the necessary tools for logical and scientific exposition. This language is to be a formal system, concerned with types and orders of symbols but paying no attention to meaning. 'The unsystematic and logically imperfect structure of the natural word-languages' makes them unamenable to such formal analysis, but in a 'well-constructed language' it is possible to formulate and understand syntactic rules. 20  For instance, given an appropriate rule, it can be proved that the word-series 'Pirots karulize elatically' is a sentence, provided only that 'Pirots' is known to be a substantive (in the plural), 'karulize' a verb (in the third person plural), and 'elatically' an adverb... The meaning of the words is quite inessential to the purpose, and need not be known.  Carnap does no more with his invented example, proposing instead to stick to symbolic languages.  Grice's approach and purpose in 'Lectures on language and reality' are very different from Carnap's, although he does not refer directly to these differences, and indeed mentions Carnap only in passing. Still at heart a philosopher of ordinary language, Grice is convinced that natural language is a worthwhile focus of philosophical investigation in its own right, and that its apparent logical imperfections are not insurmount-able. Moreover, it is philosophically important because of the purposes to which it is put, not because of its potential for logical expression.  Perhaps with an eye to the subversiveness of his undertaking, he borrows from Austin's paper 'How to talk: some simple ways' in suggesting that his programme might be subtitled 'How pirots carulize elatically: some simpler ways'.21  Grice uses Carnap's nonsense words, and others like them, to build up a fragment of a fantasy world. So his audience is treated to pieces of information such as 'a pirot a can be said to potch of some obble & as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble e, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o1 as being fid to one another'. 22 Some way into the first lecture he offers the audience the key to thiscode. Pirots are much like ourselves, and inhabit a world of obbles very much like our own world. To potch is something like to perceive, and to cotch something like to think. Feng and fang are possible descrip-tions, much like our adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles.  Part of the reason for the elaborate story of obbles, he suggests, is because:  it seems to me very important that, when one is considering this sort of thing, one should take every precaution to see that one isn't taking things for granted and that the concepts which one is going to use have, as their basis, concepts which will only bring in what is required for them to do whatever job it is that one wants them to do.  Carnap wanted to use semantically opaque forms to hint at how an analysis of syntax might proceed without reference to meaning. Grice's intention in borrowing his example is to consider what concepts might be necessary to the discussion of meaning and reference, freed from the normal preconceptions of such a discussion.  It is when the behaviour of pirots is considered, when a group of pirots in a particular gaggle interact together, that the notion of reference becomes important. Situations in which pirots want to communicate about obbles are when language 'gets on to the world'. In effect, Grice is encouraging the dispassionate consideration of what rational beings are likely to do with a communication system. The regularities of syntax are based on language's function of referring to the world; the types of meanings the pirots need to express determine the structures of the language. A successful language is one able to offer true descriptions of the world. The business of language, its driving force, is com-munication. Grice may appear to have moved rather a long way from the ideals of ordinary language philosophy, in constructing an artificial code, or language fragment. However, he emphasises that he see this as a necessary simplification, as a way of modelling and defamiliarising natural language in order to study it more clearly. His interest remains with the issue of how language maps on to reality: how it exists principally as a system for communicating about the world shared by a community of speakers. He is interested in the workings of natural language rather than the regularities of the constructed, purified language of logic. The transcriptions of the Urbana seminars show one participant asking him whether it would not be better to stick to a logical lan-guage, with its simple, familiar structures: 'why bother with ordinarylanguage?' Grice's simple reply is 'I find ordinary language more interesting. 23  Grice returns to the debate between Russell and Strawson over denoting expressions that fail to refer in the fourth Urbana lecture, the only one to be published (some years later, as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature'). Here again, his inclination is in favour of Russell's theory of descriptions to account for examples such as 'the king of France is bald', and to find alternative explanations for the 'presuppo-sitional' effects associated with them. Characteristically tentative, Grice does not explicitly endorse the Russellian position, but proposes to investigate it and test the extent of its applicability. This time, he states explicitly that he will apply the 'dodge' of implicature.  On Russell's interpretation of 'the King of France is bald', both the unique existence and the baldness of the king of France are logical entailments of the sentence; 'the king of France is not bald' is ambigu-ous, with both entailments of the positive sentence equally possible candidates for denial. Strawson objected that a person who utters 'the king of France is not bald' will generally be taken to be committed to the existence of the king and to be denying his baldness. The supposed ambiguity is rarely if ever a feature of the use of such an expression.  Grice concurs with Strawson's suggestion that the commitment to existence seems to be shared by the assertion and its denial. However, he argues, it is not necessary to assume that the commitment is of the same order, or to the same degree, in both cases. If Russell's interpretation is retained, it follows that the denial must be semantically ambiguous between a negation with scope over the whole sentence, and negation with scope simply over the baldness. The latter does, whereas the former does not, retain semantic commitment to the existence of the king of France. On this interpretation the existence of the king of France is an entailment of the positive assertion, and of one (strong) reading of the denial. However, 'without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of "the king of France is not bald" as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of the king of France.'2 In response to this, it is possible to argue that on the weak reading of the denial the commitment to the existence of the king, although not a logical entail-ment, arises as a conversational implicature in use.  The implicature envisaged by Grice in this latter case is a generalised conversational implicature; it arises by default when the expression is used, unless cancelled explicitly or by features of the context. It is present because of the speaker's choice of the form of expression. For this reason Grice proposes to explain it in terms of the general categoryof Manner. In his original account of this category he suggested four maxims, and hinted that it might be necessary to add more. Here, he suggests one such addition, namely the maxim 'Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appro-priate', or 'Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply' 25 It is reasonable to expect that conversational contributions will be expressed in a manner conducive to the most likely possible reply or range of replies.  The facilitation of likely responses is also advanced to counter another of Strawson's objections to Russell. On Russell's account, an utterance of 'the king of France is bald' is simply false. Yet, Strawson observes, our most likely response on hearing it uttered would not be to say 'you're wrong' or 'that's false', but to be in some sense lost for an answer.  According to Grice, the speaker in such a situation has not framed the utterance in a way that makes a reply easy. One possible likely response to a statement is a denial. In a conversational contribution entailing several pieces of information it is possible that any one of these pieces may be denied, but some particular aspect is often a most likely candi-date. If all pieces of information are equally likely to be denied, the most cooperative way of phrasing the utterance would be as a simple conjunction of facts. The speaker would be expected to utter something close to the Russellian expansion, something such as 'there is one unique king of France, and this individual is bald'. In producing the contracted form 'the king of France is bald', however, the speaker is apparently assuming that possible responses do not include the denial of the unique existence of the king of France. Grice suggests that it is generally information with 'common-ground' status that is not considered a likely basis for denial. This may be because the information is commonly known, and known to be commonly known between speaker and hearer. But this explanation will not always serve:  For instance, it is quite natural to say to somebody, when we are discussing some concert, My aunt's cousin went to that concert, when we know perfectly well that the person we are talking to is very likely not even to know that we have an aunt, let alone know that our aunt has a cousin. So the supposition must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that we would expect the hearer to take from us (if he does not already know). That is to say, I do not expect, when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin went to a concert, to be questioned whether I have an aunt and, if so, whether my aunt has a cousin.This is the sort of thing that I would expect him to take from me, that is, to take my word for. 6  The king of France is bald' presents the baldness as available for discussion, as possibly controversial. The existence, however, is not treated as something likely to be challenged. This explains the difficulty encountered by anyone who does in fact want to challenge it. Similarly, the negative statement is interpreted as a challenge to some actual or potential statement in which the baldness, not the existence, of the king of France is at issue. This explains why it is generally taken to commit the speaker to the belief that the king of France exists, even if it does not in fact logically entail this.  Grice's treatment of presuppositional phenomena in 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' is sketchy and partial. He offers a fairly detailed account of examples containing definite descriptions, but his rapid survey of other types of presuppositional phenomena suggests that his account may not be easily extendable. The paper offers a further example of an attempt to apply the phenomenon of conversational implicature to a philosophical problem of long standing, and in particular to preserve a classical account of logic in the face of apparently intractable facts of language use. In considering the link between grammatical structure and the status of information, it draws on Grice's general interest in ways in which meaning may drive syntax. He does not generalise from the particular consideration of referring expressions in this paper. However, an unpublished paper from much later in his life does suggest the directions in which his thoughts may have devel-oped. In 1985, Grice was seeking to reconcile the Oxford school of philosophy with Aristotle's idea that philosophy is about the nature of things, rather than language. He proposes to adopt the hypothesis that opinion is generally reflected in language, with different 'levels' representing different degrees of commitment. Some aspects of knowledge receive the deepest level of embedding within syntax, residing in what Grice describes as the 'deep berths' of language. It is not possible for a speaker even to use the language without being committed to these.  The deepest levels are at a premium, so it is in the interests of speakers to reserve these for their deepest commitments. People might challenge these, Grice suggests, but it would be dangerous to do so. If we subscribe to this account, we might be tempted to argue that first principles of knowledge are to be found in the syntactic structure, rather than the vocabulary, of language: 'how we talk ought to reflect our most solid, cherished and generally accepted opinions 2 In this discussion of whatis presented as uncontroversial and what as available for denial, Grice might be described as interested in the ways in which different syntactic devices available for conveying information bring with them different existential and ontological commitments.  The fourth Urbana lecture, taken on its own, offers an account of how a possible addition to the category of Manner suggests a new approach to the problems posed by Russell's theory of descriptions. In the somewhat abridged form in which it was published as 'Presupposition and conversational implicature' this is, of course, how it is generally read.  In the context of the Urbana lectures as a whole, however, it can also be seen as part of a much more ambitious project to describe how lan-guage, as a system to serve the communicative needs of rational beings,  'gets on to' the world, or functions to refer and describe. In this context, it is also apparent that Grice saw the question of the nature of reference as central to the philosophy of language, and particularly to his current interest in the division between syntax and semantics, or logic and grammar. Ultimately, it might be hoped that the structure of language could be shown to be revealing of the structure of human knowledge, precisely because language is dependent on knowledge.  The theory of reference was not the only topic in the philosophy of language to which Grice returned during the early 1970s. His new interest in the relationship between semantics and syntactic form, and hence in the expression of human thought, also prompted him to revisit the topic of intention. He had been elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1966, and in the summer of 1971 he made one of his rare return visits to England in order to give an Academy lecture. For his topic, he chose to return to the themes of his discussion paper 'Intentions and dispositions' some 20 years earlier. In the mean time, Hampshire and Hart had published their 'Decision, intention and certainty'. Gilbert Harman has repeated the rumour that this paper, containing a similar idea to that in 'Intentions and dispositions', 'prompted Grice to develop his alternative analysis'28 In his British Academy lecture, 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice refers rather vaguely to 'an unpublished paper written a number of years ago', and a thesis advanced in it that he now wants to criticise. He reformulates his original two-pronged account as a three-pronged one by making independence from empirical evidence into a separate criterion. 'X intends to do A' can truthfully be used only in cases where X is ready to take any preparatory steps necessary to do  A. Further, such a statement implies or suggests that X is not in any doubt that X will in fact do A. Finally, this certainty on the part of the speaker must be independent of any empirical evidence. Drawing onthe old ordinary language technique of devising a dialogue as context for a particular word, Grice offers the following illustration:  I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. You will enjoy that. I may not be there. I am afraid I don't understand. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Then you should have said to begin with, 'I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like, 'I should probably be going', or, 'I hope to go', or, 1 aim to go', or, 'I intend to go if I can'. Grice seems unconcerned by the highly artificial nature of this 'con-versation', compared to the structure and flow of naturally occurring talk. He comments that 'it seems to me that Y's remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained. 2 His point is that it seems legitimate to object to a use of 'I intend.' in cases where the speaker is not sure that it will be possible to fulfil the intention. The omission of such an addition as '... if I can' is possible only in cases where the doubt is perfectly obvious to both speaker and hearer, as when the speaker is making plans to keep ducks in extreme old age, or to climb Everest.  Grice's criticism of his own earlier analysis focuses on the implication that an intention is a type of belief, and the secondary notion that it is a belief independent of evidence. He argues that there are simply no parallels to be found for this type of belief; neither a hunch nor a memory will fit the bill. A belief such as an intention would have to be  - one that could not be true, false, right or mistaken - simply does not properly bear the title of belief at all. This means that intention lacks a clear definition, leaving it open to a sceptical attack challenging the coherency of ever saying 'I intend.. To use the statement 'I intend to do A' is to involve oneself in some degree of factual commitment and there must be something giving one the right to do this. Usually that something is evidence, but in the case of intention it has been established that there is nothing that would count as adequate evidence.  Grice responds to this possible sceptical position by rejecting the assumption that in stating an intention one is involved in a factual com-mitment. Characteristically, he develops this objection by means of a careful analysis of language. He suggests that there is a difference between two uses of the 'future tense' in English, a difference notmarked linguistically, or marked only in careful use in the distinction between 'I will..' and 'I shall ... In most normal uses, 'I will ..! can be used either with a future intentional or a future factual meaning.  Strictly speaking, if we intend to go to London tomorrow, we can only honestly use the expression 'I will go to London tomorrow' in its future intentional meaning; to do otherwise would be to suggest that it is somehow beyond our control. And for these future intentional statements it is simply not legitimate to ask for an evidential basis, any more than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!'. In each case to ask for evidence would be 'syntactically' inappropriate.  Having drawn attention to this distinction, Grice ponders the links it suggests between intending and believing with respect to a future action. He proposes the term 'acceptance' as one that can express 'a  generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief'.3° Using the notion of acceptance in the original three-pronged analysis might, he suggests, rescue it from the criticisms based on its reliance on belief as central to intention. In the case of intention but not of belief, X accepts that X will do A and also accepts that X doing A will result from that acceptance. No external justification is required.  In the case of belief, however, some external justification, or evidence, is needed for the acceptance.  At the start of 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice acknowledges a debt to Kenny's concept of 'voliting'. He does not refer directly to Kenny's work, but its influence appears in relation to the notion of 'acceptance'.  Anthony Kenny, an Oxford philosopher who was President of the British Academy, had published a collection of essays entitled Action, Emotion and Will since Grice's first attempt at analysing intention.  Kenny argues that expressions of desire and of judgement both display a similar complexity; both take as object not a thing but a state of affairs, despite surface appearances to the contrary. 'Wanting' always specifies a relation to a proposition; so, for instance 'wanting X' is in fact  'wanting to get X'. For this reason, we might 'expect that an analysis of a report of a desire should display the same structure as the analysis of a report of a judgement' 3' Kenny introduces the artificial verb 'volit' to generalise over the range of attitudes a speaker can adopt to a proposition that express approval, whether this be approval of actual states, as in 'x is glad that p' or of possible states as in 'x wishes that p'. This positive attitude distinguishes 'voliting' verbs from simple judgement, which may be neutral or even disapproving. Kenny's 'volition' also covers intention. Later, Kenny proposes to borrow Wittgenstein's term  'sentence-radical' to describe the propositional form that can serve asthe object of any verb of 'voliting'. So 'You live here now' and 'Live here now!' share the same sentence-radical as a common element of meaning, and it is necessary to distinguish this from the 'modal com-ponent, which indicates what function the presentation of this state of affairs has in communication' 32 By means of this idea, Kenny is able to identify a connection between his verbs of volition a nd those of judgement.  There is some relation which holds between a man's Idea of God and his Idea of England no matter whether he judges that God punishes England or he wants God to punish England. Any theory of judgement or volition should make this common element clear.33  In 'Intention and uncertainty', Grice employs Kenny's notion of  'voliting' in drawing a connection between intention and willing, but he does not make much use of Kenny's analysis in terms of 'sentence-radicals'. This clearly influenced his thinking in this area, however, and its effects can be seen in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', a paper written and circulated in 1972, but never published. The connection between probability and desirability, or at least between probability statements and desirability statements, had been discussed by Donald Davidson in a paper Grice heard at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina in the autumn of  1967. Davidson was another of the highly formal American philosophers of logic and language influential on Grice's thinking and methodology at this time. In this paper, eventually published in 1970, Davidson uses pr and pf, qualitative operators with scope over pairs of propositions that express attitudes of the probable and the obligatory respec-tively. Thus, 'pr (Rx, Fx)' can be instantiated as 'That the barometer falls probabilizes that it will rain', or, more naturally 'If the barometer falls, it almost certainly will rain'. A moral judgements such as lying is wrong' is to be understood, again as a relation between two proposi-tions, as something such as 'That an act is a lie prima facie makes it wrong'. This can be symbolised as 'pf (Wx, Lx)'.34  Grice considers attitudes towards probability and desirability in terms of the functions they serve in human cognition. This is reminiscent of his work in 'Indicative conditionals' on the purpose of logical connectives such as 'v' and 's' in terms of their roles in reasoning processes.  Here, he argues that probabilistic argument functions in order to reach belief in a certain proposition. Moreover:The corresponding function of practical argument should be to reach an intention or decision; and what should correspond to saying 'P', as an expression of one's belief, is saying 'I shall do A', as an expres. sion of one's intention or decision. 35  Going further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability are not merely analogous; they can both be replaced by more complex structures containing a common element.  Grice proposes two types of operators, Op^ and Op". In combination, these replace Davidson's pf and pr. The operators grouped together as Op® represent moods close to ordinary indicatives and imperatives. They can be divided into two types: Op", and Op", corresponding to t and ! respectively. A-type operators, on the other hand, represent some degree or measure of acceptability or justification. They can take scope over either of the B-type operators, yielding 'Op^ + Op", + p', or 'Op^, +t + p' for an expression of 'it is probable that p' and 'Op", + Op" + a', or 'Op+! + p' for an expression of 'it is desirable that a'.  Moving on from operators to consider the psychological aspect of rea-soning, Grice proposes two basic propositional attitudes: J-acceptance and V-acceptance, to be considered as more or less closely related to believing and wanting. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol 'V', he proposes 'X y' [p]' for J-accepts and 'X y? [pl' for V-accepts. There are further, more complex attitudes y and y*. These are reflexive: attitudes that x can take to J-accepting or V-accepting. y is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either J-accepting [p] or J-accepting [-pl; x wants to decide whether to believe p or not. y* is concerned with an attitude of V-accepting towards either x V-accepts [p] or x V-accepts I-pl; x wants to decide whether to will p or not. On the understanding that willing p gives an account of intending p, this offers a formalisa-tion of intending.  Grice notes that for each attitude there are two further subdivisions, depending on whether the attitude is focused on an attitude of x or of some other person. Therefore 'x y', Ipl' is true just in case 'x y? [x y'  [p] or x y' I-pll' is true; 'x y's Ipl' is true just in case 'x V-accepts (y}) ly V-accepts (y*) [x J-accept (y') [p] or x J-accept (v') [-p]ll' is true. Grice suggests an operator, Opa, corresponding to each particular propositional attitude y', where 'i' is a dummy taking the place of either 1, 2, 3, or 4, and where 'a' is a dummy taking the place of either 'A' or 'B'.  He now has four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets of propositional attitudes, which he describes as follows:Op'a Judicative  (A cases Indicative, B cases Informative)  Op a Volitive  (A cases Intentional, B cases Imperative)  Op a Judicative Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Imperative)  Op*a Volitive Interrogative  (A cases Reflective, B cases Inquisitive)  For all 'moods' except the second, the syntax of English does not reflect the distinction between the A and B cases. Grice notes that 'in any application of the scheme to ordinary discourse, this fact would have to be accommodated'. This suggests that he was thinking of his scheme as at least in principle applicable to an analysis of everyday language. For present purposes, he proposes to concentrate on the simple judicative and volitive operators. This is presumably because these express his basic psychological categories of J-accepting and V-accepting. He has, however, established that it is possible to discuss more complex opera-tors, and therefore more complex psychological attitudes, a topic to which he was to return. The attitudes expressed by t, and by the pair and !'s and ! ('I shall do A' and 'Do A') can be expressed by a general psychological verb of 'accepts'. So, for instance, 'x J-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts [-pl' and 'x V-accepts [pl' is 'x accepts l'ap!'.  Grice makes it clear that, in discussing meaning, he is still describing a way of speaking, a type of procedure for achieving a goal. The semantic characterisation of the operators consists in specifying the associated procedures.  This position has an obvious kinship with views of Searle; one place where we differ is that I am not prepared to treat as primitive the notion of rule (whether constitutive or otherwise), nor that of convention (indeed I am dubious about the relevance of the latter notion to the analysis of meaning and other semantic concepts). The notion of a rule seems to me extremely unclear, and its clarification would be one result which I hope might be obtained, ultimately, from the line of investigation which I am pursuing in this paper.  The written dialogue between Davidson and Grice continued. In 1978 Davidson published a paper entitled simply 'Intending', part of whichhe devoted to a response to Grice's 'Intention and uncertainty'. Like his earlier paper, 'Intending' was the result of various drafts and conference papers, including one presented at the Chapel Hill Colloquium in Philosophy in October 1974. There, Davidson has commented,  'it  received a thorough going over by Paul Grice.36 In 'Intending', Davidson suggests, or rather presupposes, that it is reasonable to 'want to give an account of the concept of intention that does not invoke unanalysed episodes or attitudes like willing, mysterious acts of the will, or kinds of causation foreign to science' 37 He sees a problem here in accounting for 'pure intending', a type not accompanied by any observable be-haviour or consequence. He proposes instead a definition, or a path towards a definition, in terms of beliefs and attitudes that can be taken as rationalising an intention. Davidson acknowledges Grice's point that intentions are often conditional on certain issues, and that the conditions are often not expressed, or not articulated, for various reasons. He quotes Grice's dialogue about the fact that X might miss the concert by being in prison. His argument is that, however misleading X's original statement of intention may have been, it was not strictly incorrect. It is not inaccurate to say 'I intend to go to the concert' when you know that there may well be a reason why you cannot go, anymore than it is contradictory to say 'I intend to be there, but I may not be there'.  Indeed, stating every condition that might prevent the fulfilment of an intention is not practicable, even if it were desirable. 'We do not necessarily believe we will do what we intend to do, and ... we do not state our intentions more accurately by making them conditional on all the circumstances in whose presence we think we would act.'38 Davidson considers intention in terms of wanting, but not as a subclass of wanting. Indeed, he argues that it is possible for someone to say that he wants to go to London next week, but he does not intend to go because there are other things he wants to do more. Rather, both intending and wanting are separate sub-parts of a general psychological pro-attitude, and they are expressed by value judgements.  Grice's 'thorough going over' of Davidson's paper was never pub-lished, but it was tape recorded and subsequently transcribed. In it he outlines the position he took in Intention and uncertainty'. X intends to do A' entails that X believes X will do A; X's belief depends on evi-dence, but the relevant evidence derives from X's own psychological state. For Davidson the relationship between intention and belief is not one of entailment, but rather by saying 'I intend..' in certain circumstances you suggest that you believe you will do it. Grice wonders whether it might be possible to explain Davidson's position in terms ofa conversational implicature from 'I intend..' to 'I believe ... But he comments wryly that 'I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing alleged entailments by implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoeuvre is appropriate in this case.'39  Grice builds his case around a distinction between extensional and non-extensional intentions. In effect, a non-extensional intention is one that the subject in question would recognise. This is the one most commonly considered in discussions of intention, Grice argues. If 'The Dean intends to ruin the department (by appointing Snodgrass chair-man)' is true on a non-extensional reading, then the Dean would, if forced, be in a position to aver 'I intend to ruin the Department'. If the Dean says 'I shall ruin the Department' he is expressing, rather than stating his intention. It would, contra Davidson's claim, be inconsistent for the Dean to say 'I shall ruin the Department, but maybe I won't in fact ruin it'. The apparent counter-examples can be explained in terms of 'disimplicature'. In effect, context sometimes means that normal entailments are suspended. If we say that Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore, in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailment that Hamlet's father was in fact on the ramparts. In such a context, the speaker 'disimplicates' that Hamlet's father was on the ramparts. In the same way, when context makes it quite apparent that there may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are not committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it. A speaker who says 'Bill intends to climb Everest next week' disimplicates that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved.  The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation, but it does not seem to be one to which he returned. As it is presented in 'Logic and conversation', and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said': to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature, Grice appears to be conceding that the meaning conveyed by a speaker in a context may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used. In the cases under discussion, there is some particular element, some entailment,  that is 'dropped' in  context. However, he also hints that disimplicature can be 'total, as in  "You are the cream in my coffee"'. This remark appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting that, in a context which makes the whole of 'what is said' untenable, it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning. The mechanismsof disimplicature are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in terms of the assumption that the speaker is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality. If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimpli-cature is total, the hearer is forced to seek a different interpretation of the utterance.  There are undoubtedly problems inherent in the notion of disimpli-cature, which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea. In a 1971 article, Jonathan Cohen suggests a 'Seman-tical Hypothesis' as an alternative explanation of the phenomena of logical particles that Grice explains by means of his 'Conversationalist Hypothesis'. Cohen's suggestion is that some natural language expres-sions, such as 'either... or', differ from their apparent logical counter-parts. In this particular case, 'either... or' differs from 'V' by entailing, as part of its dictionary meaning, that there is indirect evidence for the disjunction. In examples such as 'The prize is either in the garden or in the attic, but I'm not going to tell you which', however, this meaning does not survive. This is because 'it is deleted or cancelled in certain con-texts, just as the prefixing of "plastic" to "flower" deletes the suggestion of forming part of a plant.'40 The idea of 'disimplicature' seems remarkably close to Cohen's looser notion of 'deletion', laying open the possibility that the very natural language expressions Grice was seeking to explain might after all differ semantically from their logical equivalents.  In his reply to Davidson, as in his earlier unpublished paper, Grice considers the role of intentions in actual everyday cognition. 'First we are creatures who do not, like the brutes, merely respond to the present; we are equipped to set up, in the present, responses in the more remote future to situations in the less remote future. Grice pictures our view of the future as an appointment book in which various entries are inscribed. We are aware of a distinction between entries we have no control over (inscribed in black) and those that are there by our control, or depend on us for their realisation (inscribed in red). These latter entries are intentions. If we can foresee an unpleasant consequent of such entries, we will try to avert it if we can by deleting a red entry. The Dean derives the conclusion from the existing entries that 'Early December Dean gets fired'. He is understandably unhappy about this, but is in a position to do something about it if he can find that one of the entries from which he drew the conclusion is in red. He is able to delete, for instance, 'Dean appoints Snodgrass' inscribed in red in mid-November.  The conclusion Grice draws from this is:that we need a concept which is related to that of being sure in the kind of way which I have suggested intending is related to being sure; and if we need such a concept we may presume that we have it.  This sentence contains a large leap in the argument, but the recording of his original presentation reveals that Grice got a big laugh from the audience at this point. He presents this conclusion gleefully, provocatively 'trying it on', suggesting that 'intend' seems to him a good candidate for the name of the concept in question. This was, however, to prove a serious manoeuvre in his methodology. In the field of philosophical psychology in particular, he was to argue that the need for a particular concept in rational creatures was good enough reason to assume its existence, or at least posit it for the purpose of theorising.  Grice challenges Davidson's views on wanting, describing his picture of a person's mental life as one of a series of wants competing to be assigned the status of intention. For Grice this is just too neat and organ-ised to be plausible. It does not even reflect how the matter is described in ordinary language. There is in fact a vast range of terms in the  'wanting-family' of verbs, and these demand careful attention. Contra Davidson's claim, we would be very unlikely to say 'I want to go to London next week but I don't intend to because there are other things I want more'. We are far more likely to use some phrase such as 'I would like to go to London but... In the following elaborately extended metaphor, Grice expresses his unease with the notion of a series of competing wants, arguing that rationality is necessary to impose some order or restraint on pre-rational emotions and impulses:  It seems to me that the picture of the soul suggested by D's treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one might almost say, com-puterised. It is a picture of an ideally decorous board meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the stand-point of their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action; normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another over-impressed with the presentations made by some particular member. My soul doesn't seem to me, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout, won't listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the chair-man, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since some-times the meeting breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.  In the final section of his reply, Grice returns to the discussion of methodology. He takes issue with Davidson's aim of avoiding the mysterious and the unexplained in accounting for intention. On the con-trary, in philosophy of mind, 'a certain kind of mysteriousness' is to be prized. A concept is useful to the extent that it can explain behaviour, and this consideration outweighs some degree of opaqueness in the concept itself, as in the case of Grice's J-accepting and V-accepting. A psychological theory will be more or less rich, depending on the complexity of the behaviour, and therefore of the necessary psychological states, of the creature under investigation.  In the seven years from the time of his move to America, Grice had developed his interest in the philosophy of language to include the relationship between semantics and syntax. This had involved him in considerations of how the structure of language may mirror the structure of thought, which had in turn led him back with new insights to some old interests, including the nature of intention, and the role of psychological concepts such as this in linguistic meaning. Interest in how language is used to express thought about the world prompted a consideration of psychological concepts and ultimately a return to a topic from much earlier in his career: the philosophical status of rationality.In 1975 Grice was made full professor at Berkeley, and in the same year he was elected president of the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association. Now in his sixties, there was no apparent diminution in his restless energy and intellectual enthusiasm. He travelled frequently to speak at conferences, deliver lecture series and lead discussions, mainly within the United States. His reputation benefited from this exposure, and also from the wider dissemination of his work on implicature. He finally published the second and third William James lectures belatedly and apparently reluctantly during the 1970s, under the titles 'Logic and conversation' and 'Further notes on logic and conversation'!'  Meanwhile, Grice was cutting an increasingly striking figure around the Berkeley campus. He was always a large man and, apparently unmoved by California's growing interest in healthy eating, he had recently been putting on weight. In his youth he had been proud of his blond curls, but now his hair was thinning and whitish, and grew down over his collar. His clothes were chosen for comfort and familiarity rather than for style or fashion. He was most offended, however, when it was once suggested that his trousers were held up by a piece of string.  Wasn't it obvious, he demanded, that he was using two old cricket club ties? Grice did not, perhaps, deliberately cultivate his image as an eminent but eccentric Englishman abroad, but he does seem to have taken some pleasure in the effect he produced. Drinking one evening in Berkeley's prestigious Claremont Hotel, he was approached by a total stranger who wanted to know who he was: I don't recognise you, but I'm sure you must be someone distinguished.' Perhaps more telling than the anecdote itself is the fact that Grice was immensely pleased by the stranger's comment.Grice's chaotic untidiness extended from his person to his immediate surroundings. His desks at home and on campus were piled high with an apparent miscellany of notes, manuscripts and correspondence. He drove a series of old cars, all bought cheaply and constantly breaking down, a particular problem for Grice who had neither ability nor inclination to fix them. His disregard for appearances may have been the result of preoccupation or absent-mindedness, but it did not represent an embracing of the laissez-faire, or 'hippy' attitude of his students' gen-eration, as has sometimes been suggested. In fact, Grice seems to have been wary of the values this represented. Very early in the 1970s he jotted down an extensive list, apparently simply for his own benefit, of opposing 'good' and 'bad' values in this new ethos. The list headed  'Good Things' includes 'doing your own thing (self-expression)', 'inde-pendence (cf. authority)', 'new (unusual) experiences (self-expansion)' and 'equality'. The 'Bad (or at least not good) Things' include '(self) dis-cipline',  loyalty (except political)', tolerance (except towards what we favour)' and 'culture (except popular)'. Some items on the list are marked with as asterisk, which Grice annotates as 'some v. bad'. These include 'discrimination', 'getting unfair advantage' and 'authority'. 3  There is no mistaking Grice's disapproval for the new ethos, which may seem strange in the light of his own affectionate reminiscences of 'pinko Oxford', with its avowed dislike of discipline and authority. In fact, the rebelliousness of Grice's Oxford contemporaries was, as he himself half admits in those reminiscences, more a pose or a show of dissent than a real revolt. It drew on a lifestyle that depended on privilege maintained by the status quo. Grice was made uneasy by the more businesslike rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, with its challenge to authorities, political, social and intellectual.  If Grice was somewhat wary of his students' values, this did not diminish his enthusiasm and success in teaching them. He was exceptionally bad at the paper work and administration accompanying his teaching duties. Repeated requests from administrative staff for course reading lists went unanswered and sometimes unopened, course descriptions in student handbooks were often brief to the point of evasion, and lists of grades were submitted late or not at all. However, he seems to have taken the business of teaching itself much more seriously. Those who have heard him generally agree that he was not a talented lecturer.* Tapes of his lectures bear this out; they are full of hesitations, false starts and labyrinthine digressions. However, the few surviving tapes of Grice's seminars suggest that his approach lent itself more naturally to this form of teaching. A tape from 1978 of a seminaron theories of truth records him patiently drawing out responses from his students, encouraging even faltering attempts to form answers.  Above all, he was interested in nurturing sensitivity to philosophical method, and in reinforcing students in the habit of forming their own judgements. In the same seminar, as he helps along the discussion of truth, he draws out the significant steps in the argument: consider what criticisms might be made of our position, then think about how we might get out of them.' In teaching, he still emphasised linguistic intui-tion. Former student Nancy Cartwright has recalled a seminar on metaphysics in the mid-1970s in which Grice encouraged his students to consider the theoretical claims of physics by determining where they would incorporate 'as if'. A note from a graduate student from the late 1970s includes the comment, 'I'd say that you've already increased my belief in paying attention to our linguistic intuitions." As a supervisor he was encouraging and attentive. Judith Baker, one of Grice's doctoral students at this time, has commented that, 'When we discussed my thesis, Grice completely entered into my research and questions. He had a great gift for looking at what another philosopher wished to understand.8  It does seem that, despite his rather cavalier attitude to some of his professional duties, Grice was genuinely concerned about the welfare of his Berkeley students. Some of his notes for the Urbana lectures are written on the back of a draft letter in which he contributes to a faculty discussion of 'Graduate Programme Revision'. Recycling a favourite piece of terminology, he suggests a series of 'desiderata' for the graduate programme. These are concerned not so much with syllabus content as with the more general student experience. They include comments about increasing student access to faculty, as well as points such as  'reduce or eliminate 3rd year doldrums' and 'foster a sense of personal adequacy, together with the idea that philosophy can be an exciting and enjoyable activity'. He makes a final and particularly impassioned point about 'financial discrimination', interesting in the light of his rather wary attitude to new notions of equality. 'A pass at QE should not be nullified by poverty', he argues 'and the added anxiety would be bad in itself, and bad for student harmony and for the flow of applications for admission to the program."  As well as a growing academic reputation, and popularity among his students, Grice enjoyed at Berkeley productive intellectual friendships of the sort he had valued at Oxford. These were largely formed with younger philosophers such as George Myro, Richard Warner and Judith Baker. He collaborated with them in teaching and in writing, but aboveall he enjoyed long, informal discussions. He seemed to find it easier to put together and explore his own ideas in conversation with others than in solitude. These discussions often took place at the house in the Berkeley hills, with Kathleen on hand to cook whatever meal was appropriate to the time of day. Grice commented:  To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.lº  Perhaps the most significant collaboration of this period was that with Judith Baker. They produced copious notes on ethics, particularly  drawing on Kant and on Aristotle. They completed a book-length manuscript called 'Reflections on morals', credited to 'Paul Grice & Judy Baker or Judy Baker & Paul Grice' and planned and partly wrote another called 'The power structure of the soul'." These were intended for publication, but have not yet appeared. I The only published work to result from their long collaboration was one article, 'Davidson on  "Weakness of the will"', in which they return to some of the themes discussed by Grice in the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. 13  Grice's chief solo interest during the 1970s was not very far removed from the themes of his collaborative work with Judith Baker. Nor, typically, did it represent a completely new direction in his thinking.  Throughout his philosophical career, Grice's choices of topic tended to follow on from and build on each other, rather than forming discreet units. In this case, he returned to ideas that had interested him at least since his early work towards the William James lectures, namely the psychological property of rationality, its status as a defining feature of human cognition, and its consequences for human behaviour. Grice suggested that he drew out, and perhaps saw, the significance of rationality to his theory of conversation more clearly in later commentary on the work than in his original formulation of it.' He did mention rationality in the William James lectures, insisting that to follow the Cooperative Principle was to do no more than behave rationally in relation to the aims of a conversation. However, looking back over his work at the end of his life, he goes further, remarking on the essentially psychological nature of his theory of conversation. It was aimed not atdescribing the exact practices and regularities of everyday conversation, but at explaining the ways in which people attribute psychological states or attitudes to each other, in conversation or in any other type of interaction. Crucially, it saw conversation, an aspect of human behav-iour, as essentially a rational activity, and sought to explain this ratio-nality. Grice defends himself against criticisms that his theory overlooks argumentative, deceitful or idle conversations: 'it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess.'5 Properties of rationality, he argues, can legitimately be abstracted away from more specific conversational details.  Some of Grice's notes from the year or so immediately preceding the William James lectures suggest that even at that time he was concerned with the analysis of reason for its own sake. The back of a letter about the 1966 AGM of the North Oxford Cricket Club, for instance, is devoted to an imaginative weighing up of the respective pros and cons of spending July teaching philosophy at the University of Wigan, and of spending it on a cricket tour. Grice is looking for an analysis of  'reasons for doing', perhaps for the type of language in which people usually express such arguments. On the same paper he tries out different uses of the modal verb 'should'. I In other notes from the same year he starts considering the distinction between 'reasons for' and 'reasons why'! There seems then to have been a break in this line of thought;  Grice did little with the idea of reason during the time of his move to America, while he was concentrating on syntax and semantics.  However, he returned to the topic in the early 1970s, somehow finding the earlier notes in his idiosyncratic filing system and annotating and extending them. Returning to the distinction between 'reasons for..' and 'reasons why..!, he adopts a distinctively  'ordinary language  philosophy' approach as he tries out different uses and occurrences of the phrases. One note is actually headed 'botanizing' and lists, under the heading 'Reasons (practical)', such phrases as 'the reason why he d'd (action) was..!', 'there was (a) reason to @', 'there was (a) reason for him to q (action, attitude: fire x, distrust x)', 'he had reason to q',  'he had a reason for q-ing', 'his reasons for @-ing'. Grice makes notes on the distinction between the reason why x... was that p' and 'x's reason for ... was that/so that/to p'. He notes that for Aristotle:  Reasons for believing, if accepted, culminate in my believing something (where what I believe is the conclusion of the argument asso-ciated with these reason). Reasons for doing, if accepted, culminate in my doing something, where what I do is the conclusion of the  'practical' aspect associated with these reasons. i.e. the conclusion of a practical argument is an action. 18  Grice presented the results of these deliberations in a series of lectures called 'Aspects of reason', as the Immanuel Kant lectures at Stanford in  1977. In 1979 he used them again as the John Locke lectures in Oxford, this time adding an extra lecture to the series. The lectures were eventually edited by Richard Warner and published in 2001. The invitation to present the John Locke lectures was the occasion of one of Grice's rare trips to England. He made conscientious and surprisingly neat packing lists, including careful reminders to himself of the notes and books he would take with him to work on when not lecturing. His list of notes includes 'Kant notes - Aristotle notes - Incontinence - Ethics (Judy) - Presupposition'. The books he was packing represent some heavy, if predictable, reading: 'Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, Russell'. Perhaps less predictably, the list starts with the anomalous and unspecified  'Zoology'. Grice's interest in the study and classification of living beings was to show itself faintly in the lectures on reason, and more clearly in the work to follow.  At the start of the John Locke lectures, Grice comments on his pleasure at being back at Oxford:  I find it a moving experience to be, within these splendid and none too ancient walls, once more engaged in my old occupation of  rendering what is clear obscure. I am, at the same time, proud of my mid-Atlantic status, and am, therefore, delighted that the Old World should have called me in, or rather recalled me, to redress, for once, the balance of my having left her for the New.!9  He was no doubt highlighting the distinction between Old and New World for rhetorical effect. But there was something genuine in his claim to 'mid-Atlantic status'; just as he was always too prominently British fully to integrate into Californian life, he was no longer comfortably at home in Oxford. Notes sent and received at the time, inevitably covered with scribbled jottings to do with reason, indicate that he stayed in his old college, St Johns, and arranged to meet many of his former colleagues for drinks and dinners.  But he had to re-  accommodate to the formalities of Oxford. The back of a programme of a match between Oxford University Cricket Club and Hampshire showshim reminding himself to order 'dress shirt, black tie'. He also needs to remember 'shoe polish/brushes OR get cleaned' and 'button, needle, thread'. He poses himself a question that would not have troubled him for some years: 'gown or not gown?' There is no doubt that Grice knew the rituals of Oxford life well enough. However, the act of readapting to them seems to have involved him in some deliberate and rather strained effort after more than a decade in the very different social milieu of Berkeley. Some of his attitudes had changed as radically as his dress, although these changes were more carefully concealed from his former colleagues. Some years previously, soon after his move to America, he had confided in Kathleen that he had discovered that very few of the students at Berkeley knew any Greek; most read Aristotle in translation. Further, and rather to Kathleen's surprise, he expressed himself quite happy with this state of affairs; there were now some very good translations available. Kathleen was well aware that he would never have admitted to such an opinion in the presence of any of his former Oxford colleagues.21  The first of the John Locke lectures is titled 'Reasons and reasoning'.  Grice describes his desire to clarify the notion of reason, a notion deemed worthy of attention by both Aristotle and Kant. Typically cir-cumspect in his proposal, he suggests that such a clarification may make some interesting philosophical conclusions possible, but that the actual conclusions are beyond the scope of these lectures. He prefaces his con-sideration of the technicalities of reasoning with a fairly lengthy dis-cussion of a rather more abbreviated notion. This is the definition of reasoning with which most ordinary people are familiar. It is tempting here to see a parallel with Grice's theory of conversation. The study of the literal meanings of words is crucially important, and shows up the striking parallels between natural language and logic, but it does not tell us everything about how people actually use words. In the same way, the logical processes of reason are of supreme philosophical impor-tance, but nevertheless need to be seen as distinct from people's everyday experience of reasoning. Introspection is of limited use in establishing the processes of reasoning because people frequently take short cuts and make inferential leaps in their thinking. To do so is often beneficial in terms of the time and energy saved, and indeed might con-stitute a definition of 'intelligence'. 22 In his treatment of reason, Grice draws on and develops the line of argument from the unpublished 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'. The earlier paper was circulated in mimeograph, although far less widely than 'Logic and conversation' 23 It may have been at leastin part because much of it was subsumed into these lectures that it was not itself published. Grice's method of examining and clarifying the notion of reason is one Austin would have recognised and approved He presents the results of the dusting down of the methods of linguistic botanising apparent in his notes from the previous few years. He considers different ways in which the word 'reason' is used, classifies these uses into different categories, and illustrates these categories with examples. A sentence such as 'The reason why the bridge collapsed was that the girders were made of cellophane' exemplifies what he describes as 'explanatory reasons'.2 The same type of meaning is conveyed by variants such as 'the reason for the collapse of the bridge was that..! and 'the fact that the girders were made of cellophane was the reason why the bridge collapsed'. In all such examples the fact about the girders is offered as an explanation, or a causal account, of the collapse of the bridge. They are elaborate versions of Grice's original 'reason for' cate-gory. Such examples are 'factive' with respect to both events; the speaker implies the truth of both the fact about the bridge and the fact about the girders.  Second, there are 'justificatory reasons', exemplified by 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for thinking that the bridge had collapsed' and 'the fact that they were a day late was a reason for postponing the conference. There are many possible variants on these patterns, including 'he had reason to think that ... (to postpone ...) but he seemed unaware of the fact' and 'the fact that they were so late was a reason for wanting to postpone the meeting'. These are all variations of Grice's original category of 'reason why'. They offer some support, although not inevitably necessary or sufficient justification, for a psychological state ('thinking', 'wanting') or an action ('postponing').  Such examples are factive with respect to the reason given, but do not guarantee the truth of the other event (the collapse of the bridge, the postponement of the conference).  Grice labels the third type of use of 'reason' 'Justificatory-Explanatory', because of their hybrid nature; they draw on aspects of both the preceding classes. 25 Examples include 'John's reason for thinking Samantha to be a witch was that he had suddenly turned into a frog' and 'John's reason for denouncing Samantha was to protect himself against recurrent metamorphosis'. These reasons are relative to a particular person. As the examples illustrate, they may be introduced by either 'that..!' or 'to.... In the first case, the resulting sentence is doubly factive unless 'X thought that' is inserted before the reason. In the second case, the sentence is only singly factive. In each case, if therelevant individual believes that the reason gives sufficient justification for the attitude ('thinking') or action ('denouncing') then the reason can be seen as an explanation for that attitude or action. Grice in fact suggests that this type of reason is a special case of explanatory reason;  'they explain, but what they explain are actions and certain psychological attitudes' .26  Having spent considerable time and gone into some complexity in distinguishing these classes of 'reason', both in the published lectures and in his preparatory notes, Grice appears to drop them rather abruptly. He turns to a consideration of practical and non-practical, or alethic reasons: in effect the reasons to do and reasons to believe that had concerned him in 'Probability, desirability and mood operators'.  Grice does little to smooth the transition between these two topics, but does mention in passing that he will be concentrating exclusively on justificatory reasons. In seems that concentrating on 'reasons to' would enable him to look at the bases for intentional actions and for psychological attitudes. These two aspects of human psychology had provided an underlying thread in his work at least since 'Meaning'.  Grice refers to Kant's theory that there is one faculty of reason, a faculty that manifests itself in a practical and a non-practical aspect. For Grice, the nature and identity of a faculty is prohibitively difficult to investigate in itself. The language used to describe reason, however, is amenable to rigorous analysis. He therefore proposes to approachKant's theory by addressing the question of whether 'reason' has the same meaning or different meanings in 'practical reason' and 'non-practical reason'. He notes that a variety of ordinary language expressions used in reasoning can apparently describe both. The word 'reason' itself is one example, but so too are 'justification', modal verbs such as 'ought' and 'should', and phrases such as 'it is to be expected'. In effect, he is seeking to apply his Modified Occam's Razor to the vocabulary of reason by avoiding systematic ambiguities between separate meanings for such a range of natural language vocabulary. In doing so, he draws on his own earlier response to Davidson's suggestion of the operators 'pr' and 'pf'. He proposes that all reasoning statements have a common component of underlying structure, as well as an indication of the semantic subtype to which they belong. He posits as the common component a 'rationality' operator, which he labels 'Acc', and for which he suggests the interpretation 'it is reasonable that'. This is then followed by one of two mood-operators, symbolised by 'I' for alethic statements and '!' for practical statements. These two operators precede, and have scope over, the 'radical' ('I'). So the structure for 'John shouldbe recovering his health now' is 'Acc + t + I', while the structure for 'John should join AA' is 'Acc +! + I'.?? Grice suggests that the mood-operators be interpreted as two different forms of acceptance, technically labelled 'J-acceptance' and 'V-acceptance', but informally equated with judging and willing, or with 'thinking (that p)' and wanting (that p)'.  The mood-operators place conditions on when it is appropriate for a speaker to use a reasoning statement, in other words when speakers feel justified in expressing acceptance of a proposition. This raises the question of what is to count as relevant justification. Alethic statements are clearly justified by evidence. We have reason for making a statement about our knowledge or belief of a certain proposition just in case we have evidence for the proposition. Ideally, we are justified in using such statements if the proposition in question is true. But truth is not a possible means of validating statements of obligation, command, or inten-tion. To use some concrete examples (which Grice does not do), 'That must be the new secretary', interpreted alethically, would be optimally legitimate in a context where its radical', namely that is the new secretary', is true. The legitimacy of 'You must not kill', interpreted practically, however, cannot be assessed in terms of the truth of 'you don't kill'. There must be some other grounds on which such statements can be judged.  Grice's suggests that, in reasoning generally, we are interested in deriving statements we perceive as having some sort of 'value'. Truth, cer-tainly, is one type of value, and alethic reasoning is aimed at deriving true statements.  But in practical reasoning we are concerned with  another type of value, which might be described as 'goodness'. Grice's own summary of this difference, in which he implicitly links the two types of reasoning to his two broad psychological categories of mood operator, runs as follows:  We have judicative sentences ('t'-sentences) which are assigned truth (or falsity) just in case their radicals qualify for radical truth (or radical falsity); and we have volitive sentences ('!'-sentences) which are assigned practical value (or disvalue) just in case their radicals qualify for radical goodness (or badness). Since the sentential forms will indicate which kind of value is involved, we can use the generic term 'satisfactory' 28  In his discussion of practical value, Grice is drawing on themes he presumably expects to be familiar to his audience from Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, although he does not make any explicit reference. Grice himself was well versed in this work, which was a particular focus for his old tutor W. F. R. Hardie, and on which he himself worked collaboratively with Austin. Aristotle identifies rationality as a defining characteristic of human beings, distinguishing them from all other life forms. The rational nature of human beings ensures that all their actions are aimed at some particular end or set of ends. Although these ends differ depending on the specific field of activity, 'if there is any one thing that is the end of all actions, this will be the practical good'. Similarly, Grice considers practical value (he says very little more about 'goodness' here) as an end for which people strive in what they wish to happen, and therefore in what they choose to do. Here, again, he returns to the type of rationality he discussed in the William James lectures. Rational beings have an expectation that actions will have certain consequences, and are therefore prepared to pursue a line of present behaviour in the expectation of certain future outcomes. They are prepared to conform to regularities of communicative behaviour in the expectation of being able to give and receive information. This, however, is just one type of a much more general pattern of human behaviour. All actions are ultimately geared towards particular ends.  The extra lecture Grice added to the series at Oxford is 'Some reflections about ends and happiness', originally delivered as a paper at the Chapel Hill colloquium in 1976. Here too he draws on Aristotle's Nico-machean Ethics, this time more explicitly. Aristotle suggested that the philosopher contemplating the range of different ends for different actions is confronted with the question of the nature of the ultimate end, or the 'supreme good' to which all actions aim. The answer is not hard to find, but the significance of that answer is more complex. ' "It is happiness", say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.3 For ordinary people, however, living well involves something obvious such as wealth, health or pleasure. For the philosopher the nature of happiness is much more complex, and is linked to the proper function of a man. Individual men have different specific functions, and are judged according to those specific functions; a good flautist is one who plays the flute well and a good artist one who paints well. More generally, a good man is to be defined as one who performs the proper functions of a man well. Because rationality is the distinguishing feature of mankind, the function of a man is to live the rational life, and a good man is one who lives the rational life well. Therefore the good for man, or that which results in happi-ness, is 'an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are morekinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and more perfect kind. 31  For Grice, happiness is a complex end; that is, it is constituted by the set of ends conducive to happiness. The precise set of ends in question may vary from individual to individual, but they can be seen a conducive to happiness if they offer a relatively stable system for the guidance of life. Grice finishes on a leading but inconclusive note. It seems intuitively plausible that it should be possible to distinguish between different sets of ends in respect of some external notion. Otherwise it would, uncomfortably, be impossible to choose between the routes to happiness selected 'by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentle-man' 32 Grice's cautious proposal of the basis for a notion of 'happiness-in-general', abstracted from individuals' idiosyncrasies, draws on the essential characteristics of a rational being. He concludes his lecture series with the following, highly suggestive outline:  The ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abundance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.  As Richard Warner indicates in a footnote, the original Chapel Hill lecture ends with the further comment: 'But I have now almost exactly reached the beginning of the paper which, till recently, you thought I was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of ethical princi-ples. It is a pity that I have used up my time.'  The rather enigmatic reference to a 'creature-constructor', and the link to ethics with which Grice tantalised his Chapel Hill audience, draw on ideas developed over a number of years but not discussed in these lec-tures. Grice was working on the notion of a 'creature-constructor' back in the mid-1960s. He in fact originally planned to include discussion of this topic in the William James lectures. Papers from Oxford from 1966 include a jotted note entitled 'Provisional Grand Plan for James Lectures and Seminars'. There are two bullet points:  1. Use 'God' as expository device. Imagine creature, to behaviour of which 'think', 'know', 'goal', 'want', 'purpose' can be applied. But nocommunication. Goals continuation of self (or of species). Imagine God wishing to improve on such creatures, by enabling them to enlarge their individual worlds and power over them, by equipping them for transmission of beliefs and wants (why such change  'advance'; because of decreased vulnerability to vicissitudes of nature).  2. Mechanisms for such development. Elements in behaviour must in some way 'represent' beliefs and wants (or their objects) or rather states of the world which are specially associated with them.33  Grice's private note in fact contains the germs of most of his complex  'creature-constructor'  programme, and of the topics to which he  attempted to link it throughout the rest of his life. It also explains his interest in zoology. He was studying life in terms of the structures into which it has been classified. His idea was that it might, theoretically at least, be possible to devise a ladder or hierarchy of creatures, such that each rung on the ladder represents a creature incorporating the capacities of the creature on the lower rung, and adding some extra capacity.  As a presentational convenience, Grice proposes an imaginary agent or designer of this process, the expository device 'God' of his early notes.  In later notes, and certainly in all published work, he prefers 'creature-constructor' or 'Genitor'. The Genitor's task is to decide what faculties to bestow on each successive creature so as better to equip it to fulfil its ends. The chief end of all life forms is to ensure their own continued survival, or the survival of the species to which they belong. Grice's hierarchy could be seen as an extension of Aristotle's division of living creatures in the Nicomachean Ethics into those that experience nutrition and growth (including plants), those that are sentient (including horses and cattle) and those that sustain 'practical life of the rational part' (only human beings).34 Grice does not mention this, or indeed Locke's discussion of personal identity, familiar to him from his work on the topic more than 30 years earlier. Locke posited a hierarchy of living beings, with the identity of beings at each stage depending on the fulfilment of functions necessary to the continued existence of that being. Grice would presumably have assumed that the philosophical pedigree of his ideas would be transparent to his audience. He goes much further than Locke by employing the hierarchy of beings in a mental exercise to assess the status and function of human rationality.  In order to describe, or to represent, the place of human beings on the ladder of existence, Grice recycles the 'pirots' that had appeared in the 'Lectures on language and reality'. There, pirots had branched outfrom carulising elatically in order to model the psychological processes of communication. Now, they stand in for human beings in the Genitor's deliberations. They appeared in this guise as early as 1973 when Grice was teaching a course at Berkeley called 'Problems in philosophical psychology'. One of his students took the following notes in an early seminar in this series: 'one of the goals of the pirot programme is to discover what parallels, if any, emerge between the laws governing pirots and human psychology' 35 Grice was returning to his earlier interest in psychological states. He had addressed these back in the early 1950s when he had considered the best way of describing intentions.  In 'Dispositions and intentions' he had criticised dispositional accounts that described intentions in terms of dispositions to act. In particular he saw Ryle's version of this as coming dangerously near to behav-iourism and the denial of any privileged access to our own mental states.  His attitude seems to have softened somewhat in the intervening twenty years. The student's notes describe the pirot programme as an 'offspring of dispositional analyses of metal states from Ryle C of M. But behav-iourists unable to provide conditions for someone being in particular mental state purely in terms of extensionally described behaviour.' The pirot programme was designed to offer the bridge behaviourism could not provide, by describing underlying mental states derived from, but ontologically distinct from, observable behaviour. It was a functional account, in that each posited mental state was related to a specific function it played in the creature's observable behaviour; 'in functional account, functional states specified in terms of their relation to inner states as well as to behaviour'. Further, the student noted, 'a functional theory is concerned not only with behavioral output and input of a system, but of [sic] the functional organization of inner states which result in such outputs!'  'Philosophical psychology', then, was Grice's label for the metaphysical enquiry into the mental properties and structures underlying observable human behaviour. In contrast to a purely materialist position such as that of behaviourism, Grice was arguing in favour of positing mental states in so far as they seemed essential to explaining observable behaviour. Such explanatory power was sufficient to earn a posited mental property a place in a philosophical psychology. This openness to the inclusion of mental phenomena in philosophical theories was apparent in his earlier work on intentions, and also in the William James lectures. He was later to describe such an approach as  'constructivist'. The philosopher constructs the framework of mental structure, as dictated by the behaviour in need of explanation. Thephilosopher is able to remain ambivalent as to the reality or otherwise of the posited mental state, so long as they are explanatorily successful.  In fact, the ability to play an active role in explaining behaviour is the only available measure of reality for mental states. In the pirot pro-gramme, the fiction of the Genitor provided a dramatised account of this process, with decisions about what mental faculties would promote beneficial behaviours playing directly into the endowment of those faculties.  Grice had presented some of his developing ideas along these lines in a lecture delivered and published before the John Locke lectures, but in which the place of rationality in 'creature-construction' is more fully developed. 'Method in philosophical psychology' was Grice's presidential address to the Pacific division of the American Philosophical Association in March 1975. In general, the lecture is concerned with establishing a sound philosophical basis for analysing psychological states and processes. He sums up his attitude to the use of mental states in a metaphor: 'My taste is for keeping open house to all sorts of conditions and entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework' 3 In keeping with this policy of tolerance towards useful metaphysical entities, Grice proposes two psychological primitives, chosen for their potential explanatory value. These are the predicate-constants J and V which, as he was to do in the John Locke lectures, he relates loosely to the familiar notions of judging, or believing, and willing, or wanting. Concentrating on V, we can see ways in which positing such a mental state can help explain simple behaviour in a living creature. An individual may be said to belong to class T of creatures if that individual possesses certain capacities which are constitutive of membership in T, as well perhaps as other, incidental capacities.  These constitutive capacities are such that they require the supply of certain necessities N. Indeed the need for N in part defines the relevant capacity. Prolonged absence of some N will render the creature unable to fulfil some necessary capacity, and will ultimately threaten its ability to fulfil all its other necessary conditions. Such an absence will therefore threaten the creature's continued membership of T. In these cir-cumstances, we can say that the creature develops a mental attitude of V with respect to N. This mental attitude is directed at the fulfilment of a necessary capacity; its ultimate end is therefore the continued survival of the creature.  A concrete example of this process, a simplified version of the one offered by Grice, is to think of T as representing the class 'squirrel' and N as representing 'nuts'. One necessary condition for a creature to be asquirrel is, let us say, its capacity to eat nuts. This capacity is focused around its own fulfilment; it is manifested in the eating of nuts. If the creature experiences prolonged deprivation of nuts, its ability to fulfil this capacity, and indeed all other squirrel-capacities, will be threatened (it will be in danger of death by starvation). In such a situation, it is legitimate to say that the squirrel wants nuts. This posited mental state explains the squirrel's behaviour (it will eat nuts if it can find them) in relation to a certain end (survival).37  A metaphysical theory that offers a model of why a squirrel eats nuts may not seem particularly impressive, but it is a necessary first step in modelling behaviour in much more complex creatures: ultimately, in describing human psychology. In making this transition Grice draws on the notion of 'creature-construction'. The genitor is bound by one rule; every capacity, just like the squirrel's capacity to eat nuts, must be useful or beneficial to the creature, at least in terms of survival. This rule is sufficient to ensure that any mental properties introduced into the system are there for a reason, fulfilling Grice's criterion of the usefulness of metaphysical entities. It also, perhaps, allows Grice to imply that such mental capacities might be evolutionarily derived, without having to commit to this or any other biological theory. The final stage in the mental exercise is to consider what further, incidental features may arise as side-effects of these capacities for survival.  Grice argues that it is not unreasonable to suggest that, in designing some of the more complex creations, the genitor might decide to endow creatures with rationality. This capacity would qualify as having survival benefits. For creatures living in complex, changing environments, it is more beneficial to have the capacity to reason about their environment and choose a strategy for survival, than to be endowed with a series of separate, and necessarily finite, reflex responses. Just as with the more primitive capacity of eating, it is necessary for the complex creature to utilise the capacity of reason in order to retain continued use of it, and indeed of the set of all its capacities. But once the creature is reasoning, the subjects to which it applies this capacity will not be limited to basic survival. A creature with the capacity to hypothesise about the relationship between means and end will not stop at deciding whether to hide under or climb into a tree, for instance. A creature from the top of the scale of complexity will be able to consider the hypothetical processes of its own construction. That creature will assess how each capacity might be in place simply to promote survival, and might confront a bleak but inevitable question: what is the point of its own continued survival?The creature's capacity for reason is exactly the property to help it survive this question. Rather than persuading the creature to give up the struggle for survival, the capacity is utilised to produce a set of criteria for evaluating ends. These criteria will be used to attribute value to existing ends, which promote survival, and to further ends that the creature will establish. The creature will use the criteria to evaluate its own actions and, by extension, the actions of other rational creatures The justification the creature constructs for the pursuit of certain ends, dependent on the set of criteria, will provide it with justification for its continued existence. Thus the capacity of rationality both raises and answers the question 'Why go on surviving?'38 Grice hints at the possible beginnings, and status, of ethics, when he suggests that the pursuit of these ends might be prized by the collective rational creatures to such an extent that they are compiled into a 'manual' for living. The creatures' purposes in existing are no longer just survival, but following certain prescribed lines of conduct. Grice tantalisingly ends the section of his lecture on 'creature construction' with a nod at some possible further implications of this idea.  Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).39  Somewhat at odds with his more specific usage elsewhere, Grice has here been using the term 'pirot' to refer to any creature on the scale.  The 'very intelligent rational pirots' are the psychologically most complex of such creatures. In adopting this term, which is added in the margin of his preparatory notes, Grice would appear to be making a pun on Locke's 'very intelligent rational parrot', the imaginary case used to argue that bodily form must have some bearing on personal identity.40 Other than this knowing reference, Grice does not make any attempt to link his work on creature construction to Locke, or to his own earlier interest in personal identity. Richard Warner has criticised Grice for ignoring the connections between rationality, happiness and personal identity, arguing that a notion of self will determine what counts as an essential end for an individual. If, he suggests,  we are to pursue Grice's strategy - and it is a promising one - of replacing Aristotle's 'activity in conformity with virtue' with 'suit-ability for the direction of life', I would suggests that an appeal tothe notion of personal identity should play a role in the explication of suitability. 41  As Grice's reference to a list of 'rules for living' suggests, the next direction in which he explored these ideas was in the area of philosophical ethics. He did not, however, return to the implications of his pun on  'manual' and 'Immanuel'. It is possible that he was referring to Immanuel Kant, whose work on reason was central to his own thinking on this subject. But the pun may also contain a hint towards an explanation of religious morality, and perhaps even religious belief, as facts of human existence, necessary consequences of human nature. In his own notes on the subject this aspect of the 'Immanuel' figures more prominently. In general, the plausibility of explaining religion within philosophical psychology seems to loom larger in Grice's thinking than his published work of the time would suggest. For instance, on the back of an envelope from the bank, in faint, almost illegible hand he wonders: 'perhaps Moses brought other "objectives" from Sinai, besides 10 comms'. Here he may be thinking about other systems for living, suggesting that 'perhaps we might... "retune" them'. In the same notes he seems to be pondering the differences between 'God' and  'good', between 'conception' and 'reality'. Perhaps, he speculates, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be treated along these lines; 'real or pretend doesn't matter provided... does explanatory job'.42  Grice seems here to be experimenting with the idea of 'construc-tivism' as a general philosophical method, not just as an approach to philosophical psychology. An entity, state or principle is to be welcomed if it introduces an increase in explanatory power. Beyond that it is not suitable, and indeed not possible, to enquire into its 'reality'. A system of explanations is successful entirely to the extent that it is coherent, relatively simple, and explains the facts. It is not hard to discern the influence of Kant in this epistemology, and his notion that 'things in themselves' are inevitably unreachable, but that our systems of human knowledge can nevertheless seek to model reality.  In his final decade, Grice turned such a philosophical approach in the direction of his interest in metaphysics, in philosophical psychology and, derived from this, in ethics. Anthony Kenny suggests that since the Renaissance the main interest from philosophers in human conduct has been epistemological:  Moral philosophy has indeed been written in abundance: but it has not, for the most part, been based on any systematic examination ofthe concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. the concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbic o criticise and to praise.43  Grice was perhaps unusual in approaching his work on ethics from th basis of many years' work on precisely those concepts. Grice retired from his post at Berkeley in 1980, at the age of 67. There was no question, however, that he would cease full-time philosophical activity. He continued to teach, both part-time at Berkeley and, for a few years in the early 1980s, as a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also continued to work on new ideas, to write and, increasingly, to publish. His reluctance ever to consider a piece of work finished or ready for scrutiny had meant that only 12 articles had been published during a career of over 40 years. And in almost all cases he had been either effectively obliged to include a paper in the volume of proceedings to which it belonged, or otherwise cajoled into publish-ing. It had, however, long been agreed that the William James lectures would be published in full by Harvard University Press and now finally Grice began to take an active interest in this process. He perhaps realised that it was not feasible to continue delaying the revisions and reformulations that he considered necessary. Perhaps, also, the enthusiasm with which his ideas were received in Berkeley, and the frank admiration of students and colleagues, had slowly worn away at his formidable self-doubt. Writing in Oxford, Strawson has suggested that Grice's inhibiting perfectionism was 'finally swept away by a warm tide of approbation such as is rarely experienced on these colder shores'.! Cer-tainly, he began to draw up numerous lists of papers on related themes that he would like to see published with the lectures. These included previously published articles such as 'The causal theory of perception', but also a number that still remained in manuscript form, such as  'Common sense and scepticism', and 'Postwar Oxford philosophy'.  This planned volume was focused on his philosophy of language, but Grice was also turning his attention to publishing in other areas. After a visit to Oxford in 1980, the year in which he was made an HonoraryFellow of St John's College, he received a letter from a representative of Oxford University Press. This followed up a meeting at which Grice had clearly been eager to discuss a number of different book projects. The letter refers to 'the commentary on Kant's Ethics which you have been working on with Professor Judy Baker', and suggests that this might be the project closest to being in publishable form. However, the publisher expresses the hope that work on this 'will not deflect you from also completing your John Locke lectures on Reason', and a further work on Ethics.? Grice's desire to see some of his major projects through publication coincided with his retirement, and so could not have been driven by the demands of his post. Rather, it reflected a wish for some of the strands of his life's work to reach a wider audience than the select number of students and colleagues who had attended his classes and heard his lectures.  Grice's interests in reason and in ethics increasingly absorbed him during the 1980s. They were prominent in his teaching at Seattle and at Berkeley. He himself summarised this change of emphasis as a move away from the formalism that had dominated his work for a decade or more. The main source of the retreat for formalism lay, he suggested,  'in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attention to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language'? Certainly, the discussion of reason and, particularly, of ethics in Grice's later work takes a more metaphysical and discursive tone than that of some of the linguistic work from his early years in America. However, the break with the philosophy of language was not absolute; both new topics draw on questions about the correct analysis of various sentence types. In Grice's treatment of reason, close attention to the use of certain key terms led him to posit a single faculty of rationality, yielding both practical and non-practical attitudes. From there, his discussion of expressions of practical reasoning led to the question of the appropriate type of value to serve as the end point of such reasoning, analogous to alethic value in non-practical reasoning. A simplistically defined notion of a system for the direction of life raised the awkward suggestion that it might be impossible to discriminate between a wide variety of modes of living.  People are generally in agreement that the actions of Grice's 'well-balanced, kindly country gentleman', for instance, are to be afforded greater value than those of his 'unwavering egotist', but an account of value based simply on reasoning from means to ends seems unable to account for this.  The study of ethics has long included analysis of statements of value.  Sentences such as 'stealing is wrong' appear to draw on moral concepts;it can therefore be argued that an accurate understanding of the meaning of such sentences is fundamental to any explanation of those moral concepts. Very broadly, there are two positions on this question: the objectivist and the subjectivist. One objectivist approach to ethics argues that moral values exist as ontologically distinct entities, external to any individual consciousness or opinion. Human beings by nature have access to these values, although perceptions of them may be more or less acute, observance of them more or less rigorous, and understanding of their implications more or less perceptive. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this moral objectivism was Kant, who described ethical statements as categorical imperatives; they are to be observed regardless of personal preference or individual circumstance. These he distinguishes from hypothetical imperatives, also often expressed in terms of what one 'should' do, but dependent on some desired goal or end.  A canonical subjectivist position is that there are no moral absolutes; expressions of value judgements are always particular to subject and to context. Perhaps the most extreme version of this position was that put forward by A. J. Ayer, who followed his verificationist programme through to its logical conclusion by arguing in Language, Truth and Logic that sentences such as 'stealing money is wrong' have no factual meaning. Although apparently of subject/predicate form, they do not express a proposition at all. They merely indicate a personal, emotional response on the part of the speaker, much the same as writing 'stealing money!!', where 'the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed'. A less reductionist, but equally subjectivist position, is to analyse such statements as in fact having the form of 'hypothetical imperatives'  '. That is, moral statements attempt to  impose restrictions on behaviour, but do so in relation to certain actual or potential outcomes. They stipulate means to reach certain ends.  These ends may be made explicit, as in sentences such as 'if you want to be universally popular, you should be nice to people'. Often, however, they are suppressed, but can be understood as stipulating a general condition of success or advancement. So 'stealing is wrong' is hypothetical in nature, but this is hidden by its surface form. It can be interpreted as something such as 'if you want to get on in life, you should not steal'.  In his work on this subject, Grice draws particularly on two subjectivist analyses of statements of value as hypothetical imperatives:  Philippa Foot's 1972 essay 'Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives' and J. L. Mackie's 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.These choices are not surprising; Grice knew both Foot and Mackie personally from Oxford. In discussing the view that morality consists of a system of hypothetical imperatives, not of absolute values, Foot considers its implications for freedom and responsibility. Dispensing with absolute value raises the fear that people might some day choose to abandon accepted codes of morality. Perhaps this fear would be less, she suggests, 'if people thought of themselves as volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression' rather than as being bound to conform to pre-existing moral imperatives."  Mackie concedes that objectivism seems to be reflected in ordinary language. When people use statements of moral judgements, they do so with a sense that they are referring to objective moral values. More-over, 'I do not think that it is going too far to say that this assumption has been incorporated in the basic, conventional meanings of moral terms.' However, he argues that this in itself is not sufficient to establish the existence of objective value. The question is not linguistic but ontological. Mackie rehearses two fairly standard arguments to support the break with common sense he is proposing: the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness. The argument from relativity draws attention to the variety of moral codes and agreed values that have existed at different times in human history, and exist now in different cultures. This diversity, Mackie suggests, argues that moral values reflect ways of life within particular societies, rather than drawing on perceptions of moral absolutes external to those societies. However, he sees the argument from queerness as far more damaging to the notion of absolute value. It draws attention to both the type of entity, and the type of knowledge, this notion seems to demand. Objective values would be 'entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe', while knowledge of them 'would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'? The supporter of objective value is forced to advocate types of entity and types of knowledge of a 'queer' and highly specific kind.  Despite Mackie's concession that a commitment to objective value is apparent in ordinary language, it was far from necessary that a philosopher of ordinary language would take an objectivist stance on ethics.  Indeed, at least one of Grice's Oxford contemporaries who published on the topic presented a subjectivist argument. In 1954 P. H. Nowell-Smith published Ethics, the book in which he advanced rules of 'contextualimplication' that foreshadowed some of Grice's maxims. Grice does not refer to this book in his own writings either on conversation or on value.  Nowell-Smith defends a subjectivist account of moral value, enlisting the argument described by Mackie as 'the argument from queerness'. In the tradition of post-war Oxford philosophy, Nowell-Smith employs different uses of words, and even fragmentary conversational 'scripts' to support his arguments. The meanings of individual words, he argues, often depend on the context in which they occur. For Nowell-Smith, this observation strengthens his subjectivist position. Since words do not remain constant, but are always changing their meanings, there can be no sentences that are true simply because of the meanings of the words they contain; in effect there can be no analytic sentences. Hence statements of moral value cannot be necessarily, but only contingently  In 1983, Grice was working on another major lecture series, which he entitled 'The conception of value'. He notes in the introductory lecture that the title is ambiguous, and deliberately so. The lectures are concerned both with 'the item, whatever it may be, which one conceives, or conceives of, when one entertains the notion of value', and with  'the act, operation, or undertaking in which the entertainment of that notion consists'' In effect, they address the two areas in which Mackie argues objectivism introduces 'queerness'. Grice suggests that the nature and status of value are of fundamental philosophical importance, while the way in which people think about value, their mental relationship to it, is deeply and intrinsically linked to the very nature of personhood.  Value, as suggested in the John Locke lectures, is the ultimate end point and the measure of rationality. The value of any piece of alethic reasoning is dependent on the facts of the matter. The value of practical reasoning, however, is dependent on a notion of goodness. Grice does not state his plan for addressing this issue, or for linking it to an account of ethics. However, as the lectures progress it becomes clear that he is supporting a means-end account of practical reasons, and of assigning some motives and systems for living higher value than others. This, indeed, seems a necessary corollary of his account of reasoning in terms of goals, and of the theory of the derivability of ethical principles hinted at in the closing remark of 'Some reflections on ends and happiness'.  However, in one of his more flamboyant heresies, Grice proposes to retain the notion of absolute value. This notion, generally associated with Kant's idea that moral imperatives are categorical, is canonically seen as being in direct conflict with an account of value concerned with goals, or with reasoning from means to ends.'The conception of value' was written for the American Philosophical Association's Carus lecture series, which Grice was to deliver in the same year. Progress was slow, particularly on the third and final lecture, in which his account of objective value was to be presented and defended. Grice had always preferred interaction to solitary writing, and as he got older he relied increasingly on constructive discussion and even on dictation. Unlike in earlier years, he produced very few draft versions of his writings during the 1980s; the papers that survive from this period consist only of very rough notes and completed manuscripts.  Now, finding composition even more laborious than usual, Grice enlisted the help of Richard Warner. Warner, who was then working at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers a vivid account of the process:  To work on the Carus lecture, I drove up from LA on Friday arriving at noon. We began work, drinking inexpensive white wine as the afternoon wore on; switched to sherry as we broke off to play chess before dinner; had a decent wine from Paul's wine cellar with dinner and went back to work after eating. We worked all day Saturday with copious coffee in the morning (bread fried in bacon grease for break-fast) and kept the same afternoon and evening regime as the previous day. Paul did not sleep at all on Saturday night while he kept turning the problems over in his head. After breakfast on Sunday, he dictated, without notes, an almost final draft of the entire lecture. 1º  The result of this process was the third Carus lecture, 'Metaphysics and value'. Grice addresses the properties common to the two types of value by which alethic and practical arguments are assessed, and the centrality of both types to the definition of a rational creature. In this extremely complex but also characteristically speculative discussion, he returns to the idea that every living creature possesses a set of capaci-ties, the fulfilment of each of which is a necessary condition for the continued possession of that capacity, and indeed of all others. Here, the results of Grice's interest in biology are apparent. On the plane on the way to Oxford in 1979 he had been reading books on this topic. In 1981 he made a note to himself to 'Read "Selfish Gene", "chimp" lit'."1 In other notes from this period he lists 'mandatory functions', including 'Reproduction, Ingestion, Digestion, Excretion, Repair, Breath (why?), Cognition'.12 In 'Metaphysics and value', these thoughts are given a more formal shape as Grice considers again the distinction between essential and accidental properties of creatures. Essential prop-erties establish membership of a certain class of creature: 'the essential properties of a thing are properties which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).13 He speculates that rationality is in fact an accidental, rather than an essential property for the class of human being. However, as he argued in  'Method in philosophical psychology', once endowed with rationality, the creature will use the capacity to consider questions not just about how ends are to be achieved, but about the desirability of those ends The creature in possession of rationality, the human being, is endowed with a concern that its attitudes and beliefs are well grounded, or validated. Grice speculates that, as a result of the possession of this property, the human being performs a process of 'Metaphysical Tran-substantiation' on itself. It endorses this concern for validation with the status of an end in itself, and it transforms itself into a creature for whom this is the purpose: into a person. The properties of the human being and the person are the same, but they are differently distributed.  Crucially, for this metaphysically constructed entity 'person', but not for the human being, rationality is an essential property.  There is an unacknowledged link back to the work of John Locke in this suggestion, particularly to the work Grice drew on in his early article  'Personal identity'. Locke proposed a distinction between 'man' and  'person' to take account of the fact that people, as essentially rational beings, are uniquely distinguished from other life forms by something like self-awareness or consciousness. For Locke, the identity of a person depends on the continuation of a single consciousness, while the identity of a man, like that of any living creature, depends on unity of function. Grice's suggestion is similar to Locke's in its metaphysical distinction between 'man' or 'human being' and 'person'. However, he goes beyond Locke in attributing the distinction to the operation of rational creatures themselves, and in the link he proceeds to make between the transformed creature and the nature of value.  For Grice, the rational creature is able to devise and evaluate answers to the questions about value it is raising. This will initially take the form of comparing different possible answers in terms of effectiveness and coherence. By means of raising questions about the justification of ends, and assessing possible answers to those questions, the person takes on the function of attributing value. A rational creature becomes a creature that, by metaphysical definition, has the capacity to attribute value.  Value, even the type of value known as 'goodness', can be discussed objectively, because a creature uniquely endowed with, and indeed defined by, the capacity to judge it, exists. The creature is 'a being whoseessence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value. 1 Values exist because valuers exist. By means of this status afforded to the nature of personhood, it is perhaps possible to reassess Grice's sketchy reference in 'Aspects of reason' to the devising of systems for living. People devise systems for living from the applica-tion of the capacity of reason and the resultant ability to ascribe value to certain courses of action and withhold it from others. The develop-ment and maintenance of basic moral principles can therefore be seen as a necessary product of rational human nature.  In this way, Grice constructs his account of value as being dependent on analyses from means to ends, yet at the same time having objective existence. The process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation operates pri-marily to turn human beings into people and therefore valuers, but it thereby makes value viable. The process, and therefore the existence of valuers and value, derives from the capacity, incidentally present in human beings, for rationality. Neither value itself nor the process of valuing depend on any novel or 'queer' properties or processes. The nature of value, and the apprehension of value, can both be explained in terms of rationality, a phenomenon with an acceptable philosophi-cal pedigree of its own, and one used in other areas of explanation. In Grice's terms, value is embedded in the concept of people as rational creatures; 'value does not somehow or another get in, it is there from  the start'. 15  In the years following the delivery of the Carus lectures, Grice began to justify his claim that the study of value could have illuminating and far-reaching consequences in different areas of philosophical investiga-tion. He had already considered the implications of value for his own account of meaning in the paper 'Meaning revisited'. As so often with Grice's work, the date of publication is misleading. It was published in 1982 in the proceedings of a colloquium on mutual knowledge held in England, but an earlier version of part of the paper had been delivered at a colloquium in Toronto in March 1976. Grice offers a tantalisingly brief suggestion of what might happen if the very intelligent rational creature began to speak: an outline of an account of meaning within the framework of creature-construction to which, it seems, he did not return. If the creature could talk it would be desirable, and judged so by the creature, that its utterances would correspond with its psychologi-cal states. This would enable such beneficial occurrences as being able to exchange information about the environment with other creatures;  it would be possible to transmit psychological states from one creatureto the next. Further, the creature will judge this a desirable property of the utterances of other creatures; it will assume, if possible, that the utterances of others correspond with their psychological states.  In a sentence that is at once complex, hedged and vague, Grice pro-poses to retain some version of an intentional account of meaning:  It seems to me that with regard to the possibility of using the notion of intention in a nested kind of way to explicate the notion of meaning, there are quite a variety of plausible, or at least not too implausible, analyses, which differ to a greater or lesser extent in detail, and at the moment I am not really concerned with trying to adjudicate between the various versions.16  In an addition to the 1976 paper for the later colloquium he suggests that intentional accounts of meaning, including his own, have left out an important concept. This is heralded at the start of the article as 'The Mystery Package', and later revealed to be the concept of value. Grice hints that he has firm theoretical reasons for wanting to introduce value as a philosophical concept. Many philosophers regard value with horror, yet it can answer some important philosophical problems. It makes possible a range of different expressions of value in different cases.  Grice suggests the word 'optimal' as a generalisation over these differ-ent usages. This offers solutions to some problem areas in the inten-tional account of meaning, most significantly to the supposed 'infinite regress' identified by critics such as Schiffer. Grice expresses some scep-ticism over whether any such problem can in fact be found, but allows that it could at least be argued that his account entailed that 'S want A to think "p, because S want A to think 'p, because S wants...!"'. In effect, this demands a mental state of S that is both logically impossi-ble, because it is infinite, and yet highly desirable. Grice argues that just because it cannot in practice be attained, this mental state need not be ruled out from philosophical explanation. Indeed, 'The whole idea of using expressions which are explained in terms of ideal limits would seem to me to operate in this way', a procedure Grice links to Plato's notion of universal Ideals and actual likenesses."7  The state in which a speaker has an infinite set of intentions is optimal in the case of meaning. This optimal state is unattainable; strictly speak-ing S can never in fact mean p. Nevertheless, actual mental states can approximate to it. Indeed, for communication to proceed successfully other people can and perhaps must deem the imperfect actual mentalstate to be the optimal state required for meaning. Grice uses the story of the provost's dog to illustrate the notion of 'deeming'. It is a story of which he was apparently fond; he used it again in his later paper  'Actions and events'. The incoming provost of an Oxford college owned a dog, yet college rules did not allow dogs in college. In response, the governing body of the college passed a resolution that deemed the provost's dog to be a cat. I suspect', suggests Grice, that crucially we do a lot of deeming, though perhaps not always in such an entertaining fashion.'18  In the second version of the paper the 'mystery package' seems to be the focus of Grice's interest, but commentators at the colloquium on mutual knowledge were more interested in the possible 'evolutionary' implications of his ideas: the suggestion that non-natural meaning might be a descendant of natural meaning. This is not an idea that Grice seems to have pursued further. However, Jonathan Bennett had already postulated a possible Gricean origin for language, although carefully not committing himself to it.2°  Grice revisited 'Meaning', but not 'Logic and conversation'. Others, however, have drawn connections between rationality, value and coop-eration. Judith Baker has suggested that, 'when we cooperate with other humans on the basis of trust, our activity is intelligible only if we conceive of ourselves and others as essentially rational. 2 Marina Sbisa has gone further, making a more explicit link between Grice's notions of  'person' and of 'cooperative participant' and arguing that 'we might even envisage Metaphysical Transubstantiation as an archetypal form of ascription of rationality on which all contingent ascriptions of coop-erativity are modelled. 22 Richard Grandy, tackling the question of why a hearer might conclude that a speaker is being cooperative, suggests tentatively that Grice 'would have argued that the Cooperative Principle ought to be a governing principle for rational agents' and that such agents would follow it 'on moral, not on practical or utilitarian grounds!23 However, writing long before the publication of Grice's work on rationality and value, Asa Kasher suggested that the Cooperative Principle should be replaced by a more general and basic rationality principle. He argues that the individual maxims do not display any clear connection with the Cooperative Principle, but that they follow from the principle that one should choose the action that most effectively and efficiently attains a desired end. In this way the maxims 'are based directly on conclusions of a general rationality principle, without mediation of a general principle of linguistic action'.2 Further, in interpreting an utterance, a hearer assumes that the speaker is a rational agent.It might be that the discussion of value in Grice's later work offers a new way of interpreting the rather problematic formulation of his earlier work. Rationality and mutual attribution of rationality may be better descriptions of the motivation for the maxims described in the William James lecturers than is 'cooperation'. Speakers follow the rules of conversation in pursuit of particular communicative ends. On the assumption that other speakers are also rational creatures, the maxims also offer a good basis for interpreting their utterances. As rational crea-tures, speakers attribute value to ends that are consistent and coherent.  An implicature may be accepted as the end point of interpretation if it accords with the twin views that the other speaker is a rational being, and that their utterances correspond to their psychological states.  On this view, the Cooperative Principle and maxims are not an autonomous account of conversational behaviour precisely because they follow from the essential nature of speakers as rational creatures.  Cooperation is, in effect, just one manifestation of the much more general cognitive capacity of rationality. Further, introducing the notion of 'value' into the theory of conversation offers a defence against the charge of prescriptivism. The maxims are not motivated by a duty to adhere to some imposed external ethical code concerned with 'helpful-ness' and 'considerateness'. Their imperative form belies the fact that they are a freely chosen but highly rational course of action. Like moral rules they are means towards certain ends: ends that are attributed value by creatures uniquely endowed to do so. Both the tendency to adhere to the maxims and the tendency to prize certain courses of action as  'good' follow as consequences of the same essential property of people as rational beings: the property, indeed the necessity, of attributing value. As such, the theory of conversation can be argued to be one component in Grice's overarching scheme: a description of what it is to be human.  The allocation of time and the completion of projects became a pressing concern for Grice as the 1980s wore on because his health was failing. He had been a heavy smoker throughout his adult life, and tape recordings from the 1970s onwards demonstrate that his speech was frequently interrupted by paroxysms of coughing. In response he gave up cigarettes suddenly and completely in 1980. He insisted to Kathleen that his last, unfinished, packet of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house, but he never touched it. This drastic action was taken, as he himself was in the habit of commenting, too late. In December 1983 he gave a farewell lecture at the end of his time at the University of Washington, in which he referred to 'my recent disagreement withthe doctors'. Even before this had taken place, he explains, he had decided to offer this talk as a thank you on his and Judith Baker's behalf,  'for making the time spent by us here such fun'.? Whether or not the doctors in question were insisting that Grice finish his demanding shuttle between Berkeley and Seattle, they certainly seem to have been recommending that he slow down. It was around this time that he was first diagnosed with emphysema, the lung condition that was presenting him with breathing difficulties and was to cause increasing ill health over the following years.  If his doctors were urging him to burden himself with fewer com-mitments, they did not check his enthusiasm for work. Stephen Neale, then a graduate student at Stanford, spent a day with Grice in Berkeley in 1984. He found that Grice 'was already seriously weakened by illness, but he displayed that extraordinary intellectual energy, wit, and eye for detail for which he was so well known, and I left his house elated and exhausted' 2 Grice's response to his illness seems to have been if anything an increased impetus towards advancing the projects then in hand, and a renewed drive towards seeing his many unpublished works into print. Early in 1984 he began making lists of things to do. Some of these include private and financial business which, mixed in with academic matters, have survived with his work papers; there was, by this time at least, no real distinction between the personal and the philosophical. He planned to 'collect "best copies" of unpublished works and inform "executors" of their nature and location and of planned "editing"'?7 On the same list appears the resolution to 'go through old letters and dispose'.  In the mid-1980s, then, Grice was looking back over the work of more than four decades. This was prompted partly by his concern to tie up loose ends and partly by the demands of selecting the papers to appear along with the William James lectures in the projected book from Harvard University Press. There was also another spur to this retrospective reflection. Richard Grandy and Richard Warner were collecting and editing the essays eventually published as Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. They were themselves writing an introductory overview of Grice's work. Grice called his response to this 'Reply to Richards', fusing, as he puts it, the editors into a multiple personality. In this he develops some of the themes of his current work. But he begins with a short philosophical memoir: 'Life and opinions of Paul Grice'. The paper he offered at the end of his time in Seattle was, it seems, a preliminary sketch for this. The original, informal title was 'Prejudices and predilec-tions. Which becomes life and opinions'.One consequence of this enforced nostalgia was a renewed interest in the practices of ordinary language philosophy. Grice looked back at the influence of Austin with the amused detachment afforded by a distance of over 20 years, or perhaps more accurately with fond memories of the amused detachment with which he viewed Austin at the time. He was earnest, however, in the guarded enthusiasm with which he recounted the art of linguistic botanising'. He had never fully abandoned the practice in his own philosophy. For instance, in his notes on psychological philosophy, he had started making a list of 'lexical words' relevant to the topic. These included 'Nature, Life, Matter, Mind, Sort, End, Time'.  Perhaps catching himself in the act, next to this list he had posed the self-mocking question '"Going through Dictionary"??'28 In 'Reply to Richards', he suggests that this method has merits that might recommend it even to contemporary philosophers: 'I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing. This was a theme he repeated, often rather more forcefully, in a number of other papers, talks and informal discussions at that time. Nevertheless, Grice was well aware of how far he had moved away from Oxford philosophy in taking on metaphysical topics such as value. In 1978, in the introductory seminar to his course 'Metaphysics', he explained to his students that not very long before the word itself could be used as a term of abuse. At Oxford in the 1950s, metaphysics was viewed as 'both non-existent and disgust-ing'. Oxford philosophers, he suggests, would have said: 'All we need is tasteful and careful botanising and we'll have all any gentleman needs to know'. Twenty-five years later, Grice admitted, he was convinced that a more systematic treatment of philosophy was needed. 30  Grice's enthusiasm for the old-fashioned method of linguistic botanis-ing was accompanied, and perhaps reinforced, by a strong dislike and distrust of technology. This attitude applied to attempts to use technological tools or analogies in philosophy itself, and extended into the more personal domain. He was scathing about what he saw as attempts to 'reduce' the understanding of human beings to the understanding of computers. He may have had in mind recent debates about the possibility and nature of Artificial Intelligence, although he does not refer to them explicitly. In 1985, he wrote an overview of his earlier work on the philosophy of language, titled 'Preliminary valediction' and presumably serving as an early draft of the retrospective that appeared in Studies in the Way of Words. In this he makes an explicit link between his philosophical interest in ordinary language and his dislike oftechnological explanations in philosophy. In a single sentence, perfectly well formed, but long even for him, he tackles the need for a carefully considered argument to justify attention to ordinary language:  Indeed it seems to me that not merely is such argument required, but it is specially required in the current age of technology, when intuition and ordinary forms of speech and thought are all too often forgotten or despised, when the appearance of the vernacular serves only too often merely as a gap-sign to be replaced as soon as possible by jargon, and when many researchers not only believe that we are computers, but would be gravely disappointed should it turn out that we are, after all, not computers; is not a purely mechanical existence not only all we do have, but also all we should want to have?31  In arguing for the centrality of consciousness, that is in arguing against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, Grice was again affirming his commitment to the significance of psychological concepts to rationality in general and to meaning in particular. The processes of the interpretation and production of meaning are significant for a human being in ways that are perhaps mysterious, but crucially cannot be observed in computers. Personally, too, Grice would have nothing to do with computers. When he retired from his full-time post at Berkeley he lost the secretarial support he had always relied on and was forced to get a PC at home. But it was Kathleen who learnt to use the computer and mastered word processing. Grice could never get beyond his horror of the spell checker which, he complained, rejected 'pirot' and questioned  'sticky wicket'.  Grice was not just looking back, reflecting on the philosophy of earlier decades and planning the publication of his manuscripts. He was also working on new projects. His obsession with these was such that even his interest in his own health seemed to be predicated on the desire to have time to finish them. Cancelling a lecture he had been scheduled to give in 1986, he wrote 'my doctor has just advised me that I am taking on too much and that unless I reduce my level of activity I shall be jeop ardising the enterprises which it is most important to me to complete.'32 From the notes and the work plans he was making at the time, it seems that Grice had two main enterprises in mind: producing a finished version of his lectures on value, and developing a project these had prompted. This new project was characteristic of the pattern of Grice's work in two ways. It was daringly ambitious, in that he foresaw for it a wide range of implications and applications. But it was also not entirelynew, in that the ideas from which it developed had long been present in his work. In effect, it was nothing less than the foundations of a theory to encompass the whole of philosophy, with all its apparent branches and subdivisions. Grice was working on a metaphysical methodology to explain how the theories that make up human knowledge are constructed. Or, in one of his own favourite phrases from this time, he was doing 'theory-theory'.  Grice had long been of the opinion that the division of philosophy into different fields and disciplines was an artificial and unproductive practice. This opinion was certainly reflected in the course of his own work, in which he followed what seemed to him the natural progression of his interests, without regard for the boundaries he was crossing between the philosophies of mind and of language, logic, metaphysics and ethics. In 1983, he recalled with some pride a mild rebuke he had received years earlier from Gilbert Harman, to the effect that when it came to philosophy, 'I seemed to want to do the whole thing myself' 33 To some extent, especially in the latter part of his career, Grice had actually defined his own philosophical interests in these terms. He contributed a brief self-portrait to the Berkeley Philosophy Department booklet in 1977, in which he described himself as working recently chiefly in the philosophy of language and logic; 'takes the view, however, that philosophy is a unity and that no philosophical area can, in the end, be satisfactorily treated in isolation from other philosophical areas'.34 He comments further on this attitude in his 'Reply to Richards':  When I visit an unfamiliar university and (as occasionally happens) I am introduced to 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy' (or in 'Nineteenth-Century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.  Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in phi-losophy, namely all of them.35  Grice's distrust of subdivisions and labels extended to the classification of different schools of thought or philosophical approaches. Labelling philosophers according to the style of their subject and their approach to it was, he felt, unhelpful and even stultifying. In preparatory note for 'Reply to Richards' he lists some of the 'cons' of philosophy as being  'fads'  ', 'band wagons', 'sacred cows' (the 'pros' are simply 'fun' and 'col-laboration'). He then goes on to produce a list of '-isms' that might bear out his objections, including 'naturalism', 'phenomenalism', 'reduc-tionism', 'empiricism' and 'scepticism'. In a later note, he worked out a series of nicknames for the dedicated followers of different schools of thought. 'Constructivists' were 'Egg-heads'; 'Realists' were 'Fat-heads';  'Idealists' were 'Big-heads'; 'Subjectivists' were 'Hard-heads' or 'Nut-heads'; and 'Metaphysical Sceptics' were 'No-heads', or 'Beheads' 37 It is not clear whether Grice intended these jottings for any purpose other than his own amusement. It seems that he made public use of only one of these labels, when speaking to the American Philosophical Associa-tion, and drawing attention to his own belief in the crucial connection between value and rationality:  To reject or to ignore this thesis seems to me to be to go about as far as one can go in the direction of Intellectual Hara-Kiri; yet, I fear, it is a journey which lures increasingly many 'hard-headed' (even perhaps bone-headed) travellers.38  In 'Reply to Richards', and elsewhere, Grice is characteristically cagey about the exact consequences of his views on the entirety of philoso-phy. He is certain, however, that progress is to be made through his view of metaphysics as essentially a constructivist enterprise, in which categories and entities are added if they are explanatorily useful. In 'Method in philosophical psychology' he used the metaphor of offering houseroom to even unexplained conditions and entities if they were able to help with the housework. In the Carus Lectures, arguing that any account of value should be given metaphysical backing, he suggests that the appropriate metaphysics will be constructivist, not reductionist. In another arresting metaphor, he tells his audience that, unlike reductionist philosophers, 'I do not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware! The world is rich and complex, and the philosopher should offer an explanation that retains these qualities. The constructivist would begin with certain elements that might be seen as metaphysically primary, and would then 'build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical theory or concatenation of theories'.39 First, it would be necessary to define the suitable form for any theory to take, to engage in theory-theory. Grice does not here enter into a discussion of theory-theory itself, but it seems that his account of value is an example fitting the general constructivist approach he has in mind Th  e simple psychological attitudes of J-accepting and V-accepting areposited, together with the programme of creature construction, as primary elements in the theory. Grice's elaborate account involving rationality as a non-essential property of human beings, the process of Metaphysical Transubstantiation, the creation of people as value-givers and the derivation of absolute value, are built up from these starting points.  There is no finished written account of metaphysical constructivism and theory-theory, although they are outlined in 'Reply to Richards'.  Grice never wrote the work 'From Genesis to Revelation (and back): a new discourse on metaphysics', which he seems to have contemplated. 40  Probably the fullest record of his thoughts on this matter is a lengthy taped conversation from January 1983, in which he talks to Judith Baker and Richard Warner, setting out the ideas he hopes to have time to develop. The discipline of theory-theory, he explains, can be discussed in both general and applied terms. In general terms, it is concerned with examining the features any adequate theory would have to exhibit: with laying out the ground rules of theory construction. In its more applied aspect, it is concerned with detailing the theories formed by these rules, and with classifying them into types. Theory-theory includes in its scope, but is not restricted to, philosophical theory.  From this starting point, Grice goes on to suggest a hierarchical structure of theories, the scope and subject matter at each level being successively more restricted and specific. He offers an example of a theory from each of these levels; in effect each theory is a component of the one before. If philosophical theory is one type demarcated by theory-theory, then metaphysics is the pre-eminent form of philosophical theory. Concerned as it is with the fundamental questions of what there is, and how it is to be classified, it deserves the title of 'First Philoso-phy'. General theory-theory is concerned with specifying the appropriate subject matter and procedures of metaphysics, while applied theory-theory is concerned with the specific categories needed to delineate the subject matter, with investigating what kind of entities there are. Within metaphysics, each sub-branch has its own general and applied theory-theory. One such branch that particularly interests Grice is philosophical psychology. General theory-theory is concerned with the nature and function of psychological concepts, applied theory-theory with finding a systematic way of defining the range of psychological beings. Rational psychology is a special case. Here, general theory-theory is concerned with the essence of rational beings. Applied theory-theory widens the scope to consider features or properties other than the essential. In this way, it leads to the characterisation of a prac-tical theory of conduct, in part an ethical system. Finally, and rather briefly, Grice comments that philosophy of language is to be seen as a sub-theory of rational psychology.  Grice is even more tentative about the operation of metaphysical construction itself, in other words the procedures of metaphysics specified in general theory-theory. The relevant principles, he insists, are not fully worked out, but two ideas about the forms they might take have been with him for some time. The first idea he calls the 'bootstrap principle', in response to the realisation that a theory constructed along the lines he is describing must be able to 'pull itself up by its bootstraps', or rely on its own primitive concepts to construct potentially elaborate expla-nations. A metaphysical system contains both its primitive subject matter, and the means by which that subject matter is discussed and explained. The means are meta-systematic. In constructing the theory, it must be possible to include in the meta-system any materials that are needed. The only restriction on this, introduced in the interests of economical conduct, is that any ideas or entities used in the meta-system should later be introduced formally into the system. The legitimate routines or procedures for construction include 'Humean projection' and  'nominalisation'. First, if a particular psychological state is central to a theory, it is legitimate to use the object of those states in the meta-system. The objects of psychological states are the 'radicals' of thought described in Grice's work on rationality, Second, it is legitimate to introduce entities corresponding to certain expressions used in the relevant area of investigation.  The second general idea does not have a specific name, but can be summarised by saying that the business of metaphysics in any area of investigation is not just the production of one theory. Grice maintains that he wants to be free to introduce more than one metaphysical theory, because the production of different systems of explanation may be differently motivated. This principle, he observes, 'fits in nicely with my ecumenical tendencies'. A metaphysical system does not have to be unitary or monolithic. In fact, Grice doubts the existence of 'a theory to be revealed on The Day of Judgement which will explain everything'.  Rather than aiming at some ultimate truth, or correct version, Grice sees any theory as crucially a revision of some prior theory, or, if there is no such precedent, as building on common sense and intuition. Asked by one of his colleagues as to whether it is legitimate to reject a previous theory, or the prompting of common sense, once it has been revised, Grice expresses himself strongly opposed to the idea. The best understanding of some entity comes from an appreciation of all the guises inwhich it appears during the development of systems. The most appropriate theory on any given occasion is not always the most elaborate one available.  Grice referred to his metaphysical interests in some of the articles he wrote, or at least completed, during these final but productive years. In  'Actions and events', published in 1986, he responds to Donald Davidson's logical analysis of action sentences that included actions in the category of entities.4l The question relates, he argues, to the fundamental issue of metaphysics: the question of what the 'universe' or the  'world' contains. Grice is inclined to agree with Davidson over this act of inclusion, but to do so from a very different metaphysical position.  He suggests that Davidson, like Quine, is a 'Diagnostic Realist'; the actual nature of reality is unavailable for inspection, but the job of philosophers is to make plausible hypotheses about it. Grice's own metaphysical approach, however, is one of constructivism, of building up an account from primitives, rather than of forming theories consistent with scientific explanations. 'One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis. 42  'Actions and events' brings together many of Grice's apparently disparate philosophical interests into one article of broad scope and remarkable complexity. Still not recognising traditional philosophical boundaries, he moves from metaphysics, intention and language to rationality and the status of value. In a few concluding paragraphs, Grice turns to what he sees as the essential link between action and freedom. The link is treated briefly and cautiously in this published work, but was in fact a major concern in his thinking about value.  Grice's notes from the early 1980s show him applying the familiar techniques of 'linguistic botanising' to the concept of freedom. He jotted down phrases such as 'alcohol-free', 'free for lunch' and 'free-wheeling', and listed many possible definitions, including 'liberal', 'acting without restriction' and 'frank in conversation'43 Richard Warner has commented that their discussions in preparation for the third Carus lecture were concerned almost exclusively with freedom as a source of value, and that he himself encouraged Grice to pursue this line of enquiry rather than that of creature construction as being the more interesting and productive. * Essentially, Grice saw in the nature of action a means of justifying the problematic concept of freedom, and from this a defence of his objective conception of value. He introduces a classification of actions that is reminiscent of his hierarchy of living creatures.  Some actions are caused by influences external to a body, as is the casewith inanimate objects. Next, actions may have causes that are internal to the body but are simply the outcome of a previous stage in the same process, as in a 'freely moving' body. Then there are causes that are both internal and independently motivated. Actions provoked by these causes may be said to be based on the beliefs or desires of the creature in question and as functioning to provide for the good of the creature.  Finally, there is a stage exclusive to human creatures at which the creature's conception of something as being for its own good is sufficient to initiate the creature in performing an action. 'It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. '45  The particular nature of human action suggests the necessity of freedom. That is, humans act for reasons. These reasons may be more than mere desires and beliefs motivated by ones own survival; they may be freely adopted for their own sake. This in turn suggests that people must be creatures capable of ascribing value to certain ends, independent of external forces or internal necessity. In Grice's terms, the particular type of freedom demanded by the nature of human action  'would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are freely adopted or pursued by me'.* In this way, a consideration of action suggests the necessity of freedom, and freedom in turn offers an independent justification for people as ascribers of value. If people are inherently capable of ascribing value, then value must have an objective existence. Independent of the programme of creature construction, the concept of freedom may offer another version of the argument that value exists because valuers exist.  In 'Metaphysics, philosophical escatology and Plato's Republic' completed in 1988 and published only in Studies in the Way of Words, Grice suggests a distinction between 'categorial' and 'supracategorial' meta-physics. The first is concerned with the most basic classifications, the second with bringing together categorially different items into single classifications, and specifying the principles for these combinations.  This second type of metaphysics, closely related to his informal account of constructivism, he tentatively labels 'Philosophical Escatology'. 47 The study of escatology, or of last or final things, belonged originally to Christian theology. Grice is laying claim to an exclusively philosophical version of this discipline, and thereby linking metaphysical definitions to finality, or purpose.  The paper 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being' was published in 1988, but there is evidence that he had been working on it at least since the late 1970s. Alan Code mentions a paper 'Aristotle on being andgood' that Grice read at a conference at the University of Victoria in 1979, and that sounds in many ways similar to the published version. 48 Grice offers an explicit defence of metaphysics, contrasting it particularly with the rigid empiricism of logical positivism:  A definition of the nature and range of metaphysical enquiries is among the most formidable of philosophical tasks; we need all the help we can get, particularly at a time when metaphysicians have only recently begun to re-emerge from the closet, and to my mind are still hampered by the aftermath of decades of ridicule and vilification at the hands of the rednecks of Vienna and their adherents.49  Grice saw the 'revisionary character' of metaphysical theorising as a topic to which he would need to return. In fact, it is closely linked to another late area of interest, a topic he often described as 'the Vulgar and the Learned'. In this terminology, and indeed in the ideas it described, it seems likely that Grice was borrowing from Hume, one of the 'old boys' of philosophy he particularly admired. Hume had written about the relationship between philosophical terminology and everyday understanding in the following terms:  When I view this table and that chimney, nothing is present to me but particular perceptions, which are of a like nature with all other perceptions. This is the doctrine of philosophers. But this table, which is present to me, and that chimney, may and do exist sepa-rately. This is the doctrine of the vulgar, and implies no contradic-tion. There is no contradiction, therefore, in extending the same doctrine to all perceptions.50  Grice argued in his account of theory-theory that pre-theoretical intu-itions, or common-sense accounts, are often used as the foundations of metaphysical theories. In later notes he was particularly preoccupied by the role of such 'everyday' or 'vulgar' understanding in metaphysical construction. Very generally, he urges that theorists of metaphysics are well advised to take account of common-sense understanding. It is not that common sense is 'superior' to metaphysical accounts, or can replace them. The complex accounts offered by philosophers serve a different function from those of everyday life, and can coexist with them because they are appropriate to different purposes.  In his notes from around this time, he compares the vulgar and the learned with reference to what he calls 'Eddington's table' and 'thevulgar table'. Grice's reference here is to Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, first published in 1928. Eddington begins his book, originally delivered as a series of lectures, with the assertion that as he sat down to write he was confronted with not one table but two. There is the ordinary, familiar table: 'a commonplace object of that environ-ment which I call the world'. There is also a scientific table, an object of which he has become aware only comparatively recently. Whereas the ordinary table is substantial, the scientific table is mostly emptiness, while 'sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself'. Eddington argues that the two different descriptions of the table are discreet and serve distinct purposes. Although they might ultimately be said to describe the same object, the scientist must keep the two descriptions separate, in effect ignoring the 'ordinary table' and concentrating only on the  'scientific table'. Grice's brief notes suggest that he is happy to accept both the vulgar and the learned description of the table. There is, he notes, 'no conflict... Scientific purposes and everyday purposes are distinct'.52  Grice was advocating philosophical respect for common sense, and as such aligning himself with a philosophical tradition stretching back through Moore and Berkeley to Aristotle. Although he developed this position explicitly only towards the end of his life it is clear that, as so often in his work, he was returning to a theme, and to a philosophical outlook that had been with him for many years. It is not difficult to relate this idea to Austin's respect for ordinary language, and the indi-cation of everyday concepts and distinctions it contains. Indeed, notes from much earlier in Grice's career show that, while he was still at  Oxford, he was linking a philosophical interest in common sense to a respect for ordinary language. His jotted 'Aspects of respect for vulgar' include 'protection against sceptic', 'proper treatment of Folk Wisdom',  'protection of speech from change and impropriety' and, perhaps most tellingly 'proper position treatment of ordinary ways of speech (speech  phenomena)'.53  The same form of respect can also be detected, although more prob-lematically, in his later work on value. Subjectivists such as Mackie had suggested that they were themselves necessarily arguing against common sense, rejecting the idea apparent in ordinary language that values 'exist' as objective topics of knowledge. Grice himself rather irrev-erently sums up a position such as Mackie's in his notes from this periodas follows: 'value-predicates (e.g. "good", "ought") signify attributes which ordinary chaps ascribe to things. It is however demonstrable, on general grounds, that these attributes are vacuous. So position attribution by the vulgar are systematically false' S4 According to this account, in upholding objective value, Grice would be maintaining a straight for-wardly common-sense position. In fact Grice himself does not accept this simple identification of objectivism with common sense. He argues in the Carus lectures that 'it seems to me by no means as easy as Mackie seems to think to establish that the "vulgar valuer", in his valuations, is committed to the objectivity of value(s).5 In the taped conversation he suggests that the need to work on the status of common sense, intuition and pre-theoretical judgement is particularly acute for anyone who wants to take a constructivist approach to a topic such as value. It is not that the philosopher should simply take on board all 'vulgar' pronouncements on such a topic, but rather that a constructivist should attempt at least to use them as a starting point for any theory of value.  Grice's 'common sense' philosophy is, therefore, a more sophisticated approach than one relying simply on the understanding apparent in everyday language. Years earlier he defended common sense but attacked Moore's simplistic application of it in 'G. E. Moore and philosophers' paradoxes'. In the later work, he argues that although common sense may be the starting point, exactly how a theory is to be constructed from there is a matter for theory-theory: 'Moore-like proclamations cut no ice.'  Grice was also turning his attention to another loose end in his work: the study of perception. In particular, he returned to the area in which he had worked with Geoffrey Warnock 30 or more years before, planning a 'Grice/Warnock retrospective'. He sketched out a number of topics for this, but it does not appear to have progressed beyond note form. The first topic was to be 'The place of perception as a faculty or capacity in a sequence of living things'. Thinking about the old issue of perception in relation to his more recent interest in creature-construction, he wondered: 'at what point, if any, is further progress up the psychological ladder impossible unless some rung has previously been assigned to creatures capable of perception?'56 He dwells on the advantages of perception in terms of survival, the crucial factor for adding any capacity during creature-construction, and assesses the possible support this might offer for common sense against philosophers of sense data. If perception is to be seen as an advantage, providing knowledge to aid survival in a particular world, 'the objects revealed byperception should surely be constituents of that world'. It might be possible to say that sense data do not themselves nourish or threaten, but constitute evidence of things that do.  However, Grice notes that he is more tempted by an alternative expla-nation. 'Flows of impressions' do not so much offer evidence of what is in the world, as 'prompt, stimulate or excite certain forms of response to the possibility that such states of affairs do obtain'. These responses may be either verbal or behavioural. Both types of response suggest commitment on the part of the responding creature to the state of affairs in question. Here again, Grice seems to be offering a defence of a common sense approach to philosophical questions, but a more sophisticated one than that of simple realism. The existence of the material object is indicated not by the sense impressions themselves, but by the responses these elicit in the perceiving creature.  From the middle of the 1980s onwards, Grice was increasingly preoccupied with various publishing projects, mainly with book plans. His notes from the time suggest an explosion of energy in this area. A list from 1986 includes '"Method: the vulgar and the learned" with ?OUP.  "From Genesis to Revelations" ?HUP'. Other notes are uncompromisingly labelled 'work program', and show him carefully dividing up time by year, by month or even by day, including the injunction that he should set aside part of December 1986 to 'CATCH UP on prior topics'. 57 For most of Grice's potential audience, however, it was the William James lectures that were most eagerly awaited. With the exception of the few lectures already published, these remained as ageing manuscripts in Grice's idiosyncratic filing system. Even with his new enthusiasm for publishing, it took some persuasion from Harvard University Press, and from Kathleen, to revisit these. It is clear that he was not averse in principle to publishing the lectures; his flurry of lists from the early 1980s testify to this. But he had set himself an exacting programme of revising and adding to the them.  Grice was adamant from the start that, whatever else the book con-tained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publisher he wrote, 'the link between the two main topics of the James lectures is not loose but extremely intimate. No treatment of Saying and Implying can afford to omit a study of the notion of Meaning which plainly underlies both these ideas!58 Before the book had a name, he was planning that it should contain a Part A entitled 'Logic and conversation'. It seems that this was to include a number of postscripts to the lectures. Part B was provisionally entitled 'Other essays on language and related matters', andwas to contain a number of further postscripts and reassessments. Of all the proposed postscripts, only 'Conceptual analysis and the province of philosophy', concerned mainly with revisiting the themes of 'Postwar Oxford philosophy', was ever written. The inclusion of 'In defence of a dogma' in Part B was a matter of some debate, Grice remaining resolutely in favour. When a reader for the publisher questioned this, Grice responded with a robust defence: 'the analytic/synthetic distinction is a crucially important topic about which I have said little in the past thirty years, and must sometime soon treat at some length.' In his original plan the book was also to include a transcription of a talk on this same topic between himself, George Myro, Judith Baker, George Bealer and Neil Thomason. Indeed, Grice suggested initially that Studies in the Way of Words should be published as authored by Paul Grice with others'.  Grice revisits the analytic/synthetic distinction in the 'Retrospective epilogue'. He introduces a number of inhabitants of 'philosophical Never-Never-Land', M*, A*, G* and R*, the fairy godmothers of Moore, Austin, Grice and  Ryle. These fairy godmothers are useful to philo-  sophical discussion because they hold explicitly all the views that their godchildren hold, without regard for whether these views are explicit or implicit in their actual work. R* suggests that the division of statements of human knowledge into 'analytic' and 'synthetic' categories, far from being an artificial and unnecessary complication by philoso-phers, is in fact an insightful attempt by theorists to individuate and categorise the mass of human knowledge. This view offers a particular challenge to Quine's attack on the distinction, with which Grice had taken issue in his joint article with Strawson over 30 years earlier. It is in tacit reference to this that Grice concludes his epilogue:  Such consideration as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A* and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day.59  It is tempting to read a note of wistful resignation into the manner in which Grice chose in 1987 to conclude Studies in the Way of Words.  However, letters he was writing at the time, which affirm his intention to revisit these topics at length, argue that he at least in part believed he had time to do so. Moreover, he submitted applications for Faculty Research Grant support for both the academic years 1986-7 and 1987-8,for a project on 'Metaphysical foundations of value and the nature of metaphysics'. Kathleen recalls that he was never successful in his bids for such research grants. Despite this, he does not seem to have made much effort to accommodate to the demands of the application process.  In answer to a question about the significance of his research project and the justification of the proposed expenditure, he wrote in 1986 'I hope the character of the enterprise will be sufficient evidence of its sig-nificance.' In 1987 he offered an even more terse account of his plans:  'their importance seems to me to be beyond question'. 6 He was applying for funding to cover the expenses of secretarial support in transcribing tapes on to which he had been dictating his notes and typing up manuscripts, and for duplication, supplies and mailing. His intention was to produce two books for Oxford University Press, one a revised version of the Carus lectures and one on 'Methodology in Metaphysical Theory', a study to include a consideration of 'the nature and degree of respect due from metaphysical theorists towards the intuitions and concerns of the common man'. The plan was to complete at least first drafts during 1987-8.  Whatever his official predictions, Grice was aware that his condition was worsening and that the prognosis was not good. In the summer of 1987 he underwent eye surgery in an attempt to rescue his failing sight, and by the end of the year he needed a hearing aid. In addition, his mobility became further restricted. The entrance to his house, and the balcony on which he loved to sit, were on the first floor over the garage; a further flight of stairs led to the second floor. By early in 1988, a stair lift was needed. Even so, Grice was effectively housebound, and received visits from publishers, colleagues and even students on his balcony.  From there he also continued to work on new ideas, apparently with a sense of urgency that was only increased by his condition. He jotted on the back of an envelope, Now that my tottering feet are already engulfed in the rising mist of antiquity, I must make all speed ere it reaches, and (even) enters, my head." He dealt with the business of seeing Studies in the Way of Words to completion. Lindsay Waters from Harvard University Press, who worked with Grice throughout the preparation of the book, has commented on the determination with which he did this, suggesting that 'He knew the fight with the manuscript editor was his last.'62  Paul Grice died on 28 August 1988, at the age of seventy-five. He had, perhaps, as many projects on the go as ever. Studies in the Way of Words was on the way to press; Grice had gone over the final changes with the manuscript editor just days before. His 'work in progress' was still onhis desk, and included notes on 'the vulgar and the learned' that indicate that he was turning his thoughts back to the topic of perception in relation to this idea. The causal theory of perception could, the notes suggest, be seen as a natural way of reconciling the vulgar and the sci-entific. Perceptions could be connected either with scientific features or with vulgar descriptions, as they were in his article 'The causal theory of perception'. The causal theory explains the way things appear on the basis of the way they are. It rules out the account from sense data theory, which explains the way things are on the basis of the ways things appear. Scientific theory, Grice had noted 'cuts us off from objects'.63 The proofs of 'Aristotle on the multiplicity of being', an article he had at one point considered including in Studies in the Way of Words, were posted to him on August 17 and remained untouched.  Studies in the Way of Words, containing the long-awaited complete William James lectures and Grice's other most influential papers in the philosophy of language, was published by Harvard University Press in  1989. A number of reviewers took the opportunity, before engaging with the details of Grice's philosophy, to pay tribute to him. Peter Strawson described his 'substantial and enduring contribution to philosophical and linguistic theory' 6 Tyler Burge praised his 'wonderfully powerful, subtle, and philosophically profound mind'.6 Charles Travis argued that, 'H. P. Grice transformed, often deeply, the problems he touched and, thereby, the terms of philosophical discussion. Robert Fogelin suggested that 'even if Grice was one of the chief and most gifted practitioners of OLP, he was also, perhaps, its most penetrating critic. As Fogelin notes, Meaning revisited', with its enigmatic reference to The Mystery Package' cannot be fully interpreted without reference to Grice's work on values and teleology. When Grice died, the Carus lectures were still in manuscript form, and he had asked Judith Baker to see them through publication with Oxford University Press. She prepared the lectures for publication, together with part of the 'Reply to Richards' and 'Method in philosophical psychology'. The Conception of Value appeared in 1991. Reviewers were generally ambivalent, welcoming the contribution to debate, but expressing some reservations as to the details of Grice's position. For instance, Gerald Barnes describes Grice's defence of absolute value as 'unconventional, richly suggestive, often fascinating, and, by Grice's own admission, incomplete at a number of crucial points'.68 The John Locke lectures had to wait a further decade before they, too, appeared from Oxford University Press, edited and introduced by Richard Warner under the title Aspects of Reason. Again, reviewers had reservations. A. P. Martinich declaredhimself unconvinced by the appeal to the ordinary use of expressions such as 'reason', and criticised Grice's style of presentation for containing 'too many promissory and subjunctive gestures'. The body of published work, and the legacy of his teaching and collaborations, formed the basis of Peter Strawson and David Wiggin's assessment of Grice for the British Academy:  Other anglophone philosophers born, like him, in the twentieth century may well have had greater influence and done a larger quantity of work of enduring significance. Few have had the same gift for hitting on ideas that have in their intended uses the appearance of inevitability. None has been cleverer, or shown more ingenuity and persistence in the further development of such ideas.?º  Perhaps an even more succinct summary of Grice's philosophical life is the one implied by a comment he himself made as it became clear to him that he would not recover his failing health. Despite the indignities of his illness and treatment, he confided in Kathleen that he did not really mind about dying. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life, and had done everything that he wanted to do. Grice's career was charac-terised by years of self-doubt, by almost ceaseless battles with the minutiae of philosophical problems, and by a final frenzied struggle to finish an ever-multiplying list of projects. Yet it seems that, when he reviewed the effort in comparison with the results, he was content with the deal.By all the obvious measures of academic achievement, the big success story for Grice has been the response in linguistics to his theory of conversation. The 'Logic and conversation' series, particularly the individual lecture published under that title, has been cited widely and frequently from the first. Beyond frequency of reference, perhaps the greatest accolade is for a writer's name to be coined as an adjective, a process with few precedents in linguistics. There is 'Saussurian linguis-tics', the 'Chomskyan revolution' and 'Hallidayan grammar'. From the mid-1970s on, linguists could be confident that a set of assumptions about theoretical commitments could be conveyed by the phrase  'Gricean pragmatics'. The term has been used as a label for a disparate body of work. It includes relatively uncritical applications of Grice's ideas to a wide range of different genres, as well as attempts to identify flaws, omissions or full-blown errors in his theory. It also includes a variety of attempts to develop new theories of language use, based to varying degrees on Grice's insights.  These different types of work do not all agree on the efficacy of the Cooperative Principle, on the exact characterisation of the maxims, or even on the nature of conversational implicature itself. What they have in common, qualifying them for the title 'Gricean', is an impulse to distinguish between literal meaning and speaker meaning, and to identify certain general principles that mediate between the two. The latter is perhaps Grice's single greatest intellectual legacy. Stephen Neale has suggested that 'in the light of his work any theory of meaning that is to be taken at all seriously must now draw a sharp line between genuinely semantic facts and facts pertaining to the nature of human interaction." Grice's understanding that linguistic meaning and meaning in use may differ was shared with a variety of previous philosophers and indeedwith common sense. But he went much further in his claim that the differences were amenable to systematic, independently motivated explanation, and in his ambitious proposal to provide such an expla-nation. Whatever its flaws, imprecisions and even errors, the theory of conversation has provided a definite starting point for those interested in discussing the relevant layers of meaning. Stephen Levinson has gone so far as to suggest that 'Grice has provided little more than a sketch of the large area and the numerous separate issues that might be illuminated by a fully worked out theory of conversational implicature!?  The success of the theory of conversation was achieved despite its publication history. Demand was such that copies of the William James lectures were in fairly wide circulation around American and British universities soon after 1967 in the blurred blue type of a mimeograph, and many early responses to them refer directly to this unpublished version.  Some commentators did not have even this degree of access to the lec-tures. In an article published in 1971, Jonathan Cohen comments that he is responding to 'the oral publicity of the William James Lectures' 3 When the lectures began to appear in print, they were scattered and piecemeal. 'Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word-meaning' appeared in Foundations of Language in 1968 and 'Utterer's meaning and intentions' in The Philosophical Review in 1969. 'Logic and conversation', the second in the original lecture series, appeared in two separate col-lections, both published in 1975. Its publication was clearly the source of some confusion, with both sets of editors claiming to offer the essay in print for the first time. The Logic of Grammar, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, seems to have been Grice's preferred publication, and was the one he always cited. There, his lecture appears alongside essays by past and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Tarski and Quine. The editor's introduction places Grice in a tradition of philosophers interested in the application of traditional theories of truth to natural language. In Speech Acts, the third volume in the series Syntax and Semantics, on the other hand, 'Logic and conver-sation' is placed in the context of contemporary linguistics. Accompanying articles by, for instance, Georgia Green and Susan Schmerling discuss conversational implicature itself. The editors, Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, hail the first publication of 'the seminal work on this topic'.* It is rumoured that Grice signed the contract for his lecture to appear in this linguistics series while at a conference at Austin, Texas, and only after a long evening spent in the bar. Peter Cole included  'Further notes on logic and conversation' in Volume 9 of the same series in 1978.One catalyst for the emergence of pragmatics, and Gricean pragmat-ics in particular, was the interest in Grice's work from within generative semantics, the movement fronted by the young linguists working just across campus from Grice in the years immediately following his move to Berkeley. Attempting to integrate meaning, including contextual meaning, into their study of formal linguistics, these refugees from transformational orthodoxy discovered what they saw as a promising philosophical precedent in 'Logic and conversation'. Asa Kasher has suggested that Grice opened a 'gap in the hedge', allowing linguists to see the possibilities of 'extra-linguistic' explanations." Gilles Fauconnier has found a more startling metaphor; at a time when linguistics was largely concerned with syntax, and with meaning only in so much as it related to deep grammatical structure, 'Grice unwittingly opened Pandora's box'. 6 When linguists working within transformational grammar replied to the generative semanticists' accusation that they were artificially ignoring meaning and context, they too drew on 'Logic and conversation'.  In effect, they cited Grice's characterisation of 'what is said' and 'what is implicated' as a licence to draw a sharp distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic. In this way, they argued that it was legitimate and indeed necessary for a linguistic theory such as transformational grammar to be concerned with meaning only in terms that were insensitive to context. Features of context were to be dealt with in a separate, complementary theory, perhaps even by Grice's theory of conversation itself. Writing in the mid-1970s, transformational grammarians Jerrold Katz and Thomas Bever accuse the generative semanticists of a form of linguistic empiricism more extreme than Bloomfield. By attempting to fit every aspect of interpretation, however specific to context, into linguistic theory, the generative semanticists were failing to distinguish between grammatical and nongrammatical regularities: failing to respect the distinction between competence and performance. Katz and Bever commend Grice's account of conversational implicature by way of contrast, as an example of a type of meaning properly and systematically handled outside the grammar by independently motivated cognitive principles? In the same volume, Terence Langendoen and Thomas Bever praise Grice for correctly distinguishing between grammatical acceptability and behavioural comprehensibility. Even Chomsky himself put aside his worries about behaviourism to draw on Grice's work. In a 1969 conference paper concerned with defending his version of grammar against criticisms from generative semanticists he suggests that if certain aspects of meaning  'can be explained in terms of general "maxims of discourse" (in theGricean sense), they need not be made explicit in the grammar of a particular language'!  In the 1970s, then, the theory of conversation was seen by some as a potential means of incorporating contextual factors into grammatical theory, and by others as a reason for refusing to do so. Generative semantics eventually failed, perhaps a victim of its own ambition, and of the increasingly complex syntactic explanations needed to account for contextual meaning. Former generative semanticist Robin Lakoff has attributed its eventual decline to a growing realisation that syntax was not in fact the place where meaning could best be explained; they came to understand that to deal with the phenomena we had uncovered, the relationships between form and function that our work had made manifest and unavoidable, we needed to shift the emphasis of the grammar from syntax to semantics and pragmatics.''' Generative semantics had succeeded in putting the discussion of contextual meaning on the formal linguistic map, and had paved the way for the emergence of pragmatics as a separate discipline. The sheer size of Grice's impact on this discipline makes anything approaching a comprehensive survey prohibitive, but a few key collections can provide a representative overview. By the end of the decade, pragmatics had its own international conference. In the proceedings of the 1979 conference held at Urbino Grice is cited, or at least alluded to, in 15 of the 37 papers." These papers range over topics such as language acquisition, second language comprehension, rhetoric and intonation, as well as theories of meaning, reference and relevance.  In 1975, Berkeley Linguistics Society, a student-run organisation, began hosting an annual conference, bringing together linguists from across America. At the first meeting, Grice's work formed the basis of two very different papers. Cathy Cogan and Leora Herrmann tackled colloquial uses of the phrase 'let's just say', arguing that it 'serves as an overt marker on sentences which constitute an opting out' from straightforward observance of the maxims. At the same conference, Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters presented a much more formal paper on conventional implicata, arguing that they could be used to explain various so-called presuppositional phenomena.13 Since then, meetings of the society have included an ever-increasing number of papers on Gricean topics. In 1990 a parasession at the annual meeting was devoted to papers on 'The Legacy of Grice'. In effect, the delegates all interpret this title in relation to the theory of conversation, which they applied to topics as diverse as the language of jokes, the grammaticalisation of the English perfect between Old English and Modern English, the teach-ing of literacy, and the forms of address adopted by mothers and fathers towards their children.' By the time the The Concise Encyclopedia of Prag-matics was published in 1998, Grice's work had earned mention in entries on 29 separate topics, including advertising, cognitive science, humour, metaphor and narrative. Again, the majority of these references are to 'Logic and conversation', and in her entry on 'conversa-tional maxims' Jenny Thomas comments that 'it is this work - sketchy, in many ways problematical, and frequently misunderstood - which has proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics."s The Journal of Pragmatics, which began in the mid-1970s, has included numerous articles with Gricean themes, and in  2002 published a special focus issue entitled 'To Grice or not to Grice'.  In his introductory editorial, Jacob Mey argues that the range of articles included, both supportive of and challenging to Gricean implicature, form 'a living testimony to, and fruitful elaboration of, some of the ideas that shook the world of language studies in the past century, and continue to move and inspire today's research'. 16  Nevertheless, Kenneth Lindblom suggests that the importance and implications of the theory of conversation tend to be underestimated, because it has been used by scholars in a range of fields with significant methodological differences.' Certainly, Gricean analysis has appeared in discussions of a wide variety of linguistic phenomena, taking it well beyond the confines of its 'home' discipline of pragmatics. For instance, the relationship between Grice's theory and literary texts has long been a source of interest to stylisticians. As early as 1976, Teun van Dijk suggested that the maxims 'partially concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called "stylistic" , 18 He argues that a set of principles different from, but analogous to Grice's Cooperative Principle and maxims are needed to explain literature. For Mary Louise Pratt, however, the most successful theory of discourse would be one that could explain literature alongside other uses of language. In the case of literature, where the Cooperative Principle is particularly secure between author and reader, 'we can freely and joyfully jeopardize it'. l' Flouting and conversational implicatures are therefore particularly characteristic of literary texts but do not set them apart as intrinsically different from other types of language use. Other commentators have concentrated on Gricean analyses of discourse within literary texts, such as soliloquies in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello and dialogue in Waiting for Godot and Finnegans Wake.20  Conversational implicature has also proved suggestive in historical linguistics as an explanation for a variety of meaning shifts. The basicpremiss of this research is that meaning that is initially associated with a word or phrase as an implicature can, over time, become part of its semantic meaning. Peter Cole describes this process as 'the lexicaliza-tion of conversational meaning' 2 Elizabeth Traugott's work in this area has drawn on a wide range of historical data. For instance, in a 1989 paper she traces a general trend in the history of English for changes from deontic to epistemic meanings; both words and grammatical forms  ten in he ton or math 10g  that started out as weakly subjective become strongly subjective. For instance,  'you must go' changes its meaning from permission in Old  English to expectation in Present Day English. This process she describes as 'the conventionalising of conversational implicature' based on 'prag-matic strengthening' and derived ultimately from Grice's second maxim of Quantity22 Debra Ziegeler has followed up this study by suggesting that another process of conventionalisation can account for the hypothetical and counterfactual meanings associated with some modal verbs in the past tense, such as would, this time a process explained by the first maxim of Quality.23  It would be wrong to suggest that Grice's presence in linguistics has been greeted with constant, or universal, enthusiasm. The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is representative here, too. As well as the albeit modified praise from Thomas, the encyclopaedia includes an entry on  'Discourse' in which Alec McHoul accuses Grice of idealising conversa-tion. According to McHoul, Grice 'attempted to generalise from how he thought conversation operated', and ended up giving 'an ideal-rational version of socially pragmatic events so that it seems virtually irrelevant that the objects of analysis... constitute a form of social action'.24 McHoul is far from being a lone voice. The theory of conversation has frequently been accused of presenting an unrealistic picture of human interaction, and even of attempting to lay down rules of appropriate conversational etiquette. For instance, Dell Hymes suggests that Grice's account of conversational behaviour incorporates a tacit ideal image of discourse',25 and Sandra Harris identifies in it 'prescriptive and moral overtones' 26 For Rob Pope, an individual's willingness to accept the maxims as an accurate account of communication is dependent on 'the problem of how far you and I, in our respective world-historical posi-tions, find it expedient or desirable to espouse a view of human interaction based on consensus and/or conflict'? Geoffrey Sampson even claims that 'it would be ludicrous to suggest that as a general principle people's speech is governed by maxims' such as those proposed in the theory of conversation. However, he rather undermines his own argu-ment by presenting the observation that 'people often manifestly flout his maxims' as if it were a problem for Grice's theory.  A number of linguists have been quick to defend Grice from the suggestion that his maxims prescribe 'ideal' conversation. For instance, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson explain that the maxims 'define for us the basic set of assumptions underlying every talk exchange. But this does not imply that utterances in general, or even reasonably fre-quently, must meet these conditions, as critics of Grice have sometime thought'.2 Robin Lakoff argues that strict adherence to the maxims is not usual and that in many cases: 'an utterance that fails to incorporate implicature when it is culturally expected might be uncooperative and so liable to misunderstanding, hardly "ideal" 130  There are a number of features of the presentation of the theory, particularly read in isolation from the rest of the lectures, that may contribute to the accusation of idealising conversation. First, Grice never defines what he means by 'conversation'. It is clear from his earlier, unpublished writings that he adopted this term simply as a label for language in context, or as a reminder to his Oxford students that utterances do not generally occur in isolation from each other. However, in linguistics the term has acquired a much more specific and technical use. During the early 1970s, just as Grice's theory was becoming widely known, work by linguists such as Harvey Sacks was revealing the characteristics and regularities of naturally occurring casual conversation, dwelling on features such as turn taking and topic organisation." Linguists familiar with this work have perhaps been taken aback by Grice's apparently cavalier, unempirical generalisations. Second, Grice introduces the theory of conversation as an approach to specific philosophical problems, but his own enthusiasm for the particular conversational explanations to which it extends obscures this purpose. In the single lecture 'Logic and conversation' in particular, casual conversational examples appear to be the main focus. Further, Grice expresses both the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims as imperatives.  Despite his intention of generalising over the assumptions that participants bring to interactive behaviour, this grammatical choice gives his  'rules' a prescriptive appearance.  Perhaps most damagingly of all, Grice does not comment on his own methodology and purpose in 'Logic and conversation'. He does,  however, give some indication of these in the earlier, unpublished lectures on language and context, for instance when he defends his method of working with as few 'cards on the table' as possible, in theknowledge that this will result in certain deliberate simplifications. In another lecture, proposing to address some questions put to him in a previous discussion about the nature of his undertaking, he suggests how he would like his ideas to be evaluated. His theory building is dif ferent from his methodology in 'Meaning', which proceeded through the description of specific cases.  I am here considering what is (or may be) only an ideal case, one which is artificially simplified by abstracting from all considerations other than those involved in the pursuance of a certain sort of conversational cooperation. I do not claim that there actually occur any conversations of this artificially simplified kind; it might even be that these could not be (cf frictionless pulleys). My question is on the (artificial) assumption that their only concern is cooperation in the business of giving and receiving information, what subordinate maxims or rules would it be reasonable or even mandatory that participants should accept as governing their conversational practice? Since the object of this exercise is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why it is that a particular implicature is present, I would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be a) can it be used to construct explanations of the presence of such implicatures, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any  rival [I have tried to make a start on the first part of a)] b) Are the no doubt crude, pretheoretical explanations which one would be prompted to give of such implicatures consistent with, or better still favourable pointers towards, the requirements involved in the model?32  Grice's idealisations are of the scientific type, necessary to establish underlying principles of the subject matter, rather than of the type specifying that it always does, or should, conform to certain optimal standards.  Another criticism of Grice's theory that seems off-beam in the light of his unpublished justification, but registers a legitimate concern for linguists, is that it works for only one particular discourse type: roughly for conversations between social equals who are mutually interested in exchanging information on a particular topic. Some of the earliest commentaries on the theory of conversation to consider the social and institutional contexts of language were, perhaps surprisingly, from philosophers rather than from linguists. In a 1979 edition of The Philo-sophical Quarterly, David Holdcroft and Graham Bird contribute to a discussion of whether the Cooperative Principle is best seen as applying to all sequences of speech acts, or simply to informal conversations.  Holdcroft argues that the Cooperative Principle is not unproblemati-cally universal across all sequences; in cases where participants do not  'have equal discourse rights' the maxims do not straightforwardly apply.33 He offers the examples of the proceedings of a court of law and a viva exam, suggesting that different sets of maxims are accepted by participants in different cases. Bird argues that situations in which participants have unequal rights do not pose the problems to Grice that Holdcroft envisages; maxims may be suspended by mutual agreement without offering counter-examples to the theory. 34  These ideas were later addressed by linguists using actual conversational data rather than theorised 'types' of sequences. Norman Fair-clough pioneered critical discourse analysis, an approach concerned with relating the formal properties of texts to interpretation and hence to their relationship to social context. He suggests that mainstream discourse analysis 'has virtually elevated cooperative conversation between equals into an archetype of verbal interaction in general'.35 He holds Grice at least in part responsible for this because his emphasis on the exchange of information assumes equal rights to contribute for both parties. Fairclough analyses conversational extracts from police interviews of a woman making a complaint of rape and of a youth suspected of vandalism to argue that many interactions do not conform to this model. He notes that Grice's own proviso that in some types of conversation influencing others may be more important has too often been overlooked. Other critical discourse analysts offer qualified support for Grice, for instance arguing that the theory of conversation need not be limited to casual conversation, but can be generalised to explain discourse in institutional contexts only once it has been made to take account of societal factors. John Gumperz uses a variety of data to argue that interactions such as cross-examinations, political debates and job interviews demonstrate that 'conversational cooperation becomes considerably more complex than would appear on a surface reading of the Cooperative Principle.' William Hanks echoes many of the criticisms of the theory of conversation familiar to ethnolinguists, but argues that it should not be abandoned altogether within this discipline because 'some parts of Grice's approach are of telling interest to ethnog-raphy', in particular the active role assigned to the hearer in attributing conversational meaning. For Grice, as for sociolinguists, 'meaning arises out of the relation between parties to talk'.38If it is to some extent contrary to Grice's abstract, philosophical intentions that his theory should be applied to real language data, it is perhaps even more incongruous that it should be subjected to clinical testing. Nevertheless, the theory of conversation has generated much interest in the area of clinical linguistics, in particular the branch sometimes described as 'neuropragmatics'. Chomsky was interested in the theory of conversation because it suggested to him a principled way of distinguishing between centrally linguistic meaning that might be described as belonging to a speaker's competence or semantic ability, and context-dependent meaning belonging to performance or prag-matics. Clinical linguists have looked for evidence of a neurological basis for such a distinction. Many such studies have concentrated on patients with some degree of language impairment, in an attempt to discover whether semantics and pragmatics can be selectively impaired.  For instance, Neil Smith and lanthi-Maria Tsimpli, working within a broadly Chomskyan framework, have studied an institutionalised brain-damaged patient with exceptional linguistic abilities. Their findings suggest that his 'linguistic decoding' is as good as anyone else's but that he is unable to handle examples such as irony, metaphor and jokes, a distinction that they suggests points to a separation between linguistic and non-linguistic impairment.3º Such a suggestion seems to be supported by findings from researchers with a more clinical and less linguistic interest, who have suggested that core linguistic functions might be controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain while 'pragmatic', context-dependent meaning, together with emotions, is controlled by the right. 40  Other clinicians have adopted a more overtly Gricean framework. Elisabeth Ahlsén uses the Cooperative Principle as a tool for describing aphasic communication in which, she argues, 'implicatures based on the maxims of quantity and manner cannot be made in the same way as in the case of nonaphasic speakers.'* The theory of conversation has also been used as a tool for describing more general communication dis-orders. 42 Ronald Bloom and a group of fellow-experimenters argue that  'Gricean pragmatics has provided a theoretically meaningful framework for examining the discourse of individuals with communication disorders' 43 Clinicians using Gricean analyses tend to be reluctant to draw definite conclusions about the division of labour between the hemi-spheres. This is argued perhaps most explicitly by Asa Kasher and his team, who have investigated the processing of implicatures by using an 'implicature battery' for both right brain-damaged and left brain-damaged stroke patients. They use both verbal implicatures and non-verbal implicatures based on visual images, and conclude that 'both cerebral hemispheres appear to contribute to the same degree to processing implicatures.'* This scepticism about the localisation of pragmatic processing in the right hemisphere is shared by Joan Borod and others, who use a series of pragmatic features, including some based on Gricean implicature, to test language performance in right-hand brain-damaged, left-hand brain-damaged and normal control subjects. They conclude that 'deficits in pragmatic appropriateness are shared equally by both brain-damaged groups.'45 Elsewhere, Kasher has argued explicitly against the tendency to make sweeping generalisations over pragmatic phenomena that locate them all in the right hemisphere.  Implicature, he argues, is part of a larger competence, 'hence it would be implausible to assume that some domain-specific cognitive system produces conversational implicature' 46 As Kasher's position illustrates, the positing of a separate pragmatic faculty, to which implicature belongs, is not dependent on the faculty being physically autonomous.  It can be impaired selectively from language, an observation that in itself legitimises the hypothesis of a physical basis in the brain.  Another field in which the theory of conversation has been used enthusiastically is Artificial Intelligence, a striking application given Grice's personal animosity to computers. Computer programmers have realised that formal linguistic theories can go a long way towards specifying the rules that make up grammatical sentences, but have little to say about how those sentences can be used to form natural-sounding conversations. For instance, Ayse Pinar Saygina and Ilyas Ciceki are not impressed by the pragmatic skills of computers. They analyse the output of various programmes entered for the Loebner Prize, an annual competition to find the programme closest to passing the Turing Test, in which a computer is deemed to be intelligent if a human observer cannot distinguish its participation in a conversation from that of a human. Saygina and Ciceki argue that pragmatic acceptability, rather than the simple ability to generate natural language, is the biggest challenge to such programmes. Moreover, the programmes that are the most successful are those that adhere most closely to Grice's maxims, suggesting future applications for these, specifically that programmers will inevitably have to find ways of "making computers cooperate" ' 47  Various programmers have in fact made some attempts in this direc-tion. Robert Dale and Ehud Reiter consider an algorithm for natural-sounding referring expressions in computer-human interaction. They note that such an algorithm must produce expressions that successfully pick out the referent without leading 'the human hearer or reader tomake false conversational implicatures',48 Perhaps not surprisingly, they consider Grice's maxims to be 'vague' compared to the principles needed for computational implementation. Nevertheless, they base their algorithm on an interpretation of the maxims, claiming that the simpler interpretation produces a result that is 'faster in computational terms and seems to be closer to what human speakers do when they construct referring expressions'.4 Michael Young tackles the problem of intelligent systems designed to form plans to direct their own activities or those of others. 'There is a mismatch between the amount of detail in a plan for even a simple task and the amount of detail in typical plan descriptions used and understood by people' 5º In order to address this issue, Young proposes a computational model that draws on Grice's maxim of Quantity, which he labels the Cooperative Plan Identification architecture. He argues that this produces instructions that are much more successful in communicating a plan to a human subject than instructions produced by alternative methods.  Grice would have recognised discussion of irony and metaphor as more closely related to his work, although he would not necessarily have welcomed the form some of this debate has taken. The explana-tion of such 'non-literal' uses has generally been taken as a central task for the theory of conversation, and indeed Grice himself seems to encourage this view. In a rather hurried exegesis in the William James lectures, he explains irony and metaphor as floutings of the first maxim of Quality. 'X is a fine friend' said just after X has been known to betray the speaker cannot be intended to be taken as a true expression of belief.  Instead, the speaker must intend some other related proposition; 'the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward!»' Grice later restricts his definition of irony, claiming that it is 'intimately connected with the expression of a feeling, attitude or evaluation'.52 As an example of metaphor, 'You are the cream in my coffee' is also clearly false, but cannot be interpreted as meaning its simple opposite, which is a truism; 'the most likely sup-position is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance.'53  Some linguists working on such figures of speech have accepted an account along the lines suggested by Grice.5 Others, however, have taken issue with the apparent ease with which Grice's hearer in each case derives the interpretation. Their argument is that nothing within the Cooperative Principle or the maxims as they stand specifies why the hearer should reach that interpretation rather than some other. RobertHarnish wonders what tells us that the hearer in the irony example reaches the conclusion that 'X is a cad'; 'why should we suppose that the contradictory is the most obviously related proposition?' Similarly, if Grice's metaphor example is to be explained, 'we need some principles to guide our search for the correct supposition.'ss Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson argue that Grice's description of the process by which irony is interpreted 'is virtually free of rational constraints' 56 There is no reason why the negation of what is said should serve as the impli-cature, rather than some other closely related assumption. Wayne Davis worries about how a hearer is expected to identify accurately exactly what sort of interpretation is intended when, for instance, the maxim of Quality is flouted.s7  Some claim that experimental work also poses problems for Grice's account. Rachel Giora argues that the 'salient' meanings of metaphors and irony 'enjoy a privileged status: they are always accessed, and always initially, regardless of context'.58 Raymond Gibbs goes so far as to claim that 'the results of many psycholinguistic experiments have shown the traditional, Gricean view to be incorrect as a psychological theory'S His argument is that a figurative example does not require more processing time than a literal one; speakers often understand metaphorical or ironic meaning straight away without first having to analyse and reject literal meaning. Gibbs sees this as a threat to the whole distinction between the said and the implicated.  Not all experimental linguists would subscribe to Gibbs's conclusions.  Thomas Holtgraves points out that many metaphorical figures of speech such as 'he spilled the beans' have 'a conventional, nonliteral meaning that is comprehended directly' because in such cases 'the default meaning is clearly the nonliteral meaning' 6 Gerald Winer and his team compare the reactions of children and adults to a set of questions and observe that children tend to respond to literal but trivial meanings, adults to metaphorical interpretation. They argue that these findings are quite consistent with Grice's theory, which 'holds that people respond to the intended or inferred, rather than the literal, meaning of utter-ances'.61 Anne Bezuidenhout and J. Cooper Cutting suggest that experiments can never bear directly on the debate over the accuracy of Grice's theory because 'Grice was interested in giving a conceptual analysis of the concepts of saying, meaning, and so on, and not in giving a psychological theory of the stages in utterance processing. 2 They also express some concerns about the validity of results based on simple measurements of processing time, and the readiness of experimental linguists to reach generalised conclusions from these.Despite his own philosophical and analytical interests, then, Grice's theory has been debated in terms of its social application, its computational implementation and its psychological and even neurological plausibility. It has also been discussed by those whose studies extend across cultures, some of whom have criticised it as ethnocentric, as drawing unquestioningly on the mores of one society. In an echo of the accusations of elitism levelled at Austin and his 'empirical' approach to language, Grice has even been accused of concentrating on one privileged rank of that society. This particular criticism dates back to Elinor Ochs Keenan's article 'The universality of conversational postulates', first published in 1976. Keenan's basic tenet is that Grice's analysis is implicitly but inappropriately offered as applying universally. Her specific claim is that the maxims, in particular those of Quantity, do not hold among the indigenous people of the plateaus area of Madagascar.  Hence the maxims are culturally specific and the assumption that Grice's account demonstrates a pragmatic universal is flawed.  In Malagasy society, speakers regularly breach the maxim to 'be infor-mative', by failing to provide enough information to meet their interlocutor's needs. So if A asks B 'Where is your mother?', B might well reply 'She is either in the house or at the market', even when fully aware of the mother's location. Further, the reply would not generally give rise to the implicature that B is unable to provide a more specific answer because in that society 'the expectation that speakers will satisfy informational needs is not a basic norm' 63 Keenan suggests some reasons for this specific to Malagasy society. New information is such a rare commodity that it confers prestige on the knower, and is therefore not parted with lightly. Further, speakers are reluctant to commit themselves explicitly to particular claims, and therefore to take on responsibility for the reliability of the information. For these reasons, the expectations about conversational practice and the implicatures following from particular utterances are different from those assumed by Grice to be universal norms.  Keenan complains that 'the conversational maxims are not presented as working hypotheses but as social facts' and argues that much more empirical work on conversation must be conducted before true paradigms of conversational practice can be drawn up. Her criticism, then, is chiefly the familiar one that Grice has attempted to describe 'con-versation' without having considered the mechanics of any actual con-versation, with the added claim that such a consideration would reveal some significant variations between cultures. However, she welcomes Grice's attempt to posit universal conversational principles, because ofthe possibility it suggests for those engaged in fieldwork to move away from specific empirical observations 'and to propose stronger hypotheses related to general principles of conversation'. She suggests that the particular maxims may apply in different domains and to different degrees in different societies. In Malagasy society, determining factors include the importance of the information in question, the degree of intimacy between the participants, and the sex of the speaker. A number of linguists have defended Grice against Keenan's accusation. Georgia Green has suggested that even the discovery that a particular maxim did not apply at all in one society would not invalidate Grice's general enterprise. Since the maxims are individual 'special cases' of coopera-tion, 'discovering that one of the maxims was not universal would not invalidate claims that the Co-operative Principle was universal'. Robert Harnish argues that Grice nowhere claims that all conversations are governed by all the maxims; in many types of conversation, as in Keenan's examples, one or more of the maxims 'are not in effect and are known not to be in effect by the participants'. Geoffrey Leech points out that  'no claim has been made that the CP applies in an identical manner to all societies. '68  Keenan's criticisms of Grice, and indeed these responses to those crit-icisms, consider meaning as a social and interactive, rather than a purely formal phenomenon. This is a project shared to varying degrees by works that have attracted the title 'politeness theory'. Such works date back to the mimeograph days of 'Logic and conversation',  ', and indeed  can be seen as one area in which the newly emerging discipline of prag-matics took its inspiration and basic premisses from Grice. Looking back to the early 1970s, politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson comment that at that time the division of meaning into semantics and pragmatics was motivated chiefly by 'the basic Gricean observation that what is "said" is typically only part of what is "meant" the proposition expressed by the former providing a basis for the calculation of the latter. In studying politeness phenomena, linguists such as Brown and Levinson were seeking an explanation not so much of the mechanics of this calculation as of its motivation. John Gumperz observes in the foreword to Brown and Levinson's study that politeness theory concentrated on the social functions of language, thereby bringing Grice's work into the field of sociolinguistics for the first time.  Theorised conversational politeness, like cooperation, is neither a description of ideal behaviour nor a guide to etiquette. Indeed, politeness theorists are eager to stress that they are positing hypotheses about conventionalised and meaningful patterns of behaviour, rather thandescribing a general tendency in people to be 'considerate' or 'nice' to each other. The conventions of politeness are not accounted for in the maxims, and some have seen this as a weakness in Grice's account.  However, the tendency towards cooperation and that towards politeness are means towards different sets of ends: the former to informing and influencing and the latter to the maintenance of harmonious social relationships. Norms of politeness are therefore appropriate complements to, not subcategories of, norms of cooperation. This certainly seems to have been the view Grice himself took in his only reference to politeness in 'Logic and conversation':  There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as 'Be polite', that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve.?°  Those who have taken a closer interest than Grice in politeness have generally done so for one of two reasons. Some have given what for Grice are secondary purposes of conversation a more central impor-tance, arguing either explicitly or by implication that the maintenance of social relationships is at least as important a function of conversation as the 'rational' goals of informing and influencing. Others have seen in the phenomenon of politeness a possible answer to a question Grice has been criticised for never fully addressing: the question of why speakers convey meaning through implicatures at all, rather than through straightforward assertion. In other words, they have seen politeness not as a supplementary norm of conversation, but as a potential key to the operation of the Cooperative Principle itself.  Some of the earliest work in politeness theory came from Robin Lakoff. In common with other generative semanticists, she was dissatisfied with the tenet that judgements of grammaticality were autonomous and sufficient: that a fully successful transformational grammar would be able to legislate absolutely between 'good' and 'bad' strings. Rather, she argued, phenomena entirely dependent on context, and on aspects of context as specific as the relationship between two people, could effect such judgements and should be taken into account.  She has since argued that the notion of 'continuousness', the idea thatjudgements of acceptability must be arranged along a continuous scale rather than being binary and polar, is the single greatest contribution of generative semantics to the understanding of human language." In articles published in the early 1970s, Lakoff defended the importance of pragmatic explanations. In 'Language in context', for instance, she argues that transformational grammar had 'explicitly rejected' contextual aspects from consideration.?? Her particular claim is that certain features of English sentences can be explained only in terms of the relationship between the speaker and hearer. In this sense they are no different from, for instance, honorifics in Japanese; it is just that their context-bound nature is not immediately apparent because they are expressed using linguistic devices that have other, more centrally semantic, functions as well. So Lakoff discusses the use of modal verbs in offers and requests, considering why, for instance, 'You must have some of this cake' counts as a politer form than 'You should have some of this cake'. Their social meaning is often dependent not just on the form used but the implications this triggers. The verb 'must' implies, generally contrary to the facts of the case, that the hearer has no choice but to eat the cake, hence that the cake is not in itself desirable, and that the speaker is politely modest about the goods she is offering.  Lakoff draws an analogy between these politeness phenomena and some other conversational features 'not tied to concepts of politeness', such as those discussed in Grice's mimeograph. Like politeness phe-nomena, these features are not part of the grammar but can nevertheless have an effect on the form of utterances. Lakoff notes that expressions such as 'well' and 'why' may sometimes be labelled 'mean-ingless', but that they in fact have specific conditions for use. Because they can be used either appropriately or inappropriately, a linguistic theory needs to be able to account for them, yet the conditions governing their appropriateness are often dependent on a purely context-bound phenomenon such as the breaking of a conversational maxim.  They signal, respectively, that the utterance to follow is in some way incomplete, breaking the maxims of Quantity, and that a preceding utterance was in some way surprising, and so considered a possible breaking of the maxims of Quality. The attitudes of speakers to the information conveyed, just like their awareness of their relationships to each other, is sometimes communicated by the actual form of words used.  Therefore, any sufficient account of language must pay attention to contextual as well as syntactic factors.  In 'The logic of politeness', published the following year, Lakoff reiterates her belief in the necessity of contextual explanations to comple-ment syntactic ones, but this time goes further in arguing that prag-matics should be afforded a status equal to syntax or semantics. Ulti-mately, she would like to see pragmatic rules 'made as rigorous as the syntactic rules in the transformational literature (and hopefully a lot less ad hoc)'? The basic types of rules to be accounted for fall under two headings: 'Be clear' and 'Be polite'. These sometimes produce the same effect in a particular context and therefore reinforce each other, but more often place conflicting demands on the speaker, meaning that one must be sacrificed in the interests of the other. Grice's theory of conversation provides an account of the rules subsumed under 'Be clear'. It remains to be explained why speakers so often depart from these norms in their conversations and here, Lakoff implies, the second type of pragmatic rule comes into play. In cases when the interests of clarity are in conflict with those of politeness, politeness generally wins through. This is perhaps because: 'in most informal conversations, actual communication of important ideas is secondary to merely reaffirming and strengthening relationships.'75  Lakoff tentatively suggests three 'rules of politeness', analogous to the rules of conversation: 'don't impose', 'give options' and 'make A feel good - be friendly'? The first rule explains why people choose lengthy or syntactically complex expressions in apparent breach of clarity, such as 'May I ask how much you paid for that vase, Mr Hoving?' and 'Dinner is served'. The second rule explains the use of hedges ('Nixon is sort of conservative') and euphemisms (I hear that the butler found Freddy and Marion making it in the pantry'), expressions leaving hearers the superficial option of not interpreting an expression in a way they may find offensive. The third rule explains nicknames and particles expressing feeling and involving the hearer, particles such as like', 'y'know', '1 mean'. All these conversational features might appear to be in breach of one or more maxim; in effect the more powerful rules of politeness explain why and when the conversational maxims are breached. Lakoff even suggests that Grice's rules of conversation are perhaps best seen as  'subcases' of Rule 1; in other words that the tendency towards clarity is just part of a more general tendency not to impose on your addressee.  The other two types of politeness, particularly 'be friendly', take precedence over clarity when they come into conflict with it. For Lakoff politeness, perhaps including Grice's maxims, is a subsection of the more general category of 'cooperation'.  Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness is perhaps the most fully articulated and successful of the attempts to integrate sociolinguisticnotions of politeness with Grice's account of cooperation. The theory itself dates from just after the time when Lakoff was publishing on the need for linguistics to take account of contextual factors. Brown and Levinson first wrote up their ideas in the summer of 1974; these were eventually published as a long essay late in the 1970s, and in book form almost a decade later." They claim that their account is based on just the same basic premiss as Grice's: 'there is a working assumption by conversationalists of the rational and efficient nature of talk.'78 Brown and Levinson draw on sociology by introducing Erving Goffman's notion of 'face' into the discussion of politeness. In the 1950s, Goffman defined face as the positive social value a person claims, and argued that  'a person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participant'" Brown and Levinson refine Goffman's idea by distinguishing between 'positive' and 'negative' face. Participants in social situations are aware, both in themselves and in others, of the needs of both positive and negative face. Positive face is, generally, the desire to be liked, to be held in high regard by others. Negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon, to retain freedom of choice. Certain types of act can be classified as inherently impolite because they are threatening to one or other type of face for the addressee. Criticisms are inherently impolite because they threaten hearers' positive face by showing that they are in some way not held in high regard. Orders or requests are inherently impolite because they threaten negative face by seeking to impose the speaker's will on others and to restrict freedom of choice. In such circumstances the speaker has the option of producing the impolite act 'bald on-record'.80 That is, of producing it without any attempt to disguise it: to say 'You look fat in that dress', or 'Give me a lift to the station'. Brown and Levinson observe that in doing this, the speaker adheres precisely to Grice's maxims; 'You look fat in that dress' is clear, informative and truthful.  The speakers may be adhering to the maxims of conversation in these examples, but they are in breach of the rules of politeness prescribing maintenance of the other's face. Utterances such as 'That isn't the most flattering of your dresses' and 'I wonder if I could trouble you for a lift to the station' are less clear and less efficient than their 'on-record' coun-terparts. However, the very fact that speakers are putting more effort into producing these longer and more complex utterances ensures that they are seen to be striving to satisfy the hearers' face wants. Such ways of conveying meaning are very common in conversation, Brown andLevinson note. Successive commentators have been simply wrong in assuming that Grice specifies that utterances must meet the conditions of cooperation. Their purpose here, in fact, is 'to suggest a motive for not talking in this way' 81 Like Lakoff, they note that hedges are generally concerned with the operation of the maxims. They emphasise that cooperation is met, indicate that it may not be met, or question whether it has been met.82 Further, 'off-record' strategies are often accompanied by a 'trigger' indicating that an indirect meaning is to be sought. The individual conversational maxims determine the appropriate type of trigger.  Work on politeness in naturally occurring conversation has produced both supportive and more pessimistic responses to the Gricean frame-work. Susan Swan Mura draws on the transcriptions of 24 dyadic interactions to consider factors that might license deviation from the maxims. She concludes that for all the maxims the relevant factors provide for problem-free interaction in contexts where there is a threat of some sort to the coherence of the interaction. She concludes enthusiastically that 'this study also provides preliminary evidence that the Cooperative Principle represents a psychologically real construct, modeling the behavioural (in a non-Skinnerian sense of the term) basis for conversational formulation and interpretation.'83 Yoshiko Matsumoto, on the other hand, considers politeness phenomena in Japanese and notes that 'a socially and situationally adequate level of politeness and adequate honorifics must obligatorily be encoded in every utterance even in the absence of any potential face threatening act', arguing that this is a serious challenge to the universality of both Grice's and Brown and Levinson's theories.8  In his contribution to the literature on politeness, Geoffrey Leech draws together concepts from contemporary pragmatics and adds some of his own, to present what he describes as an 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' 85 He claims that the Cooperative Principle, although an important  account of what goes on in conversation, is not in itself sufficient to explain interpersonal rhetoric. Principles of politeness and also of irony must be added on an equal footing with cooperation; indeed, they can sometimes 'rescue' it from apparently false predictions. The result is a vastly more complex account of conversation than Grice had envisaged, as well as a more complex pragmatics in general. For example, Leech suggests that if, in response to 'We'll all miss Bill and Agatha, won't we?', a speaker were to say 'Well, we'll all miss BILL', thereby implicating that she will not miss Agatha, the speaker has apparently failed to observe the needs of Quantity. The speaker 'could have been moreinformative, but only at the cost of being more impolite to a third party: [the speaker] therefore suppressed the desired information in order to uphold the P[oliteness] P[rinciple]'.86  Leech's PP itself contains an elaborate list of additional conversational maxims. He initially describes these as comprising Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy, but later suggests that further maxims of politeness may prove necessary, including the Phatic maxim, the Banter maxim and the Pollyanna maxim.8 He seems, in fact to be prepared to add maxims in response to individual examples as they present themselves. This stance is open to the criticism that the choice of maxims becomes ad hoc, and the number arbitrary, significantly weakening the explanatory power of the theory. Indeed Brown and Levinson suggest that Leech is in danger of arguing for an 'infinite number of maxims', making his addition of the politeness principle in effect an elaborate description, rather than an explanatory account, of pragmatic communication.88  Leech's 'Interpersonal Rhetoric' is unusual among theories of politeness for advocating such a plethora of principles in addition to Grice's maxims of cooperation. It is certainly unusual in the more general framework of Gricean pragmatics. Here, the tendency in responses to the theory of conversation has been to attempt to reduce the number of maxims, to streamline the theory and therefore make it more powerfully explanatory and psychologically plausible. In their overview of the place of pragmatics in linguistics during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Hartmut Haberlard and Jacob Mey criticise Leech for multiplying pragmatic principles and types, while most responses to Grice have been reductive in tendency. The general feeling that Grice's maxims need tidying up and clarifying is, they suggest, not particularly surprising 'if one considers the strong a priori character of Grice's maxims'. His main motivation in their choice and titles was to echo Kant's table of categories. Perhaps the most extreme of such theories was Relevance Theory (RT), developed by a number of linguists, but principally by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. It offered an account of communication and cognition drawing on Grice's theories of meaning and of conversation, especially on his distinction between what is said and what is meant, while at the same time departing from Grice sig-nificantly. From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, RT was perhaps the most influential school of thought in pragmatics and spawned a large number of articles, conference papers and doctoral theses, especially at its 'home' at University College, London. It was used as a framework for the analysis of various semantic and pragmatic phenomena in a varietyof languages, as well as an approach to texts as diverse as poetry, jokes and political manifestos.  In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson argue that Grice's account is too cumbersome and too ad hoc, consisting in a series of maxims each intended to account for some particular, more or less intuitive response.  Gricean pragmatics had for too long been bound by the outline provided by 'Grice's original hunches'? The dangers of this are apparent:  'It might be tempting to add a maxim every time a regularity has to be accounted for.'' Rather, the various maxims and submaxims can be subsumed into a suitably rich notion of relevance. This does not consist of a maxim, such as Grice's 'Be relevant', which speakers may adhere to or not, and which in the later case may lead to implicature. There is no place in Sperber and Wilson's theory for the notion of 'flouting' a rule of conversation. Rather, they posit a 'Principle of Relevance', a statement about communication; 'communicators do not "follow" the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to'. The principle applies 'without exception'. It is a fact of human behaviour explaining how people produce, and how they respond to, communicative acts. The principle states that every act of ostensive communication is geared to the maximisation of its own relevance; people produce utterances, whether verbal or otherwise, in accordance with the human tendency to be relevant, and respond to others' utterances with this expectation. Relevance is defined as the production of the maximum number of contextual effects for the least amount of processing effort. These notions are all entirely dependent on context; just as there is no place for flouting in Sperber and Wilson's theory, so there is no place for any notion of generalised implicature. Every implicature is entirely dependent on and unique to the context in which it occurs.  Sperber and Wilson take issue with Grice over what they see as his simplistic division of the semantic and the pragmatic, or the encoded and the inferenced. It is simply not possible, they argue, to arrive at a unique, fully articulated meaning from decoding alone: to produce a semantic form on which separate, pragmatic principles can then work.  In assuming that this was possible, Grice took an unwarranted step back towards the code model he so tellingly critiqued in his earlier article  'Meaning', returning to an outmoded reliance on the linguistic code to deliver a fully formed thought. He abandoned a 'common-sense' approach with psychological plausibility: the attempt to formalise and explain the notion that 'communication involves the publication and recognition of intentions'.' Cognitive principles such as relevance will be involved even at the stage of producing a Gricean 'what is said',determining features such as reference assignment and disambiguation.  Unlike  the Gricean maxims, the Principle of Relevance is not an autonomous rule applying after decoding has issued a unique linguistic meaning. Rather, both 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning rely on the Principle of Relevance. Sperber and Wilson argue, contra Grice, for the need to consider explicitness as a matter of degree.  Unlike the ethnologists and politeness theorists who claim common ground with Grice through an interest in social interaction, relevance theorists see their approach, and also Grice's maxims, as essentially cognitive in nature. For instance, Diane Blakemore has argued that RT responds to Grice's own dismissal of 'the idea that the maxims had their origin in the nature of society or culture on the grounds that this did not provide a sufficiently general explanation' and his warning that 'the key to a general, psychological explanation lay in the notion of relevance'.'4  There is some evidence that Grice was reluctant to be drawn on his views on RT. His only published comment is very brief and rather damning. In the retrospective overview of his own work in Studies in the Way of Words, he comments on the possible problem of the interdependence of his maxims, especially Quantity and Relation. However, he argues that Sperber and Wilson's account, far from clarifying this matter, in fact loses the significance of the link between relevance and quantity of information by considering relevance without specification of direction. The amount of information appropriate in any given context is determined by the particular aim of the conversation, or of what is deemed relevant to that aim. So success in conversation is not simply a matter of accumulating the highest possible number of contextual effects. Further, Grice argues that as well as direction of rele-vance, information is necessary concerning the degree of a concern for a topic, and the extent of opportunity for remedial action. In sum, the principle of relevance may well be an important one in conversation, but when it comes to implicature it might be said 'to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity'.9S This last suggestion seems to align Grice more with another branch of pragmatics, again one attempting to refine the notion of implicature and reduce the number of conversational maxims: the work of the so-called 'neo-Griceans'.  The term 'neo-Gricean' has been applied to a number of linguists, both American and British, and to a body of work produced since the early 1980s. Across the range of their published work, these linguists have revised their ideas many times, and used a sometimes bewildering array of terminology. Nevertheless, the work all remains located firmlywithin the tradition of Gricean pragmatics, seeking to elaborate a theory of meaning based on levels of interpretation. Neo-Griceans have tended towards two types of revision of Grice's theory of conversation, one much more radical than the other. First, very much in keeping with Grice's own speculations about the interdependence of Quantity and Relation, they have questioned the need for as many separate maxims as Grice originally postulated, and investigated ways of reducing these.  Second, and rather more at odds with Grice's own original conception, they have questioned the sharpness of the distinction between the levels of meaning. They have been concerned with what Laurence Horn has described as a problem raised by the Cooperative Principle, 'one we encounter whenever we cruise the transitional neighbourhood of the semantics/pragmatics border: how do we draw the line between what is said and what is implicated?'96  The neo-Griceans have upheld the importance of making some such distinction, but they have in various ways and with different terminologies challenged the viability of separating off entirely the 'literal' from the 'implied'. In this, they share the anxiety expressed by Sperber and Wilson in terms of the appropriate division between 'explicit' and 'implicit' meaning. Sperber and Wilson argue that purely explicit meaning is generally not enough to render a full propositional form; implicit aspects of meaning must be admitted at various stages, leading to 'levels' of explicitness. Neo-Griceans have made similar claims,  leading them not actually to abandon the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, but to question the autonomy of the two, and the possibility of their applying to interpretation in series. The chief ways in which the neo-Griceans differ from relevance theorists, and stay closer to Grice, is in their maintenance of separate maxims of conversation that can be exploited and flouted, and the use they make of gen-eralised conversational implicatures (GCIs). These latter, rejected by RT because they take minimal account of context, are crucial to the devel-opment, and presentation, of much of the neo-Gricean literature.  In his 1989 book A Natural History of Negation, Laurence Horn comments that 'much of neo- and post-Gricean pragmatics has been devoted to a variety of reductionist efforts'!' He suggests that a premiss for him, and perhaps for many of the neo-Griceans, setting them apart from relevance theorists, is that 'Quality ... is primary and essentially unreducible.' What needs further to be said about conversation can be summarised in two separate, sometimes conflicting, driving forces within communication. These are, in general terms, the drive towards clarity, putting the onus on speakers to do all that is necessary to makethemselves understood, and the drive towards economy, putting the onus on hearers to interpret utterances as fully as necessary. Horn labels the principles resulting from these drives Q and R respectively (stand-ing for 'quantity' and 'relation', but with no straightforward correlation to Grice's maxims). He traces the development of this reductive model to early work by Jay Atlas and Stephen Levinson, and by Levinson on his own. But an important part of the account of 'Q-based implicatures' draws on work almost a decade earlier by Horn himself on the notion of 'scalar implicatures'.  Horn's development of the Gricean notion of Quantity to account for the interpretation of a range of vocabulary in terms of 'scalar implica-ture' is arguably one of the most productive and interesting of the expansions of 'Logic and conversation'. It is in many ways true to Grice's original conception of implicature, not least because it divides the  'meaning' of a range of terms into 'said' and 'implicated' components, removing the need to posit endless ambiguities in the language, and offering a systematic explanation of a wide range of examples. It is perhaps in keeping that such a thoroughly Gricean enterprise should remain in manuscript for many years, and then be published only partially (in A Natural History of Negation). The main source for Horn's account of scalar implicature remains his doctoral thesis, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, presented to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972.  In his later commentary on scalar implicatures, Horn describes them as the 'locus classicus' of GCIs based on his own notion of Quantity.98 Indeed, Grice himself seems to have seen examples of this type as particularly important, although he does not use the term 'scalar', or identify them as a separate category. In 'Logic and conversation', he introduces the notion of GCI as follows:  Anyone who uses a sentence of the form X is meeting a woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend. ... Sometimes, however, there would be no such implicature (T have been sitting in a car all morning') and sometimes a reverse implicature (I broke a finger yesterday'). I am inclined to think that one would not lend a sympathetic ear to a philosopher who suggested that there are three senses of the form of expression an X. ... [Rather] when someone, by using the form of expression an X, implicates that the X does not belong to or is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is presentbecause the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be assumed that he is no in a position to be specific.  This is a familiar implicature and is classifiable as a failure, for one reason or another, to fulfil the first maxim of Quantity."  The most easily identifiable type of GCI is based on the first maxim of Quantity, which calls for as much information as is necessary. In other words, it draws on Grice's earliest observation about the regularities of conversation: that one should not make a weaker statement when a stronger one is possible. Horn observes that there are many areas of vocabulary where similar apparent problems can be resolved by just such an analysis. A more general term often implicates that a more specific alternative does not apply, by means of the assumption that the speaker is not in a position to provide the extra information. Horn discusses this informativeness in terms of the 'semantic strength' of a lexical item. Such items can be understood as ranged on 'scales' of infor-mativeness, each scale consisting of two or more items.  In all cases, it is possible to describe the different meanings associated with a particular item in terms not of a semantic ambiguity, but of a basic semantic meaning and of an additional implicated meaning that arises by default, but can be cancelled in context. The first scale Horn discusses is that of the cardinal numbers. The numbers can be seen as situated on a scale, ranging from one to infinity: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...). Each item semantically entails all items to its left, and pragmatically implicates the negation of all items to its right. As Horn describes it:  Numbers, or rather sentences containing them, assert lower-  boundedness - at least n - and given tokens of utterances containing cardinal numbers may, depending on the context, implicate upper-boundedness - at most n - so that the number may be interpreted as denoting an exact quantity, 100  This explains the apparent ambiguity of a cardinal number in use.  'John has three children', for example, will generally be interpreted as meaning 'John has exactly three children', but is not logically incompatible with John's having four or more. Horn points to the fact that  'John has three children, and possibly even more' is acceptable, suggesting that 'no more than three' cannot be part of the semantic meaning of 'three'. If it were, this example should be simply logically contradictory. Rather than forcing the intolerable conclusion that allcardinal numbers are semantically multiply ambiguous, Horn's account allows that their semantic meaning is 'at least. but that they implicate 'at most..'. This is because, if the speaker were able to use an item further to the right on the scale, it would be more informative, hence more cooperative, to do so. Taken together, these two meanings give he interpretation 'exactly... Horn proposes similar scales fo vocabulary items from across the range of the lexicon, including adjec tives, (warm, hot), (good, excellent); verbs, (like, love), (dislike, hate); and quantifiers, (all, some). As Horn observes in his own later com-mentary, in all these examples 'since the implicature relation is context-dependent, we systematically obtain two understandings for each scalar value p ('at least p', 'exactly p') without needing to posit a semantic ambiguity for each operator'. 101  In this later work, Horn describes scalar implicatures as examples of Q-based implicatures, dependent on our expectations that speakers will seek to be as clear as possible. However, Q-based implicatures need to be balanced against R-based ones, drawing on the notion of economy.  The tension between these can offer a clear account of the issue to do with articles Grice originally identified:  Maxim clash, for example, arises notoriously readily in indefinite contexts; thus, an utterance of I slept in a car yesterday licenses the Q-based inference that it was not my car I slept in (or I should have said so), while an utterance of I broke a finger yesterday licenses the R-based inference that it was my finger I broke (unless I know that you know that I am an enforcer for the mob, in which case the opposite, R-based implicatum is derived). 102  There is some experimental support for the psychological plausibility of Horn's scalar implicatures, and hence for the Gricean framework on which they are based. Ira Noveck concludes from a number of experiments that although adults react to the enriched pragmatic meaning of scalars, young but linguistically competent children respond chiefly to their logical meaning. 'The experiments succeeded in demonstrating not only that these Gricean implicatures are present in adult inference-making but that in cognitive development these occur only after logical interpretations have been well established.'103  There have been some attempts to extend the range of Horn's notion of scalar implicature. Horn himself has offered a scalar analysis of the  'strengthening' of 'if' to mean 'if and only if', 104 Earlier, Jerrold Sadock sought to explain the meaning of 'almost' in terms of a semantic scale(almost p, p). Sadock observes that the argument for a relationship of implicature between the use of 'almost p' and the meaning 'not p' is considerably weakened by the difficulty of finding contexts in which it would be cancellable. His explanation is that this is because 'the context-free implicature in the case of almost is so strong'.10s In discussing the one example he does see as cancellable, he introduces a qualification that is again to do with the 'strength' of an implicature. Surely, Sadock argues, if a seed company ran a competition to breed an almost black marigold', and a contestant turns up with an entirely black marigold, it would be in the interests not just of fair play but of correct semantic interpretation to award him the prize. However, he cautions:  In the statement of the contest's rules, the word almost should not be read with extra stress. Stressing a word that is instrumental in conveying a conversational implicature can have the effect of emphasizing the implicature and elevating it to something close to semantic content. 106  Sadock does not go so far as claiming that an implicature can actually become part of semantic content, but his rather equivocal statement certainly suggests a blurring of what for Grice is a clearly defined boundary.  This blurring of the boundaries is more apparent, or more explicitly advocated, in other neo-Gricean work, initially from Gazdar and later from Atlas and Levinson. Gerald Gazdar is perhaps the least clearly  'Gricean' of the neo-Griceans, in that he departs most radically from Grice's bipartite conception of meaning. Nevertheless, he bases his pragmatic account at least in part on a conception of implicature drawing on 'Logic and conversation'. He proposes a 'partial formulization' of GCIs, drawing on Horn's original account, which he describes as 'basi-cally correct'.107 For Gazdar, the semantic representation of certain expressions carry 'im-plicatures', potential implicatures that will later become actual if not cancelled by context. The relationship between context, implicature and eventual interpretation is a formal process.  Stephen Levinson, sometimes in collaboration with other linguists, has developed a revised account of GCIs. Levinson's conception of the processes of interpretation is summarised in his exegesis of 'Logic and conversation' in his 1983 Pragmatics. He describes how the assumptions about conversation expressed in the maxims 'arise, it seems, from basic rational considerations and may be formulated as guidelines for the efficient and effective use of language'. 10 These goals in conversation areclosely related to Horn's 'economy' and 'clarity', respectively, and in Levinson's work too they prompt the search for a reductive reformulation of the maxims. He is also concerned with developing an 'inter-leaved' account of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.  Along with RT, but differing overtly from it, Levinson's account offers perhaps the most developed alternative to the view of semantics and pragmatics operating serially over separate inputs.  In a joint article published in 1981, Atlas and Levinson lay claim to an explicitly Gricean heritage, but argue that 'Gricean theories need not and do not restrict their resources to Grice's formulations. 109 They argue that it is necessary to pay attention to semantic structure that exists above and beyond truth-conditions, and that in turn interacts with pragmatic principles to produce 'informative, defeasible implicata'. 110  This concern with layers of meaning not found in Grice's formulation has remained in Levinson's work. His 2000 book Presumptive Meanings is a sustained defence of the notion of GCI, based on Grice's original conception but reformulating and elaborating it. As in the defence from 20 years earlier, GCIs are seen as informative and defeasible. Their essential purpose is to add information to what is offered by literal meaning; as Levinson explains, they help overcome the problem of the 'bottle-neck' created by the slowness of phonetic articulation relative to the possibilities of interpretation. The solution, he suggests, takes the following form: let not only the content but also the metalinguistic properties of the utterance (e.g., its form) carry the message. Or, find a way to piggyback meaning on top of the meaning. "11  As part of this programme, Levinson offers a detailed characterisation of three separate levels of meaning in utterance interpretation. As well as 'sentence meaning' and 'speaker meaning', he argues the need for  'statement-meaning' or 'utterance-type meaning', intermediate between the two. It is at this level, he suggests, that 'we can expect the system-aticity of inference that might be deeply interconnected to linguistic structure and meaning, to the extent that it can become problematical to decide which phenomena should be rendered unto semantic theory and which unto pragmatics. 12 He places GCIs at this intermediate level; for him they are ambiguously located between semantics and pragmat-ics. Part of his argument here hinges on the idea, not dissimilar from that put forward by Sperber and Wilson, that the very first level is often not enough to give a starting point of meaning at all. Various factors in what Grice calls 'what is said' need to be determined with reference to precisely those inferential features described as GCIs. Levinson describes this process as 'pragmatic intrusion into truth conditions'. 113 Pragmaticinference plays a part in determining even basic sentence meaning, suggesting that pragmatics cannot be simply a 'layer' of interpretation applying after semantics. 114  Neo-Griceans have sometimes been described as engaging in 'radical pragmatics' because, as Levinson's model illustrates, they claim much richer explanatory powers for their pragmatic principles than is the case in traditional Gricean pragmatics. In 'Logic and conversation',  ', the layers  of meaning before the Cooperative Principle becomes effective are somewhat shady. Conventional meaning, always a problem area for Grice, is added to by various uninterrogated processes of disambigua-tion and reference assignment, to give 'what is said'. This may be enriched by conventional implicature, depending on the individual words chosen. It is only then that Grice's elaborate mechanism for deriving conversational implicatures is brought into play. For neo-Griceans such as Levinson, conventional meaning is a highly restrictive, although perhaps no less shady, phenomenon. It needs assistance from pragmatic principles before it can even offer a basis from which interpretation can proceed. In John Richardson and Alan Richardson's instructive extended metaphor:  Grice allowed himself considerable pragmatic machinery with which to try to bridge the gap between intuitive and posited meanings, whereas radical pragmaticians have been eagerly scrapping much of Grice's machinery while frequently allowing gaps between intuitive and posited meanings greater than anything Grice proposed - a geometrically more ambitious program. l1s  A number of recent articles reassess the claims that implicature must play a part in determining literal content. These generally take issue with linguists such as the relevance theorists and Levinson, and show a renewed interest in Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated, although they are by no means unanimously uncritical of his original characterisation of these. Kent Bach argues that 'what is said in uttering a sentence need not be a complete proposition'; if we observe what Bach sees as Grice's stipulation that 'what is said' must correspond directly to the linguistic form of the sentence uttered, it may be that what is said is not informationally complete. 16 However, this need not be a problem, because in the Gricean framework what is communicated is not entirely dependent on what is said but is derived from it by a process of implicature. Bach accuses some of Grice's commentators of confusing their intuitions about what is communicated, in whichimplicatures play a part, with judgements about semantic fact. Directly taking issue with RT, he argues that 'I have had breakfast' might be literally true even if the speaker had not had breakfast on the day of utter-ance; it is simply that intuitive judgements focus on a more limited interpretation. These intuitive judgements are not a good guide to the theoretical question of the constitution of 'what is said': 'the most natural interpretation of an utterance need not be what is strictly and literally said. 117  Mira Ariel has also dwelt on intuitive responses in her discussion of  'privileged interactional interpretation'. l18 What people respond to as the speaker's chief commitment does not always correspond either to Grice's 'what is said' or to some enriched form such as the relevance theorists' 'explicatures'. Jennifer Saul suggests that Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has been dismissed too hurriedly by his critics. To argue against Grice on the grounds of how people generally react to utterances is seriously to misrepresent his intention.  Further, within Grice's original formulation there is no reason why what is said needs to be a cooperative contribution recognised by either speaker or hearer: 'a speaker can perfectly well be cooperative by saying something trivial and implicating something non-trivial. 119  Grice's work was often characterised by the speculative and open-ended approaches he took to his chosen topics. At times the result can be frustratingly tentative discussions of crucial issues that display a knowing disregard for detail or for definitions of key terms. Ideas and theories are offered as sketches of how an appropriate account might succeed, or how a philosopher - by implication either Grice or some unnamed successor - might eventually formulate an answer. In the case of the theory of conversation, these characteristics are perhaps at least in part responsible for its success. Certainly, Grice offered enough for his description of interactive meaning to be applied fruitfully in a number of different fields across a vast range of data. But the sketchiness of some aspects of the theory, and the failure fully to define terms as central as 'what is said', have also indicated possibilities for theoretical adjustments and reformulations. There is something of an air of  'work in progress' about even the published version of 'Logic and con-versation' that indicates problems to be solved rather than simply ideas to be applied. Grice himself mounted a spirited defence of problems at the end of his own philosophical memoir:  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same oldproblems it would still not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries up. 120  ready supply of problems is as valued by linguists as it is by philosc hers. The original, highly suggestive, but somehow unfinished natur of the lectures on logic and conversation is a telling example of a Gricean heresy, and one that may explain much of the story of their success.  Baker (1986: 277). Festschrift etc. H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Wittgenstein (1958: 43). See Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. In Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 516-17). E.g. Brown and Yule (1983: 31-3), Coulthard (1985: 30-2), Graddol et al. (1994: 124-5), Wardhaugh (1986: 281-4).  7. Respectively, Rundquist (1992), Perner and Leekam (1986), Gumperz (1982:  94-5), Penman (1987), Schiffrin (1994: 203-26), Raskin (1985), Yamaguchi  (1988), and Warnes (1990).  See, for instance, Grice (1987b: 339). Grandy and Warner (1986a: 1). Grice (1986a: 65, original emphasis). Grice (1986b: 10). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Misc. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47). Grice (1986a: 61). See, for instance, Burge (1992: 619). Grice (1986a: 61-2). See, for instance, Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 527). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Richard Warner, personal communication. Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Grice (1967b) in Grice (1989: 64). Handwritten version of Kant lectures, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Miscellaneous "Group" notes 84-85', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  25. 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS  90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  2 Philosophical influences  1. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1986a: 46). Quotation courtesy of the Old Cliftonian Society. Grice (1991: 57-8, n1). Grice (1986a: 46-7). Ibid. Quotations in this paragraph from Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Information from The Rossall Register, Rossall School, Lancashire. Martin and Highfield (1997: 337). Ayer (1971: 48). Rogers (2000: 144). 'Preliminary Valediction, 1985', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 48). 'Negation and Privation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Rogers (2000: 255). Rogers (2000: 146). Locke (1694: 37) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 38) in Perry (1975b). Locke (1694: 39) in Perry (1975b). Ibid. Locke (1694: 47) in Perry (1975b). Reid (1785: 115) In Perry (1975b). Gallie (1936: 28). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 74). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 88). Grice (1941) in Perry (1975b: 90). Perry (1975a: 155n). Perry (1975a: 136). Williamson (1990: 122). 3 Post-war Oxford  Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 10), Strawson in Magee (1986: 149). Grice (1986a: 48). Ryle (1949: 19). Rée (1993: 8). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 20). Pitcher (1973: 20). Grice (1986a: 58). Rogers (2000: 255). Manuscript: 'Philosophy and ordinary language', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 50). Frege (1892: 57). Russell (1905: 479). For instance, Magee (1986: 10). For instance in the introduction to Gellner (1979), written and first published in 1959. For instance Grice (1987b: 345). Moore (1925) reprinted in Moore (1959: 36). Grice (1986a: 51). Gellner (1979: 17, and elsewhere). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Rogers (2000: 254). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 11). Williams and Montefiore (eds) (1966: 11). Wittgenstein (1922: 4.024). Wittgenstein (1958: 120). Ayer (1964). Austin (1962a: 3). Austin (1950) in Austin (1961: 99). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 130). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 137). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 138, original emphasis). Forguson (2001: 333 and n16). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 51), Grice (1987a: 181). Grice (1986a: 49). Quine (1985: 249). Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 14). Notes for Ox Phil 1948-1970, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice (personal communication). Warnock (1973: 36). Austin (1956) in Austin (1961: 129, original emphasis). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Urmson et al. (1965: 79-80). 'Philosophers in high argument', The Times Saturday 17 May 1958. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Strawson in Magee (1986: 149), and Gellner (1979, passim) as examples of these two points of view. Russell (1956: 141). Gellner (1979: 23). Gellner (1979: 264). Mundle (1979: 82). Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Grice (1986a: 51). Manuscript draft of 'Reply to Richards', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ibid. Ackrill (1963: vi). Strawson (1950: 326). Strawson (1998: 5). For instance, in Strawson (1952: 175ff). Strawson (1950: 344). Quine (1985: 247-8). Grice (1986a: 47). Grice (1986a: 49). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Notes for Categories with Strawson, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Quine (1953: 43). Grice and Strawson (1956) in Grice (1989: 205). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. 'The Way of Words', Studies in: Notes, offprints and draft material, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 54). Quinton (1963) in Strawson (1967: 126). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 37). Warnock (1973: 39). Perception Papers, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962a: 30-1). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'More about Visa', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1955: 201). Grice (1961) and Grice (1962). Grice (1966). Warnock (1973: 39, original emphasis). Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Quine (1985: 248). Grice (1958).   4 Meaning  Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, Oxford Philosophy in the 1930s and 1940s, APA, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See, for instance, Warnock (1973: 40). Grice (1957: 379). Stevenson (1944: 66). Stevenson (1944: 38). Stevenson (1944: 69). Stevenson (1944: 74, original emphasis). Grice (1957: 380). Stout (1896: 356). Notes on intention and dispositions - HPG and others in Oxford, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Dispositions and intentions', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Ryle (1949: 103). Ryle (1949: 183). Stout (1896: 359). Hampshire and Hart (1958: 7). Grice (1957: 379). Peirce (1867: 1). Peirce (1867: 7). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1957: 382). Grice (1957: 385). Grice (1957: 386). Grice (1957: 387). Bennett (1976: 11). Schiffer (1972: 7). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Austin (1962b: 149). Austin (1962b: 108). Austin (1962b: 114). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 155). Strawson (1964) in Strawson (1971: 163). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 171-2). Searle (1986: 210). Searle (1969: 45). A similar point is made by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 25). Schiffer (1987: xiii). Schiffer (1972: 13). Schiffer (1972: 18-19). Cosenza (2001a: 15). Avramides (1989), Avramides (1997). Schiffer (1972: 3). Ziff (1967: 1, 2). Ziff (1967: 2-3). Malcolm (1942: 349). Malcolm (1942: 357, original emphasis). Grice (c. 1946-1950: 150). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 167). Grice (c. 1953-1958: 168). 5 Logic and conversation  See Quine (1985: 235). Grice (1986a: 59-60). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Warnock (1973: 36). Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chomsky (1957: 5). See Warnock (1963) in Fann (1969: 21). 'Lectures on negation', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 12, 14a, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 13, 14b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 5, 2b, in Ackrill (1963). Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 10, 12a, in Ackrill (1963). Mill (1868:188). Mill's work in this area is discussed by Horn (1989), who refers to a number of other nineteenth and twentieth century logicians who made similar observations. Mill (1868: 210, original emphasis). Ibid.   16. 'PG's incomplete Phil and Ordinary Language paper'  ', H. P. Grice Papers,  BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California,    Berkeley.  17. Grice (1975a: 45-6).    18. Moore (1942: 541, original emphasis).    19. Bar-Hillel (1946: 334).    20. Bar-Hillel (1946: 338, original emphasis).    21. O'Connor (1948: 359).    22. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 224).    23. Urmson (1952) in Caton (1963: 229).    24. Nowell-Smith (1954: 81-2).    25. Edwards (1955: 21).    26. Grant (1958: 320).    27. Hungerland (1960: 212).    28. Hungerland (1960: 224).    29. Strawson (1952: 178-9).    30. Grice (1961: 121).    31. Grice (1961: 152).    32. Grice (1961: 124).    33. Grice (1961: 125).    34. Grice (1961: 126).    35. Grice (1961: 132).    36. Warnock (1967: 5).    37. 'Logic and conversation (notes 1964)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135  c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.    38. Aristotle Categoriae, ch. 4, 1b, in Ackrill (1963).  39. Kant (1998: 212).    40. Kant (1998: 213).    41. Grice (1967a: 4).    42. Grice (1967a: 21).    43. Grice (1975a: 45).    44. Grice (1975a: 48).    45. Grice (1975a: 49).    46. Many of my students have pointed out to me that A could equally well  understand B as implicating that Smith is just too busy, with all the visits  he has to make to New York, for a social life at the moment. Green (1989:  91) argues that many different particularised conversational implicatures    are possible in this example.  Grice (1978) in Grice (1989: 47).  Ryle (1971: vol. II: vii).. Benjamin (1956: 318)0. Horn (1989), ch. 4. See also Levinson (1983), ch. 3 and McCawley (1981), ch. 8. This issue will be discussed in the final chapt 51. Martinich (1996: 1 52. Strawson (1952:   53. Strawson (1952:.    54. Strawson (1952: 83, 86, 891).  55. Strawson (1952: 36, 37, 85). 56. Grice (1967b: 58).  Grice (1967b: 60). Grice (1967b: 59). Grice (1967b: 77). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 88). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 93, 94, 95). Grice (1969a) in Grice (1989: 99). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 117) Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 123, original emphasis). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 127). Grice (1968) in Grice (1989: 136, original emphasis). Grice (1967c: 139, original emphasis). Black (1973: 268). Grice (1987b: 349). Avramides (1989: 39). See also Avramides (1997). Loar (2001: 104). Strawson (1969) in Strawson (1971: 178). Chomsky (1976: 75). 6 American formalism  Grice (1986a: 60). All details from Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Strawson (1956: 110, original emphasis). Grice (1969b: 118). 'Reference and presupposition', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 119). Lectures on Peirce, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1969b: 143). Grice (1969b: 142). Later published in Chomsky (1972a). Notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1989: 955). See, for instance, Sadock (1974). See, for instance, Gordon and Lakoff (1975). 'Notes for syntax and semantics', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Robin Lakoff for a very valuable discussion of the ideas in this paragraph. 'Urbana seminars', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff (1995: 194-5). Simpson (1997: 151). Carnap (1937: 2). Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The spelling 'carulize' may be Grice's own, a result of his not referring directly to Carnap, or may be simply an error of transcription; the typescript from which this quotation was taken was made from a recording of the lectures . Lecture 1, 'Lectures on language and reality', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Urbana seminars', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft  Library, University of California, Berkeley.  Grice (1981: 189). Ibid. Grice (1981: 190). 'Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Harman (1986: 368). Grice (1971: 265). Grice (1971: 273). Kenny (1963: 207). Kenny (1963: 224). Kenny (1963: 229). Davidson (1970) in Davidson (1980: 37-8). 'Probability, desirability and mood operators', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Davidson (1980: vii). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 83). Davidson (1978) in Davidson (1980: 95). 'Reply to Davidson on "Intending"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cohen (1971: 66). 7 Philosophical psychology  Grice (1975a) and Grice (1978). For instance, although perhaps only semi-seriously, by Quine (1985: 248). 'Odd notes: Urbana and non Urbana', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For instance, the writer of Grice's obituary in The Times, 30 August 1988. Also Robin Lakoff and Kathleen Grice (personal communication). 'Tapes', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cartwright (1986: 442). 'Knowledge and belief', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker, personal communication. 'Urbana Lectures', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 62). 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Judith Baker is currently editing 'Reflections on morals' for publication. Grice and Baker (1985). Grice (1987b: 339). Grice (1987b: 369). 'Reasons 1966', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Practical reason', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Kant lectures 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (2001: 3). 'John Locke lectures miscellaneous notes 1979', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kathleen Grice, personal communication. Grice (2001: 17). It is cited, for instance, in Levinson (1983). Grice (2001: 37). Grice (2001: 41). Grice (ibid., original emphasis). Grice (2001: 50). Grice (2001: 88, original emphasis). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1095, in Thomson (1953). Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1098, in Thomson (1953). Grice (2001: 134). 'Reference 1966/7', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book 1 1097, in Thomson (1953). 'Steve Wagner's notes on 1973 seminar', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 131). See Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 134-8) for a much fuller account of this process. Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 144). Grice (1975b) in Grice (2001: 145). Locke in Perry (1975b: 38). See Chapter 2 of this book for fuller discussion. Warner (1986: 493). 'Reflections on morals, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Kenny (1963: 1). 8 Metaphysics and value  Strawson quoted in Strawson and Wiggins (2001: 517). Misc. K. notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 61). Ayer (1971: 142). Foot (1972) in Foot (1978: 167). Mackie (1977: 35). Mackie (1977: 38). For example, Nowell-Smith (1954: 79). Grice (1991: 23). Warner in Grice (2001: xxxvii, n). 'Odd notes Spring 1981', ', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Ban-  croft Library, University of California, Berkeley.  'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 79). Grice (1991: 90). Grice (1991: 67, original emphasis). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 283). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 301). Grice (1982) in Grice (1989: 302). See Isard (1982), Cormack (1982). Bennett (1976: 206-10). Baker (1989: 510). Sbisa (2001: 204). Grandy (1989: 524). Kasher (1976: 210). 'Prejudices and predilections', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Neale (2001: 139). 'Richards paper and notes for "Reply"', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Reflections on morals', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 58). Tape, 'PG seminar I Metaphysics S '78', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Preliminary valediction', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Unsorted notes, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tape, 29 January 1983, Grice in conversation with Richard Warner and Judith Baker, H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Course descriptions and faculty information, fall quarter 1977', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1986a: 64). 'Festschrift notes (miscellaneous)', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'Recent work', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 'PG's incomplete "Phil and ordinary language" paper', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Grice (1991: 70).  'Miscellaneous notes '84-'85', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See Davidson (1967). Grice (1986b: 3, original emphasis.). 'Notes with Judy', H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Richard Warner (personal communication). Grice (1986b: 34). Ibid. Grice (1988b: 304). 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I might, perhaps, at this point voice my suspicion that some of my reservations about Davidson's proposals stem from divergences from him, or uncertainties about his precise position, with respect to some larger issues, mostly methodological. I had, indeed, thought of tabulating some of these issues in a brief final section until I reflected that such a prolongation would, if it were sufficiently brief to be tolerable, be too brief to be illuminating.  A. Overview  A(1). METHODOLOGY  I think that it would be fair to say that Davidson's discussion of action-sentences falls within the boundaries of a larger idea about metaphysics. It is a widely (if not universally) held view, that at least one part of the business of metaphysics is to determine an ontology; or, if you prefer it, to settle on an answer to the question what, in general or particular terms, the  "universe" or the "world" contains. It is obvious that very many widely different answers have at one time or another been put forward; some of them have been wildly generous like Richard Robinson's "You name it", since anything you can mention will win its share of the prize; some of them have been remarkably niggardly, like what Broad once reported to be Hegel's solitary selection, namely, the Kingdom of Prussia; most of them have fallen somewhere between these two extremes. In recent times there has been a strong tendency to restrict recognition to individual entities, excluding of course, all abstract entities except sets, and excluding above all "intensional" entities like universals and propositions. So (thus far) people, tables and chairs, atoms, electrons and quarks have escaped exclu-sion, though for many philosophers further acts of exclusion would be on the way. It is an important thesis of Davidson's, toward which I am, in broad terms, very sympathetic, that a little more inclusion is called for; notably, room has to be found for events of various sorts, among which a prominent and honored place must be kept for actions. Given that this is so we must, as metaphysicians, turn our attention to items of this kind too; it, for example, we admit Julius Caesar to membership of the universe, then we should also admit a class of entities which will include the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and a special subclass of these which will include Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.  It is my suspicion (which I should find it very hard to support with evidence) that Davidson's basic metaphysical outlook, like that of Quine, is that of what I might call a "Diagnostic Realist". Crudely put, such a position would concede, in line with the contentions of a number of classical Skeptics and Idealists, that Reality hides forever behind an impenetrable curtain; it is relentlessly too modest to allow anyone to strip away its protective covering and take a look at it, to see what it is really like. But, contrary to the opinions of classical Skeptics, that fact does not condemn us to perpetual metaphysical silence; for though we cannot inspect Reality, we can form hypotheses about it, each of which (from case to case) may be more, or again less, judicious. Metaphysical hypotheses will be judicious to the extent to which, if true, they would provide backing or justification for the content and methodology of scientific theory.  This metaphysical outlook is unlike that which, at present at least, appeals most to me. My favored outlook would be one or another form of Con-structivism. I waver between two options; a version of Limited Construc-tivism, according to which Reality would be divided into two segments, an original or unconstructed segment, and a constructed segment (or sequence of segments) in which constructed items are added as legitimate metaphysical extensions of what is present before the extension is made; and a version of Unlimited Constructivism, which would, more radically, seck to exhibit all categories of items as constructed rather than original; the escape from the invocation of an unconstructed segment would be (it is hoped) achieved by the supposition of a plurality of metaphysical schemes such that items which are primitive in one scheme would be non-primitive in another. Both forms will need to characterize legitimate construction-procedures by which metaphysical extensions are made. One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis.  Both approaches face formidable difficulties of principle. For the present occasion I shall restrict myself to the troubles of Diagnostic Realism. The Diagnostic Realist wishes to regard the optimal metaphysical posture as being the one which accepts that gencral account of Reality which maximally justifies and supports the deliverances of science. But what science?  Palmistry? And what deliverances? Phlogiston theory? It seems that we need at least a restriction to reputable deliverances of reputable sciences.  And how are these to be selected except on the basis of likelihood of truth, and how is that to be optimized in advance of any clue about the nature of Reality? It seems that there is an initial need for some grounds of acceptability of the findings of science which are independent of those which, it is hoped, will be provided by a correct and adequate account of Reality.  Now it is entirely possible that I am quite mistaken in supposing Davidson to be, at best, a Diagnostic Realist; indeed conversations which I have had with students indicate that he may regard a distinction between 'original' and 'constructed' Reality (like other once popular dichotomies) as non-viable. If so, I will freely admit to error, but not to guilt. For it seems clear to me that Davidson's treatment of ontological questions requires some metaphysical Weltanschauung to support it; and if Diagnostic Realism is not to fill this role, I have no idea what is to fill it.  A(2). PROBLEMS  What considerations can we point to which would encourage us, perhaps even force us, into this metaphysical direction, that of admitting events and actions to the ontology? Davidson, I think, recognizes four such consid-erations, the first of which was the one which primarily influenced Kenny, to whom Davidson gives credit for the introduction, or the revival, of this topic.  (1) The phenomenon of (so-called) *variable polyadicity". If we pick on what looks like a relational verb, for example "to butter," we find that it can be used on different occasions in the formation of predicates of varying measures of polyadicity. Sentences containing it can be constructed which exhibit two, three or more terms; there appears to be no upper limit imposed by grammar, a fact which tells against one possible account of this phenomenon, viz., that varying numbers of indefinite pronouns (like 'someone' or 'something') have elliptically dropped out of the surface forms; just how many are we to suppose to have been there to drop out? This phenomenon begins to lose its air of mystery if we suppose that there may be a central entity (an action), which from occasion to occasion may be described with greater or not less specificity. The phenomenon of 'variable polyad-icity' now begins to look precisely parallel to the situation with regard to sentences used to describe things; there we may take our choice between describing Socrates as a man, as a fat man, as a fat greedy man, and so on.  Sometimes, in one's progress through the maze of 'polyadicity', one moves between sentences which are not logically independent of one another; one moves, say, from the '3 term' sentence, *Bill buttered the toast in the bathroom" to the '2 term' sentence, "Bill buttered the toast," which is entailed by the '3 term' sentence from which it originated. This is often but not invariably the case: it is not the case, for example that *H.M.S. Rodney sank the Bismarck" entails "H.M.S. Rodney sank". We need some theoretical characterization of the occasions when such inferences are in order, and the idea of treating actions as entities in their own right, and so as subjects of attribution, may help us to obtain it. Actions are on occasion in demand to serve as objects of reference for neuter pronouns, such as *it". Consider the sentence "The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". What is "it"? Obviously not the Moonrakers or their manager, and it is hardly being suggested Ann Landers made a joke about last week. If, however, one treats the resignation of the manager as an entity which could be referred to, it will fill the gap quite comfortably. Some of our explanatory talk about what we do, like the provision of excuses, seems to require the possibility of describing things we do in different ways. If actions are describable entities, this may happen to them; and if it may happen to them, we need criteria of identity for actions which will tell us when it is and when it is not taking place. I shall return to the first three items later in this paper; but since the fourth item is about to disappear beyond the horizon forever, I shall say a word or two about it while it is still visible. It does not seem to me to be put forward as a reason of the same degree of cogency as its three prede-cessors; for it assures us only that if, for other reasons, we have decided to admit actions to the ontology, they need not be merely a technically required category; they can be put to work in the service of certain parts of our discourse. The stronger claim that the admissibility of that sort of discourse requires the admission of actions to the ontology is not, and, as far as I can see, could not be justifiably made. B. Davidson's Criticism of Prior Theorists  B(1). REICHENBACH ("LOGICAL FORM AND LOGICAL  EQUIVALENCE")  Davidson takes Reichenbach mildly to task for holding that "(3x) (x consists in the fact that Amundsen flew to the North Pole)* is logically equivalent to, but does not give the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole"; according to Reichenbach the first sentence is about an event, while the second is not; so the first sentence cannot give the logical form of the second. If we considered instead of the second sentence, the sentence  "A flight by Amundsen to the North Pole took place" we would be introducing a sentence which is short an event, and so a sentence the logical form of which could be given by the first sentence, to which (presumably) the new sentence would also be logically equivalent. Davidson proposes to amend Reichenbach's position, so that the first sentence is taken as giving the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole", and not merely as being logically equivalent to that sentence; this change is advocated mainly on the grounds that it is, or would be a step on the way to, a pattern of analysis which will account for the entailments considered with variable polyadicity.  If, as Reichenbach thought, there are in our language pairs of logical equivalent sentences one of which is about events, while the other is not, that difference might justly be held to be a reason for denying that the event-mentioning sentence gives the logical form of the other member of the pair; and if one were a constructivist (as maybe Reichenbach was not) one might suggest that the reason for this richness in our vocabulary is that events are constructs belonging to an extension of a more primitive ontology which does not contain them and which is mirrored only in sentences which do not mention them. If one held that position, one would properly reject Davidson's emendation of Reichenbach.  B(2). REICHENBACH (THE "HIDEOUS CONSEQUENCE")  Davidson's main criticism of Reichenbach's position is that, once he has admitted two principles which are needed to legitimize patently valid inferences turning on the intersubstitutibility of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sentences in appropriately embedded contextual positions, Reichenbach cannot escape the hideous consequence that all events are identical with one another. Davidson's ingenious argument may be summarized as follows. Let 'a' abbreviate Reichenbach's operator 'con-sists in the fact that', which when prefixes to a sentence produces a predicate (epithet); let 'C" abbreviate 'Caesar was murdered', and let 'N' abbreviate  'Napoleon became Emperor of France': Then: (a) sentence (1), 'x a C, is true just in case sentence (2), 'x a (9(y= y & C) = 9(y = y)' is true, since  the parts of the subsentences which follow the operator 'c' in the two main sentences are logically equivalent. (b) Sentence (2) is true just in case sentence (3), 'xa(ý(y= y & N) = 9(y= y)' is true, since '9(y= y & C)' and '9(y=y & N)' are singular terms, which, if 'C' and 'N' are both true,  both refer to P(y = y), and are therefore coreferential and intersubstitutable.  (c) Sentence (3) above is true just in case 'xoN' is true, since "N' and the sub-sentence which follows 'o' in (3) are logically equivalent. So provided that 'C' and 'N' are both true, regardless of what they say, any event which consists of the fact that C also consists of the fact that N, and vice versa; that is to say, any pair of randomly chosen events are identical.  To this argument I think it might be replied that the principles licensing intersubstitution of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sub-sentences are officially demanded because they are needed to license certain patently valid inferences; if in addition to providing this benefit, they also saddle us with a commitment to the 'hideous consequence', then the rational course is to endeavor to find a way of retaining the benefit while eliminating its disastrous accompaniment, much as it has seemed rational to seck in set-theory, as generous a comprehension axiom as the need to escape paradoxes will permit. Such a way seems to be available; we might, for example, while retaining the two added principles, prohibit the use of the 'co-referentiality principle' after the 'logical equivalence principle' has been used. Such a measure would indeed have some intuitive appeal, since in the cited argument its initial deployment of the 'logical equivalence principle' seems to be tailored to the production of a sentence which will provide opportunity for trouble-raising application of the other principle; and if that is what the game is, why not stop it?  B(3). VON WRIGHT (INVOCATION OF INITIAL AND TERMINAL  STATES)  It is Davidson's view that von Wright wishes to characterize events as being, in effect, ordered pairs of an initial state and a terminal state, and (no doubt) actions as being the bringing about of events. One of Davidson's criticisms of this approach is that my walking from San Francisco to New York and my flying from San Francisco to New York would not be distinguished from one another by the pairs of states involved (which would be the same); and that if reference to the mode of travel be brought in (in a distinction between walking to New York and flying to New York) reference to the initial state has now been rendered otiose.  It seems to me that this response does not do justice to von Wright who is plainly working on the twin idea that (a) the notion of change is fundamental to the notion of event, and (b) that change can be represented as a succession of states. In my view this proposal has great merit, even if some modification be required. I shall, however, postpone more detailed consid-cration of it until the next section of these comments.  C. Further Consideration of Davidson's Problem List  C(/). VARIABLE POLYADICITY  Let us now redirect our attention to the considerations which were listed as calling for a philosophical study of action-sentences, The surviving members of this list are the phenomenon of variable polyadicity, the need for a satisfactory systematic account of a certain range of entailments relating to actions, and the demand for the provision of objects of reference for certain occurrences of pronouns. So far, I have spoken as if the first two considerations are independent of each other, each pointing to a distinct problem for which a solution is needed. I am in fact far from sure that this is a correct representation of Davidson. There is considerable support in ordinary language for the idea that verbs and other relational predicate expressions carry concealed within themselves (so to speak) a specification of a given degree of polyadicity (or "n-adicity"); "between", for example, seems to express a three-term relation (x being between y and z), while the relation signified by "above" is a merely two-term relation; and specification of the number of terms which a relational expression involves seems to be essential rather than accidental to the nature of the relation. Certainly many logicians have taken this vicw. But it is by no means certain that this view is correct, nor that it is unequivocally supported by ordinary parlance.  If we ask whom John met in Vienna, we may get the answer *Bill", or  "Bill and Harry", or "Bill, Harry, and Bob" without any suggestion that some restrictive condition or n-adicity is being violated. Moreover, so far as the construction of logical systems is concerned, it has been shown that restrictions or n-adicity are not required for predicate logic.  So perhaps what the first two considerations call for is not just the solution of two distinct problems, but the provision of an account of action-sentences which will jointly account for two problems, that of variable polyadicity and that of the systematization of a certain range of inferences.  This thought leads at once to the question why it should be supposed, or desired, that these two demands should be met by a single maneuver; what would be wrong about giving separate answers to them? Let us look more closely at the two strands; I begin with variable polyadicity.  To talk, let us say, of variable politeness would perhaps be appropriate if one were discussing the manner in which some central item (a person) exhibited, on different occasions, varying degrees of politeness; or, per-haps, exhibited on different occasions varying degrees and forms of impoliteness (sometimes he is malicious, sometimes just plain rude). By parity of reasoning, to exhibit variable polyadicity, an item would have to be (say) on occasion dyadic, on occasion triadic, on occasion tetradic; and this boring ascent could presumably be continued ad infinitum. But what item might we be talking about? To my mind, it would have to be a non-linguistic item, like a relation (a classification which might include some actions); the meeting might be a single item (relation or action) which holds, variably, between two, three, or more persons, depending on how many people met or were met. This way of talking, would, however, raise serious questions about why the focal item (the relation or action) should be regarded as single questions, moreover, which seem a long way from Davidson's text.  If, on the other hand, we turn from the non-linguistic to the linguistic world, we find clearly single items, viz., predicates and verb-phrases, which exemplify determinate forms of n-adicity; this gain, however, is balanced by the fact that it seems that the embodiment of (say) dyadicity and triadicity are distinct from one another. "—met—" and "—met—and—" are structures which do not have common instances; so are:  "—buttered—";  "—buttered—in—";  "—buttered-in—in the presence of—".  To gather the threads together, in the linguistic world one may discern three different kinds of entity:  Verbs (or predicate letters) which are the bricks out of which predicates are made, and which may or may not have assignable n-adicity; Predicates (open sentences) formed from the bricks, like "—but-tered—in—"; these must have assignable n-adicity; Instances (individuals or sets) to which predicates can be truly applied; these must contain just as many elements as the number n in the n-adicity of the predicate; but the number of distinct clements may be variable; recurrences may or may not be permitted by the rules governing the predicates. It seems to be the business of a systematic theory of a language to make provision for the presence of each of these types of item. When it comes to attempting to satisfy the demands for a systematic account of the validity of such inferences as that from "Smith buttered the toast in the bathroom" to "Smith buttered the toast", it seems clear that some appeal to structure is called for; the question is whether the structures now invoked are or are not the same as (or included in) those which are required for a systematic account of a language. It is my suspicion that Davidson holds (or held) that the same structures are involved in both cases;  I am not sure that this answer is right, and the question will assume greater prominence as our discussion develops. Whatever its final answer, one can see the appeal of treating actions as subjects or foci of predicates; once the quantifiers have been dropped, the validity of such inferences might turn out to parallel (indeed to be a special case that of) inferences from 'Fx & Gx' to 'Fx' or indeed from 'A & B' to 'A. But for me the suspicion remains that the proposed identification of structures is illegitimate.  C(2). PRONOMINAL REFERENCES  My uneasiness is not decreased by attention to the third consideration, which relates to the provision of an object of reference for the pronoun "it" in such a sentence as *The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". Who or what was the subject of Ann Landers' joke? Neither the Minneapolis Moon-rakers nor their manager could properly be referred to by the neuter pro-noun, as distinct from a masculine pronoun "he' or a plural 'they'; the reference is plainly to the manager's resignation. Now this event (action) could certainly be the object of a pronominal reference if that reference were demonstrative rather than anaphoric; anyone present at the meeting at which the manager tendered his resignation could certainly say, "That, at last, is what the directors have been hoping for", or, *Now, at last, they have got it". But my sentence seems to make an anaphoric reference, and yet there is no previous reference which is being picked up. The situation might, however, be regarded as being eased if (1) a covert reference to the manager's act of resignation were made in the first clause of my exemplary sentence, and (2) it is sufficient for the supposition that a covert reference is made that a designation of that act should be present in the underlying structure of the sentence.  I suspect that we need to consider two questions with regard to references which are "felt" as anaphoric. (1) Is the mode of reference, in such a case, formally or strictly correct as judged by the official standards of gram-marians? (2) Is the reference, while not formally or strictly in conformity with official standards of grammarians, nevertheless intelligible and so at least informally admissible? It would not surprise me to discover that the matter of a covert underlying structural reference is irrelevant to the answer to these questions. It might well be that for a grammatically strictly correct anaphoric reference to be made, a prior explicit is required; a covert reference will be insufficient. However if the demand is not for impeccable grammar but for intelligibility, then a covert reference is not needed; what is needed is that the identification of the object of reference should rely on prior discourse, not necessarily on prior reference. For example:  *I spent last summer in Persia; they are very dissatisfied with the present regime*. (They are of course the Persians.) "A car went whizzing by me and scraped my fender; but he didn't stop". (The driver, of course.) "Jones's views on the immortality of the soul filled many pages in Mind; but it was the Oxford University Press which in the end published it". (It = Jones's presentation of his views.) (4) "His leg was cancerous; he contracted it in Africa". (It = the disease  cancer.)  One might, as a tailpiece, remark that the accessibility to reference of such items, as the above, depends on their existence or reality in some humdrum sense, not on so scholarly a matter as their presence in or absence from The Ontology.  D. Outline of Davidson's Proposal  We turn now to Davidson's own well-known proposal for handling the three questions which we have just been discussing. It possesses a surface simplicity which may or may not turn out to be misleading. It involves the introduction, into a candid representation of the structure of action-sentences, of a 'slot' which may be occupied by variables ranging over actions, and which may legitimately be bound by quantifiers. The sentence  "Shem kicked Shaun" is now thought of not as a combination of two names and a two-place predicate, but as involving a three-place predicate 'Kicked' and as being (really) of the form (Ex) (Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x)), a structure within which, as Davidson points out, the sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears. As a reading in English of Davidson's structure, we are offered somewhat tentatively, 'There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem'.  E. Pre-Theoretical Demarcation of Actions and Events  E(1). ACTIONS  Before continuing our examination of Davidson's proposals, let us first turn our attention to the matter of identifying the material to which the proposals relate. Mere reference to actions, or in a more updated idiom, to action-sentences, seems to me to tell us less than I should like to know.  The word 'action' does not, I think, make frequent appearances in our carefree chatter. I am not surprised if I hear it said that so-and-so is a man of action, or that actions speak louder than words, or that Botswana is where the action is, or even (before he retired from the scene) that Howard Cosell would describe for us third-round action in the current heavyweight contest; but such occurrences of the word as these do not help us much when it comes to applying the word to concrete situations. The word 'action' has a portentous and theatrical flavor, and the related verb 'act' is obviously theatrical in a further sense, in view of the connection with this or that kind of pretending. The more homely word "do" is plainly a much happier denizen of common talk; indeed, the trouble here is that it is too happy; almost any circumstance will qualify as something which some person or thing, in one way or another, does or has done. The question, "What did the prisoner do then?" may be quite idiomatically answered in any of the following ways: *He hit me on the nose", "He fainted", "He burst out laughing*, "He just sat there", "Nothing at all, he just sat there", "He left his sandwiches untouched". The noun "deed", on the other hand, is by comparison exceedingly bashful, tending to turn up only in connection with such deeds of derring-do as the rescuing of captive maidens by gallant knights. The grossly promiscuous behavior of the verb "do", I think, has in fact a grammatical explanation. We are all familiar with the range of interrogatives in English whose function is to inquire, with respect to a given category, which item within the category could lend its name to achieve the conversion of an open sentence into the expression of a truth.  "When?" (at what time?), "where?" (at what place?), "why?" (for what reason?) are each examples of such interrogatives; and some languages, such as Greek and Latin, are even better equipped than English. All, or most of these interrogative pronouns have indefinite counterparts; corresponding to "where" is "somewhere", to "what?", "something"  ", and so on.  Now there might have been (though in fact there is not) a class of expres-sions, parallel to the kinds of pronouns (interrogative and indefinite) which I have been considering, called "pro-verbs"; these would serve to make inquiries about indefinite references to the category of items which predicates (or epithets) ascribe to subjects, in a way exactly parallel to the familiar ranges of pronouns. "Socrates whatted in 399 B.C.?"  ", might be  answered by "Drank the hemlock"  ", just as "Where did Socrates drink the  hemlock?" is answered by "In Athens"; and given that Socrates did drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., we might have been able to say "There, I knew he somewhatted in 399 B.C.". In fact we cannot grammatically talk in that way—but we can come close to it by using the verb "do", and asking (for example) "What did Socrates do in 399 B.C.?". In its capacity as part of a makeshift pro-verb, *do" can stand in for (be replaceable by) any verb or verb phrase whatsoever; in which case, it is hardly surprising that it will do little to specify a narrowed-down range of actions, or of "action-verbs".  Frustrated in these directions, we might think of turning to a longstanding tradition in Ethics from the Greeks onwards, of connecting the concept of action with that of the Will; a tradition which reached its peak in Prichard, who not merely believed that action is distinguished by a special connection with the will, but maintained that acting is to be identified with willing. It is clear from Davidson's comments on Chisholm, that, at least when his article was written, he would have none of such ideas, perhaps because the suggestion that actions are distinguished by a connection with the will may be expected to lead at once to the idea that particular actions are distinguished by their connection with acts of will; and the position that there are such things as acts of will is not merely false but disreputable. An alternative strategy more in tune with some recent philosophy (and perhaps with Davidson's own style), would be to look at the particular verbs or verb phrases which are used to specify or describe what philosophers at least are inclined to think of as actions; we will examine not generic words like  'act' and 'do', but an indefinite range of particular words and phrases, such as "milk the cow", "cook the meat", and "butter the toast". The trouble which we now encounter is that while some verbs or verb phrases, like  "melt" or "turn pale", look as if they cannot be used to refer to actions, and while others, like "donate a hospital to the city of New York", cannot but be used to refer to what philosophers would call actions— an enormous number of verb phrases occupy an indeterminate position; they can, it seems, be used either way, and therefore are useless as pointers. To offer just one example, "fell on his sword"; one Roman soldier fell on his sword because he lost his legion and could not face the disgrace which, to his mind, attended his responsibility for the deaths of so many people; another Roman soldier lost his legion because he fell on his sword, tripping on it in the dark and as a result knocking himself out, so that when he regained consciousness, the legion had moved on and he was unable to find it.  In my view, there is no escape from a recognition that a characterization of actions (or of action-sentences) has not been provided; in order to proceed then, we have to assume that for the present inquiry such a characterization is not needed. The interpretation of such an idea is not unproblematic. For example, if we do not need to know what actions are (or what are actions) how can we be sure that the current inquiry is properly described as an inquiry about actions or action-sentences? Might it not be, for example, really an inquiry about events (a not implausible suggestion). If it replied that this, if true, would be no great matter, since actions are one kind or subclass of events, I would respond with the comment that some philoso-phers, including Davidson himself, regard actions as a subelass of events, but many do not; this is not a closed question; and may be one which is of vital importance. In any case, other trouble might lie in wait for us if we theorize about actions without a proper identification of what we are theorizing about.  E(2). EVENTS  Parallel to these questions about actions, there are questions which arise about events; if Davidson is offering us an analysis of event-predicates, or event-sentences, just what range of locutions is being analyzed? Two modes of procedures would to my mind be natural; one would be, by an exercise in 'linguistic botany', to further an intuitive recognition of the class of event-descriptions by identifying likenesses and differences between vernacular expressions of this sort and those of different but more or less closely related kinds, like expressions for states of affairs, facts, circumstances, condi-tions, and so forth; the other would be to give a general characterization, which might or might not seek to reflect the vernacular, of a class of event-descriptions with which we are to be concerned, it being understood that any such general characterization might well need to be replaced, for philosophical purposes, by an account which would be theoretically more satisfying and illuminating. Davidson, however, seems to be interested in neither of these procedures. On pages 119-120 he tells us, first that "part of what we must learn when we learn the meaning of any predicate is how many places it has, and what sorts of entities the variables that hold their places range over. Some predicates have an event-place, some do not"; and second that "our ordinary talk of events, of causes and effects, requires constant use of the idea of different descriptions of the same event", with the apparent implication that the range of items to be counted as events is just that range of items with respect to which such inferential problems arise as those of 'variable polyadicity', problems which the proposed analysis would enable us to solve.  I find myself puzzled by two distinet aspects of the foregoing account.  One is the combination of the idea that ability to recognize the number of places which a predicate has, including recognition of the presence or absence of an event-place, is a part of what is involved in learning the meaning of the predicate, and so (presumably) a part of what is involved in learning the language to which the predicate belongs, with the further idea that people (or philosophers) may be expected to be surprised, indeed even skeptical, about Davidson's proposed 'importation' of an extra pred-icate-place for events. Are we to be, like those who in Moore's view go against common sense, persistently engaged in sincere denials of what we know for certain to be true? I do not find such a diagnosis very appealing. Unless I have misread what 1 described as Davidson's implication, surely the idea that events are to be treated as being those items which raise problems which an application of Davidson's analysis is capable of solving is a very different suggestion from the suggestion that the ability to recognize event-places (and so events) is part of having learned the language. E Difficulties With Davidson's Proposal F(I). INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE 'EXTRA SLOT Let us now address the question whether Davidson's proposal, with regard to the logical form of action-sentences, might not be deceptively simple.  The proposal is that contrary (perhaps) to our natural instincts and incli-nations, we should regard 'Kicked' (for example) not as a two-place predicate where the vacancies are filled by designation of the kicker and the kicked, but as a three-place predicate with an extra vacancy for reference to the event or action in which that kicking consists. I find this puzzling as it stands, and I am inclined to inquire how the extra place fits into an understanding of kicking (or of any comparable relational feature). There was, not so long ago, in Oxford, a professor of the philosophy of religion who (so he said) espoused what might be called a form of *Neo-Berkelei-anism"; he maintained that such sentences as "There is a table in the corner of the room" or "Snow is white" were incompletely formulated; the proper forms of expression would be "There is a table in the corner of the room;  God!" and "Snow is white; God!" We can imagine more elaborate variations on the same theme. Suppose that in the later 1930's, it had become de rigueur in colloquial German to terminate sentences with the phrase  "Heil Hitler". We might next suppose that, as the months wore on, this practice became fragmented; it was permissible to substitute for the name of Hitler any of the names of his more notorious henchmen (of course omitting the word 'Heil'); so the vernacular was flooded with German versions of such sentences as "The toast is burned; Bormann!", "Those pictures are very valuable; Goering!", "She was as gentle as a young child;  Himmler!". One can even imagine the practice extended so as to provide for the appearance of quantifiers; "(3x) (Western democracies are corrupt; x!)*.  What is wrong with these idiocies seems, primarily, to be that no account at all has been provided of the purpose which the newly made slots serve: they are just paraded for implementation without indication of what seman-tie gain could come from the implementation. On the face of it, Davidson's presentation suffers from a similar lacuna; he does not tell us the function of the places, he merely gives us an English "paraphrase". But closer attention does something to fill the gap. It seems clear that Davidson regarded the appearance of such extra slots as being just the manifestation of the variable polyadicity of such predicates as "Kicked", and as a phenomenon whose mystery is removed once its logical form is revealed and it is seen how it decomposes into a cluster of relational predicates which covers, in formal garb, the inferences for which justification is required. (We should here attend particularly to Davidson's remarks about verbs and preposi-tions.) Once we distinguish between predicate-verbs and predicates, we can regard the role of the extra slot as specified by its place in the predicate (open sentences) into which the predicate-verb enters (the role, for example, of the slot filled by 'x' is supplied by the fact that it is the first slot in the predicate 'a kicked b in the action (event) x'; and we can regard the characterization of this role as provided by our ability to decompose complex predicates like 'a kicked b on the e [left shin] in the d [bathroom] in x (action)' into such a conjunctive predicate (of actions or events) as ta kicked b in x, and x was done upon c, and x was done in d'. That provision is made for the problematic entailments is clear in light of the formal fact that if a conjunctive predicate P applies to an item, so does a predicate P' which results from P by the omission on one conjunct. F(2). SAYING/DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENS  There is one matter which, I think, deserves initially a little attention.  My linguistic intuition tells me if I say to you that I am 93, I am (standardly) telling you my age (telling you how old 1 am), and not talking about my age; and that similarly if I say to you that two cars collided on the bridge, 1 am (standardly) saying (telling you) what happened, not describing or talking about or saying something about what happened. Indeed saying what happened seems to be not merely to be distinct from talking about what happened, but to be, in a sense, presupposed by it; saying what happened seems, intuitively, to be specially central; it is something one needs to do in order to inform a hearer what one is talking about when one talks about what happened. It was, perhaps, considerations like those which led Reichenbach to distinguish between logically equivalent sentences one of which does, and the other of which does not, refer to or talk about an event. Davidson's analysis, I think, has no place for the distinction which I am defending; on his view anything one says about what happened is (in effect) a case of saying that something happened which —. As I have already indicated, as a would-be constructivist about events I am inclined to side with Reichenbach.  F(3). THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZED FORMULATION  As a preliminary, let me state that in this and immediately subsequent sections I shall treat Davidson's proposal concerning the logical form of action-sentences as applying generally to event-sentences of which (accord-ing to Davidson) action-sentences are a subclass. It seems clear then in Davidson's view an action-sentence derives the logical form which he attributes to it from its status as one kind of event-sentence; what differentiates action from other events is less clear, but perhaps need not trouble us just at this point [cf. p. 120].  Davidson presents his proposal in a relaxed manner and with the aid of an example. "The basic idea is that verbs of action—verbs that say 'what someone did'-should be construed as containing a place for singular terms or variables that they do not appear to. For example, we should normally suppose that 'Shem kicked Shaun' consisted in two names and a two-place predicate. I suggest, though, that we think of 'kicked' as a three-place predicate, and that the sentence to be given in this form: (x) (kicks (Shem, Shaun, x). If we try for an English sentence that directly reflects this form, we now note difficulties. "There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem' is about the best I can do, but we must remember 'a kicking' is not a singular term. Given this English reading, my proposal may sound very like Reichenbach's, but of course it has quite different logical properties. The sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears inside my analytic sentence, and this makes it differ from all the theories we have considered."  Troubles begin when we look for a rigorously presented general formulation of this proposal; "action-verbs [event-verbs] are to be construed as predicates involving one more place than you think they do" seems hardly satisfactory, and to substitute for "you" the phrase "the man-in-the-street", or the phrase "the philosopher-in-the-library", does not seem a large improvement. Apart from anything eise, what would account for the extreme gullibility of people, or philosophers, with respect to conceptions of logical form in this region? We seem to need to lay our hands on some less sub-jectively-tinged material, if we are to achieve a satisfactory general for-mulation; and we should perhaps also bear in mind that at least one would-be philosophical theory (a near ancestor of Convention T, viz., the "Dis-appearance Analysis of Truth") has (or is widely thought to have) foundered on the shoals of non-formulability.  We may be able to make some progress if we survey the range of positions which might be taken with regard to events. Those who wish to admit events as entities will have to consider the question of the relation between events and event-predicates, predicates employed to describe or report events.  Such a predicate (or its deep structure) will have as its denotation, a set of instances, each of which will be a sequence of instance-elements. It is plainly Davidson's view that one element in the sequence that satisfies an event-predicate, which will invariably be an event; contrary to my suggestion in (6) above, reference to events will not be eliminable from any true account of what happens. But though events may not be eliminable as instance-elements, they may well be elements of a special kind; while one who kicks, or one who is kicked, will, for Davidson, in one way or another, be involved in or participate in something other than himself, namely a kick, the kick will not be a participant in any item othey than itself. We are now within sight of a possible general formulation of Davidson's contention: any applicable event-predicate will be satisfied by a set of sequences, each of which will contain a non-participant element in which, in one way or another, the remaining elements in the sequence participate. Davidson, has, indeed, in discussion, shown himself to be favorably disposed towards a treatment of the logical form of event-sentences along these lines. A correct standard representation of the sentence Shem kicks Shaun" might run somewhat as follows: (3x) (x is a kick and (x is by Shem and (x is of Shaun and (x —)))). A format of this sort might turn out not just to be an elegance but to be indispensable for generalized formulability.  The range of relevant questions about events may not yet, however, have been exhausted; some, not necessarily independent of one another, may be still unanswered. Are events independent, whether with respect to their existence or to their specifiability, of items which participate in them? Are they original entities, or constructs? Are they non-composite rather than composite, in relation to participant items? It is my impression that Davidson would wish to answer Yes" to each of these questions; that he would regard events as 'original' rather than as 'constructed' entities partly because he would not find the distinction clearly intelligible and partly because if events are to be thought of as constructs reference to them might become undesirably eliminable; and that he would think of them as non-composite rather than composite, since if they were composite with respect to participating items the participation in an event of certain items would seemingly be essential to the identity of the event in question (that event would not be differently compounded); and I suspect that Davidson would not favor essential connections of that sort. But I suspect that not everyone would incline towards the same set of answers; and I would certainly want to ask whether, if events are non-composite there is any guarantee that one and the same event could not be both a kick administered by Shem to Shaun and a buttering of toast by Jones.  F(4). PREPOSITIONS AND VERB-DEPENDENCE  Unfortunately we are not yet in the clear, since to my mind, new trouble starts with Davidson's claim with regard to the beneficial results of treating prepositions as having, so to speak, a life of their own which does not just consist in being an appendage to a verb. This idea has two interpretations, one innocuous and one far from innocuous. The innocuous interpretation would tell us that such a sentence as "James flew to Jerusalem" may be variously parsed; it may be parsed as "James [subject] flew to Jerusalem [predicate]", or as "James [subject) flew to [verb-phrase] Jerusalem [object]*, or again as "James [subject] flew [verb] to Jerusalem [adverb]". We not only can but must avail ourselves of such varieties of parsing, if we are to provide ourselves with the inferences we need. If, however, it is being suggested that the preposition 'to' is not merely grammatically separable from the verb 'fly', but is semantically independent of it, then we should hesitate; for the appearance of a preposition signifying direction may well presuppose the presence of a directional verb in some dress or other. Such phrases as "was done to Jerusalem" or "did it to Jerusalem" would not be intelligible unless a directional verb is thought of as covertly present.  I think it can be seen that what I am now taking to be a Davidsonian analysis of action commits us, either invariably or all too frequently, to just such unwanted unintelligibilities. The simplest and most natural version of such an analysis (not quite Davidson's version) for the sentence, *Shem kicked Shaun violently on the left shin in the bathroom", would, to my mind, run as follows. "There is an x such that x is a kicking, and x is done by Shem, and x is done to Shaun, and x is done on Shaun's left shin, and x is done violently, and x is done in the bathroom". It seems to me that many, if not all, of the adverbial prepositional phrases contained in his analysis are verb-dependent; their intelligibility depends on the idea that they attach to x quả kicking, in which case reference to 'kicking' is not eliminable. The recurrent participle 'done' is not an inflection of an action-verb; it is, or would be, but for stylistic considerations, an inflection of a pro-verb; only stylistic barriers prevent our replacing it by the word "some-whatted", which plainly is not a word which invokes a restriction on an attendant adverb; "violent qua somewhatting' is not the name of a special dimension of violence. Similarly kicking of Shaun, kicking on Shaun's shin, are modes of kicking, but not modes of somewhatting. So 'kicking vio-lently' or 'kicking on the shin' cannot be treated as expressing a conjunction of kicking and doing something -ly (ф-wise); a concealed reference to kicking will be contained in the interpretation of -ly (ф-wise).  The drift of my argument could perhaps be summarized as follows: (1)  'Violence' is not the name of a common feature of (say) sneezes and be-ratings of one's wife; sncezes are violent qui sneezes, beratings are violent qua beratings; and only in riddle-mongering are these to be taken as com-parable. (2) So 'sneezing violently' does not signify a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently', only at best a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently quâ sneezing'. (3) So 'conjune-tive analysis', of, 'sneezing violently' fails; but nevertheless 'sneezes vio-lently' entails 'sneezes'. (4) So the problematic entailments are not in gen-cral accounted for by a Davidsonian analysis of action-sentences; if a general account of them is to be given, it must be one of a different sort.  The point can, perhaps, be made even more strongly. Let us imagine that at dawn on New Year's Day, 1886, an event e took place in which:  (I) The notorious pirate Black Jack perished  The Governor of Malta hanged Black Jack, and thereby Rid the Mediterranean of its most dangerous seafarer, Black Jack, and Humiliated the Sultan (Black Jack's master). Let us now recast this motion into the proposed canonical form (with some omissions):  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is of Black Jack, and x is a hanging and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack, and x is a ridding and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of Black Jack, and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Sultan).  Rearranging the conjunctive clauses a little we arrive at:  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is a hanging and x is a ridding and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of the Sultan).  Or should recurrences of phrases involving 'by' and 'of' be omitted? Or retained with differentiating subscripts worn by 'by' and 'of" (e.g., "by,,  'byz', 'by'; 'off, 'ofz, and so on)? And if so, on what principle should the subscripts be distributed? There are several attendant problems and discomforts.  The occurrences of 'by', and some of the occurrences of 'of", seem to signalize a projection into the real world of certain grammatical features, those of being subject or objcet of some verb, which would primarily attach not to things but to words. Then, once the objectifying transference is achieved, the things or people referred to (e.g., Black Jack, the Sultan) become detached from the operation and occurrences signified by the originally associated verbs; so that now it becomes impossible to decide whether it is Black Jack or the Sultan who has been hanged, or who has been humiliated. There are no visible principles for the 'disambiguation' of preposi-tions, a feature which may perhaps arise from an extensional conception of asymmetrical relations as ordered couples without any connotational relation to fix the membership of each couple. G. Towards an Alternative Account of Events  G(I). EVENTS AND 'HAPPENSTANCES': VON WRIGHT'S IDEAS  RESUMED  We might now, perhaps, profitably take a closer look at the views of von Wright. As Davidson remarked, von Wright sees events as transitions between (ordered couples of) an initial state and a terminal state; and, in view of the uncertainty attending the identification of the class of events, it may be worth our while to expand this idea a little. My strategy will be first to display, with illustrative comments, some apparatus which might be useful in presenting a viewpoint akin to that of von Wright; second, to endeavor to put a finger on some weak spots in Davidson's position; and third to consider the possibility of putting the aforementioned apparatus to work in the formulation of a constructivist account of events.  First the apparatus. Let 't' [*t,', 'tz'] represent times (moments, instants).  Let 'ф' [*Ф,', 'ф' represent an attribute which falls under a determinable admitting of variations in degree or magnitude: provision for general attributes other than such determinables, like color, the specifications of which do not differ in degree but rather in kind or sort, could easily be made. A.  (1)  (2)  represents "up to t'  represents ' into t'.  (3)  中  小  represents ' out of t' [from t onwards).  ¢  (4)  (5) →1  ¢  В. (6) '<ф',  '=ф', " >ф' represents '& from t' [@ after t).  represents '$ through t'.  represent  "below  'within  the limits of '  above respectively.  C. (9)  (10)  (11)  (12)  D. (13)  (14)  →t  <ф  →t  り♪  →t  ＜中  t  t  1  d  t  1  中  中  t→  中＞  t-  中ン  >ф  中2  12  ф2  represents 'rising through $ at t  represents 'falling through & at t'.  represents 'peaking through @ at t represents 'bottoming with d at t'.  represents 'rising from d, to 2 within determinable A, from ty to t'-  represents 'falling from d, to z within determinable A, from t, to 1'-  E. (15) A represents a determinable (e.g., velocity).  (16) A-  m+ Acn, A»n represent a sub-determinable of A [e.g., 'a speed of from 40 to 50 mph', 'a speed of less than 50 mph', 'a speed of more than 50 mph'].  (17) A, represents a precise determinate of A.  COMMENTS  We are now, it seems in possession of an apparatus which is capable of representing a certain subelass of what I shall call 'basic events', one which consists of transitions of a subject item between contradictorily opposed states, like being fat and not being fat, or not being 6 feet tall and being 6 feet tall. Let us say that such events as these are 'metabolically expressible'. Metabolically expressible transitions, however, will include not only instantaneous contradictory changes, but also persistent states, like sitting on a bench at noon; the apparatus is equipped to express such absences of change in the notation of A (5). Let us press a linguistic barbarism "hap-penstance" into service to cover not only basic events which are changes but also those which are persistences. It is not clear to me whether Davidson's category of events is supposed to include happenstances which are not changes. The class of basic events could be, and I think should be, thought of as including not only instantancous transition between contradictorily opposed states, but also time-spanning (periodic) transitions between contrarily opposed states (e.g., being 4 feet tall and being 5 feet tall), for the representation of which the patterns listed under (D) will be brought into play. Only thus can we hope to accommodate such events as journeys from San Francisco to New York. [Perhaps one might think of such transactions as being a compact infinite sequence of instantaneous transitions.]  In the case of periodie changes between contraries @, and dz, there will frequently be an indefinitely large plurality of alternative paths which such a change might follow. It will be necessary to make provision in the characterization of some such changes fro the expression of conditions which restrict admissible paths to a subclass of, or even to an individual instance of, the paths which are initially available (as flights are restricted to paths which are aerial). It will, I think, have to be allowed that not all events are basic, some events will not be metabolically expressible as consisting of transitions through a sequence of opposed states. But this admission need not lead us to abandon the idea that basic events are the primitive model for the class of events as a whole, nor even the idea that events which are non-basic derive their status as events from their connection, in one way or another, with events which are basic. One way, for example, in which a non-basic event a might be connected with basic events B,, Bz,.. . might be via causal connection; a consists in a causal connection between its subject-item S and one or more basic events, Bi, B2,... which confer both event-status and temporal position upon a. Obviously, an examination of possible modes of dependence of non-basic events on basic events would be a pressing task for a metaphysician. (6) Should objection be raised to my shift from talking about predicates to talking about attributes, my immediate reply would be twofold. First, that unless there are insuperable objections to the shift, it is extremely desirable to make it. Second, that if the primary objection to the change is that criteria of individuation for attributes are problematical, this objection may well not be insuperable. For example, one might hold (a) that attributes are signified by theoretical predicates in the relevant branch of theory, (b) that there is in general no difficulty in distinguishing one theoretical predicate from another, and (c) that several 'vulgar epithets', which intuitively, are not perfectly synonymous with one another, may be legitimately mapped onto a single theoretical predicate, since the theorist will attempt to capture not all but only some aspects of the intuitive meaning of the epithets which in ordinary speech correspond to the predicates of his theory.  As a tailpiece, it may be remarked that, in many cases, what are to be counted as actions are realized not in events or happenings, but in nonevents or non-happenings. What I do is often a matter of what I do not prevent, what I allow to happen, what I refrain from or abstain from bringing about-what, when it comes about, I ignore or disregard. I do not interrupt my children's chatter; I ignore the conversational intrusions of my neighbor; I omit the first paragraph of the letter I read aloud; I hold my fire when the rabbit emerges from the burrow, and so on. In many cases, my abstentions and refrainings are at least as energy-consuming as the positive actions in which I engage; and their consequences (as for example, when I do not sign exemptions from penalties) may be equally momentous. Often when my actions do involve physical behavior, that behavior is distinguished more by what it does not include than by what it does include; those who preceded the Good Samaritan on the road certainly passed by the injured traveler. So a movement may go equally with not doing things and with doing them.  Such omissions and forbearances might prove an embarrassment to Davidson if the thesis that actions are a subclass of events is to be taken seriously. For he might be forced into the admission of negative events, or negative happenstances, with one entity filling the 'event slot' if on a particular occasion I go to Hawaii (or wear a hat) and another entity filling that slot if on that occasion I do not go to Hawaii (or do not wear a hat).  G(2). THE POSSIBLE AVOIDABILITY OF CITED DRAWBACKS AND GLIMPSES OF A CONSTRUCTIVIST TREATMENT  I come now to the question whether the complications generated by Davidson's proposal are avoidable. It is my view that they are, indeed, that there was never a need to introduce them. One of the avowed purposes, though not the only such purpose, of Davidson's analysis was to provide an explanation of certain patterns of valid inference relating to events, in particular of those inferences connected with *variable polyadicity". I doubt if the analysis does provide an explanation of these inferences, though it may well provide a general classification of some or all of them; that, to my mind, is not the same thing. My doubts may be illustrated by a pair of examples: (a) the statement Martha fell into a ditch, from which it follows that Martha fell, and (b) the statement Martha fell into a trance, from which this conclusion does not follow. It seems to me that the question whether the logical form of one or other of these initial statements is such as to conform to Davidson's pattern of analysis turns on the question whether the initial statement does or does not entail Martha fell, and that, this being so, an exposure of the logical form cannot explain, though it may help to classify, the inference should it in fact hold. To explain the inference, it will be necessary to show why it holds; and this has not so far been done.  I think one might come nearer to an explanation of the inference from Martha fell into a ditch to Martha fell if one observed that Martha fell into a ditch does, while Martha fell into a trance does not, offer us what I might call a "specificatory modification" of Martha fell; it purports to tell us how, in what circumstances, in what context (or such-like) Martha fell, and in virtue of that fact it presupposes, or involves a commitment to, the truth of the statement that Martha fell. Since, in my view, there is no uniquely correct way of specifying the logical form of a statement (the logical form of one and the same statement may be characterized with equal propriety, in different ways for different purposes) it may even be that one characterization of logical form of a conjunctive statement is that of providing a specificatory modification of one of the conjuncts; John arrived and Mary departed might be seen as embodying the attachment of an adverbial modifier ("and Mary departed") to the initial conjunct. It also seems to me that deployment of the idea of specificatory modification would dispel the embarrassments which were noted as arising from the verb-dependence of certain adverbs; whether or not violence in sneezes is the same feature as violence in swearing, 'sneezes violently' or 'swears violently' will offer specificatory modifications, respectively, of sneezing and swearing.  On the assumption that the problems which originally prompted Davidson's analysis are at least on their way towards independent solution, we may now perhaps turn out attention to the possibility of providing a constructivist treatment of events which might perhaps have, for some, more intuitive appeal than the realist approach which I have been attributing to Davidson. We begin with a class H of happenstance-attributions, which will be divided into basic happenstance-attributions, that is, ascriptions to a subject-item of an attribute which is metabolically expressible, and non-basic happenstance-attributions, in which the attributes ascribed, though not themselves metabolically expressible, are such that their possession by a subject-item is suitably related, in one or another of a number of ways yet to be determined, to the possession by that or by some other subject-items, of attributes which are metabolically expressible. The members of class H may be used to say what happens (or happens to be the case) without mentioning or talking about any special entities belonging to a class of happenings or happenstances. The next stage will involve the introduction of a Reichenbach-type operator (like "consists in the fact that") which, when prefixed to a sentence S which makes a happenstance-attribution to a subject-item, yields a predicate which will be satisfied by an entity which is a happenstance, provided that S is true, and provided that some further metaphysical condition (not yet identified) obtains which ensures the metaphysical necessity of the introduction into reality of the category of hap-penstances, thereby ensuring that the 'new' category is not just a class of convenient fictions. In the light of my defense of Reichenbach against Davidson's attack, I can perhaps be reasonably confident that this metaphysical extension of reality will not saddle us with any intolerable paradox.  What the condition would be which would justify the metaphysical extension would remain to be determined; it is tempting to think that it would be connected with a theoretical need to have events (or happenstances) as items in causal relations, or as bearers of other causal properties; while 1 would be disinclined to oppose this idea, I could wish to sound a note of caution. Events do not seem to me to be the prime bearers of causal prop-erties; that I think belongs to enduring, non-episodic things such as sub-stances. To assign a cause is primarily to hold something accountable or responsible for something; and the primary account-holders are substances, not events, which are (rather) relevant items which appear in the accounts.  I suspect that a great deal of the current myopia about causes has arisen from a very un-Aristotelian inattention to the place of Substance in the conception of Cause.  G(3). ESSENTIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF EVENTS  If the suggestions which I have just been outlining should find favor, and events are admitted to reality as constructed entities, it it to my mind tempting to go one step further; this step would involve treating the attributes formed with the aid of a Reichenbachian operator not merely as attributes which happen to be used in the metaphysical construction of events, but as attributes which are constitutive of and so belong essentially to the events in the construction of which they are deployed. The death of Julius Caesar will be an entity whose essential nature consists in, or at least contains, the attribute being an event in which Julius Caesar died; in which case that particular event could not conceivably have lacked that attribute, even though there may be many other attributes which it in fact possesses but might have failed to possess, like the attribute of being the cause of the rise of Augustus. A decision with regard to the suitability of this further step is, I think, connected with the view one takes with regard to the acceptability of one or both of two further ideas. First, the idea that for an item x to be a genuine particular there must be a distinction between (i) what x is in itself (intrinsically) and (ii) how x is related to other things, and also a distinction within what it is itself between what it is essentially and what it is accidentally or non-essentially. Without satisfying these dis-tinctions, x will be characterless, and any features attributed to it will be no more than pale and delusive reflections of verbal descriptions which, in a nominalistic fashion, are thought of as applying to it. Second, the idea that the possession of an essential attribute is achieved only as an aspect of the metaphysical construction of the item which possesses it (or of the category to which that item belongs); or perhaps (less drastically) that only in the case of constructs are essential characteristics unmistakably evident (waiting, so to speak, to be read off), whereas, in the case of non-con-structs, though such characteristics may, or must, exist, their identification involves the solution of a theoretical problem. A combination of the strongest affirmative answers to these questions would yield the possibly wel-come, possibly unwelcome, doctrine that particulars as such are necessarily constructs; other combinations of answers would lead to milder positions.  H. Actions and Events  H(I). THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF ACTIONS  I begin with two preliminary observations. First, I am inclined to extend to actions the kind of treatment which in the previous section I was, somewhat tentatively, advocating with respect to events or happenstances, namely that one should not merely accord to them an internal as well as an external or relational character, but that within their internal character (what they are like in themselves), we should distinguish what they are like essentially from what they are like accidentally. As I have indicated, I suspect that this move may be required both by the invocation of a distinction between internal and external character, and by the supposition (if we make it as 1 am inclined to do) that actions, no less than events, are metaphysically constructed entities. But even if my theoretical suspicions are unfounded, I think my essentialist inclinations with regard to actions would survive. I also regard them as independent of the yet undecided identity question about actions and events. I do not, of course, expect Davidson to look with a favorable eye on such inclinations.  Second, when Davidson addresses the question of the nature of agency, he suggests that two ingredients are discernible; the first of these is the notion of activity; in action the agent is active what comes about is something which is made by him to come about, of which he is the cause; the second ingredient is that of purpose or design or intention; what comes about comes about as he meant or intended it to come about. This seems to me to be substantially correct, though I am inclined to think that there is a somewhat more illuminating way of presenting it which I shall later attempt to provide. In the meantime, what these ingredients seem to me to indicate is an intimate connection between agency and the will, which I am inclined to explore directly. Again, I suspect that Davidson and I might here part company, on account of his hostility to so-called 'acts of will'.  How then should we see application to the nature of agency of the idea that its essence consists in the exercise of will, at least so far as paradigmatic examples are concerned? Non-paradigmatic cases will be briefly considered later. I am, and what 1 do is, in paradigmatic cases, subject to my will. I impose my will on myself, and my actions are acting only insofar as they are the product of this imposition. This imposition may take various forms, and may relate to various aspects of or elements in the deliberation process.  In many cases explicit exercise of will is confined to the finding of means to the fulfillment of some already selected end. Such cases are relatively undramatic, and are also well-handled in some of the philosophical litera-ture, as for example by Aristotle in the carly chapters of Eth. Nic. If. But sometimes what goes on is more dramatic, as when one needs to select an end from one's established stock of ends, or when the stock or ends itself has to be in some way altered, or (perhaps most dramatically) when an agent is faced with the possibility of backsliding and following the lure of inclination rather than the voice of reason or principle. Particularly in such cases as the last, what takes place in action (paradigmatically) is essentially part of a transaction between a person and a person; I, as a person, treat myself as a person and communicate with myself as a person. The seemingly problematic character of the kind of relation to myself which is evident in action has led some philosophers to separate the participants in such dialogue, as Plato distinguished the rational, appetitive, and spirited elements as distinct parts of the soul; and, again, as Aristotle distinguished the rational parts, one which is rational in the sense of being capable of listening to and following reason, and one which is rational as having the capacity to give reasons and determine rational behavior. But Aristotle hedged on this point, and it seems to me that we do not want a divided self here. Our self-direction is the direction of a whole self by a whole self.  Our internal dialogue contains different sorts of elements; we may counsel ourselves, as when my Oxford tutor, called on the telephone by someone who was plainly a woman, said aloud, "Now keep your head, Meiggs" We may impute responsibility to ourselves for actions or situations, sometimes laudatorily, sometimes chidingly, sometimes in a neutral tone. Primarily the language of our self-direction is forensic; the way in which I impose my will on myself is by self-addressed commands. I lay down what is required of me, by requiring it of myself; I am, so to speak, issuing edicts to someone who in standard circumstances has no choice but to obey. I say "in standard circumstances", which are those in which I have authority over myself, and am responsible for myself. It seems to me arguable that the conception of myself as directing myself is comprehensible only against a background of situations in which I am in a position to direct others.  Analogues of relationships with others, which will entitle me to direct others, have to hold in my relations with myself for me to have authority over myself. Failure of trust in myself, for example, either because I regard myself as incompetent to look after myself, or alternatively as unwilling, because of self-hatred, so to do, will undermine this authority. So self-love and self-concern would be indispensable foundations for self-direction; only the assumption of these elements will enable me to justify to myself the refusal to allow myself indulgences which, in my view, would be bad for me.  I may in conclusion remark that I do not see any prospect of thinking of the story of internal dialogue, self-addressed commands, and authority and commitment as being a picturesque representation of the kinds of causal sequence of desires, beliefs, and intentions of which I think Davidson would suppose agency to consist. The forensic language seems to get no foothold.  However, when we come to non-paradigmatic cases of action, the situation is different. Provided that the cases of action in which will is recognizably present are taken as paradigmatic, it is possible by a procedure which I shall in a moment outline, to regard a multitude of performances in which will is not recognizably present as having a license to be counted as actions.  H(2). ARE ACTIONS A SUBCLASS OF EVENTS?  The foregoing discussion of the essential character of action exerts, I hope, some force towards loosening the grip of the idea that actions are to be thought of as a special subclass of events (or happenstances), but I do not think that it provides an argument which would settle whether or not this idea is correct, its force seems to be to a considerable degree rhetorical.  Such an argument, however, seems at least at first sight to be available.  Consider Nero's activities when Rome burned. One of the things which he could certainly be said to have done was to produce a sequence of bodily movements which, given that he was wielding a bow and fiddle, resulted in the passing of the bow across the strings of the fiddle and in a consequent flow of sounds. But there were at least two further things which Nero could be said to have done on this occasion: one is to have given a performance of the formidably difficult Seneca Chaconne, and the other is to have displayed his contempt for the people of Rome. Now it may be that we are free to regard the passage of the bow across the strings and the sounds thereby generated, or even perhaps Nero's production of these phenomena, as a sequence of events, but it does not look as if we are free to identify these events either with Nero's performance or with Nero's display of con-tempt, or to identify one of these last things with the other. Nero's playing of the Chaconne was (for all we know) masterly and profoundly sensitive, while his behavior vis-à-vis the people of Rome was callous, squalid, and hideous in the extreme; these items are therefore distinct from each other, and also distinct from the physical events involving Nero's body, bow and fiddle, which can hardly be said to have been either masterly and sensitive or callous, squalid, and hideous.  I fear the question at issue is not quite so easily settled, as the following response perhaps demonstrates. First, the epithets ('masterly', 'sensitive",  'callous', 'hideous', etc.) which are, in the example given, applied to what Nero did (however that may be variously described) are all resultant or supervenient, and the features upon which they depend are the specific characteristics of what Nero did, viewed as a fragment of conduct or as a performance. Second, description of what Nero did may simultaneously fulfill two roles, a referential role and a descriptive role. Such combinations are commonplace in ordinary discourse. To say, for example, "Robert's mother would not denounce him to the police" both refers to a particular lady, and at the same time gives a description of her which explains or is otherwise relevant to the presence or absence of the phenomenon mentioned in the predicate. Similarly, specifications of Nero's activity as a fiddler or as a moral agent may serve both to pick out that activity and to do so in a way which is relevant to what is being said about it. Third, where we find occurrences in a single sentence of more than one description fulfilling such a duality of roles, there is in general nothing to prevent the plurality of descriptions from being co-referential; "The composer of the San Francisco Sonata would hardly have forgotten how it goes, and the winner of the Pacific Piano Prize would hardly be unable to play the work" may involve a reference to a single person, Joe Doakes. Finally, the evaluative epithets which are applied to Nero's productions are not inconsistent with one another, and so might truly attach to a single item; sensitivity (and so aesthetic beauty) may be combined with moral hideousness. Nothing then prevents a single item, namely a certain sequence of bodily movements, from being also a certain sort of performance and a certain sort of conduct; nor from being, in each of these capacities (quâ each of these things) differently describable. Such an item may be, quâ performance sensitive and, quâ conduct, hideous; qua bodily movement, however, it is neither of these. It is in such a fashion that the example should be interpreted.  I can, however, think of a line of argument that might be invoked, with possibly better prospects of success, to establish the non-identity of actions with events, in particular with bodily movements. This argument begins with the suggestion that if we wish to identify the central, or essential, character of some kind of item, we should attend to the question why we are interested in items of that sort, and in particular what kind of theory or system we envisage items of that sort as belonging to, and what purpose we consider such a theory or system to serve. In the case of actions, a plausible answer seems to lie in the idea that we are concerned with particular (individual) actions as being crucial to a no doubt complex array of procedures for evaluating people as agents— attention to human actions is the product of a concern to determine in a systematic way what people (including myself are like on the basis of what they do. The notion of action, therefore, will be what is required for actions to provide within the framework of a theory of conduct, a basis for the assessment of the agents to whom they are imputable. But for that purpose the all-important elements are the presence of will directed towards the realization of a state of affairs specially associated with the action, accompanied perhaps by belief or conviction that that state of affairs has been, or is being realized; whether the realization is actually forthcoming seems to be, in comparison, relatively unimportant as far as moral assessment is concerned, though it may be of greater consequence in other related forms of assessment, such as legal assessment. As Kant wrote in the Grundlegung, *Even if it should happen that owing to the special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if in its greatest efforts it should yet achieve noth-ing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself"  ", (Abbott edition, p. 11). And, no doubt mutatis mutandis something  comparable could be said about the bad will.  If then, the theoretical interest of actions is detached from the execution or achievement of actual events, it will be reasonable to determine the conception of action in such a way that performing an action is distinct from, and does not require, the actuality of the events or states of affairs which an agent wills or believes himself to have realized; in which case particular actions will be distinct from and will not require, bodily movements or event-sequences.  Indeed we should regard the determination of the categorial features of action as belonging to where Kant would have placed it; belonging, that is, not to the Philosophy of Language but to the Metaphysics of Morals. It is not clear to me that this mode of conception of action is accommodated by Davidson's treatment of action.  H(3). THE POSSIBILITY OF A COHERENTLY FORMULATED  DISTINCTION BETWEEN ACTIONS AND EVENTS  Rather than pursue the question whether such arguments as the one which I have just outlined are successful in establishing the distinctness of actions from events, I shall attend, instead, to the question whether one who accepts this distinctness has a fully coherent story to tell. I shall consider this topic in a series of stages:  (a) If we are to commit ourselves to the idea of distinguishing actions from events, I think that we should state more precisely than has so far been done just what it is to which we are referring when we speak of actions.  One possibility is that we should be talking about action-types, or (as 1 should say) agenda (*things to do"); it will be agenda which, in deliber-ation, we consider adopting, and one or more which, when a decision comes, we actually do adopt. It is conceivable, though not perhaps man-datory, that we license the possibility that different persons may deliberate upon, and in this end adopt, one and the same agendum (e.g., to vote for the re-election of the President, or to compete in the Indianapolis 500). But there are two further possibilities, both of which might justifiably be regarded as particular actions (actions-instances) incapable of being shared by more than one agent. One of these would be examples of the adoption, by a particular person on a particular occasion, of an agendum, whether or not such adoption is completed, or realized, in the realm of events; such action-instances might be called "open" action-instances. The other possible kind of action-instance would be completed action-instances, where realization in the realm of events is demanded. In neither case, however, will it be legitimate to regard the action-instance as identical with an event (hap-penstance) which realizes it.  (b) A further extremely important possibility is visible when we turn our attention to what 1 am treating as non-paradigmatic cases of action. These cases involve the very large class of action-surrogates, which are bodily movements or (alternatively) the making by us of bodily movements, such items being properly deemed to be, or countable as, actions even though (strictly speaking) they are not, at least if they are bodily movements, actions at all. (I shall revert in a moment to the question whether such items are movements, or are makings of movements.) I presume that, in designing the Universe or at least the living segment of it, the imaginary Genitor would be governed by a principle of providing for the highest possible degree of Economy of Effort; such a procedure would not only make his work more elegant, but would be beneficial to the creatures under construction, on the assumption that calculation and concentration of attention involve effort, and that there are to be limitations on the quantity of effort of which a creature is capable at any one time, with the result that the less the effort which is expended, the greater the reserve which is available for emergencies. At least three varieties of unreflective performance might be available in sufficiently advanced creatures as substitutes for paradigmatic reflection and calculated activity: (1) What were once natural (instinctual) performances which then later came to be understood, the reasons for their presence having become apparent and, perhaps, the performances themselves having been in consequence modified. It is on this model that Aristotle, I think, interpreted the relation between natural virtue and virtue proper. (2) Examples when certain forms of behavior have become "Second Nature", without the knowledge on the part of the exhibiting creature of the justification for that behavior. It was in this kind of way that English Public Schools used to foster morality, by beating the boys who broke the rules. (3) Examples in which the behavior which has become Second Nature has become so after, and normally because, the justification for such behavior is understood, and close attention to such justification can in many cases be relaxed; habit will do what is needed.  Perhaps Aristotle's suggestion that we study Ethics in order to be good is based on the idea that type (2) Second Nature, should be if possible replaced by type (3) Second Nature, since only if the underlying justifications of decent behavior are fully recognized by the agent can he earn full credit for the behavior in question. Items which are action-surrogates no doubt owe their status to the fact, or presumed fact, that should an agent encounter difficulties or complications a further reflection machincry may be usually counted on to be called into operation; indeed part of treating people as responsible persons consists in presuming this to be the case; and unless an agent is thought to be under special stress, or to be temporarily or permanently mentally infirm, a failure of this recall to occur tends to be treated as a case of unconscious bad motivation. It is, I hope, also clear that though movements or movement-makings may be properly counted as, or deemed to be, actions of a certain sort, they are not, strictly speaking and in fact, actions of that sort. A certain Oxford college was once embarrassed by a situation in which its newly elected Provost wished to house in his lodgings his old and dearly beloved dog, but in the way of this natural step stood a College statute forbidding the keeping of dogs within the College. The Governing Body ingeniously solved this problem by passing a resolution deeming the Provost's dog a cat. It could only be deemed a cat if it were in fact not a cat. So with actions and action-surrogates.  (c) If an agent does an action, either paradigmatically or via an action surrogate, what he does is something of which he is the cause; that this is so lies at the heart of the concept of agency. But we need to exercise care in the interpretation of the word 'cause'. We need to get away from the kind of employment of the word 'cause' which has become, these days, virtually de rigueur in philosophy [viz., one exemplifying an event-relating, mechanistic, Hume-like conception] into a direction which might well have been congenial to Aristotle. Actions which we perform have ends, which may or may not involve further ends, and which, as Aristotle was aware, may be the expected results or outcomes of actions of which they are the ends, or, again, may themselves be actions, either the same as or different from those whose ends they are. When someone has a preferential concern for some end which would be served by a given agendum, he has cause to perform, or realize, that agendum; and if the agendum is performed by him because he has cause to perform it, then the action is something of which he is the cause, and is explained (though non-predictively explained) by the fact that he had cause to perform it. States which have as their  'intentional' objects propositional contents, or states of affairs more or less closely related to propositional contents, may be divided into (i) those which are factive (those like knowledge, whose instantiation requires the truth, or actuality, of their intentional objects), (ii) those which are counterfactive, like being under the delusion that, which requires the falsity, or non-actual-ity, of their intentional objects, and (iti) those, like belief and hope, where instantiation of the state leaves it an open question whether the intentional object is true or actual, or not. Hume-type causation is factive, having cause to is non-factive, and being the cause of one's own action is factive, but factive in a special way which is divorced from full predictability. We might then say that the uses of 'cause' which are most germane to action are either non-factive ('cause to') or only in a special non-predictive way factive (like 'x was the cause of x's A-ing'). We might also say that, in our preferred mode of conception, actions (like giving Jones a job) are non-factive, in that the performance of this action does not guarantee that Jones actually gets a job. We might also say that, when a particular sequence of movements issues from, or flows from (in a typically unreflective way), an action which an agent has performed, and so realizes that action, the agent has caused,, or is the cause, of, the movements in question. (The numerical subscript will shortly be explained.)  There may indeed be more than one kind of factivity. The kind of factivity which 1 have been discussing might be renamed 'inflexible factivity'; if state s is inflexibly factive, every instantiation of it will require the truth or actuality of , its intentional-object. But there may be states which though not inflexibly factive, are flexibly factive, that is to say, states whose instantiation on any occasion require the general, or normal, or standard truth or actuality of intentional objects of states of that'sort; in such cases, though, truth or actuality of an intentional object of an individual instantiated state is not guaranteed; it may be presumed as something which should be there in the absence of known interference-factors. It is likely, I think, that the items with which we are here specially concerned, like actions and causes (to), though not inflexibly factive are flexibly factive; actions with individual non-realization are possible only against a background of general realization. If this were not so, the 'automatic' bodily realizations which typically supervene upon adopted agenda might not be forthcoming, to the ruin of the concept of action.  (d) I have not yet addressed question whether the items which provide the final realization of actions, and so on occasion function as action-surrogates, are to be supposed to be bodily movements (or sequences thereof) or, alternatively, the makings of such bodily movements (items which we might call 'geometrical' as distinct from 'vulgar' actions). It is my view that this will turn out not to be a question of the highest importance. As we have noted, the sequences of movements involved in the realizations of vulgarly specified actions tend, on the vast majority of occasions other than those in which an agent is learning how to perform some vulgar action, to appear 'automatically' and unreflectively, without attention to the geometric pattern of the movements being made; indeed the acquisition of such unreflective capacities lies at the core of learning how to live in the world. On such occasions, therefore, geometrical actions would be performed through their own action-surrogates, namely the associated bodily movements. This fact has an important bearing on the classical problem of distinguishing or refusing to distinguish my raising my arm from my arm's going up. Various philosophers have looked for the presence, in my raising my arm, of a distinct occurrence, or at least of a distinct observable and introspectable element or feature; and in the case of Prichard this idea formed part of his reason for identifying action with willing. But an example shows this idea to be misguided. A gymnastic instructor is drilling a squad, and gives the order "Raise your right arm"; all the right arms are dutifully elevated. He then says "How many of you actually raised your right arm, and for how many of you was it simply the case that your arm went up?" The oddity of this question indicates that raising the right arm involves no distinguishing observable or introspectible element; all the squad-members were (so to speak) in the same boat, and they all, in fact, raised their arms. What, then, is special about raising one's arm or about making any bodily move-ment? The answer is, I think, that the movement is caused by the agent in the sense that its occurrence is monitored by him; he is aware of what takes place and should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise, he is ready to intervene in order to correct the situation. He sees to it that the appropriate moment is forthcoming. We have then a further interpretation of 'cause' ('cause",  2), namely that of their being monitored by us, in which  we are the cause, of the movement which we make.  (e) It is, finally, essential to give proper attention to the place occupied by the notion of Freedom in any satisfactory account of action. The features noted by Davidson as characteristic of agency, namely activity and purpose (or intention) are perhaps best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development of the concept of freedom. We can distinguish such succession of stages as the following: (1) External, or 'transeunt", causation in inanimate objects, when an object is affected by processes in other objects, (2) Inter-nal, or 'immanent, causation in inanimate objects, where a process in an object is the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body, (3) Internal causation in living things, in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are not earlier stages of the same change, but independent items like beliefs, desires, and emotions, the function (or finality) of which is, in general, to provide for the good of the creature in question, (4) A culminating stage at which the conception in a certain mode by a human creature of something as being for that creature's good is sufficient to initiate in the creature the doing of that thing. At this stage, it is (or at least appears to be) the case that the creature is liberated not merely from external causes, but from all factive causes, being governed instead by reasons, or non-factive causes. It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. Attention to the idea of freedom will also call for formidably difficult yet indispensable undertakings, such as the search for rational justification for the adoption or abandonment of ultimate ends; whatever the difficulties involved in such enterprises, if they are not fulfilled, our freedom threatens to dissolve into compulsion or chance.  It may be worthwhile to present the issues involved here in a slightly more detailed way, and in doing so to relate them to the question of the adequacy of a "desire/belief" characterization of action, to which many philosophers (including Davidson) are sympathetic. Two initially distinct lines of argument seem to me to be discernible; they may in the end coa-lesce, but perhaps they should initially be kept separate.  Line (A) runs roughly as follows:  Action (full human action) calls for freedom in a specially 'strong' sense of 'freedom'. At least at first sight, the offerings of the desire/belief analysis of action are insufficient to provide for 'strong' freedom; the most they can give us is a notion of freedom which consists in the determination of my actions by their recognized conduciveness to my own ends, rather than by an imposed conduciveness to the ends of others (com-pulsion), or by the operation of undirected natural necessity. 'Strong' freedom would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also freely adopted or pursued by me. (3) Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of chance or causal indetermination will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher.  (4) The precise nature of 'strong' freedom remains to be determined; but it might perhaps turn out to consist in, or at least to involve the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation, which would include the rational selection of ultimate ends and would, therefore, be beyond the reach of the desire/belief analysis of action.  Line (B) proceeds thus:  (1) Action (full human action) calls for the presence, in at least some cases, of reasons, and these in turn require that the actions for which they account should be the outcome of 'strong' rational valuation which, in the case of ends, will not be restricted to valuation by reference to some ulterior end. (2) This last demand the desire/belief theory is unable to meet, since the ends which it deploys are treated as pre-given ends of the agent.  This feature is not eliminable within the theory, since the account of rationality offered by the theory depends on its presence.  Taken together, lines (A) and (B) suggest first that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation, second that the desire/belief theory is in no position to provide either member of this pair, and third that each member of the pair involves the other.  A possible attempt to reduce the desire/belief theory from such attacks should be briefly mentioned, which might take approximately the following form.  In the case of ultimate ends, justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their fulfillment but rather of their presence as ends. My having such-and-such an end, or such-and-such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having this end, or combination of ends, will exhibit some desirable feature or features (for example, in the case of a combination of ends, that the combination is one which, unlike some combinations, would be harmonious). This will put the desire/belief theory back in business at a higher level, since the suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to higher-order ends which would be realized by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends would lie within reach of the desire/ belief theory. Whether such an attempt to defend the desire/belief theory would in the end prove successful i shall not here attempt to determine. I shall confinc myself to observing that the road is by no means yet clear; for seemingly the higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress thus started might well turn out to be vicious.  So, attention to the idea of freedom may lead us to the need to resolve or dissolve the most important unsolved problem in philosophy, namely how we can be at one and the same time members both of the phenomenal and of the noumenal world; or, to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the scientific part which calls (or seems to call) for the universal reign of deterministic law, and that other part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but every varicty of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign.  ACTIONS AND EVENTS Is this paper, I devote a good deal of attention  to the views of Donald Davidson on this topic, primarily as presented in his well-known and influential essay "The Logical Form of Action Sen-tences", reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, pp. 105-148). Though I examine Davidson's position in detail, I do not confine myself to discussion of that position; I seck also to sketch, I hope sympathetically though without commitment, a possible alternative account. I might, perhaps, at this point voice my suspicion that some of my reservations about Davidson's proposals stem from divergences from him, or uncertainties about his precise position, with respect to some larger issues, mostly methodological. I had, indeed, thought of tabulating some of these issues in a brief final section until I reflected that such a prolongation would, if it were sufficiently brief to be tolerable, be too brief to be illuminating.  A. Overview  A(1). METHODOLOGY  I think that it would be fair to say that Davidson's discussion of action-sentences falls within the boundaries of a larger idea about metaphysics. It is a widely (if not universally) held view, that at least one part of the business of metaphysics is to determine an ontology; or, if you prefer it, to settle on an answer to the question what, in general or particular terms, the  "universe" or the "world" contains. It is obvious that very many widely different answers have at one time or another been put forward; some of them have been wildly generous like Richard Robinson's "You name it", since anything you can mention will win its share of the prize; some of them have been remarkably niggardly, like what Broad once reported to be Hegel's solitary selection, namely, the Kingdom of Prussia; most of them have fallen somewhere between these two extremes. In recent times there has been a strong tendency to restrict recognition to individual entities, excluding of course, all abstract entities except sets, and excluding above all "intensional" entities like universals and propositions. So (thus far) people, tables and chairs, atoms, electrons and quarks have escaped exclu-sion, though for many philosophers further acts of exclusion would be on the way. It is an important thesis of Davidson's, toward which I am, in broad terms, very sympathetic, that a little more inclusion is called for; notably, room has to be found for events of various sorts, among which a prominent and honored place must be kept for actions. Given that this is so we must, as metaphysicians, turn our attention to items of this kind too; it, for example, we admit Julius Caesar to membership of the universe, then we should also admit a class of entities which will include the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and a special subclass of these which will include Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.  It is my suspicion (which I should find it very hard to support with evidence) that Davidson's basic metaphysical outlook, like that of Quine, is that of what I might call a "Diagnostic Realist". Crudely put, such a position would concede, in line with the contentions of a number of classical Skeptics and Idealists, that Reality hides forever behind an impenetrable curtain; it is relentlessly too modest to allow anyone to strip away its protective covering and take a look at it, to see what it is really like. But, contrary to the opinions of classical Skeptics, that fact does not condemn us to perpetual metaphysical silence; for though we cannot inspect Reality, we can form hypotheses about it, each of which (from case to case) may be more, or again less, judicious. Metaphysical hypotheses will be judicious to the extent to which, if true, they would provide backing or justification for the content and methodology of scientific theory.  This metaphysical outlook is unlike that which, at present at least, appeals most to me. My favored outlook would be one or another form of Con-structivism. I waver between two options; a version of Limited Construc-tivism, according to which Reality would be divided into two segments, an original or unconstructed segment, and a constructed segment (or sequence of segments) in which constructed items are added as legitimate metaphysical extensions of what is present before the extension is made; and a version of Unlimited Constructivism, which would, more radically, seck to exhibit all categories of items as constructed rather than original; the escape from the invocation of an unconstructed segment would be (it is hoped) achieved by the supposition of a plurality of metaphysical schemes such that items which are primitive in one scheme would be non-primitive in another. Both forms will need to characterize legitimate construction-procedures by which metaphysical extensions are made. One might say that, broadly speaking, whereas the Diagnostic Realist relies on hypothesis, the Constructivist relies on hypostasis.  Both approaches face formidable difficulties of principle. For the present occasion I shall restrict myself to the troubles of Diagnostic Realism. The Diagnostic Realist wishes to regard the optimal metaphysical posture as being the one which accepts that gencral account of Reality which maximally justifies and supports the deliverances of science. But what science?  Palmistry? And what deliverances? Phlogiston theory? It seems that we need at least a restriction to reputable deliverances of reputable sciences.  And how are these to be selected except on the basis of likelihood of truth, and how is that to be optimized in advance of any clue about the nature of Reality? It seems that there is an initial need for some grounds of acceptability of the findings of science which are independent of those which, it is hoped, will be provided by a correct and adequate account of Reality.  Now it is entirely possible that I am quite mistaken in supposing Davidson to be, at best, a Diagnostic Realist; indeed conversations which I have had with students indicate that he may regard a distinction between 'original' and 'constructed' Reality (like other once popular dichotomies) as non-viable. If so, I will freely admit to error, but not to guilt. For it seems clear to me that Davidson's treatment of ontological questions requires some metaphysical Weltanschauung to support it; and if Diagnostic Realism is not to fill this role, I have no idea what is to fill it.  A(2). PROBLEMS  What considerations can we point to which would encourage us, perhaps even force us, into this metaphysical direction, that of admitting events and actions to the ontology? Davidson, I think, recognizes four such consid-erations, the first of which was the one which primarily influenced Kenny, to whom Davidson gives credit for the introduction, or the revival, of this topic.  (1) The phenomenon of (so-called) *variable polyadicity". If we pick on what looks like a relational verb, for example "to butter," we find that it can be used on different occasions in the formation of predicates of varying measures of polyadicity. Sentences containing it can be constructed which exhibit two, three or more terms; there appears to be no upper limit imposed by grammar, a fact which tells against one possible account of this phenomenon, viz., that varying numbers of indefinite pronouns (like 'someone' or 'something') have elliptically dropped out of the surface forms; just how many are we to suppose to have been there to drop out? This phenomenon begins to lose its air of mystery if we suppose that there may be a central entity (an action), which from occasion to occasion may be described with greater or not less specificity. The phenomenon of 'variable polyad-icity' now begins to look precisely parallel to the situation with regard to sentences used to describe things; there we may take our choice between describing Socrates as a man, as a fat man, as a fat greedy man, and so on.  Sometimes, in one's progress through the maze of 'polyadicity', one moves between sentences which are not logically independent of one another; one moves, say, from the '3 term' sentence, *Bill buttered the toast in the bathroom" to the '2 term' sentence, "Bill buttered the toast," which is entailed by the '3 term' sentence from which it originated. This is often but not invariably the case: it is not the case, for example that *H.M.S. Rodney sank the Bismarck" entails "H.M.S. Rodney sank". We need some theoretical characterization of the occasions when such inferences are in order, and the idea of treating actions as entities in their own right, and so as subjects of attribution, may help us to obtain it. Actions are on occasion in demand to serve as objects of reference for neuter pronouns, such as *it". Consider the sentence "The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". What is "it"? Obviously not the Moonrakers or their manager, and it is hardly being suggested Ann Landers made a joke about last week. If, however, one treats the resignation of the manager as an entity which could be referred to, it will fill the gap quite comfortably. Some of our explanatory talk about what we do, like the provision of excuses, seems to require the possibility of describing things we do in different ways. If actions are describable entities, this may happen to them; and if it may happen to them, we need criteria of identity for actions which will tell us when it is and when it is not taking place. I shall return to the first three items later in this paper; but since the fourth item is about to disappear beyond the horizon forever, I shall say a word or two about it while it is still visible. It does not seem to me to be put forward as a reason of the same degree of cogency as its three prede-cessors; for it assures us only that if, for other reasons, we have decided to admit actions to the ontology, they need not be merely a technically required category; they can be put to work in the service of certain parts of our discourse. The stronger claim that the admissibility of that sort of discourse requires the admission of actions to the ontology is not, and, as far as I can see, could not be justifiably made. B. Davidson's Criticism of Prior Theorists  B(1). REICHENBACH ("LOGICAL FORM AND LOGICAL  EQUIVALENCE")  Davidson takes Reichenbach mildly to task for holding that "(3x) (x consists in the fact that Amundsen flew to the North Pole)* is logically equivalent to, but does not give the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole"; according to Reichenbach the first sentence is about an event, while the second is not; so the first sentence cannot give the logical form of the second. If we considered instead of the second sentence, the sentence  "A flight by Amundsen to the North Pole took place" we would be introducing a sentence which is short an event, and so a sentence the logical form of which could be given by the first sentence, to which (presumably) the new sentence would also be logically equivalent. Davidson proposes to amend Reichenbach's position, so that the first sentence is taken as giving the logical form of "Amundsen flew to the North Pole", and not merely as being logically equivalent to that sentence; this change is advocated mainly on the grounds that it is, or would be a step on the way to, a pattern of analysis which will account for the entailments considered with variable polyadicity.  If, as Reichenbach thought, there are in our language pairs of logical equivalent sentences one of which is about events, while the other is not, that difference might justly be held to be a reason for denying that the event-mentioning sentence gives the logical form of the other member of the pair; and if one were a constructivist (as maybe Reichenbach was not) one might suggest that the reason for this richness in our vocabulary is that events are constructs belonging to an extension of a more primitive ontology which does not contain them and which is mirrored only in sentences which do not mention them. If one held that position, one would properly reject Davidson's emendation of Reichenbach.  B(2). REICHENBACH (THE "HIDEOUS CONSEQUENCE")  Davidson's main criticism of Reichenbach's position is that, once he has admitted two principles which are needed to legitimize patently valid inferences turning on the intersubstitutibility of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sentences in appropriately embedded contextual positions, Reichenbach cannot escape the hideous consequence that all events are identical with one another. Davidson's ingenious argument may be summarized as follows. Let 'a' abbreviate Reichenbach's operator 'con-sists in the fact that', which when prefixes to a sentence produces a predicate (epithet); let 'C" abbreviate 'Caesar was murdered', and let 'N' abbreviate  'Napoleon became Emperor of France': Then: (a) sentence (1), 'x a C, is true just in case sentence (2), 'x a (9(y= y & C) = 9(y = y)' is true, since  the parts of the subsentences which follow the operator 'c' in the two main sentences are logically equivalent. (b) Sentence (2) is true just in case sentence (3), 'xa(ý(y= y & N) = 9(y= y)' is true, since '9(y= y & C)' and '9(y=y & N)' are singular terms, which, if 'C' and 'N' are both true,  both refer to P(y = y), and are therefore coreferential and intersubstitutable.  (c) Sentence (3) above is true just in case 'xoN' is true, since "N' and the sub-sentence which follows 'o' in (3) are logically equivalent. So provided that 'C' and 'N' are both true, regardless of what they say, any event which consists of the fact that C also consists of the fact that N, and vice versa; that is to say, any pair of randomly chosen events are identical.  To this argument I think it might be replied that the principles licensing intersubstitution of co-referential singular terms and of logically equivalent sub-sentences are officially demanded because they are needed to license certain patently valid inferences; if in addition to providing this benefit, they also saddle us with a commitment to the 'hideous consequence', then the rational course is to endeavor to find a way of retaining the benefit while eliminating its disastrous accompaniment, much as it has seemed rational to seck in set-theory, as generous a comprehension axiom as the need to escape paradoxes will permit. Such a way seems to be available; we might, for example, while retaining the two added principles, prohibit the use of the 'co-referentiality principle' after the 'logical equivalence principle' has been used. Such a measure would indeed have some intuitive appeal, since in the cited argument its initial deployment of the 'logical equivalence principle' seems to be tailored to the production of a sentence which will provide opportunity for trouble-raising application of the other principle; and if that is what the game is, why not stop it?  B(3). VON WRIGHT (INVOCATION OF INITIAL AND TERMINAL  STATES)  It is Davidson's view that von Wright wishes to characterize events as being, in effect, ordered pairs of an initial state and a terminal state, and (no doubt) actions as being the bringing about of events. One of Davidson's criticisms of this approach is that my walking from San Francisco to New York and my flying from San Francisco to New York would not be distinguished from one another by the pairs of states involved (which would be the same); and that if reference to the mode of travel be brought in (in a distinction between walking to New York and flying to New York) reference to the initial state has now been rendered otiose.  It seems to me that this response does not do justice to von Wright who is plainly working on the twin idea that (a) the notion of change is fundamental to the notion of event, and (b) that change can be represented as a succession of states. In my view this proposal has great merit, even if some modification be required. I shall, however, postpone more detailed consid-cration of it until the next section of these comments.  C. Further Consideration of Davidson's Problem List  C(/). VARIABLE POLYADICITY  Let us now redirect our attention to the considerations which were listed as calling for a philosophical study of action-sentences, The surviving members of this list are the phenomenon of variable polyadicity, the need for a satisfactory systematic account of a certain range of entailments relating to actions, and the demand for the provision of objects of reference for certain occurrences of pronouns. So far, I have spoken as if the first two considerations are independent of each other, each pointing to a distinct problem for which a solution is needed. I am in fact far from sure that this is a correct representation of Davidson. There is considerable support in ordinary language for the idea that verbs and other relational predicate expressions carry concealed within themselves (so to speak) a specification of a given degree of polyadicity (or "n-adicity"); "between", for example, seems to express a three-term relation (x being between y and z), while the relation signified by "above" is a merely two-term relation; and specification of the number of terms which a relational expression involves seems to be essential rather than accidental to the nature of the relation. Certainly many logicians have taken this vicw. But it is by no means certain that this view is correct, nor that it is unequivocally supported by ordinary parlance.  If we ask whom John met in Vienna, we may get the answer *Bill", or  "Bill and Harry", or "Bill, Harry, and Bob" without any suggestion that some restrictive condition or n-adicity is being violated. Moreover, so far as the construction of logical systems is concerned, it has been shown that restrictions or n-adicity are not required for predicate logic.  So perhaps what the first two considerations call for is not just the solution of two distinct problems, but the provision of an account of action-sentences which will jointly account for two problems, that of variable polyadicity and that of the systematization of a certain range of inferences.  This thought leads at once to the question why it should be supposed, or desired, that these two demands should be met by a single maneuver; what would be wrong about giving separate answers to them? Let us look more closely at the two strands; I begin with variable polyadicity.  To talk, let us say, of variable politeness would perhaps be appropriate if one were discussing the manner in which some central item (a person) exhibited, on different occasions, varying degrees of politeness; or, per-haps, exhibited on different occasions varying degrees and forms of impoliteness (sometimes he is malicious, sometimes just plain rude). By parity of reasoning, to exhibit variable polyadicity, an item would have to be (say) on occasion dyadic, on occasion triadic, on occasion tetradic; and this boring ascent could presumably be continued ad infinitum. But what item might we be talking about? To my mind, it would have to be a non-linguistic item, like a relation (a classification which might include some actions); the meeting might be a single item (relation or action) which holds, variably, between two, three, or more persons, depending on how many people met or were met. This way of talking, would, however, raise serious questions about why the focal item (the relation or action) should be regarded as single questions, moreover, which seem a long way from Davidson's text.  If, on the other hand, we turn from the non-linguistic to the linguistic world, we find clearly single items, viz., predicates and verb-phrases, which exemplify determinate forms of n-adicity; this gain, however, is balanced by the fact that it seems that the embodiment of (say) dyadicity and triadicity are distinct from one another. "—met—" and "—met—and—" are structures which do not have common instances; so are:  "—buttered—";  "—buttered—in—";  "—buttered-in—in the presence of—".  To gather the threads together, in the linguistic world one may discern three different kinds of entity:  Verbs (or predicate letters) which are the bricks out of which predicates are made, and which may or may not have assignable n-adicity; Predicates (open sentences) formed from the bricks, like "—but-tered—in—"; these must have assignable n-adicity; Instances (individuals or sets) to which predicates can be truly applied; these must contain just as many elements as the number n in the n-adicity of the predicate; but the number of distinct clements may be variable; recurrences may or may not be permitted by the rules governing the predicates. It seems to be the business of a systematic theory of a language to make provision for the presence of each of these types of item. When it comes to attempting to satisfy the demands for a systematic account of the validity of such inferences as that from "Smith buttered the toast in the bathroom" to "Smith buttered the toast", it seems clear that some appeal to structure is called for; the question is whether the structures now invoked are or are not the same as (or included in) those which are required for a systematic account of a language. It is my suspicion that Davidson holds (or held) that the same structures are involved in both cases;  I am not sure that this answer is right, and the question will assume greater prominence as our discussion develops. Whatever its final answer, one can see the appeal of treating actions as subjects or foci of predicates; once the quantifiers have been dropped, the validity of such inferences might turn out to parallel (indeed to be a special case that of) inferences from 'Fx & Gx' to 'Fx' or indeed from 'A & B' to 'A. But for me the suspicion remains that the proposed identification of structures is illegitimate.  C(2). PRONOMINAL REFERENCES  My uneasiness is not decreased by attention to the third consideration, which relates to the provision of an object of reference for the pronoun "it" in such a sentence as *The manager of the Minneapolis Moonrakers resigned last week and Ann Landers made a joke about it in her column". Who or what was the subject of Ann Landers' joke? Neither the Minneapolis Moon-rakers nor their manager could properly be referred to by the neuter pro-noun, as distinct from a masculine pronoun "he' or a plural 'they'; the reference is plainly to the manager's resignation. Now this event (action) could certainly be the object of a pronominal reference if that reference were demonstrative rather than anaphoric; anyone present at the meeting at which the manager tendered his resignation could certainly say, "That, at last, is what the directors have been hoping for", or, *Now, at last, they have got it". But my sentence seems to make an anaphoric reference, and yet there is no previous reference which is being picked up. The situation might, however, be regarded as being eased if (1) a covert reference to the manager's act of resignation were made in the first clause of my exemplary sentence, and (2) it is sufficient for the supposition that a covert reference is made that a designation of that act should be present in the underlying structure of the sentence.  I suspect that we need to consider two questions with regard to references which are "felt" as anaphoric. (1) Is the mode of reference, in such a case, formally or strictly correct as judged by the official standards of gram-marians? (2) Is the reference, while not formally or strictly in conformity with official standards of grammarians, nevertheless intelligible and so at least informally admissible? It would not surprise me to discover that the matter of a covert underlying structural reference is irrelevant to the answer to these questions. It might well be that for a grammatically strictly correct anaphoric reference to be made, a prior explicit is required; a covert reference will be insufficient. However if the demand is not for impeccable grammar but for intelligibility, then a covert reference is not needed; what is needed is that the identification of the object of reference should rely on prior discourse, not necessarily on prior reference. For example:  *I spent last summer in Persia; they are very dissatisfied with the present regime*. (They are of course the Persians.) "A car went whizzing by me and scraped my fender; but he didn't stop". (The driver, of course.) "Jones's views on the immortality of the soul filled many pages in Mind; but it was the Oxford University Press which in the end published it". (It = Jones's presentation of his views.) (4) "His leg was cancerous; he contracted it in Africa". (It = the disease  cancer.)  One might, as a tailpiece, remark that the accessibility to reference of such items, as the above, depends on their existence or reality in some humdrum sense, not on so scholarly a matter as their presence in or absence from The Ontology.  D. Outline of Davidson's Proposal  We turn now to Davidson's own well-known proposal for handling the three questions which we have just been discussing. It possesses a surface simplicity which may or may not turn out to be misleading. It involves the introduction, into a candid representation of the structure of action-sentences, of a 'slot' which may be occupied by variables ranging over actions, and which may legitimately be bound by quantifiers. The sentence  "Shem kicked Shaun" is now thought of not as a combination of two names and a two-place predicate, but as involving a three-place predicate 'Kicked' and as being (really) of the form (Ex) (Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x)), a structure within which, as Davidson points out, the sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears. As a reading in English of Davidson's structure, we are offered somewhat tentatively, 'There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem'.  E. Pre-Theoretical Demarcation of Actions and Events  E(1). ACTIONS  Before continuing our examination of Davidson's proposals, let us first turn our attention to the matter of identifying the material to which the proposals relate. Mere reference to actions, or in a more updated idiom, to action-sentences, seems to me to tell us less than I should like to know.  The word 'action' does not, I think, make frequent appearances in our carefree chatter. I am not surprised if I hear it said that so-and-so is a man of action, or that actions speak louder than words, or that Botswana is where the action is, or even (before he retired from the scene) that Howard Cosell would describe for us third-round action in the current heavyweight contest; but such occurrences of the word as these do not help us much when it comes to applying the word to concrete situations. The word 'action' has a portentous and theatrical flavor, and the related verb 'act' is obviously theatrical in a further sense, in view of the connection with this or that kind of pretending. The more homely word "do" is plainly a much happier denizen of common talk; indeed, the trouble here is that it is too happy; almost any circumstance will qualify as something which some person or thing, in one way or another, does or has done. The question, "What did the prisoner do then?" may be quite idiomatically answered in any of the following ways: *He hit me on the nose", "He fainted", "He burst out laughing*, "He just sat there", "Nothing at all, he just sat there", "He left his sandwiches untouched". The noun "deed", on the other hand, is by comparison exceedingly bashful, tending to turn up only in connection with such deeds of derring-do as the rescuing of captive maidens by gallant knights. The grossly promiscuous behavior of the verb "do", I think, has in fact a grammatical explanation. We are all familiar with the range of interrogatives in English whose function is to inquire, with respect to a given category, which item within the category could lend its name to achieve the conversion of an open sentence into the expression of a truth.  "When?" (at what time?), "where?" (at what place?), "why?" (for what reason?) are each examples of such interrogatives; and some languages, such as Greek and Latin, are even better equipped than English. All, or most of these interrogative pronouns have indefinite counterparts; corresponding to "where" is "somewhere", to "what?", "something"  ", and so on.  Now there might have been (though in fact there is not) a class of expres-sions, parallel to the kinds of pronouns (interrogative and indefinite) which I have been considering, called "pro-verbs"; these would serve to make inquiries about indefinite references to the category of items which predicates (or epithets) ascribe to subjects, in a way exactly parallel to the familiar ranges of pronouns. "Socrates whatted in 399 B.C.?"  ", might be  answered by "Drank the hemlock"  ", just as "Where did Socrates drink the  hemlock?" is answered by "In Athens"; and given that Socrates did drink the hemlock in 399 B.C., we might have been able to say "There, I knew he somewhatted in 399 B.C.". In fact we cannot grammatically talk in that way—but we can come close to it by using the verb "do", and asking (for example) "What did Socrates do in 399 B.C.?". In its capacity as part of a makeshift pro-verb, *do" can stand in for (be replaceable by) any verb or verb phrase whatsoever; in which case, it is hardly surprising that it will do little to specify a narrowed-down range of actions, or of "action-verbs".  Frustrated in these directions, we might think of turning to a longstanding tradition in Ethics from the Greeks onwards, of connecting the concept of action with that of the Will; a tradition which reached its peak in Prichard, who not merely believed that action is distinguished by a special connection with the will, but maintained that acting is to be identified with willing. It is clear from Davidson's comments on Chisholm, that, at least when his article was written, he would have none of such ideas, perhaps because the suggestion that actions are distinguished by a connection with the will may be expected to lead at once to the idea that particular actions are distinguished by their connection with acts of will; and the position that there are such things as acts of will is not merely false but disreputable. An alternative strategy more in tune with some recent philosophy (and perhaps with Davidson's own style), would be to look at the particular verbs or verb phrases which are used to specify or describe what philosophers at least are inclined to think of as actions; we will examine not generic words like  'act' and 'do', but an indefinite range of particular words and phrases, such as "milk the cow", "cook the meat", and "butter the toast". The trouble which we now encounter is that while some verbs or verb phrases, like  "melt" or "turn pale", look as if they cannot be used to refer to actions, and while others, like "donate a hospital to the city of New York", cannot but be used to refer to what philosophers would call actions— an enormous number of verb phrases occupy an indeterminate position; they can, it seems, be used either way, and therefore are useless as pointers. To offer just one example, "fell on his sword"; one Roman soldier fell on his sword because he lost his legion and could not face the disgrace which, to his mind, attended his responsibility for the deaths of so many people; another Roman soldier lost his legion because he fell on his sword, tripping on it in the dark and as a result knocking himself out, so that when he regained consciousness, the legion had moved on and he was unable to find it.  In my view, there is no escape from a recognition that a characterization of actions (or of action-sentences) has not been provided; in order to proceed then, we have to assume that for the present inquiry such a characterization is not needed. The interpretation of such an idea is not unproblematic. For example, if we do not need to know what actions are (or what are actions) how can we be sure that the current inquiry is properly described as an inquiry about actions or action-sentences? Might it not be, for example, really an inquiry about events (a not implausible suggestion). If it replied that this, if true, would be no great matter, since actions are one kind or subclass of events, I would respond with the comment that some philoso-phers, including Davidson himself, regard actions as a subelass of events, but many do not; this is not a closed question; and may be one which is of vital importance. In any case, other trouble might lie in wait for us if we theorize about actions without a proper identification of what we are theorizing about.  E(2). EVENTS  Parallel to these questions about actions, there are questions which arise about events; if Davidson is offering us an analysis of event-predicates, or event-sentences, just what range of locutions is being analyzed? Two modes of procedures would to my mind be natural; one would be, by an exercise in 'linguistic botany', to further an intuitive recognition of the class of event-descriptions by identifying likenesses and differences between vernacular expressions of this sort and those of different but more or less closely related kinds, like expressions for states of affairs, facts, circumstances, condi-tions, and so forth; the other would be to give a general characterization, which might or might not seek to reflect the vernacular, of a class of event-descriptions with which we are to be concerned, it being understood that any such general characterization might well need to be replaced, for philosophical purposes, by an account which would be theoretically more satisfying and illuminating. Davidson, however, seems to be interested in neither of these procedures. On pages 119-120 he tells us, first that "part of what we must learn when we learn the meaning of any predicate is how many places it has, and what sorts of entities the variables that hold their places range over. Some predicates have an event-place, some do not"; and second that "our ordinary talk of events, of causes and effects, requires constant use of the idea of different descriptions of the same event", with the apparent implication that the range of items to be counted as events is just that range of items with respect to which such inferential problems arise as those of 'variable polyadicity', problems which the proposed analysis would enable us to solve.  I find myself puzzled by two distinet aspects of the foregoing account.  One is the combination of the idea that ability to recognize the number of places which a predicate has, including recognition of the presence or absence of an event-place, is a part of what is involved in learning the meaning of the predicate, and so (presumably) a part of what is involved in learning the language to which the predicate belongs, with the further idea that people (or philosophers) may be expected to be surprised, indeed even skeptical, about Davidson's proposed 'importation' of an extra pred-icate-place for events. Are we to be, like those who in Moore's view go against common sense, persistently engaged in sincere denials of what we know for certain to be true? I do not find such a diagnosis very appealing. Unless I have misread what 1 described as Davidson's implication, surely the idea that events are to be treated as being those items which raise problems which an application of Davidson's analysis is capable of solving is a very different suggestion from the suggestion that the ability to recognize event-places (and so events) is part of having learned the language. E Difficulties With Davidson's Proposal F(I). INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE 'EXTRA SLOT Let us now address the question whether Davidson's proposal, with regard to the logical form of action-sentences, might not be deceptively simple.  The proposal is that contrary (perhaps) to our natural instincts and incli-nations, we should regard 'Kicked' (for example) not as a two-place predicate where the vacancies are filled by designation of the kicker and the kicked, but as a three-place predicate with an extra vacancy for reference to the event or action in which that kicking consists. I find this puzzling as it stands, and I am inclined to inquire how the extra place fits into an understanding of kicking (or of any comparable relational feature). There was, not so long ago, in Oxford, a professor of the philosophy of religion who (so he said) espoused what might be called a form of *Neo-Berkelei-anism"; he maintained that such sentences as "There is a table in the corner of the room" or "Snow is white" were incompletely formulated; the proper forms of expression would be "There is a table in the corner of the room;  God!" and "Snow is white; God!" We can imagine more elaborate variations on the same theme. Suppose that in the later 1930's, it had become de rigueur in colloquial German to terminate sentences with the phrase  "Heil Hitler". We might next suppose that, as the months wore on, this practice became fragmented; it was permissible to substitute for the name of Hitler any of the names of his more notorious henchmen (of course omitting the word 'Heil'); so the vernacular was flooded with German versions of such sentences as "The toast is burned; Bormann!", "Those pictures are very valuable; Goering!", "She was as gentle as a young child;  Himmler!". One can even imagine the practice extended so as to provide for the appearance of quantifiers; "(3x) (Western democracies are corrupt; x!)*.  What is wrong with these idiocies seems, primarily, to be that no account at all has been provided of the purpose which the newly made slots serve: they are just paraded for implementation without indication of what seman-tie gain could come from the implementation. On the face of it, Davidson's presentation suffers from a similar lacuna; he does not tell us the function of the places, he merely gives us an English "paraphrase". But closer attention does something to fill the gap. It seems clear that Davidson regarded the appearance of such extra slots as being just the manifestation of the variable polyadicity of such predicates as "Kicked", and as a phenomenon whose mystery is removed once its logical form is revealed and it is seen how it decomposes into a cluster of relational predicates which covers, in formal garb, the inferences for which justification is required. (We should here attend particularly to Davidson's remarks about verbs and preposi-tions.) Once we distinguish between predicate-verbs and predicates, we can regard the role of the extra slot as specified by its place in the predicate (open sentences) into which the predicate-verb enters (the role, for example, of the slot filled by 'x' is supplied by the fact that it is the first slot in the predicate 'a kicked b in the action (event) x'; and we can regard the characterization of this role as provided by our ability to decompose complex predicates like 'a kicked b on the e [left shin] in the d [bathroom] in x (action)' into such a conjunctive predicate (of actions or events) as ta kicked b in x, and x was done upon c, and x was done in d'. That provision is made for the problematic entailments is clear in light of the formal fact that if a conjunctive predicate P applies to an item, so does a predicate P' which results from P by the omission on one conjunct. F(2). SAYING/DESCRIBING WHAT HAPPENS  There is one matter which, I think, deserves initially a little attention.  My linguistic intuition tells me if I say to you that I am 93, I am (standardly) telling you my age (telling you how old 1 am), and not talking about my age; and that similarly if I say to you that two cars collided on the bridge, 1 am (standardly) saying (telling you) what happened, not describing or talking about or saying something about what happened. Indeed saying what happened seems to be not merely to be distinct from talking about what happened, but to be, in a sense, presupposed by it; saying what happened seems, intuitively, to be specially central; it is something one needs to do in order to inform a hearer what one is talking about when one talks about what happened. It was, perhaps, considerations like those which led Reichenbach to distinguish between logically equivalent sentences one of which does, and the other of which does not, refer to or talk about an event. Davidson's analysis, I think, has no place for the distinction which I am defending; on his view anything one says about what happened is (in effect) a case of saying that something happened which —. As I have already indicated, as a would-be constructivist about events I am inclined to side with Reichenbach.  F(3). THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZED FORMULATION  As a preliminary, let me state that in this and immediately subsequent sections I shall treat Davidson's proposal concerning the logical form of action-sentences as applying generally to event-sentences of which (accord-ing to Davidson) action-sentences are a subclass. It seems clear then in Davidson's view an action-sentence derives the logical form which he attributes to it from its status as one kind of event-sentence; what differentiates action from other events is less clear, but perhaps need not trouble us just at this point [cf. p. 120].  Davidson presents his proposal in a relaxed manner and with the aid of an example. "The basic idea is that verbs of action—verbs that say 'what someone did'-should be construed as containing a place for singular terms or variables that they do not appear to. For example, we should normally suppose that 'Shem kicked Shaun' consisted in two names and a two-place predicate. I suggest, though, that we think of 'kicked' as a three-place predicate, and that the sentence to be given in this form: (x) (kicks (Shem, Shaun, x). If we try for an English sentence that directly reflects this form, we now note difficulties. "There is an event x such that x is a kicking of Shaun by Shem' is about the best I can do, but we must remember 'a kicking' is not a singular term. Given this English reading, my proposal may sound very like Reichenbach's, but of course it has quite different logical properties. The sentence 'Shem kicked Shaun' nowhere appears inside my analytic sentence, and this makes it differ from all the theories we have considered."  Troubles begin when we look for a rigorously presented general formulation of this proposal; "action-verbs [event-verbs] are to be construed as predicates involving one more place than you think they do" seems hardly satisfactory, and to substitute for "you" the phrase "the man-in-the-street", or the phrase "the philosopher-in-the-library", does not seem a large improvement. Apart from anything eise, what would account for the extreme gullibility of people, or philosophers, with respect to conceptions of logical form in this region? We seem to need to lay our hands on some less sub-jectively-tinged material, if we are to achieve a satisfactory general for-mulation; and we should perhaps also bear in mind that at least one would-be philosophical theory (a near ancestor of Convention T, viz., the "Dis-appearance Analysis of Truth") has (or is widely thought to have) foundered on the shoals of non-formulability.  We may be able to make some progress if we survey the range of positions which might be taken with regard to events. Those who wish to admit events as entities will have to consider the question of the relation between events and event-predicates, predicates employed to describe or report events.  Such a predicate (or its deep structure) will have as its denotation, a set of instances, each of which will be a sequence of instance-elements. It is plainly Davidson's view that one element in the sequence that satisfies an event-predicate, which will invariably be an event; contrary to my suggestion in (6) above, reference to events will not be eliminable from any true account of what happens. But though events may not be eliminable as instance-elements, they may well be elements of a special kind; while one who kicks, or one who is kicked, will, for Davidson, in one way or another, be involved in or participate in something other than himself, namely a kick, the kick will not be a participant in any item othey than itself. We are now within sight of a possible general formulation of Davidson's contention: any applicable event-predicate will be satisfied by a set of sequences, each of which will contain a non-participant element in which, in one way or another, the remaining elements in the sequence participate. Davidson, has, indeed, in discussion, shown himself to be favorably disposed towards a treatment of the logical form of event-sentences along these lines. A correct standard representation of the sentence Shem kicks Shaun" might run somewhat as follows: (3x) (x is a kick and (x is by Shem and (x is of Shaun and (x —)))). A format of this sort might turn out not just to be an elegance but to be indispensable for generalized formulability.  The range of relevant questions about events may not yet, however, have been exhausted; some, not necessarily independent of one another, may be still unanswered. Are events independent, whether with respect to their existence or to their specifiability, of items which participate in them? Are they original entities, or constructs? Are they non-composite rather than composite, in relation to participant items? It is my impression that Davidson would wish to answer Yes" to each of these questions; that he would regard events as 'original' rather than as 'constructed' entities partly because he would not find the distinction clearly intelligible and partly because if events are to be thought of as constructs reference to them might become undesirably eliminable; and that he would think of them as non-composite rather than composite, since if they were composite with respect to participating items the participation in an event of certain items would seemingly be essential to the identity of the event in question (that event would not be differently compounded); and I suspect that Davidson would not favor essential connections of that sort. But I suspect that not everyone would incline towards the same set of answers; and I would certainly want to ask whether, if events are non-composite there is any guarantee that one and the same event could not be both a kick administered by Shem to Shaun and a buttering of toast by Jones.  F(4). PREPOSITIONS AND VERB-DEPENDENCE  Unfortunately we are not yet in the clear, since to my mind, new trouble starts with Davidson's claim with regard to the beneficial results of treating prepositions as having, so to speak, a life of their own which does not just consist in being an appendage to a verb. This idea has two interpretations, one innocuous and one far from innocuous. The innocuous interpretation would tell us that such a sentence as "James flew to Jerusalem" may be variously parsed; it may be parsed as "James [subject] flew to Jerusalem [predicate]", or as "James [subject) flew to [verb-phrase] Jerusalem [object]*, or again as "James [subject] flew [verb] to Jerusalem [adverb]". We not only can but must avail ourselves of such varieties of parsing, if we are to provide ourselves with the inferences we need. If, however, it is being suggested that the preposition 'to' is not merely grammatically separable from the verb 'fly', but is semantically independent of it, then we should hesitate; for the appearance of a preposition signifying direction may well presuppose the presence of a directional verb in some dress or other. Such phrases as "was done to Jerusalem" or "did it to Jerusalem" would not be intelligible unless a directional verb is thought of as covertly present.  I think it can be seen that what I am now taking to be a Davidsonian analysis of action commits us, either invariably or all too frequently, to just such unwanted unintelligibilities. The simplest and most natural version of such an analysis (not quite Davidson's version) for the sentence, *Shem kicked Shaun violently on the left shin in the bathroom", would, to my mind, run as follows. "There is an x such that x is a kicking, and x is done by Shem, and x is done to Shaun, and x is done on Shaun's left shin, and x is done violently, and x is done in the bathroom". It seems to me that many, if not all, of the adverbial prepositional phrases contained in his analysis are verb-dependent; their intelligibility depends on the idea that they attach to x quả kicking, in which case reference to 'kicking' is not eliminable. The recurrent participle 'done' is not an inflection of an action-verb; it is, or would be, but for stylistic considerations, an inflection of a pro-verb; only stylistic barriers prevent our replacing it by the word "some-whatted", which plainly is not a word which invokes a restriction on an attendant adverb; "violent qua somewhatting' is not the name of a special dimension of violence. Similarly kicking of Shaun, kicking on Shaun's shin, are modes of kicking, but not modes of somewhatting. So 'kicking vio-lently' or 'kicking on the shin' cannot be treated as expressing a conjunction of kicking and doing something -ly (ф-wise); a concealed reference to kicking will be contained in the interpretation of -ly (ф-wise).  The drift of my argument could perhaps be summarized as follows: (1)  'Violence' is not the name of a common feature of (say) sneezes and be-ratings of one's wife; sncezes are violent qui sneezes, beratings are violent qua beratings; and only in riddle-mongering are these to be taken as com-parable. (2) So 'sneezing violently' does not signify a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently', only at best a conjunction of  'sneezing' and 'doing something violently quâ sneezing'. (3) So 'conjune-tive analysis', of, 'sneezing violently' fails; but nevertheless 'sneezes vio-lently' entails 'sneezes'. (4) So the problematic entailments are not in gen-cral accounted for by a Davidsonian analysis of action-sentences; if a general account of them is to be given, it must be one of a different sort.  The point can, perhaps, be made even more strongly. Let us imagine that at dawn on New Year's Day, 1886, an event e took place in which:  (I) The notorious pirate Black Jack perished  The Governor of Malta hanged Black Jack, and thereby Rid the Mediterranean of its most dangerous seafarer, Black Jack, and Humiliated the Sultan (Black Jack's master). Let us now recast this motion into the proposed canonical form (with some omissions):  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is of Black Jack, and x is a hanging and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack, and x is a ridding and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of Black Jack, and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of the Sultan).  Rearranging the conjunctive clauses a little we arrive at:  There is an x such that (x is a perishing and x is a hanging and x is a ridding and x is a humiliating and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is by the Governor of Malta and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of Black Jack and x is of the Mediterranean and x is of the Sultan).  Or should recurrences of phrases involving 'by' and 'of' be omitted? Or retained with differentiating subscripts worn by 'by' and 'of" (e.g., "by,,  'byz', 'by'; 'off, 'ofz, and so on)? And if so, on what principle should the subscripts be distributed? There are several attendant problems and discomforts.  The occurrences of 'by', and some of the occurrences of 'of", seem to signalize a projection into the real world of certain grammatical features, those of being subject or objcet of some verb, which would primarily attach not to things but to words. Then, once the objectifying transference is achieved, the things or people referred to (e.g., Black Jack, the Sultan) become detached from the operation and occurrences signified by the originally associated verbs; so that now it becomes impossible to decide whether it is Black Jack or the Sultan who has been hanged, or who has been humiliated. There are no visible principles for the 'disambiguation' of preposi-tions, a feature which may perhaps arise from an extensional conception of asymmetrical relations as ordered couples without any connotational relation to fix the membership of each couple. G. Towards an Alternative Account of Events  G(I). EVENTS AND 'HAPPENSTANCES': VON WRIGHT'S IDEAS  RESUMED  We might now, perhaps, profitably take a closer look at the views of von Wright. As Davidson remarked, von Wright sees events as transitions between (ordered couples of) an initial state and a terminal state; and, in view of the uncertainty attending the identification of the class of events, it may be worth our while to expand this idea a little. My strategy will be first to display, with illustrative comments, some apparatus which might be useful in presenting a viewpoint akin to that of von Wright; second, to endeavor to put a finger on some weak spots in Davidson's position; and third to consider the possibility of putting the aforementioned apparatus to work in the formulation of a constructivist account of events.  First the apparatus. Let 't' [*t,', 'tz'] represent times (moments, instants).  Let 'ф' [*Ф,', 'ф' represent an attribute which falls under a determinable admitting of variations in degree or magnitude: provision for general attributes other than such determinables, like color, the specifications of which do not differ in degree but rather in kind or sort, could easily be made. A.  (1)  (2)  represents "up to t'  represents ' into t'.  (3)  中  小  represents ' out of t' [from t onwards).  ¢  (4)  (5) →1  ¢  В. (6) '<ф',  '=ф', " >ф' represents '& from t' [@ after t).  represents '$ through t'.  represent  "below  'within  the limits of '  above respectively.  C. (9)  (10)  (11)  (12)  D. (13)  (14)  →t  <ф  →t  り♪  →t  ＜中  t  t  1  d  t  1  中  中  t→  中＞  t-  中ン  >ф  中2  12  ф2  represents 'rising through $ at t  represents 'falling through & at t'.  represents 'peaking through @ at t represents 'bottoming with d at t'.  represents 'rising from d, to 2 within determinable A, from ty to t'-  represents 'falling from d, to z within determinable A, from t, to 1'-  E. (15) A represents a determinable (e.g., velocity).  (16) A-  m+ Acn, A»n represent a sub-determinable of A [e.g., 'a speed of from 40 to 50 mph', 'a speed of less than 50 mph', 'a speed of more than 50 mph'].  (17) A, represents a precise determinate of A.  COMMENTS  We are now, it seems in possession of an apparatus which is capable of representing a certain subelass of what I shall call 'basic events', one which consists of transitions of a subject item between contradictorily opposed states, like being fat and not being fat, or not being 6 feet tall and being 6 feet tall. Let us say that such events as these are 'metabolically expressible'. Metabolically expressible transitions, however, will include not only instantaneous contradictory changes, but also persistent states, like sitting on a bench at noon; the apparatus is equipped to express such absences of change in the notation of A (5). Let us press a linguistic barbarism "hap-penstance" into service to cover not only basic events which are changes but also those which are persistences. It is not clear to me whether Davidson's category of events is supposed to include happenstances which are not changes. The class of basic events could be, and I think should be, thought of as including not only instantancous transition between contradictorily opposed states, but also time-spanning (periodic) transitions between contrarily opposed states (e.g., being 4 feet tall and being 5 feet tall), for the representation of which the patterns listed under (D) will be brought into play. Only thus can we hope to accommodate such events as journeys from San Francisco to New York. [Perhaps one might think of such transactions as being a compact infinite sequence of instantaneous transitions.]  In the case of periodie changes between contraries @, and dz, there will frequently be an indefinitely large plurality of alternative paths which such a change might follow. It will be necessary to make provision in the characterization of some such changes fro the expression of conditions which restrict admissible paths to a subclass of, or even to an individual instance of, the paths which are initially available (as flights are restricted to paths which are aerial). It will, I think, have to be allowed that not all events are basic, some events will not be metabolically expressible as consisting of transitions through a sequence of opposed states. But this admission need not lead us to abandon the idea that basic events are the primitive model for the class of events as a whole, nor even the idea that events which are non-basic derive their status as events from their connection, in one way or another, with events which are basic. One way, for example, in which a non-basic event a might be connected with basic events B,, Bz,.. . might be via causal connection; a consists in a causal connection between its subject-item S and one or more basic events, Bi, B2,... which confer both event-status and temporal position upon a. Obviously, an examination of possible modes of dependence of non-basic events on basic events would be a pressing task for a metaphysician. (6) Should objection be raised to my shift from talking about predicates to talking about attributes, my immediate reply would be twofold. First, that unless there are insuperable objections to the shift, it is extremely desirable to make it. Second, that if the primary objection to the change is that criteria of individuation for attributes are problematical, this objection may well not be insuperable. For example, one might hold (a) that attributes are signified by theoretical predicates in the relevant branch of theory, (b) that there is in general no difficulty in distinguishing one theoretical predicate from another, and (c) that several 'vulgar epithets', which intuitively, are not perfectly synonymous with one another, may be legitimately mapped onto a single theoretical predicate, since the theorist will attempt to capture not all but only some aspects of the intuitive meaning of the epithets which in ordinary speech correspond to the predicates of his theory.  As a tailpiece, it may be remarked that, in many cases, what are to be counted as actions are realized not in events or happenings, but in nonevents or non-happenings. What I do is often a matter of what I do not prevent, what I allow to happen, what I refrain from or abstain from bringing about-what, when it comes about, I ignore or disregard. I do not interrupt my children's chatter; I ignore the conversational intrusions of my neighbor; I omit the first paragraph of the letter I read aloud; I hold my fire when the rabbit emerges from the burrow, and so on. In many cases, my abstentions and refrainings are at least as energy-consuming as the positive actions in which I engage; and their consequences (as for example, when I do not sign exemptions from penalties) may be equally momentous. Often when my actions do involve physical behavior, that behavior is distinguished more by what it does not include than by what it does include; those who preceded the Good Samaritan on the road certainly passed by the injured traveler. So a movement may go equally with not doing things and with doing them.  Such omissions and forbearances might prove an embarrassment to Davidson if the thesis that actions are a subclass of events is to be taken seriously. For he might be forced into the admission of negative events, or negative happenstances, with one entity filling the 'event slot' if on a particular occasion I go to Hawaii (or wear a hat) and another entity filling that slot if on that occasion I do not go to Hawaii (or do not wear a hat).  G(2). THE POSSIBLE AVOIDABILITY OF CITED DRAWBACKS AND GLIMPSES OF A CONSTRUCTIVIST TREATMENT  I come now to the question whether the complications generated by Davidson's proposal are avoidable. It is my view that they are, indeed, that there was never a need to introduce them. One of the avowed purposes, though not the only such purpose, of Davidson's analysis was to provide an explanation of certain patterns of valid inference relating to events, in particular of those inferences connected with *variable polyadicity". I doubt if the analysis does provide an explanation of these inferences, though it may well provide a general classification of some or all of them; that, to my mind, is not the same thing. My doubts may be illustrated by a pair of examples: (a) the statement Martha fell into a ditch, from which it follows that Martha fell, and (b) the statement Martha fell into a trance, from which this conclusion does not follow. It seems to me that the question whether the logical form of one or other of these initial statements is such as to conform to Davidson's pattern of analysis turns on the question whether the initial statement does or does not entail Martha fell, and that, this being so, an exposure of the logical form cannot explain, though it may help to classify, the inference should it in fact hold. To explain the inference, it will be necessary to show why it holds; and this has not so far been done.  I think one might come nearer to an explanation of the inference from Martha fell into a ditch to Martha fell if one observed that Martha fell into a ditch does, while Martha fell into a trance does not, offer us what I might call a "specificatory modification" of Martha fell; it purports to tell us how, in what circumstances, in what context (or such-like) Martha fell, and in virtue of that fact it presupposes, or involves a commitment to, the truth of the statement that Martha fell. Since, in my view, there is no uniquely correct way of specifying the logical form of a statement (the logical form of one and the same statement may be characterized with equal propriety, in different ways for different purposes) it may even be that one characterization of logical form of a conjunctive statement is that of providing a specificatory modification of one of the conjuncts; John arrived and Mary departed might be seen as embodying the attachment of an adverbial modifier ("and Mary departed") to the initial conjunct. It also seems to me that deployment of the idea of specificatory modification would dispel the embarrassments which were noted as arising from the verb-dependence of certain adverbs; whether or not violence in sneezes is the same feature as violence in swearing, 'sneezes violently' or 'swears violently' will offer specificatory modifications, respectively, of sneezing and swearing.  On the assumption that the problems which originally prompted Davidson's analysis are at least on their way towards independent solution, we may now perhaps turn out attention to the possibility of providing a constructivist treatment of events which might perhaps have, for some, more intuitive appeal than the realist approach which I have been attributing to Davidson. We begin with a class H of happenstance-attributions, which will be divided into basic happenstance-attributions, that is, ascriptions to a subject-item of an attribute which is metabolically expressible, and non-basic happenstance-attributions, in which the attributes ascribed, though not themselves metabolically expressible, are such that their possession by a subject-item is suitably related, in one or another of a number of ways yet to be determined, to the possession by that or by some other subject-items, of attributes which are metabolically expressible. The members of class H may be used to say what happens (or happens to be the case) without mentioning or talking about any special entities belonging to a class of happenings or happenstances. The next stage will involve the introduction of a Reichenbach-type operator (like "consists in the fact that") which, when prefixed to a sentence S which makes a happenstance-attribution to a subject-item, yields a predicate which will be satisfied by an entity which is a happenstance, provided that S is true, and provided that some further metaphysical condition (not yet identified) obtains which ensures the metaphysical necessity of the introduction into reality of the category of hap-penstances, thereby ensuring that the 'new' category is not just a class of convenient fictions. In the light of my defense of Reichenbach against Davidson's attack, I can perhaps be reasonably confident that this metaphysical extension of reality will not saddle us with any intolerable paradox.  What the condition would be which would justify the metaphysical extension would remain to be determined; it is tempting to think that it would be connected with a theoretical need to have events (or happenstances) as items in causal relations, or as bearers of other causal properties; while 1 would be disinclined to oppose this idea, I could wish to sound a note of caution. Events do not seem to me to be the prime bearers of causal prop-erties; that I think belongs to enduring, non-episodic things such as sub-stances. To assign a cause is primarily to hold something accountable or responsible for something; and the primary account-holders are substances, not events, which are (rather) relevant items which appear in the accounts.  I suspect that a great deal of the current myopia about causes has arisen from a very un-Aristotelian inattention to the place of Substance in the conception of Cause.  G(3). ESSENTIAL CHARACTERIZATION OF EVENTS  If the suggestions which I have just been outlining should find favor, and events are admitted to reality as constructed entities, it it to my mind tempting to go one step further; this step would involve treating the attributes formed with the aid of a Reichenbachian operator not merely as attributes which happen to be used in the metaphysical construction of events, but as attributes which are constitutive of and so belong essentially to the events in the construction of which they are deployed. The death of Julius Caesar will be an entity whose essential nature consists in, or at least contains, the attribute being an event in which Julius Caesar died; in which case that particular event could not conceivably have lacked that attribute, even though there may be many other attributes which it in fact possesses but might have failed to possess, like the attribute of being the cause of the rise of Augustus. A decision with regard to the suitability of this further step is, I think, connected with the view one takes with regard to the acceptability of one or both of two further ideas. First, the idea that for an item x to be a genuine particular there must be a distinction between (i) what x is in itself (intrinsically) and (ii) how x is related to other things, and also a distinction within what it is itself between what it is essentially and what it is accidentally or non-essentially. Without satisfying these dis-tinctions, x will be characterless, and any features attributed to it will be no more than pale and delusive reflections of verbal descriptions which, in a nominalistic fashion, are thought of as applying to it. Second, the idea that the possession of an essential attribute is achieved only as an aspect of the metaphysical construction of the item which possesses it (or of the category to which that item belongs); or perhaps (less drastically) that only in the case of constructs are essential characteristics unmistakably evident (waiting, so to speak, to be read off), whereas, in the case of non-con-structs, though such characteristics may, or must, exist, their identification involves the solution of a theoretical problem. A combination of the strongest affirmative answers to these questions would yield the possibly wel-come, possibly unwelcome, doctrine that particulars as such are necessarily constructs; other combinations of answers would lead to milder positions.  H. Actions and Events  H(I). THE SPECIAL CHARACTER OF ACTIONS  I begin with two preliminary observations. First, I am inclined to extend to actions the kind of treatment which in the previous section I was, somewhat tentatively, advocating with respect to events or happenstances, namely that one should not merely accord to them an internal as well as an external or relational character, but that within their internal character (what they are like in themselves), we should distinguish what they are like essentially from what they are like accidentally. As I have indicated, I suspect that this move may be required both by the invocation of a distinction between internal and external character, and by the supposition (if we make it as 1 am inclined to do) that actions, no less than events, are metaphysically constructed entities. But even if my theoretical suspicions are unfounded, I think my essentialist inclinations with regard to actions would survive. I also regard them as independent of the yet undecided identity question about actions and events. I do not, of course, expect Davidson to look with a favorable eye on such inclinations.  Second, when Davidson addresses the question of the nature of agency, he suggests that two ingredients are discernible; the first of these is the notion of activity; in action the agent is active what comes about is something which is made by him to come about, of which he is the cause; the second ingredient is that of purpose or design or intention; what comes about comes about as he meant or intended it to come about. This seems to me to be substantially correct, though I am inclined to think that there is a somewhat more illuminating way of presenting it which I shall later attempt to provide. In the meantime, what these ingredients seem to me to indicate is an intimate connection between agency and the will, which I am inclined to explore directly. Again, I suspect that Davidson and I might here part company, on account of his hostility to so-called 'acts of will'.  How then should we see application to the nature of agency of the idea that its essence consists in the exercise of will, at least so far as paradigmatic examples are concerned? Non-paradigmatic cases will be briefly considered later. I am, and what 1 do is, in paradigmatic cases, subject to my will. I impose my will on myself, and my actions are acting only insofar as they are the product of this imposition. This imposition may take various forms, and may relate to various aspects of or elements in the deliberation process.  In many cases explicit exercise of will is confined to the finding of means to the fulfillment of some already selected end. Such cases are relatively undramatic, and are also well-handled in some of the philosophical litera-ture, as for example by Aristotle in the carly chapters of Eth. Nic. If. But sometimes what goes on is more dramatic, as when one needs to select an end from one's established stock of ends, or when the stock or ends itself has to be in some way altered, or (perhaps most dramatically) when an agent is faced with the possibility of backsliding and following the lure of inclination rather than the voice of reason or principle. Particularly in such cases as the last, what takes place in action (paradigmatically) is essentially part of a transaction between a person and a person; I, as a person, treat myself as a person and communicate with myself as a person. The seemingly problematic character of the kind of relation to myself which is evident in action has led some philosophers to separate the participants in such dialogue, as Plato distinguished the rational, appetitive, and spirited elements as distinct parts of the soul; and, again, as Aristotle distinguished the rational parts, one which is rational in the sense of being capable of listening to and following reason, and one which is rational as having the capacity to give reasons and determine rational behavior. But Aristotle hedged on this point, and it seems to me that we do not want a divided self here. Our self-direction is the direction of a whole self by a whole self.  Our internal dialogue contains different sorts of elements; we may counsel ourselves, as when my Oxford tutor, called on the telephone by someone who was plainly a woman, said aloud, "Now keep your head, Meiggs" We may impute responsibility to ourselves for actions or situations, sometimes laudatorily, sometimes chidingly, sometimes in a neutral tone. Primarily the language of our self-direction is forensic; the way in which I impose my will on myself is by self-addressed commands. I lay down what is required of me, by requiring it of myself; I am, so to speak, issuing edicts to someone who in standard circumstances has no choice but to obey. I say "in standard circumstances", which are those in which I have authority over myself, and am responsible for myself. It seems to me arguable that the conception of myself as directing myself is comprehensible only against a background of situations in which I am in a position to direct others.  Analogues of relationships with others, which will entitle me to direct others, have to hold in my relations with myself for me to have authority over myself. Failure of trust in myself, for example, either because I regard myself as incompetent to look after myself, or alternatively as unwilling, because of self-hatred, so to do, will undermine this authority. So self-love and self-concern would be indispensable foundations for self-direction; only the assumption of these elements will enable me to justify to myself the refusal to allow myself indulgences which, in my view, would be bad for me.  I may in conclusion remark that I do not see any prospect of thinking of the story of internal dialogue, self-addressed commands, and authority and commitment as being a picturesque representation of the kinds of causal sequence of desires, beliefs, and intentions of which I think Davidson would suppose agency to consist. The forensic language seems to get no foothold.  However, when we come to non-paradigmatic cases of action, the situation is different. Provided that the cases of action in which will is recognizably present are taken as paradigmatic, it is possible by a procedure which I shall in a moment outline, to regard a multitude of performances in which will is not recognizably present as having a license to be counted as actions.  H(2). ARE ACTIONS A SUBCLASS OF EVENTS?  The foregoing discussion of the essential character of action exerts, I hope, some force towards loosening the grip of the idea that actions are to be thought of as a special subclass of events (or happenstances), but I do not think that it provides an argument which would settle whether or not this idea is correct, its force seems to be to a considerable degree rhetorical.  Such an argument, however, seems at least at first sight to be available.  Consider Nero's activities when Rome burned. One of the things which he could certainly be said to have done was to produce a sequence of bodily movements which, given that he was wielding a bow and fiddle, resulted in the passing of the bow across the strings of the fiddle and in a consequent flow of sounds. But there were at least two further things which Nero could be said to have done on this occasion: one is to have given a performance of the formidably difficult Seneca Chaconne, and the other is to have displayed his contempt for the people of Rome. Now it may be that we are free to regard the passage of the bow across the strings and the sounds thereby generated, or even perhaps Nero's production of these phenomena, as a sequence of events, but it does not look as if we are free to identify these events either with Nero's performance or with Nero's display of con-tempt, or to identify one of these last things with the other. Nero's playing of the Chaconne was (for all we know) masterly and profoundly sensitive, while his behavior vis-à-vis the people of Rome was callous, squalid, and hideous in the extreme; these items are therefore distinct from each other, and also distinct from the physical events involving Nero's body, bow and fiddle, which can hardly be said to have been either masterly and sensitive or callous, squalid, and hideous.  I fear the question at issue is not quite so easily settled, as the following response perhaps demonstrates. First, the epithets ('masterly', 'sensitive",  'callous', 'hideous', etc.) which are, in the example given, applied to what Nero did (however that may be variously described) are all resultant or supervenient, and the features upon which they depend are the specific characteristics of what Nero did, viewed as a fragment of conduct or as a performance. Second, description of what Nero did may simultaneously fulfill two roles, a referential role and a descriptive role. Such combinations are commonplace in ordinary discourse. To say, for example, "Robert's mother would not denounce him to the police" both refers to a particular lady, and at the same time gives a description of her which explains or is otherwise relevant to the presence or absence of the phenomenon mentioned in the predicate. Similarly, specifications of Nero's activity as a fiddler or as a moral agent may serve both to pick out that activity and to do so in a way which is relevant to what is being said about it. Third, where we find occurrences in a single sentence of more than one description fulfilling such a duality of roles, there is in general nothing to prevent the plurality of descriptions from being co-referential; "The composer of the San Francisco Sonata would hardly have forgotten how it goes, and the winner of the Pacific Piano Prize would hardly be unable to play the work" may involve a reference to a single person, Joe Doakes. Finally, the evaluative epithets which are applied to Nero's productions are not inconsistent with one another, and so might truly attach to a single item; sensitivity (and so aesthetic beauty) may be combined with moral hideousness. Nothing then prevents a single item, namely a certain sequence of bodily movements, from being also a certain sort of performance and a certain sort of conduct; nor from being, in each of these capacities (quâ each of these things) differently describable. Such an item may be, quâ performance sensitive and, quâ conduct, hideous; qua bodily movement, however, it is neither of these. It is in such a fashion that the example should be interpreted.  I can, however, think of a line of argument that might be invoked, with possibly better prospects of success, to establish the non-identity of actions with events, in particular with bodily movements. This argument begins with the suggestion that if we wish to identify the central, or essential, character of some kind of item, we should attend to the question why we are interested in items of that sort, and in particular what kind of theory or system we envisage items of that sort as belonging to, and what purpose we consider such a theory or system to serve. In the case of actions, a plausible answer seems to lie in the idea that we are concerned with particular (individual) actions as being crucial to a no doubt complex array of procedures for evaluating people as agents— attention to human actions is the product of a concern to determine in a systematic way what people (including myself are like on the basis of what they do. The notion of action, therefore, will be what is required for actions to provide within the framework of a theory of conduct, a basis for the assessment of the agents to whom they are imputable. But for that purpose the all-important elements are the presence of will directed towards the realization of a state of affairs specially associated with the action, accompanied perhaps by belief or conviction that that state of affairs has been, or is being realized; whether the realization is actually forthcoming seems to be, in comparison, relatively unimportant as far as moral assessment is concerned, though it may be of greater consequence in other related forms of assessment, such as legal assessment. As Kant wrote in the Grundlegung, *Even if it should happen that owing to the special disfavour of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if in its greatest efforts it should yet achieve noth-ing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself"  ", (Abbott edition, p. 11). And, no doubt mutatis mutandis something  comparable could be said about the bad will.  If then, the theoretical interest of actions is detached from the execution or achievement of actual events, it will be reasonable to determine the conception of action in such a way that performing an action is distinct from, and does not require, the actuality of the events or states of affairs which an agent wills or believes himself to have realized; in which case particular actions will be distinct from and will not require, bodily movements or event-sequences.  Indeed we should regard the determination of the categorial features of action as belonging to where Kant would have placed it; belonging, that is, not to the Philosophy of Language but to the Metaphysics of Morals. It is not clear to me that this mode of conception of action is accommodated by Davidson's treatment of action.  H(3). THE POSSIBILITY OF A COHERENTLY FORMULATED  DISTINCTION BETWEEN ACTIONS AND EVENTS  Rather than pursue the question whether such arguments as the one which I have just outlined are successful in establishing the distinctness of actions from events, I shall attend, instead, to the question whether one who accepts this distinctness has a fully coherent story to tell. I shall consider this topic in a series of stages:  (a) If we are to commit ourselves to the idea of distinguishing actions from events, I think that we should state more precisely than has so far been done just what it is to which we are referring when we speak of actions.  One possibility is that we should be talking about action-types, or (as 1 should say) agenda (*things to do"); it will be agenda which, in deliber-ation, we consider adopting, and one or more which, when a decision comes, we actually do adopt. It is conceivable, though not perhaps man-datory, that we license the possibility that different persons may deliberate upon, and in this end adopt, one and the same agendum (e.g., to vote for the re-election of the President, or to compete in the Indianapolis 500). But there are two further possibilities, both of which might justifiably be regarded as particular actions (actions-instances) incapable of being shared by more than one agent. One of these would be examples of the adoption, by a particular person on a particular occasion, of an agendum, whether or not such adoption is completed, or realized, in the realm of events; such action-instances might be called "open" action-instances. The other possible kind of action-instance would be completed action-instances, where realization in the realm of events is demanded. In neither case, however, will it be legitimate to regard the action-instance as identical with an event (hap-penstance) which realizes it.  (b) A further extremely important possibility is visible when we turn our attention to what 1 am treating as non-paradigmatic cases of action. These cases involve the very large class of action-surrogates, which are bodily movements or (alternatively) the making by us of bodily movements, such items being properly deemed to be, or countable as, actions even though (strictly speaking) they are not, at least if they are bodily movements, actions at all. (I shall revert in a moment to the question whether such items are movements, or are makings of movements.) I presume that, in designing the Universe or at least the living segment of it, the imaginary Genitor would be governed by a principle of providing for the highest possible degree of Economy of Effort; such a procedure would not only make his work more elegant, but would be beneficial to the creatures under construction, on the assumption that calculation and concentration of attention involve effort, and that there are to be limitations on the quantity of effort of which a creature is capable at any one time, with the result that the less the effort which is expended, the greater the reserve which is available for emergencies. At least three varieties of unreflective performance might be available in sufficiently advanced creatures as substitutes for paradigmatic reflection and calculated activity: (1) What were once natural (instinctual) performances which then later came to be understood, the reasons for their presence having become apparent and, perhaps, the performances themselves having been in consequence modified. It is on this model that Aristotle, I think, interpreted the relation between natural virtue and virtue proper. (2) Examples when certain forms of behavior have become "Second Nature", without the knowledge on the part of the exhibiting creature of the justification for that behavior. It was in this kind of way that English Public Schools used to foster morality, by beating the boys who broke the rules. (3) Examples in which the behavior which has become Second Nature has become so after, and normally because, the justification for such behavior is understood, and close attention to such justification can in many cases be relaxed; habit will do what is needed.  Perhaps Aristotle's suggestion that we study Ethics in order to be good is based on the idea that type (2) Second Nature, should be if possible replaced by type (3) Second Nature, since only if the underlying justifications of decent behavior are fully recognized by the agent can he earn full credit for the behavior in question. Items which are action-surrogates no doubt owe their status to the fact, or presumed fact, that should an agent encounter difficulties or complications a further reflection machincry may be usually counted on to be called into operation; indeed part of treating people as responsible persons consists in presuming this to be the case; and unless an agent is thought to be under special stress, or to be temporarily or permanently mentally infirm, a failure of this recall to occur tends to be treated as a case of unconscious bad motivation. It is, I hope, also clear that though movements or movement-makings may be properly counted as, or deemed to be, actions of a certain sort, they are not, strictly speaking and in fact, actions of that sort. A certain Oxford college was once embarrassed by a situation in which its newly elected Provost wished to house in his lodgings his old and dearly beloved dog, but in the way of this natural step stood a College statute forbidding the keeping of dogs within the College. The Governing Body ingeniously solved this problem by passing a resolution deeming the Provost's dog a cat. It could only be deemed a cat if it were in fact not a cat. So with actions and action-surrogates.  (c) If an agent does an action, either paradigmatically or via an action surrogate, what he does is something of which he is the cause; that this is so lies at the heart of the concept of agency. But we need to exercise care in the interpretation of the word 'cause'. We need to get away from the kind of employment of the word 'cause' which has become, these days, virtually de rigueur in philosophy [viz., one exemplifying an event-relating, mechanistic, Hume-like conception] into a direction which might well have been congenial to Aristotle. Actions which we perform have ends, which may or may not involve further ends, and which, as Aristotle was aware, may be the expected results or outcomes of actions of which they are the ends, or, again, may themselves be actions, either the same as or different from those whose ends they are. When someone has a preferential concern for some end which would be served by a given agendum, he has cause to perform, or realize, that agendum; and if the agendum is performed by him because he has cause to perform it, then the action is something of which he is the cause, and is explained (though non-predictively explained) by the fact that he had cause to perform it. States which have as their  'intentional' objects propositional contents, or states of affairs more or less closely related to propositional contents, may be divided into (i) those which are factive (those like knowledge, whose instantiation requires the truth, or actuality, of their intentional objects), (ii) those which are counterfactive, like being under the delusion that, which requires the falsity, or non-actual-ity, of their intentional objects, and (iti) those, like belief and hope, where instantiation of the state leaves it an open question whether the intentional object is true or actual, or not. Hume-type causation is factive, having cause to is non-factive, and being the cause of one's own action is factive, but factive in a special way which is divorced from full predictability. We might then say that the uses of 'cause' which are most germane to action are either non-factive ('cause to') or only in a special non-predictive way factive (like 'x was the cause of x's A-ing'). We might also say that, in our preferred mode of conception, actions (like giving Jones a job) are non-factive, in that the performance of this action does not guarantee that Jones actually gets a job. We might also say that, when a particular sequence of movements issues from, or flows from (in a typically unreflective way), an action which an agent has performed, and so realizes that action, the agent has caused,, or is the cause, of, the movements in question. (The numerical subscript will shortly be explained.)  There may indeed be more than one kind of factivity. The kind of factivity which 1 have been discussing might be renamed 'inflexible factivity'; if state s is inflexibly factive, every instantiation of it will require the truth or actuality of , its intentional-object. But there may be states which though not inflexibly factive, are flexibly factive, that is to say, states whose instantiation on any occasion require the general, or normal, or standard truth or actuality of intentional objects of states of that'sort; in such cases, though, truth or actuality of an intentional object of an individual instantiated state is not guaranteed; it may be presumed as something which should be there in the absence of known interference-factors. It is likely, I think, that the items with which we are here specially concerned, like actions and causes (to), though not inflexibly factive are flexibly factive; actions with individual non-realization are possible only against a background of general realization. If this were not so, the 'automatic' bodily realizations which typically supervene upon adopted agenda might not be forthcoming, to the ruin of the concept of action.  (d) I have not yet addressed question whether the items which provide the final realization of actions, and so on occasion function as action-surrogates, are to be supposed to be bodily movements (or sequences thereof) or, alternatively, the makings of such bodily movements (items which we might call 'geometrical' as distinct from 'vulgar' actions). It is my view that this will turn out not to be a question of the highest importance. As we have noted, the sequences of movements involved in the realizations of vulgarly specified actions tend, on the vast majority of occasions other than those in which an agent is learning how to perform some vulgar action, to appear 'automatically' and unreflectively, without attention to the geometric pattern of the movements being made; indeed the acquisition of such unreflective capacities lies at the core of learning how to live in the world. On such occasions, therefore, geometrical actions would be performed through their own action-surrogates, namely the associated bodily movements. This fact has an important bearing on the classical problem of distinguishing or refusing to distinguish my raising my arm from my arm's going up. Various philosophers have looked for the presence, in my raising my arm, of a distinct occurrence, or at least of a distinct observable and introspectable element or feature; and in the case of Prichard this idea formed part of his reason for identifying action with willing. But an example shows this idea to be misguided. A gymnastic instructor is drilling a squad, and gives the order "Raise your right arm"; all the right arms are dutifully elevated. He then says "How many of you actually raised your right arm, and for how many of you was it simply the case that your arm went up?" The oddity of this question indicates that raising the right arm involves no distinguishing observable or introspectible element; all the squad-members were (so to speak) in the same boat, and they all, in fact, raised their arms. What, then, is special about raising one's arm or about making any bodily move-ment? The answer is, I think, that the movement is caused by the agent in the sense that its occurrence is monitored by him; he is aware of what takes place and should something go wrong or should some difficulty arise, he is ready to intervene in order to correct the situation. He sees to it that the appropriate moment is forthcoming. We have then a further interpretation of 'cause' ('cause",  2), namely that of their being monitored by us, in which  we are the cause, of the movement which we make.  (e) It is, finally, essential to give proper attention to the place occupied by the notion of Freedom in any satisfactory account of action. The features noted by Davidson as characteristic of agency, namely activity and purpose (or intention) are perhaps best viewed as elements in a step-by-step development of the concept of freedom. We can distinguish such succession of stages as the following: (1) External, or 'transeunt", causation in inanimate objects, when an object is affected by processes in other objects, (2) Inter-nal, or 'immanent, causation in inanimate objects, where a process in an object is the outcome of previous stages in that process, as in a 'freely moving' body, (3) Internal causation in living things, in which changes are generated in a creature by internal features of the creature which are not earlier stages of the same change, but independent items like beliefs, desires, and emotions, the function (or finality) of which is, in general, to provide for the good of the creature in question, (4) A culminating stage at which the conception in a certain mode by a human creature of something as being for that creature's good is sufficient to initiate in the creature the doing of that thing. At this stage, it is (or at least appears to be) the case that the creature is liberated not merely from external causes, but from all factive causes, being governed instead by reasons, or non-factive causes. It is at this stage that rational activity and intentions appear on the scene. Attention to the idea of freedom will also call for formidably difficult yet indispensable undertakings, such as the search for rational justification for the adoption or abandonment of ultimate ends; whatever the difficulties involved in such enterprises, if they are not fulfilled, our freedom threatens to dissolve into compulsion or chance.  It may be worthwhile to present the issues involved here in a slightly more detailed way, and in doing so to relate them to the question of the adequacy of a "desire/belief" characterization of action, to which many philosophers (including Davidson) are sympathetic. Two initially distinct lines of argument seem to me to be discernible; they may in the end coa-lesce, but perhaps they should initially be kept separate.  Line (A) runs roughly as follows:  Action (full human action) calls for freedom in a specially 'strong' sense of 'freedom'. At least at first sight, the offerings of the desire/belief analysis of action are insufficient to provide for 'strong' freedom; the most they can give us is a notion of freedom which consists in the determination of my actions by their recognized conduciveness to my own ends, rather than by an imposed conduciveness to the ends of others (com-pulsion), or by the operation of undirected natural necessity. 'Strong' freedom would ensure that some actions may be represented as directed to ends which are not merely mine, but which are also freely adopted or pursued by me. (3) Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to the introduction of chance or causal indetermination will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the moral philosopher.  (4) The precise nature of 'strong' freedom remains to be determined; but it might perhaps turn out to consist in, or at least to involve the idea of action as the outcome of a certain kind of 'strong' valuation, which would include the rational selection of ultimate ends and would, therefore, be beyond the reach of the desire/belief analysis of action.  Line (B) proceeds thus:  (1) Action (full human action) calls for the presence, in at least some cases, of reasons, and these in turn require that the actions for which they account should be the outcome of 'strong' rational valuation which, in the case of ends, will not be restricted to valuation by reference to some ulterior end. (2) This last demand the desire/belief theory is unable to meet, since the ends which it deploys are treated as pre-given ends of the agent.  This feature is not eliminable within the theory, since the account of rationality offered by the theory depends on its presence.  Taken together, lines (A) and (B) suggest first that action requires both strong freedom and strong valuation, second that the desire/belief theory is in no position to provide either member of this pair, and third that each member of the pair involves the other.  A possible attempt to reduce the desire/belief theory from such attacks should be briefly mentioned, which might take approximately the following form.  In the case of ultimate ends, justification should be thought of as lying (directly, at least) in some outcome not of their fulfillment but rather of their presence as ends. My having such-and-such an end, or such-and-such a combination of ends, would be justified by showing that my having this end, or combination of ends, will exhibit some desirable feature or features (for example, in the case of a combination of ends, that the combination is one which, unlike some combinations, would be harmonious). This will put the desire/belief theory back in business at a higher level, since the suggestions would involve an appeal, in the justification of ends, to higher-order ends which would be realized by having first-order ends, or lower-order ends of a certain sort. Such valuation of lower-order ends would lie within reach of the desire/ belief theory. Whether such an attempt to defend the desire/belief theory would in the end prove successful i shall not here attempt to determine. I shall confinc myself to observing that the road is by no means yet clear; for seemingly the higher-order ends involved in the defense would themselves stand in need of justification, and the regress thus started might well turn out to be vicious.  So, attention to the idea of freedom may lead us to the need to resolve or dissolve the most important unsolved problem in philosophy, namely how we can be at one and the same time members both of the phenomenal and of the noumenal world; or, to put the issue less cryptically, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the scientific part which calls (or seems to call) for the universal reign of deterministic law, and that other part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but every varicty of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign. We are to enquire what metaphysics is, what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that the question is one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, dispassionately. Many people think that the essential task of philosophers is to provide metaphysical doctrines; some even say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers.  But many people,  including many philosophers,  think that all metaphysical doctrines are spurious; some have even called them meaningless. Metaphysics has a unique power to attract or repel, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand, an impatient condemnation on the other.  All the  more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and dispassionate account.  The name of the subject is the name given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle described the subject of his treatise as the science of Being as such, a supremely general study of existence or reality,  distinct from any of the special sciences and more fundamental than they. He argued that there must be such a science; since each of the special sciences, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, made use in common with all the others of certain quite general notions, such as those of identity and difference,    unity and plurality. Such common notions as these would provide the topics of the general science of being, while various different kinds of existence or reality, each with its own peculiar features provided the subject matter of the more departmental studies.  The conception of metaphysics as a supremely general study which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one. We find it, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. But some metaphysicians could have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject without sharing Kant's or Descartes' concern with the foundations of science. Bradley is an example.  He says: 'We may agree, perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a whole'. This agrees with Aristotle in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley would say, fragmentary studies. The  'attempt to know reality' sounds something like 'the study of being as such'. And both would agree on the task of discovering 'first principles'. But Bradley would have ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at the presuppositions or foundations of science.  Some contemporary accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. He says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a pointed paradox,which uses language in a disturbing and even shocking way in order to make us aware of hidden differences and resemblances in things - differences and resemblances hidden by our ordinary ways of talk-ing. Of course Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one. Perhaps it should itself be seen as an illuminating paradox. In any case, its relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter is not obvious.  But perhaps  a relation can be established.  Certainly not all metaphysical statements are paradoxes serving to call attention to usually unnoticed differences and resemblances. For many metaphysical statements are so obscure that it takes long training before their meaning can be grasped, whereas a paradox must operate with familiar con-cepts; for the essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock people when they are standing on such unfamiliar ground that they have no particular expectations. Nevertheless there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise the differences between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by argument to the effect that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since themind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, then indeed it is clearly a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly seen as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics -  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appear-ance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of their enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical.  But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive in so far as there were no elements of reality to which the theory did not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory were interdependent; that is to say, if the proposi-tions of the theory were not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system in which from a limited number of axioms one could derive, as logical consequences, the remaining propositions of the theory; and it is notable that some seventeenth-century rationalist metaphysicians thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It might be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, then science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics, which is certainly systematic enough, might be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though physics might be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. Physical laws may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way organisms develop, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the biologist. So we can still regard physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless particular sciences are too independent of one another for science as a whole to count as a single system.  Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a dis-  tinction between metaphysics and science.  It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences mightadvance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent biological phenomena as obeying laws which were only special cases of physical laws. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brought certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of gases as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about gases. Such a unification and systematization of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be logically im-possible, though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it were to occur; one would still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a metaphysical system.  This refusal would not be the result of mere pre-judice. Just because the universal systematized science was science, it would not be metaphysics.  For even the most general and basic laws it contained would ultimately depend for their acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of a metaphysical system. The methods of science, the tests for acceptability of scientific laws, remain quitedifferent from the methods of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of metaphysical principles. So we have here a further question. For even though it is true that the most general laws or axioms of a unified science would not count as metaphysics, it is also true that many metaphysicians have thought it at least a part of their task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how they conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundations and scientific superstructure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general laws of nature.  Many metaphysicians did not explicitly ask themselves this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if they had. But there are ex-ceptions. One of them is Kant. He thought there were certain principles which had a quite special place in knowledge, in that they stated the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, was possible.  These principles were not themselves a part of science.  Rather, they embodied the conditions of the possibility of science, and of ordinary everyday knowledge too, for that matter. It was an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental ideas these principles involved, and what the principles themselves were; and also to prove that they had this peculiar character. For this was the only kind of proof of which they were sus-ceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doc-trine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositionsof science, and not merely its most general part.  Yet the shortcomings were important. Kant's fundamental principles varied greatly in character ; and very few would now agree that they embodied general presuppositions of the possibility of scientific knowledge. And most would now be very sceptical of the possibility of establishing any rival set of principles with just this status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principles which were, in something like Kant's sense, the pre-suppositions, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. And this was in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics: the metaphysician exposed the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. He might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering new directions in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Col-lingwood. There is at least some analogy between his views and those, for example, of Carnap, who was once a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between questions which arise within a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and questions which are sometimes raised about that framework or system. Questions of the first sort belong to the field of some science or of everyday life, and areanswered by the methods appropriate to those fields.  Questions of the latter sort have traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of questions about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus philosophers have asked whether there really existed such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics were real, and so on. But such questions can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as metaphysical assertions, as opposed to metaphysical decisions. The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding metaphysicians as engaged in a kind of propaganda on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things.  At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenthcentury, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Berkeley, it was minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume was inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was individual sense-impressions and images.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God or Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. He, unlike Berkeley and Hume, was a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathe-matics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science was the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceived of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thought that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possessed were spatial char-acteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world were also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general was a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is de-ductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ontology, in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognized just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world were their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real char-acteristics.  Second, Descartes recognized minds, or  mental substances, of which the essential characteristic was thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, was conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive con-sequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant,as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such prefer-ence. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types and not between them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, was declared by him to be ultimately only appear-ance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not and cannot know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality was perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality was of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant was a very ambitious metaphysician, who sought to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a con-  cern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. In thenineteenth century, for example, when history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers as science had done in the seventeenth century, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies.  Thus the historically minded metaphysician searches for the true nature of historical explanation and con-cludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same con-cept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoured one type of historical explanation by making it the foundation of his system; and it was this system that Marx turned upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel had, and were intended to have, implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: moral conclusions about how we ought to behave are to follow from metaphysical premises about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinozaprovides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and heightens its prestige.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but commands, moral  imperatives. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if pre-carious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence were peculiarly his own. He thought he could demonstrate that reality mustexhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of pheno-mena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality trans-cendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of  quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philo-sophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that material object exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in whichit is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, there-  fore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the material world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which material things present to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there were milk bottles on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really are milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptive-ness as the sense-impressions with which we started ; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the material world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the material world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of material object, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to material objects, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that all claims to knowledge of the material world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the material world, for example, would be to maintain that material objects may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experi-ence. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between realityand appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of material objects. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up.  A very different type of response to the problem was Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about material objects incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted ; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Tran-scendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduc-tion.* For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and material objects by maintaining that material objects are just collections or families of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they havesuggested that sentences about material objects are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about material objects; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is  pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of transcendental hypotheses, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but if he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as beingthe only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, then he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures.  The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such em-phasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is im-possible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It will be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject in the essays that follow. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganize the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual revision which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such revisions are often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity,reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localized disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map. H. P. Grice I am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy.   It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the essential task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine.  Some even go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy!   But *other* philosophers think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious.    Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification.     Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other.    All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account.    As it happens, the name of the subject is the name given to a treatise by Aristotle.     And Aristotle described the subject of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from— and more fundamental than— any such *special* — and thus less generic — science..     With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science.    Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use in common with all the others of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality.     Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being  or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts  of, say, existence or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject matter of the more departmental studies.    This conception of metaphysics as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.     We find this conception of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    But, whereas some metaphysicians could have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such.    Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says:     “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to know reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truths, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.”    Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study.    Bradley’s attempt to know reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse.    And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel  if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle.    But, as a trueblooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at the presuppositions or foundations of science!    Some contemporary accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these.    Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement.     Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood.    A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox,which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way in order to make us aware of hidden differences and resemblances in things - differences and resemblances hidden by our ordinary ways of talking, as we do at Oxford.    Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.     Indeed it’s been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox.     In any case, Wisdkm’s characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter is far from obvious.    But perhaps a relation can be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradoxe serving to call attention to usually unnoticed differences and resemblances.     For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure that it takes long training before their meaning can be grasped.    By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts.    The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations!    Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox.     Suppose we consider the paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise the differences between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by argument to the effect that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since themind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, then indeed it is clearly a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly seen as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics -  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appear-ance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of their enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical.  But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive in so far as there were no elements of reality to which the theory did not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory were interdependent; that is to say, if the proposi-tions of the theory were not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system in which from a limited number of axioms one could derive, as logical consequences, the remaining propositions of the theory; and it is notable that some seventeenth-century rationalist metaphysicians thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It might be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, then science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics, which is certainly systematic enough, might be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though physics might be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. Physical laws may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way organisms develop, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the biologist. So we can still regard physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless particular sciences are too independent of one another for science as a whole to count as a single system.  Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a dis-  tinction between metaphysics and science.  It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences mightadvance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent biological phenomena as obeying laws which were only special cases of physical laws. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brought certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of gases as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about gases. Such a unification and systematization of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be logically im-possible, though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it were to occur; one would still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a metaphysical system.  This refusal would not be the result of mere pre-judice. Just because the universal systematized science was science, it would not be metaphysics.  For even the most general and basic laws it contained would ultimately depend for their acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of a metaphysical system. The methods of science, the tests for acceptability of scientific laws, remain quitedifferent from the methods of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of metaphysical principles. So we have here a further question. For even though it is true that the most general laws or axioms of a unified science would not count as metaphysics, it is also true that many metaphysicians have thought it at least a part of their task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how they conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundations and scientific superstructure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general laws of nature.  Many metaphysicians did not explicitly ask themselves this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if they had. But there are ex-ceptions. One of them is Kant. He thought there were certain principles which had a quite special place in knowledge, in that they stated the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, was possible.  These principles were not themselves a part of science.  Rather, they embodied the conditions of the possibility of science, and of ordinary everyday knowledge too, for that matter. It was an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental ideas these principles involved, and what the principles themselves were; and also to prove that they had this peculiar character. For this was the only kind of proof of which they were sus-ceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doc-trine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositionsof science, and not merely its most general part.  Yet the shortcomings were important. Kant's fundamental principles varied greatly in character ; and very few would now agree that they embodied general presuppositions of the possibility of scientific knowledge. And most would now be very sceptical of the possibility of establishing any rival set of principles with just this status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principles which were, in something like Kant's sense, the pre-suppositions, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. And this was in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics: the metaphysician exposed the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. He might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering new directions in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Col-lingwood. There is at least some analogy between his views and those, for example, of Carnap, who was once a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between questions which arise within a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and questions which are sometimes raised about that framework or system. Questions of the first sort belong to the field of some science or of everyday life, and areanswered by the methods appropriate to those fields.  Questions of the latter sort have traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of questions about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus philosophers have asked whether there really existed such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics were real, and so on. But such questions can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as metaphysical assertions, as opposed to metaphysical decisions. The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding metaphysicians as engaged in a kind of propaganda on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things.  At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenthcentury, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Berkeley, it was minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume was inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was individual sense-impressions and images.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God or Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. He, unlike Berkeley and Hume, was a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathe-matics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science was the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceived of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thought that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possessed were spatial char-acteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world were also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general was a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is de-ductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ontology, in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognized just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world were their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real char-acteristics.  Second, Descartes recognized minds, or  mental substances, of which the essential characteristic was thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, was conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive con-sequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant,as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such prefer-ence. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types and not between them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, was declared by him to be ultimately only appear-ance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not and cannot know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality was perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality was of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant was a very ambitious metaphysician, who sought to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a con-  cern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. In thenineteenth century, for example, when history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers as science had done in the seventeenth century, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies.  Thus the historically minded metaphysician searches for the true nature of historical explanation and con-cludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same con-cept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoured one type of historical explanation by making it the foundation of his system; and it was this system that Marx turned upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel had, and were intended to have, implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: moral conclusions about how we ought to behave are to follow from metaphysical premises about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinozaprovides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and heightens its prestige.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but commands, moral  imperatives. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if pre-carious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence were peculiarly his own. He thought he could demonstrate that reality mustexhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of pheno-mena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality trans-cendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of  quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philo-sophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that material object exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in whichit is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, there-  fore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the material world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which material things present to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there were milk bottles on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really are milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptive-ness as the sense-impressions with which we started ; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the material world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the material world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of material object, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to material objects, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that all claims to knowledge of the material world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the material world, for example, would be to maintain that material objects may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experi-ence. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between realityand appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of material objects. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up.  A very different type of response to the problem was Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about material objects incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted ; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Tran-scendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduc-tion.* For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and material objects by maintaining that material objects are just collections or families of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they havesuggested that sentences about material objects are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about material objects; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is  pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of transcendental hypotheses, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but if he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as beingthe only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, then he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures.  The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such em-phasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is im-possible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It will be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject in the essays that follow. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganize the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual revision which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such revisions are often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity,reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localized disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map. H. P. GriceI am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the *essential* task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine. Some even would go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy! But then *other* philosophers go and think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious. Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification. Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm, on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other. All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account. As it happens, the rather odd *name* of the subject is the ‘tote’ given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle describes the *subject* or topic of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from — and more fundamental than —  any such *special* — and thus less generic — science. With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science. Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use, in common with all the others, of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality. Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being, or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts of, say, existence, or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject-matter of the more departmental studies. This conception of metaphysics, as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf. ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.  We find this conception of theme of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    Granted, some metaphysicians may have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s, concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such. Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says: “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to *know* reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truth, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.” Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study. Bradley’s attempt ‘to *know* reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse. And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle. But, as a true-blooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at this or that presupposition or foundation of science! Some other accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it, at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood. A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox, which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way — in order to make us aware of some hidden difference or some hidden resemblance in this or that thing - a differences or a resemblance hidden by our ordinary way of talking, as we do at Oxford. Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.  Indeed it has been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox. In any case, Wisdom's characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter, is far from obvious. But perhaps a relation *can* be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradox serving to call attention to some usually unnoticed difference or resemblance. For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure to take quite some ‘training’ in Philosophese, before its meaning can be grasped. By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts. The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations! Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the Philosopher’s Paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise any difference between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by an argument to the effect, say, that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since the mind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, indeed it is *clearly* a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly interpreted as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, or of talking about things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics —  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appearance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of the metaphysical enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in the Philosopher’s Paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical. But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive, in so far as there is no element of reality to which the theory does not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory are inter-dependent; that is to say, if the propositions of the theory are not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system, in which, from a limited number of axioms, one derives, as a logical consequence, any remaining proposition of the theory; and it is notable that some rationalist metaphysicians indeed thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It may be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics —- if not Stone-Age Physics — which is certainly systematic enough, may be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though Stone-Age Physics may be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. A Physical law may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way an organism develops, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the physiologist — or the biologist, or even the physician. So we can still regard Stone-Age physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless any particular science is too independent of any other for science as a whole to count as a single system.  But cf. scientism, or the devil of it. Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a distinction between metaphysics and stone-age science. It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences may advance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of physiology or biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent this of that physiological or biological phenomena as obeying this of that law which is only a special case of a law of  physics. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brings certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of a gas as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about a gas. Such a unification and systematisation of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be *logically*, or as I prefer, conceptually impossible, — — cf. the devil of ANTI-scientism — though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it is to occur. Some metaphysician might still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a ‘metaphysical’ system.  This refusal would not be the result of a purist’s mere prejudice. Just because the universal systematised science is stone-age science, it would not be stone-age metaphysics. For even the most general and basic law stone-age physics contains would ultimately depend for its acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment, in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of  say, Bradley’s metaphysical system — who would rather be seen dead than at at a lab — such as a lab doesn’t exist at Oxford! The methods of stone-age physics and a fortiori science, the tests for acceptability of this or that stone-scientific or physical law, remains quite different from the method of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of this or that metaphysical first principle. So we have here a further question. For even though it *is* true that the most general law or axioms of a unified stone-age physics or science would _not_ — never!? Hardly ever — count as metaphysics, it is also true that many a metaphysician has thought it at least a part of his task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of stone-age ohysics or science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how such a meta-physician conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundation and the stone-physical or scientific super-structure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general law of nature. Not every metaphysician explicitly asks himself this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if he has. But there are exceptions. One of them is Kant. Kat thinks that there is a certain principle which has a quite special place in knowledge, in that the principle states the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, is possible.  This principles is not itself a part of stone-age physics or science.  Rather, the principle embodies the conditions of the possibility of stone-age physics of science, and of ordinary every-day knowledge as expressed in ordinary language  too, for that matter. It is an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental idea this principle involves, and what the principle itself is; and also to prove that it has this peculiar character. For this is the only kind of proof of which if was susceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doctrine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositions of stone-age physics or science, and not merely its most general part. And the shortcomings *are* important. Kant's fundamental principle varies greatly in character; and very few metaphysician would agree to-day that it embodies the general presupposition of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Most metaphysician would be today pretty sceptical about the very possibility of establishing any rival principle with just that status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principle which is, in something like Kant's sense, the presupposition, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. This is in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics. The metaphysician exposes the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood or Foucault, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. The metaphysician might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering this or that direction in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Collingwood. There is at least some analogy between Collingwood’s views and those, for example, of Carnap, a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between a question which arises *within* a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and a question which may be on occasion raised about that framework or system. A question of the first sort belongs to the field of some science or of everyday life, and is answered by the methods appropriate to this or that field. A question of the latter sort has traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of a question about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus a meta-physician may have asked whether there really existe such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics are real, and so on. But such a question can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as a metaphysical assertion, as opposed to a metaphysical *decision* — a different, practical  buletic — not alethic — mood! The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding the metaphysician as engaged in a kind of propaganda —- typically at Cambridge  where they take stone-age physics more seriously than we do af Oxford — on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things. At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenth century, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Bishop Berkeley, it is minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume is inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was the individual sense-impression and the image.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God *or* Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, Descartes is a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathematics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science is the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceives of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thinks that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possess are spatial characteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world are also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general is a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is deductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ‘ontology,’ in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognizes just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world are their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real characteristics.  Second, Descartes recognised the mind, at least his own, or a mental substance, of which the essential characteristic is thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, is conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive consequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant, as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such preference. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types, and not *between* them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, is declared by Kant to be ultimately only appearance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not — and cannot — know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality is perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality is of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant is a very ambitious metaphysician, who seeks to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a concern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. When history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers such as Croce, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies. Think Collingwood! Thus the historically-minded metaphysician would search for the true nature of historical explanation and concludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same concept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoures one type of historical explanation, by making it the foundation of his system; and it is this system that Marx turns upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel ard intended to have implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many other different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: a moral conclusion about how we ought to behave is to follow from a metaphysical premise about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinoza provides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and *heightens its prestige*.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but a command, a moral imperative. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if precarious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence are peculiarly his own. He thinks he can demonstrate that reality must exhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of phenomena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality transcendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philosophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that thing exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in which it is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, therefore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which this or that thing presents to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there is a milk bottle on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really is a milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptiveness as the sense-impressions with which we started; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of thing, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to this of that thing, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that any claim to knowledge of the world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the world, for example, would be to maintain that a thing may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experience. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between reality and appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of this or that thing. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up. A very different type of response to the problem is Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about this or that thing incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Transcendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduction. For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and the thing by maintaining that a thing is just a collection or family of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they have suggested that sentences about a thing are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about a thing; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of a transcendental hypothesis, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but IF he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as being the only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures. The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such emphasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is impossible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It may be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganise the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual *revision* which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such a revision is often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity, reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localised disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map — unless he describes it, by analysing with systematic botanic skills  the ways we, at Oxford, talk!  H. P. GriceI am to enquire what metaphysics *is* — what distinguishes metaphysics from the rest of philosophy. It seems likely that that question is, as Heidegger well knew, one which it is particularly difficult to answer neutrally, or dispassionately.   Not a few philosophers, at Oxford even, think that the *essential* task for a philosopher is to provide this or that metaphysical doctrine. Some even would go on to say that this is the only justification for the existence of philosophers — if not philosophy! But then *other* philosophers go and think that every metaphysical doctrine is spurious. Some, even at Oxford, have even called every metaphysical doctrine meaningless — or lacking in signification. Metaphysics has thus a unique power to attract — or repel, or, to use a different disjunction, to encourage an uncritical enthusiasm, on the one hand, and an impatient condemnation on the other. All the more reason for giving, if possible, a neutral and *dispassionate* account. As it happens, the rather odd *name* of the subject is the ‘tote’ given to a treatise by Aristotle. And Aristotle describes the *subject* or topic of his treatise as the *science* of being as such — *esse* qua esse — or a supremely general or generic study of existence or reality, as distinct from — and more fundamental than —  any such *special* — and thus less generic — science. With Parmenides, Aristotle argues that there *must* be such a science. Each of the sciences which are more specific, besides having its own peculiar subject matter, makes use, in common with all the others, of this or that quite generic notion, such as that of identity, or difference, or unity and plurality. Such a set of common, generic, notions or tags or labels as these  — is, is identical to, etc. — would provide the shopping list of topics of this generic science — of being, or esse qua esse — while various different kinds or sorts of, say, existence, or reality — realia —  each with its own peculiar features, would provide the subject-matter of the more departmental studies. This conception of metaphysics, as a supremely general study of esse qua esse — cf. ethics as the science of bonum qua bonum — which is somehow presupposed by the special sciences, is a fairly enduring one.  We find this conception of theme of a discourse on esse qua esse, for example, though with variations, in Descartes, Leibniz and Kant — not to mention Carnap!    Granted, some metaphysicians may have agreed with Aristotle about the comprehensive and general and ultimate nature of their subject, they would have opposed Descartes's, or Kant’s, concern with the role of a metaphysical doctrine in the foundation of science as such. Bradley is a good example.    Bradley indeed says: “We may agree, perhaps, to understand by ‘metaphysics’ any attempt to *know* reality — or realia — as against mere appearance, or the study of the first principle,  or the ultimate truth, or the Absolute, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piece-meal, or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.” Bradley’s characterisation thus agrees with Aristotle’s in contrasting metaphysics with departmental or, as Bradley has it, any vulgar fragmentary study. Bradley’s attempt ‘to *know* reality' sounds something like Aristotle’s study of esse qua esse. And both Aristotle and Bradley would, indeed with Plato and Hegel if nor Kant, agree on the task of discovering the first principle. But, as a true-blooded Oxonian, Bradley would have very much ridiculed the idea that he was concerned to get at this or that presupposition or foundation of science! Some other accounts of metaphysics sound, on the face of it, at least, very different from either of these. Consider, for example, from The Other Place, Wisdom's description of a metaphysical statement. Wisdom, slightly out of the blue — that’s Cambridge forya — says that a metaphysical proposition is, characteristically, a sort of an illuminating falsehood. A metaphysical sentence is, in Moorean parlance, a pointed paradox, which uses the English language in a disturbing and even shocking way — in order to make us aware of some hidden difference or some hidden resemblance in this or that thing - a differences or a resemblance hidden by our ordinary way of talking, as we do at Oxford. Of course, Wisdom is not not claiming this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.  Indeed it has been seen as a pearl, a wise illuminating … paradox. In any case, Wisdom's characterisation of a metaphysical sentence, in relation to Aristotle's, or Bradley's, account of the matter, is far from obvious. But perhaps a relation *can* be established.    Certainly, not every metaphysical sentence is a paradox serving to call attention to some usually unnoticed difference or resemblance. For one, a metaphysical sentence — think Heidegger — may so obscure to take quite some ‘training’ in Philosophese, before its meaning can be grasped. By contrast, a paradox must operate with familiar concepts. The essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock a philosophy pupil if he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations! Nevertheless, there is a connection between metaphysics and Wisdom's kind of paradox. Suppose we consider the Philosopher’s Paradox that everyone is really always alone. Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram — rather a flat one — about the human condition. It might be said, at least, to minimise any difference between being by oneself and being with other people. But now consider it, not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of argument: by an argument to the effect, say, that what passes for knowledge of each other's mental processes is, at best, unverifiable conjecture, since the mind and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations. When the solitude-affirming paradox is seen in the context of a general theory about minds and bodies and the possibilities and limits of knowledge, when it is seen as embodying such a theory, indeed it is *clearly* a metaphysical statement. But the fact that the statement is most clearly interpreted as metaphysical in such a setting does not mean that there is no metaphysics at all in it when it is deprived of the setting.  'Everyone is really alone' invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at things, or of talking about things, and hints that the changed view we get is the truer, the profounder, view. And part of Bradley's characterization of metaphysics —  'the attempt to know reality as against mere appearance' — seems to herald a general invitation to a general change of view, which will also be a change to a profounder view. We may surmise, perhaps, that the attempt to secure that comprehensiveness, which both Aristotle and Bradley find characteristic of the metaphysical enquiry, leads often enough to those shifts of view, expressible in the Philosopher’s Paradox, which Wisdom finds characteristically metaphysical. But what exactly is the meaning of the requirement that metaphysics should yield a comprehensive system of reality? A theory about the nature of reality might be held to be comprehensive, in so far as there is no element of reality to which the theory does not apply; and might be held to be systematic if the propositions comprised in the theory are inter-dependent; that is to say, if the propositions of the theory are not divided into a number of independent groups. An extreme case of something systematic in the required sense would be a deductive system, in which, from a limited number of axioms, one derives, as a logical consequence, any remaining proposition of the theory; and it is notable that some rationalist metaphysicians indeed thought of metaphysics as constituting a deductive system. It may be objected that if we are to understand in this way the idea of a comprehensive and systematic account of reality, science as a whole, or even some particular science, would qualify as metaphysics; for example, physics —- if not Stone-Age Physics — which is certainly systematic enough, may be said to deal with the whole of reality.  But this  objection has little force. For though Stone-Age Physics may be said to be concerned with the whole of reality, it could not be said to be concerned with every aspect or feature of reality. A Physical law may govern, for example, part of the behaviour of living bodies; but if we wish to know about the way an organism develops, we have to go, not to the physicist, but to the physiologist — or the biologist, or even the physician. So we can still regard Stone-Age physics as insufficiently comprehensive to qualify as meta-physics. And though science as a whole might be thought to be comprehensive, in that every aspect of reality falls under some particular science or other, nevertheless any particular science is too independent of any other for science as a whole to count as a single system.  But cf. scientism, or the devil of it. Nevertheless a difficulty remains in drawing a distinction between metaphysics and stone-age science. It is  perhaps not inconceivable that the sciences may advance to a point at which it would be possible to recast the whole of science as a single system. For example, after enormous strides within biology itself, it might perhaps become possible to reinterpret the basic concepts of physiology or biology in terms of the concepts of physics, and so represent this of that physiological or biological phenomena as obeying this of that law which is only a special case of a law of  physics. What is here envisaged is, roughly speaking, a very large-scale version of the unification effected by the Kinetic Theory of Gases, which brings certain seemingly independent laws concerning gases within a single wider system, by exhibiting them as special cases of dynamical laws. This result was achieved, roughly, by thinking of a gas as being composed of particles, and redefining, in terms of the properties of the particles, certain concepts involved in the laws about a gas. Such a unification and systematisation of the whole of science is of course, at present, the wildest of dreams, and may even be *logically*, or as I prefer, conceptually impossible, — — cf. the devil of ANTI-scientism — though it has not been shown to be so.  But suppose it is to occur. Some metaphysician might still surely refuse to call the resulting systematized science, or even the most general part of it, a ‘metaphysical’ system.  This refusal would not be the result of a purist’s mere prejudice. Just because the universal systematised science is stone-age science, it would not be stone-age metaphysics. For even the most general and basic law stone-age physics contains would ultimately depend for its acceptability upon the results of observation and experiment, in a way which is quite uncharacteristic of the principles of  say, Bradley’s metaphysical system — who would rather be seen dead than at at a lab — such as a lab doesn’t exist at Oxford! The methods of stone-age physics and a fortiori science, the tests for acceptability of this or that stone-scientific or physical law, remains quite different from the method of metaphysics and the test for acceptability of this or that metaphysical first principle. So we have here a further question. For even though it *is* true that the most general law or axioms of a unified stone-age physics or science would _not_ — never!? Hardly ever — count as metaphysics, it is also true that many a metaphysician has thought it at least a part of his task to lay, or to lay bare, the foundations of stone-age ohysics or science. We must ask, then, how we are to conceive, or how such a meta-physician conceived, of the relations between the metaphysical foundation and the stone-physical or scientific super-structure.  That relation, it is clear,  is not to be understood simply as the relation of the most general to less general law of nature. Not every metaphysician explicitly asks himself this question, nor is it clear what answer they would have given if he has. But there are exceptions. One of them is Kant. Kat thinks that there is a certain principle which has a quite special place in knowledge, in that the principle states the conditions under which alone scientific knowledge of nature, considered as a spatio-temporal system, is possible.  This principles is not itself a part of stone-age physics or science.  Rather, the principle embodies the conditions of the possibility of stone-age physics of science, and of ordinary every-day knowledge as expressed in ordinary language  too, for that matter. It is an important part of the metaphysician's task to discover what fundamental idea this principle involves, and what the principle itself is; and also to prove that it has this peculiar character. For this is the only kind of proof of which if was susceptible. Whatever the shortcomings of Kant's doctrine, it at least gives a clear meaning to saying that metaphysics is concerned with the presuppositions of stone-age physics or science, and not merely its most general part. And the shortcomings *are* important. Kant's fundamental principle varies greatly in character; and very few metaphysician would agree to-day that it embodies the general presupposition of the possibility of scientific knowledge. Most metaphysician would be today pretty sceptical about the very possibility of establishing any rival principle with just that status. A more acceptable notion might be that of a body of ideas or principle which is, in something like Kant's sense, the presupposition, not of scientific knowledge in general, but of a particular kind of scientific enquiry, or of the science of a particular time. This is in fact Collingwood's idea of the nature of meta-physics. The metaphysician exposes the presuppositions of the science of a particular epoch. Only we need not, like Collingwood or Foucault, think of the metaphysician just as an archaeologist of thought. The metaphysician might also be, as he has often intended to be and sometimes has been, a revolutionary, fostering this or that direction in scientific discovery rather than uncovering the foundations of scientific remains.  This line of thought about metaphysics is not peculiar to a relatively traditional thinker like Collingwood. There is at least some analogy between Collingwood’s views and those, for example, of Carnap, a member of the philosophically radical Vienna Circle. Carnap draws a sharp distinction between a question which arises *within* a given system of concepts, or framework of ideas, and a question which may be on occasion raised about that framework or system. A question of the first sort belongs to the field of some science or of everyday life, and is answered by the methods appropriate to this or that field. A question of the latter sort has traditionally appeared in metaphysics in the misleading form of a question about the reality or existence of some very general class of entities corresponding to the fundamental ideas of the system of concepts in question.  Thus a meta-physician may have asked whether there really existe such things as numbers, whether the space-time points of physics are real, and so on. But such a question can be significantly understood only as raising the practical issue of whether or not to embrace and use a given conceptual scheme or framework of ideas. To answer affirmatively, according to Carnap, is simply to adopt such a framework for use, and hence to give shape or direction to a whole field of enquiry.  Carnap's view of the matter might seem to make it mysterious that there should be such things as a metaphysical assertion, as opposed to a metaphysical *decision* — a different, practical  buletic — not alethic — mood! The mystery could be solved in principle by regarding the metaphysician as engaged in a kind of propaganda —- typically at Cambridge  where they take stone-age physics more seriously than we do af Oxford — on behalf of some conceptual scheme, the acceptance of which is obscurely felt to be a presupposition of the development of science in a particular direction. Like all forms of propaganda, conceptual or metaphysical propaganda is liable to involve distortion and exaggeration. As Carnap's remarks suggest, one form which conceptual advocacy is liable to take is the entering of a strong claim for the status of reality on behalf of some general class of entities, together with a disposition to deny this status to other, less favoured things. At least  from Aristotle's time till the end of the eighteenth century, the traditional honorific title for things declared to be real, or ultimately real, was that of substance. So we constantly find the entities favoured in any particular metaphysical system being accorded the rank of substances, while everything else is given some inferior, dependent status, or is even declared to be merely appearance. The types of entity favoured in this way have varied enormously. For Bishop Berkeley, it is minds or spirits; for Leibniz, some curious mind-like centres of conscious or unconscious experience. Hume is inclined to scoff at the whole notion; but in so far as anything deserved the title, he thought it was the individual sense-impression and the image.  For Spinoza, on the other hand, it was nothing less than everything: the single comprehensive system of reality, which he called God *or* Nature.  But the best example for the immediate purpose is provided by Descartes. Unlike Berkeley and Hume, Descartes is a very scientifically-minded philosopher, with very clear ideas about the proper direction for science. He seems to have thought that mathematics, and in particular geometry, provided the model for scientific procedure. And this determined his thinking in two ways. First, he thought that the fundamental method in science is the deductive method of geometry, and this he conceives of as rigorous reasoning from self-evident axioms. Second, he thinks that the subject-matter of all the physical sciences, from mechanics to medicine, must be fundamentally the same as the subject-matter of geometry. The only characteristics that the objects studied by geometry possess are spatial characteristics. So from the point of view of science in general, the only important features of things in the physical world are also their spatial characteristics.  Physical science in general is a kind of dynamic geometry. Here we have an exclusive preference for a certain type of scientific method, and a certain type of scientific explanation: the method is deductive, the type of explanation mechanical. These beliefs about the right way to do science are exactly reflected in Descartes' ‘ontology,’ in his doctrine, that is, about what really exists.  Apart from God, the  divine substance, he recognizes just two kinds of substance, two types of real entity. First, there was material substance, or matter; and the belief that the only scientifically important characteristics of things in the physical world are their spatial characteristics goes over, in the language of metaphysics, into the doctrine that these are their only real characteristics.  Second, Descartes recognised the mind, at least his own, or a mental substance, of which the essential characteristic is thinking; and thinking itself, in its pure form at least, is conceived of as simply the intuitive grasping of self-evident axioms and their deductive consequences. These restrictive doctrines about reality and knowledge naturally called for adjustments elsewhere in our ordinary scheme of things. With the help of the divine substance, these were duly provided.  It is not always obvious that the metaphysician's scheme involves this kind of ontological preference, this tendency, that is, to promote one or two categories of entity to the rank of the real, or of the ultimately real, to the exclusion of others. Kant, as much concerned as Descartes with the foundations of science, seems, in a sense, to show no such preference. He seems prepared to accord reality to all the general types of phenomena which we encounter in experience or, rather, to draw the distinction between the illusory and the real, as we normally do, within these types, and not *between* them. Yet it is only a relative reality or, as he said, an empirical reality, that he was willing to grant in this liberal way to all the general classes of things we encounter.  For the whole world of nature, studied by science, is declared by Kant to be ultimately only appearance, in contrast with the transcendent and unknowable reality which lay behind it. So, in sense, he downgraded the whole of what we know in favour of what we do not — and cannot — know. But this thoroughgoing contrast between appearance and reality is perhaps of less importance to him in connection with science than in connection with morality. The transcendent reality is of interest to us, not as scientific enquirers, but as moral beings, not as creatures faced with problems of knowledge, but as creatures faced with problems of conduct.  Kant is a very ambitious metaphysician, who seeks to secure, at one stroke, the foundations of science and the foundations of morality.  The last point is of importance.  Though a concern with the foundations of science is, or has been, one impetus to the construction of metaphysical systems, it is only one among others. Concern with morality, with the right way to behave, has been scarcely less important. And other disciplines have contributed to the metaphysical drive. When history came of age and began to preoccupy philosophers such as Croce, metaphysical systems started to grow out of historical studies. Think Collingwood! Thus the historically-minded metaphysician would search for the true nature of historical explanation and concludes, perhaps, that the key concept is that of a certain mode of development of human institutions.  Suppose he then extends this theory beyond the confines of history, maintaining that this same concept, which is, in a certain sense, a concept of mental development, provides the only true explanation of the whole universe.  The result is a comprehensive  system something like Hegel's. Hegel honoures one type of historical explanation, by making it the foundation of his system; and it is this system that Marx turns upside down, making the whole process of development material instead of mental.  Systems like those of Marx and Hegel ard intended to have implications regarding human behaviour.  But concern with moral and  emotional, even with aesthetic, requirements may  take many other different forms. It may take the form of a desire to provide some transcendental authority, some more than human backing,  for a particular  morality: a moral conclusion about how we ought to behave is to follow from a metaphysical premise about the nature of reality. It may take the more general form of a wish to supply transcendental backing for morality in general. Or it may take the form of a wish to demonstrate that there is some surpassing and unobvious excellence about the nature of things, an ultimate satisfactoriness in the universe. Spinoza provides another example of the first of these. He claims to demonstrate, from the nature of reality, that the supreme satisfaction is also the supreme virtue, and that both consist of what he calls the intellectual love of God: which seems to mean, for him, a kind of acquiescent and admiring understanding of the workings of Nature. Kant is the supreme example of the second. The whole world of nature, including our ordinary human selves — the whole province of scientific knowledge, in fact — is declared to be mere appearance, in contrast with the world of transcendent reality, the world of things in themselves. Reality is set behind a curtain impenetrable to scientific enquiry, a removal which both guarantees its security and *heightens its prestige*.  But communications are not wholly severed. From behind the curtain Reality speaks — giving us, indeed, not information,  but a command, a moral imperative. In some admittedly unintelligible way, Reality is within us, as rational beings; and, with unquestionable authority, it lays down the general form of the moral law which we ought, as ordinary human beings, to obey. Finally, Leibniz, who unites so many intellectual concerns in a brilliant, if precarious, harmony, provides a good example of the third form which this element in metaphysics may take. The celebrated optimism — 'Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' — is not, in the context of his system, at all as absurd as Voltaire made out. We may find it unsympathetic, which is another matter; for Leibniz's criteria of the highest excellence are peculiarly his own. He thinks he can demonstrate that reality must exhibit a peculiarly satisfying combination of the maximum possible diversity and richness of phenomena, together with the greatest possible simplicity of natural laws. Sometimes the demonstration appears to be theological, sometimes purely logical. In any case it was this combination of richness and elegance which he found so admirable - worth, no doubt, a Lisbon earthquake or a Turkish war. It seems a taste that we might find unsympathetic, but could scarcely find ridiculous.  It is time, however, to enter a caveat.  It would  be misleading to suggest that the sources of metaphysics are always of the kinds we have so far described — such as the wish to get morality transcendentally underwritten, or the desire to give science the right direction, or the urge to show that some departmental study holds the key to the universe at large. Metaphysics may have a humbler origin. It often enough happens that philosophers, reflecting upon a particular matter, find themselves, or seem to find themselves, in a certain kind of quandary. We can best illustrate this by considering in a little detail one particular quandary of this kind.  We select the problem of our knowledge of the material world, a problem — or apparent problem — which has long occupied the attention of philosophers. On the one hand, in their unphilosophical moments, they (like all the rest of us) have no hesitation in sometimes claiming to know on the evidence of the senses that this or that thing exists or is of such and such a character; they do, in practice, seem to have no difficulty (in many cases) in distinguishing between situations in which it is in order to claim to know, for example, that the milk is on the doorstep and situations in which such a claim would not be in order.  Naturally, therefore, they have a strong antipathy to any suggestion that all such claims to knowledge should be rejected as false. Nevertheless, on reflection, they find themselves faced with philosophical considerations which seem to force them into just such a rejection. For (the argument runs) if we are to have perceptual knowledge of the world, this knowledge must be based on the appearances which this or that thing presents to us, on our sense-impressions. But it is clear that our sense-impressions may be deceptive or even hallucinatory; the fact that it looks to me as if there is a milk bottle on the doorstep does not guarantee that there really is a milk bottles on the doorstep, or even that there is in fact anything on the doorstep. If we try to remove this doubt in a given case by further observation, all we are doing is providing ourselves with further sense-impressions, each of which is open to the same suspicion of deceptiveness as the sense-impressions with which we started; so we are no better off. Indeed (the argument may continue) so far from providing us with certain knowledge about the world, our sense-impressions cannot even be justifiably regarded as more or less reliable clues to, or indications of, the character of the world. For they could only properly function as clues if we could correlate particular kinds of sense-impression with particular kinds of thing, and to do this we should have to possess some kind of direct access to this of that thing, and not merely indirect access via sense-impressions.This direct access we do not have. This is an example of the kind of philosophical consideration which seems to lead to the conclusion that any claim to knowledge of the world must be rejected.  The result is a quandary of just the kind we are seeking to illustrate: that is to say, a conflict between a reluctance to discard some range of propositions with which in everyday life everyone is perfectly satisfied, and the pressure of a philosophical argument which seemingly leaves no alternative but to reject the propositions in question. The propositions in jeopardy often (though not always) state that we have knowledge of this or that kind, in which case the philosophical arguments which undermine them do so by setting up a barrier between appearance and reality, or between the evidence and that for which it is (supposedly) evidence.  Now, when is the response to such a quandary a metaphysical response? One kind of response, which would be generally admitted to be metaphysical is what one might call the Transcendentalist response.  To respond in this way to the quandary about the world, for example, would be to maintain that a thing may be known to exist, even though not observable, and to explain the possibility of such knowledge by invoking some transcendental hypothesis, some principle which is supposed to be acceptable independently of experience. For example, one might invoke the principle that God is not a deceiver, or that appearances must have causes; and then, by invoking the further principle that there must be some resemblance between cause and effect (and so between reality and appearance) one might guarantee some knowledge of the character, as well as of the existence, of this or that thing. In general, it is characteristic of the Transcendentalist to admit both unobservable entities and principles which are not empirically testable; by this means he may hope to reinstate, at least in part, the propositions which he was in danger of having to give up. A very different type of response to the problem is Hume's. Put very baldly, his view was that all our everyday statements about this or that thing incorporate mistakes in a systematic way, and so none of them can, as they stand, be rationally accepted; hence, of course, claims to know them to be true must be false or absurd. He adds, however, that we are so constituted as human beings that we are incapable of ceasing to make and accept such statements in our everyday life, even though in our reflective moments we may see the error of our ways.  We might perhaps confer the label of rejector' upon one who, when it is asked how we are to preserve a particular range of everyday assertions from destruction by philosophical argument, replies that such preservation is not rationally possible. The rejector's response is not less metaphysical than the Transcendentalist's.  A more recently fashionable method of dealing with our kind of quandary is the method of reduction. For instance, some philosophers have tried to remove the barrier between sense-impressions and the thing by maintaining that a thing is just a collection or family of sense-impressions; or to put the view in a more modern garb, they have suggested that sentences about a thing are translatable, in principle at least, into complicated sentences about the sense-impressions that people actually do have, or would have, in certain conditions.  If so much is granted, it would be claimed, there remains no difficulty in the idea that facts about sense impressions constitute a legitimate evidential basis for statements about a thing; for to conclude that since certain sorts of sense-impressions have been obtained in certain sorts of conditions, therefore more or less similar sense-impressions  would be obtained in more or less similar conditions, is not more objectionable in principle than to argue (say) from the character of a sample to the character of the population from which the sample is drawn. In general, the procedure of the reducer when faced with a question of the type 'How can we legitimately claim to know about Xs when our only direct information is about Ys' is to reply that the difficulty disappears if we recognize that Xs are nothing over and above Ys, that to talk about Xs is to talk in a concealed way about Ys. Whether we are to count the reductive response as metaphysical or not depends on how seriously it is pressed. If the 'reducer' maintains that his proposed reduction, or something like it, must be accepted as the only way of avoiding on the one hand the introduction of a transcendental hypothesis, and on the other hand wholesale rejection of a certain class of everyday statements, then he, too, is to be counted as a metaphysician; but IF he is prepared to allow his proposed reduction to be treated purely on its merits, and does not regard its acceptance as being the only satisfactory way of meeting some threat to common sense, he is not a metaphysician. But then, too, he cannot be taking the quandary very seriously: he must be thinking of it as an apparent quandary, the illusion of a quandary, which can be dispelled without recourse to any of these drastic  measures. The question arises: How is our characterization of these quandary-responses as metaphysical connected with what we have previously had to say about metaphysics? In more ways than one. In the first place, it is necessary, in order for the quandary to arise at all, and to appear as something requiring drastic measures, that some conceptual shift, some perhaps unnoticed change in our ordinary way of looking at things, should already be occurring. That change of view, on which Wisdom lays such emphasis, is already taking place. Second, behind the, quandary and the change of view, we may sometimes glimpse the working of one of those preferences among the categories which we earlier mentioned.  For example, it may be that Plato believed in the supreme reality of those eternal changeless entities, the Forms, partly at least because he wished to preserve the possibility of scientific knowledge and yet was threatened with having to reject it; for philosophical reflection made it appear that knowledge of perceptible things was impossible, since perceptible things were constantly in process of change. In order, then, to resolve his quandary, to find a subject-matter for scientific knowledge, Plato was led to introduce, and to exalt, the Forms. But the idea that knowledge of changeable things is impossible, which gives rise to the quandary, may itself arise from a preference: from the feeling that to be unchanging (and so permanent and stable) is so much better than to be changing (and so fleeting and insecure) that only knowledge of unchanging things is worthy of the name of knowledge.  We have spoken of some of the springs, and of some of the characteristic features, of metaphysics.  Our survey is summary and incomplete. It may be supplemented by more detailed discussion of different aspects of the subject. But even from a summary survey, a general picture emerges.  The enterprise of metaphysics emerges as,  above all, an attempt to re-order or to reorganise the set of ideas with which we think about the world; assimilating to one another some things which we customarily distinguish, distinguishing others which we normally assimilate; promoting some ideas to key positions, downgrading or dismissing others. It is supremely a kind of conceptual *revision* which the metaphysician undertakes, a re-drawing of the map of thought — or parts of it — on a new plan. Of course such a revision is often undertaken within particular departments of human thought, and are not then metaphysical ventures. But the revision which the metaphysician undertakes, although it may be undertaken in the interests — or supposed interests — of science, or in the light of history, or for the sake of some moral belief, is always of a different order from a merely departmental revision. For among the concepts he manipulates are always some  — like those of knowledge, existence, identity, reality - which, as Aristotle said, are common to all the departmental studies. Partly for this reason, the metaphysical revision tends to comprehensiveness, tends to call for readjustments everywhere. Not that it inevitably issues in a comprehensive system, although it is never merely departmental. For though the notions to be revised are general, and not departmental, notions, they need not all be revised at once and to the limit. So we have those comparatively localised disturbances, where, from the interplay of quandary and preference, there emerges some minor metaphysical shift in the contours of thought. But the metaphysician par excellence will not stop short at this. With more or less of boldness, ingenuity and imagination, he re-draws the whole map — unless he describes it, by analysing with systematic botanic skills  the ways we, at Oxford, talk!  H. P. Grice
Series 1 Correspondence Carton 1 (folders 1-15). Arranged alphabetically according to surname; followed by general correspondence. Series includes correspondence with Baker, Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Folder 1 Bennett  Folder 2 Baker, Folder 3 Bealer Folder 4 Code Folders 5-6 Suppes Folders 7-8 Warner Folder 9 Wyatt 10-12 General to H. P. Grice Folders 13-14 General Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice Series 2 Publications Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates. Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing  Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" Folders 21-23 “Logic and Conversation” Folders 24-26 William James Lectures Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning"  Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" Folders 22-23 "Incontinence" Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" Folders 29-30 “Aspects of Reason” Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" Folder 5 Reprints Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good"  Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Folder 10 “Negation” Folder 11 “Negation” Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Materials Folder 1 Seminar at Cornell Folder 2 Seminar Folder 3 Philosophy Folder 4 Philosophy Folders 5-6 Kant's Ethical Theory Folder 7 Aristotle Ethics Folder 8 Kant Seminar Folder 9 Kant's Ethics Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures Folders 14-15 Philosophy 16-17 “Kant's Ethics” Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Folders 19-21 Kant's Ethics Folder 22 Philosophy Folder 23 Kant Folder Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy Folder 25 Freedom Folder 26 Lectures Undated Folders 27-28 Kant's Ethics Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Folder 30 Modest Mentalism Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Folder 3 "That" Clause Series 4 Associations Carton 6, Folder 4 Entailment Folders 5-6 "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant Folder 7 Causality Folder 8 Transcription of Tape Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes Folder 11 Universals Folder 12 Universals - Partial Working Copy Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences Series 5 Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship  Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Folder 20 Notes Folder 21 Notes 1983 Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Folder 23 Categories Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Folder 26 "On Saying That" Folders 27-28 Descartes Folder 29 Denials of Indicative Conditionals" Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Folders 34-35 Ethics Folder 36 Ethics Folder 37 Festschrift and Notes Folder 38 "Finality" Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Folder 3"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" Folder 4 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated Folder 7 Hume Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity  Folder 10 Identity Folders 11-12 Ifs and Cans Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Folders 14-16 Kant Folder 17 Kant's Ethics Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Folder 19 Language and Reference Folder 20 Language Semantics Folders 21-22 Locke Lectures Folder 23 LogicalForm and Action Sentences Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Folders 26-27 Metaphysics Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Folder 30 Method and Myth Folder 31 Mill’s Induction Folder 32 Actions and Events Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous Folder 2 Metaphysics Folder 3 Oxford Philosophy Folders 4-8 Philosophy Folders 9-13 Philosophy Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Folders 16-17Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Folder 23 Perception Folder 24 Perception Folder 25 Perception Folder 26 “Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Folder 27 “A Pint of Philosophy” Folder 28 “A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Folder 29 Pierce Folder Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Folder 2 Preliminary Valediction Folder  Presupposition and Implicative Folder 4Probability and Life Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Folder 6 Reasons Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Folder 9 Schiffer Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Folder 13 Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics Folder 14 Social Justice Folder 15 “Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Folder 16 Super-Relatives Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Folder 20 Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc Folder 21 Universals Folder 22 Universals Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Folders 25-27 Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated Folder 29 Virtues and Vices Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs H. P. Grice Series 1 Correspondence Carton 1 (folders 1-15). Arranged alphabetically according to surname; followed by general correspondence. Series includes correspondence with Baker, Bealer, Warner, and Wyatt addressing various forms of his research on philosophy. Folder 1 Bennett  Folder 2 Baker, Folder 3 Bealer Folder 4 Code Folders 5-6 Suppes Folders 7-8 Warner Folder 9 Wyatt 10-12 General to H. P. Grice Folders 13-14 General Folder 15 Various published papers on Grice Series 2 Publications Carton 1 (folders 16-31), Cartons 2-4 Arranged chronologically; Arranged alphabetically for those publications without dates. Series includes published papers, drafts and notes that accompany their publications, unpublished papers along with their drafts and/or notes, and published transcripts of his various lectures (William James, Urbana, Carus, John Locke). Also included is Grice's volume "Studies in the Way of Words" which is compilation of all his other published works including, "Meaning," "Utterer's Meaning," and "Logic and Conversation." Carton 1, Folder 16 "Meaning" Folders 17-18 "Meaning Revisited" Folder 19 Oxford Philosophy - Linguistic Botanizing  Folder 20 "Descartes on 'Clear and Distinct Perception'" Folders 21-23 “Logic and Conversation” Folders 24-26 William James Lectures Folder 27 "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning"  Folders 28-30 "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" Folder 31 "Vacuous Names" Carton 2, Folders 1-4 "Vacuous Names" Folders 5-7 Urbana Lectures Folder 8 Urbana Lectures - Lecture Folders 9-10 "Intention and Uncertainty" Folder 11 "Probability, Desirability, and Mood Operators" Folders 12-13 Carus Lectures Folders 14-16 Carus Lectures Folders 17-18 "Reply to Davidson on 'Intending'" Folders 19-21 "Method in Philosophical Psychology" Folders 22-23 "Incontinence" Folder 24 "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation" Folder 25 "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" Folders 26-28 "Freedom and Morality in Kant's Foundations" Folders 29-30 “Aspects of Reason” Carton 3, Folders 1-5 Actions and Events Folder 6 Postwar Oxford Philosophy Folders 7-21 "Studies in the Way of Words" Folders 22-25 "Retrospective Foreword" Folder 26 "Retrospective Epilogue" Carton 4, Folder 1 "Retrospective Epilogue" Folder 2 "Retrospective Epilogue and Foreword" Folders 3-4 "Metaphysics, Philosophical Eschatology, and Plato's Republic" Folder 5 Reprints Folder 6 "Aristotle on Being and Good"  Folder 7 "Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being" Folder 8 "Aristotle: Pleasure" Folder 9 "Conversational Implicative" Folder 10 “Negation” Folder 11 “Negation” Folder 12 "Personal Identity" (including notes on Hume) Folder 13 "Philosopher's Paradoxes" Folder 14 "A Philosopher's Prospectus" Folder 15 "Philosophy and Ordinary Language" Folder 16 Some Reflections about Ends and Happiness Folders 17-25 Reflections on Morals Folder 26 "Reply to Anscombe" Folders 27-30 "Reply to Richards" Materials Folder 1 Seminar at Cornell Folder 2 Seminar Folder 3 Philosophy Folder 4 Philosophy Folders 5-6 Kant's Ethical Theory Folder 7 Aristotle Ethics Folder 8 Kant Seminar Folder 9 Kant's Ethics Folders 10-13 Kant Lectures Folders 14-15 Philosophy 16-17 “Kant's Ethics” Folder 18 Knowledge and Belief Folders 19-21 Kant's Ethics Folder 22 Philosophy Folder 23 Kant Folder Metaphysics and the Language of Philosophy Folder 25 Freedom Folder 26 Lectures Undated Folders 27-28 Kant's Ethics Folder 29 "The Criteria of Intelligence" Folder 30 Modest Mentalism Folder 31 Topics for Pursuit, Zeno, Socrates Notes Carton 6, Folders 1-2 Syntax, Semantics, and Phonetics Folder 3 "That" Clause Series 4 Associations Carton 6, Folder 4 Entailment Folders 5-6 "Some Aspects of Reason," Kant Folder 7 Causality Folder 8 Transcription of Tape Folder 9 Unity of Science and Teleology "Hands Across the Bay," and Beanfest Folder 10 Beanfest - Transcripts and Audio Cassettes Folder 11 Universals Folder 12 Universals - Partial Working Copy Carton 10 Audio Files of various lectures and conferences Series 5 Carton 6, Folders 13-14 "The Analytic/Synthetic Division" Folder 15 Aristotle and "Categories" Folder 16 Aristotle's Ethics Folder 17 Aristotle and Friendship  Folder 18 Aristotle and Friendship, Rationality, Trust, and Decency Folder 19 Aristotle and Multiplicity Folder 20 Notes Folder 21 Notes 1983 Folder 22 Casual Theory Perception Folder 23 Categories Folder 24 Categorical Imperatives Folder 25 "The Logical Construction Theory of Personal Identity" Folder 26 "On Saying That" Folders 27-28 Descartes Folder 29 Denials of Indicative Conditionals" Folder 30 Dispositions and Intentions Folder 31 Dogmas of Empiricism Folder 32 Emotions and Incontinence Folder 33 Entailment and Paradoxes Folders 34-35 Ethics Folder 36 Ethics Folder 37 Festschrift and Notes Folder 38 "Finality" Carton 7, Folder 1 "Form, Type, and Implication" Folder 2 Frege, Words and Sentences Folder 3"Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics" Folder 4 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Folder 5 Grammar and Semantics Folder 6 Happiness, Discipline, and Implicatives Undated Folder 7 Hume Folders 8-9 Hume's Account on Personal Identity  Folder 10 Identity Folders 11-12 Ifs and Cans Folder 13 Irony, Stress, and Truth Folders 14-16 Kant Folder 17 Kant's Ethics Folder 18 Kant, Midsentences, Freedom Folder 19 Language and Reference Folder 20 Language Semantics Folders 21-22 Locke Lectures Folder 23 LogicalForm and Action Sentences Folders 24-25 Meaning and Psychology Folders 26-27 Metaphysics Folder 28 Metaphysics and Ill-Will Folder 29 Metaphysics and Theorizing Folder 30 Method and Myth Folder 31 Mill’s Induction Folder 32 Actions and Events Carton 8, Folder 1 Miscellaneous Folder 2 Metaphysics Folder 3 Oxford Philosophy Folders 4-8 Philosophy Folders 9-13 Philosophy Folders 14-15 Modality, Desirability, and Probability Folders 16-17Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle Ethics Folder 18 Objectivity and Value Folder 19 Objective Value, Rational Motivation Folder 20 Oddents - Urbane and Not Urbane Folders 21-22 Vision, Taste, and other Perception Folder 23 Perception Folder 24 Perception Folder 25 Perception Folder 26 “Clear and Distinct Perception and Dreaming" Folder 27 “A Pint of Philosophy” Folder 28 “A Philosophy of Life" Notes, Happiness Folder 29 Pierce Folder Basic Pirotese, Sentence Semantics and Syntax Folder 31 Pirots and Obbles Folders 32-33 Methodology - Pirots Carton 9, Folder 1 Practical Reason Folder 2 Preliminary Valediction Folder  Presupposition and Implicative Folder 4Probability and Life Folder 5 Rationality and Trust notes Folder 6 Reasons Folder 7 Reflections on Morals Folder 8 Russell and Heterologicality Folder 9 Schiffer Folder 10 Semantics of Children's Language Folder 11 Sentence Semantics Folder 12 Sentence Semantics - Prepositional Complexes Folder 13 Significance of the Middle Book's Aristotle's Metaphysics Folder 14 Social Justice Folder 15 “Subjective" Conditions and Intentions Folder 16 Super-Relatives Folders 17-18 Syntax and Semantics Undated Folder 19 The 'That" and "Why" - Metaphysics Folder 20 Trust, Metaphysics, Value, etc Folder 21 Universals Folder 22 Universals Folder 23 Value, Metaphysics, and Teleology Folder 24 Values, Morals, Absolutes, and the Metaphysical Folders 25-27 Value Sub-systems, the "Kantian Problem" Folder 28 Values and Rationalism Undated Folder 29 Virtues and Vices Folders 30-31 Wants and Needs H. P. Grice  TEMPERANZA  I shall approach the topic of incontinence via consideration of Donald Davidson's recent admirable paper, 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' (EAE, pp. 21-42), and we begin by rather baldly summarizing what are for our purposes the salient points of that paper. An incontinent act is, in effect, initially defined as an act done intentionally, an alternative to which is both open to the agent and judged by the agent to be, all things considered, better than the act in question. A primary conceptual difficulty about incontinence is seen as being the inconsistency of a triad consisting of the statement (P3) that there are incontinent acts together with two further principles which state, in effect, (PI) given that a man does either x or y intentionally, preference in wanting (wanting x more than y) is always reflected in preference in intention (intentionally doing x rather than y) and (P2) that preference in wanting always follows preference in evaluative judgement judging x to be better than y) if such preference in evaluative judgement obtains. We have a suspicion that, though he does not say so, Davidson is committed by what seems to be the rationale for accepting these principles, as he does, to accepting also the converses at least of P1, and possibly also of P2; that is to say, to holding not only that if there is preference in wanting there is also preference in intention (if either act is done intentionally) but also that if x is preferred in intention to y then x is also preferred in wanting to y. And similarly, perhaps, not only if there is preference in evaluative judgement there is preference in wanting, but if there is preference in wanting there is preference in evaluative judgement. This suspicion however obviously will need further elaboration and substantiation.  Davidson's solution to this paradox utilizes a suggested analogy between evaluative statements and probability statements to reachand deploy a distinction between conditional and unconditional judgements which, it is contended, makes possible an interpretation of the members of the apparently inconsistent triad on which they are no longer inconsistent; suitably interpreted, all three principles can and should be accepted. More specifically, the man who incon-tinently does y rather than x does indeed judge that x is better than y, but the judgement is the conditional judgement that all things considered, x is better than y; but only an unconditional judgement that x is better than y would require to be reflected first in preference in wanting and second in preference in intention. The incontinent man does not judge unconditionally that x is better than y; indeed, if we interpret Davidson aright, the incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that, all things considered, x is better than y, with the unconditional judgement in line with his preference in intention, namely that y is better than x.  The attachment to the idea of preserving both Pl and P2 is, it seems, rooted in a view about the analysis of the notion of intentional action. The proper analysis of this notion is seen as requiring, in a way to be more fully discussed in a moment, that there should be some interpretation of the expression 'judges x to be better than y' such that such a preferential evaluative judgement should be reflected in an intention formed with respect to doing x or doing y.  Davidson's view of action seems to lead him to maintaining also, though the basis of this contention is less obvious, that if an action is done intentionally then it is done for a reason.  It emerges from Davidson's survey of previous discussion of the subject of incontinence that he considers there to be two themes which are liable to be confused, both of which, if we interpret him aright, are at least to some degree mistaken. To quote him: 'One is, that desire distracts us from the good, or forces us to the bad; the other is that incontinent action always favours the beastly, selfish passion over the call of duty and morality."' As presented, an exem-plification of the second theme would entail an exemplification of the first theme. This logical connection seems to us inessential; the statement of the themes can be recast in such a way as to make them logically distinct. The first theme would be that in incontinence it is always the case that desire or passion makes us act against our better judgement: desire or passion is always the victor over better  • 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?'  *, p. 29.judgement. The second theme would be that in incontinence what our better judgement calls for is always action in line with duty or morality; it is always duty or morality which is the loser. Davidson's example of the man who allegedly acts incontinently by getting out of his comfortable bed in order to remedy his forgetful failure to brush his teeth may be envisaged as a counter to these themes in certainly two, and possibly three, ways.  (1) It is not always the passion which wins, if we can take the reluctance to get out of bed as falling under the heading of desire or passion, because this is the element which loses in this case, thereby invalidating theme one. (2) If duty or morality is involved at all, that is, if we think brushing one's teeth to be a duty, duty or morality is involved not as a loser but as victor. This example may also be used to make the even stronger point that since the call upon me to brush my teeth is not a call of duty or morality but only the call of self-interest, in this case as in Davidson's reference to the man who acts incontinently when concerned to maximize his own pleasure (the allusion to Mill) duty or morality is not involved at all, on either side.  And we might say he might have produced (though he does not), as his example suggests, some cases in which desire or passion are not involved at all. We can imagine a case in which a man is diverted from what he knows to be his duty by what he judges to be in his self-interest. While someone who wished to distinguish wickedness from incontinence might wish to classify such cases as wickedness rather than as incontinence, it is clear that they would fall within the characterization of incontinence given by Davidson himself.  11  The conditional/unconditional distinction stems, as we have already remarked, from an attempt to provide for the logical possibility of incontinence while retaining the two principles Pl and P2, and to do so via a distinction of content between those evaluative judgements which carry with them intention or decision and those which do not. Crucial to this distinction is the analogy which Davidson finds between, on the one hand, probability judgements and those non-practical arguments within which they figure, and, on the other hand, evaluative judgements and the practical arguments in which they figure. The relevant type of probability judgement, for example, 'given that the skies are red this evening, it will probablyrain tomorrow', is seen by Davidson as exemplifying the canonical form pr(m,, p) where 'pr' represents a sentential connective, 'm;' represents a sentence specifying an evidentially relevant considera-tion, and 'p' represents a sentence specifying a state of affairs to which m, is claimed to be relevant. While a procedure is needed to enable us sometimes to infer by detachment from such a probability judgement, together with the premiss that my, to the conclusion that p, unrestricted detachment cannot be allowed since (1) pr(m,, p) and (2) pr(m, and mar -p) may both be true. As Hempel and others have noted, inferences of this type have, therefore, to be subject to a 'principle of total evidence', the proper formulation of which we do not at this point have to discuss, but which would prevent an inference by detachment from (1) when (2) is available. Analog-ously, some evaluative judgements are considered by Davidson as representable by the structure pf(my, a better than b) where  'pf' (pronounced 'prima facie') is a sentential connective which parallels 'pr'  ', and 'a' and 'b' represent possible actions. Inferences  from such conditional value judgements to the corresponding unconditional value judgement that a is better than b are, like their counterparts in the area of probability, and for the same reasons, subject to a principle of total evidence. A special case of a conditional value judgement is, according to Davidson, a judgement of the type 'all things considered, a is better than b', representable by the structure pfe, a better than b) where e represents the total available evidence. Davidson's solution to the problem of incontinence consists in the thesis that the typical incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that pfle, a better than b) with the unconditional judgement that b is better than a. The latter judgement is the one on which the incontinent man acts, and since the type of evaluative judgement which supposedly is in line both with preference in wanting and with intention to act is taken to be the unconditional value judgement, the phenomenon of incontinence is compatible with the principles Pl and P2. We may note here for future reference that on Davidson's account the unconditional judgement, which in the case of the incontinent man is in quasi-  2 Our notation for probability judgements reverses the standard form utilized by Davidson, in that we make the representation of the evidential base precede rather than follow the representation of that to which probability is ostensibly assigned.  We make this change in order to hint at, though not to affirm, the idea that probability and its practical analogue might be treated as attributes of conditional propositions (statements), on some suitable analysis of non-material conditionals.conflict with the 'all things considered' judgement, stems from a consideration which is an element in the set of considerations covered by the phrase 'all things considered', for example, from the thought that to do b would be more pleasant than to do a. Such a consideration is treated as being the incontinent man's reason for doing b and as being the cause of, though not his reason for, the unconditional judgement from which his act proceeds (EAE, p. 41).  While we agree with Davidson about the existence and importance of the analogy between probabilistic and evaluative statements and arguments, we are dubious about certain aspects of Davidson's characterization of it. A discussion of this question however, will not be undertaken on this occasion.3 This issue apart, two modifications of the Davidsonian scheme seem to us to be initially demanded if it is to be advanced as a model for practical reasoning.  The first of these does not seem in any way damaging to the essence of Davidson's treatment of the problem of incontinence, but the second leads us on to some serious objections. There seem to us to be cogent grounds for providing room for evaluative judgements to the effect not just that (1) relative to certain considerations a is better than b, but that (2) relative to certain considerations, a is best.  Given Davidson's conditional/unconditional distinction it looks as if for many, if not all, cases the final conditional evaluative judgement in practical argument should be thought of as being of formrather than form (1), and the same may be true of some of the non-final evaluative judgements contained in such an argument. It is true that in some cases the judgement that a is best is tantamount to the judgement that a is better than b, where b is the most promising alternative to a: but this is not always so. Sometimes we seem to decide that relative to certain evidence a is better than any of a range of alternatives without deciding on any evaluative ordering of the remainder of the range and sometimes even without identifying any of the elements in that remainder. If we are right in supposing that an 'all things considered' judgement would characteristically be of form (2), then clearly the incontinent man must be supposed to reach this type of judgement. It is tempting, but we suspect wrong, to suggest that a judgement to the effect that, relative to ma, a is best is to be represented as a special case of form (L), namely, that given by the schema recognized by Davidson, pf(m j, a is better thanDiscussed in Paul Grice, 'Probability, Desirability, and Modal Operators' (unpublished).-a) (for example, EAE, p. 38). The latter schema unfortunately can be read in either of two ways; as a way of saying that, relative to my, a is good, and as a way of saying that relative to my, a is better than any alternative. These readings are clearly distinct and examples of each of them may occur in practical argument.  Our second modification may have more awkward consequences  for Davidson's account. Davidson wishes 'pf", like 'pr'  • to be  treated as a special sentential connective. While this proposal may be adequate for dealing with many examples of conditional judge-ment, there are some important candidates which raise difficulties.  If judgements expressed by the sentence forms 'all things con-sidered, a is better than b' or 'relative to the available evidence, a is better than b' are to be regarded as instances of conditional judge-ment, as Davidson seems to demand, the proposal will have to be modified. For in the expression of these judgements the relevant considerations are not sententially specified but are referred to by a noun phrase, and in such cases characterization of 'pf", and for that matter of 'pr', as sentential connectives would seemingly flout syntax.  It would be no more legitimate to treat the phrases 'the available evidence' or 'all things considered' (or 'all things') as substituends for a sentential place marker (as 'e' should be to parallel 'm,') in one of Davidson's canonical forms than it would be to treat 'the premisses of your argument' (as distinet from 'The premisses of your argument are true') as a substituend for 'p' in the form 'if p then q'. So if the account of conditional judgement is to be both uniform and capable of accommodating 'all things considered' judgements (interpreted in the manner just suggested), 'pr' and 'pf" will have to be thought of as representing not connectives but relational expressions signitying relations between such entities as sentences, statements, propositions, or judgements, according to philosophical predilection.  These reflections, however, raise a doubt whether we have, after all, correctly interpreted Davidson's notion of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement. Such a judgement might, as we have suggested, be a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, relative to the available evidence, a is better than b', but, alterna-tively, it might be thought of as a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, given that p, and P2... and Pn, a is better than b', where the conjunctive schema 'P2... and Pn,represents a specification of what is, in fact, the available evidence.  If this alternative interpretation should prove sufficient for a Davidsonian solution to the problem of incontinence, its adoption would enable us to preserve the characterization of 'pr' and 'pf" as representing connectives. But is it sufficient for this purpose? The question whether, to discharge its role in Davidson's scheme, an  'all things considered' judgement can be regarded as specifying a set of propositions which in fact constitute the body of evidence, or whether it has to be regarded as referring to such a set of propositions as constituting the body of evidence, is, to our minds, bound up with the further question about the meaning of the expressions 'all things considered' and 'available evidence'. 'All things considered' might mean either 'relative to everything which has so far been considered' or 'relative to everything which should be con-sidered'. Similarly 'the available evidence' might mean 'the evidence of which I have so far availed myself' or 'all the evidence of which I should avail myself'. In each case the natural interpretation seems to us to be the second, but there is some indication (albeit in passages not altogether unambiguous) that Davidson intends the first.  It might be helpful, before we examine possible interpretations of 'all things considered' judgements, to consider what might be the maximal set of stages through which a man might pass in practical deliberation. We offer an expanded sequence of stages which we hope Davidson would not individually reject, although he might wish to claim that not all of them are distinct. As we note below, Davidson might himself argue that stage (7) is not distinct from stage (6), and we will later present as our first interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement one that corresponds to stage (3) (hence, on this interpretation stages (3), (4), and (5) would not be distinct) and as our second interpretation one that corresponds to stage (4) (hence on this interpretation stages (4) and (5) would not be distinct). These stages can be seen as occurring in non-practical deliberation as well, and we have included the non-practical analogues of the evaluative judgements. We may note that the labels are those of philosophical reflection and not the agent's and, most important, that the schema is of a provisional nature and, we think, will be seriously affected by criticisms offered later in this paper.(1) Single specificatory prima-facie (pf) (conditional) judge-ments:  [pf(4,z better than not-z)]  [prob(A,z)]  (2) Non-final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judge-ments:  (pf((A,B), z better than not-z)l  [prob((4, B), z)l  Final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((A,B, C,D), z better than not-z)] (prob((A, B,C, D), z)I when (A,B,C,D) = set of relevant factors before me Summative non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((all things before me), z better than not-z) l [prob((all things before me), z)] Final non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: Ipf(all things considered), z better than not-z)] (prob(all things considered), z)] Unconditional judgement: (z better than not-z) Intention to do z Beliet that z (Note that Davidson might say that (7) is not distinct from (6).)  111  Let us now revert to the actual text of Davidson's paper. There seem to be four interpretations, or varieties of interpretation, of one or other of the phrases 'all things considered' and 'relative to the available evidence' which, in one way or another, need to be considered in connection with Davidson's account of incontinence. We shall argue that the first three both give unnatural accounts of an  'all things considered' judgement and, when incorporated into Davidson's framework, yield unsatisfactory accounts of inconti-nence; while the fourth, though it seems to represent correctly the nature of an 'all things considered' judgement, cannot be fittedinto Davidson's framework without modification to that framework which, we suspect, he would find unwelcome.  1. One possible interpretation, which has already been mentioned, is to take the 'all things considered' judgement as being of the form  'pf, given P,... Po, a is better than b', where Pr... Po are in fact the totality of the propositions which the agent believes to be both true and relevant. While this interpretation preserves Davidson's stipulation that 'pf' be treated as a connective, it fails to represent the incontinent man as thinking of his judgement in favour of a as being relativized to the totality of available evidence. For all that has been said, he might think this only a partial survey of the pieces of evidence which, severally, he has considered, in which case he would not have achieved the kind of judgement that a is better than b which, intuitively, we want to attribute to him.To avoid this difficulty, we might abandon the idea that 'pf' is a connective rather than a relational expression and, in line with what Davidson seems to suggest himself, interpret the 'all things con-sidered' judgement as being of the form 'pf, relative to the totality of propositions, each of which is believed by me to be true and rele-vant, a is better than b', or, to put it more succinctly, 'pf, relative to all that is now before me, a is better than b'. This seems to give one legitimate reading of the expression 'available evidence' (= 'everything I have at present under consideration) but ignores what seems to be a genuine distinction between 'relative to the available evidence' (so understood) and 'all things considered'. It ignores, that is, the possibility that a man, in his deliberation, might regard the evidence at present available to him as inadequate, in which case it would seem inappropriate to suppose him to be ready to make the judgement that 'all things considered, a is better than b' (as 'all things considered' is normally understood), Surely a general account of incontinence should provide for the possibility of this measure of scrupulousness in the deliberations of the man who subsequently acts incontinently.Our third candidate for the interpretation of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement is one which it is pretty evident that Davidson would, quite rightly, reject, but it is worth mentioning in order that it should be clear just why it should be rejected. In pursuit of the proper goal of accommodating a distinction between an *all things considered' judgement and a conditional probability judgement orevaluative judgement which is relativized to the totality of the evidence present before the judger (an 'all things before me' judge-ment), one might seek to understand the idea of an 'all things considered judgement as being the idea of a judgement to the effect that something is probable, or prima facie better than something else, relative to some totality of supporting facts, many of which would in a normal case be unavailable to the judger, at least at the time of judging, and possibly at any time. On this view, a standard piece of fully explicit practical reasoning might be supposed to contain two distinct steps: (a) a step from a (conditional) *all things before me' judgement (together with the reflective judgement that certain qualificatory conditions obtain which license this step) to a (conditional) 'all things considered' judgement, which is relativized to an ideal totality of evidence; and (b) a step from a (conditional)  'all things considered' judgement, so interpreted, to an unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Such a view would be open to two grave objections. First, as Davidson himself points out, if we stock this ideal totality of evidence too generously it will not merely support but will entail the content of the unconditional judgement. If I am investigating prob-abilistically the possibility that it is now raining in Timbuctoo, the relevant ideal totality of evidence should not include either the fact that it is raining in Timbuctoo or the fact that the residents of Tim-buctoo can now see that it is raining. Such a totality of evidence would have to occupy an intermediate position between the evidence before the judger and the totality of all relevant facts of any sort, and it is far from clear that there is any satisfactory characterization of such an intermediate totality. Second, even if the idea of such a totality could be defined, it seems plausible to suppose that at any given stage in the reasoning, a reasoner's best estimate at that stage of what conclusion such an ideal totality of evidence would support wouid have to coincide with the conclusion supported by the evidence, so far as it goes, which is before him at that stage. In so far as the evidence before me supports p, 1 am naturally at this point inclined to believe rather than disbelieve that the totality of evidence will support p. On the view considered, the crucial stage in probabilistic or practical reasoning will not be that at which we become entitled to attach some degree or other of credence to the content of some 'all things considered' judgement, as so interpreted (if we have any evidence at all we are always in that position); it would rather be the stage at which we are entitled,in the light of the judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, actually to judge, as opposed to, say, merely conjecture, that an ideal totality would support a certain conclusion. But now it is not clear what useful function the 'all things considered' judge-ment, so understood, can be supposed to fulfill. For if, as seems to be the case, a rational man will automatically make the second of our two steps once he has made the first, would it not be more economical, and therefore better, to suppose that the combination of an 'all things before me' judgement, together with a judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, directly entities a reasoner to make the appropriate unconditional judgement rather than to suppose it to entitle him to make an 'all things considered' judgement from which he is to be supposed, if rational, to make a further move to an unconditional judgement?  4. The argument of the last paragraph has led us directly to the final possibility to be here considered, namely, that for x to make an'all things considered' judgement that a is better than b is for * to judge that, since he has a certain body of evidence, e, in favour of the supposition that a is better than b, and since certain qualifi-catory conditions are satisfied, it is best for x to (* should, x ought to) make the unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Whether or not this interpretation will succeed in preserving the idea than an 'all things considered' judgement is a special sort of conditional, or prima-facie, judgement is a question which we will discuss in a moment.  The only remaining alternative interpretation, so far as we can see, is one which although it might perhaps be thought to give a better representation of the meaning of the phrase 'all things considered' would certainly not preserve the conditional, or prima-facie, character of the 'all things considered' judgement. One might treat the statement that, all things considered, a is better than b, as expressing the judgement that a is better than b, with the gloss that this judgement is justified in the light of one's possession of a favourable body of evidence with respect to which the qualificatory conditions obtain; but since on this interpretation an 'all things considered' judgement would plainly involve the unconditional judgement that a is better than b, just as part of what would be expressed by saying  'Demonstrably, p' would be the judgement that p, no room would be left for the idea that an 'all things considered' judgement is a conditional judgement.  The crucial question to be considered is whether, if we interpret an'all things considered' judgement in what seems to us the most plausible way which does not represent it as patently involving a commitment to an unconditional evaluative judgement, we are still entitled to classify it as a conditional, or prima-facie, judgement.  Let us assume that we can facilitate exposition without introducing any relevant change in substance if we express a standard prima-facie evaluative judgement by the sentence form 'given that p. x should (ought to) do A'; the shift from 'a is better than b' to 'x should do A' seems for present purposes immaterial, and it is to be understood that the form we propose is not to be taken as entailing that p. To incorporate a commitment to the truth of p, the pattern might be varied to 'given the fact that p. x should do A'. In an attempt to assimilate an 'all things considered' judgement as closely as possible to this standard pattern, we might suppose its expansion to be of the general form 'given the fact that p. certain things are the case such that, given that they are the case, x should do A, and given the fact that certain qualificatory conditions are met, x should judge that x should do A'. The qualificatory conditions in question need not here be accurately specified; their effect would be to stipulate that 'the principle of total evidence' was satisfied, that, for example, x's judgement that, given certain facts, x should do A, had taken into account all the relevant facts in x's possession and that x had fulfilled whatever call there was upon him at the time in question to maximize his possession of relevant facts. Let us summarily express the idea that these qualificatory ,conditions are fulfilled by using the form 'x's judgement that, given the facts in question, & should do A, is optimal for x at the time in question'. Our question, then, is whether a judgement on the part of x expressible in the form, 'given the fact that  given certain facts, x should do A, and x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x, then & should judge that & should do A' is properly classifiable as a conditional or prima-facie judgement.  To put the matter more shortly, but less precisely, the kind of judgement whose status is in question is one such as 'given the fact that on my evidence I should do A, and that my judgement that this is so is optimal, I should judge that I should do A'. (Let us call a specially interpreted 'all things considered' judgement of this form ATC*.)The question we have to ask, then, is whether ATC* is properly classified as a conditional, rather than an unconditional, judge-ment. On one possible interpretation of conditional judgement it clearly has strong claims, inasmuch as it would be possible to replace, in its standard expression, the opening phrase given the fact that' by the word 'if' without any violence to the normal usage of 'if', and the resulting conditional sentence would express one part of the sense of the ATC* judgement, the other part being what would be expressed by the antecedent of this conditional sentence.  The ATC* judgement would then seem to be conditional in very much the same way as one might regard a judgement of the form  'since p, q' our conditional, on the grounds that its sense includes the sense of 'if p, g'. This sense of 'conditional' is plainly not that which we need in the present context. The sense which we need is one which carries with it the idea of being prima-facie in character, of being connected in some way with defeasibility. In an attempt to show that ATC* is not conditional in this further sense, let us characterize the sense more precisely.  Let 'p,' abbreviate 'x has told y that x will consider lending y $100  towards the purchase of a new car':  Let 'P,' abbreviate 'y is hard up and needs a car for work';  Let'p,' abbreviate 'y's spouse only too often gets hold of y's money';  Let 'q' abbreviate 'x should lend y $100'; and Let 'q" abbreviate 'x should not lend y $100'.  The judgement that 'given p, & Pz, @' is clearly prima facie in that the related argument form  Given p,& p2,9  P1&p2  q  is plainly defeasible, insofar as the addition of the premisses that p and that, given P1, Pr & Pa, q' to the premisses above gives us, without falsifying thereby p, or pz, a set of premisses from which it would be illegitimate to conclude that q. All of this is, of course, familiar. For purposes of comparison with ATC*, it is important to note that the argument just characterized as defeasible could have been expressed in a telescoped form, viz.  • The relevant interpretation of 'if' may, of course, not be any of those standardly selected by logicians or philosophers of logic.Given the fact that p, & pa, 9  q  Here too the inferential step will be upset without falsification of its premiss if we suppose x also to have judged that, given the fact that Pa, Pa, & Pa, Q. Let us as a first stage in examining the status of ATC make use of the notion of a specification of an ATC* judge-ment, that is, a judgement which differs from ATC* in that the relevant considerations are identified and not merely alluded to (Spec (ATC*)). The Spec (ATC*) appropriate for the present example will be X's judgement at / that given the fact that  given the fact that p, & Pz, 9; and that at t, x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x; then x should judge at t that q. That a step by x from this judgement to the detached conclusion that q would not be a step which is defeasible in the required sense is shown by the fact that if, at t, x had made the additional judgement  'given the fact that p, & p,& pa, q"', his making this judgement would have entailed that his judgement 'given the fact that p, & Pa, q' was not optimal for x at t. In this case he would not have been in a position to make the step from Spec (ATC*) to q, but this would be because a judgement by him in favour of Spec (ATC*) would, given the supposed additional judgement, be falsified. We do not, then, have the characteristic case of a defeasible inference in which the inference may be upset without falsification of any of its pre-misses. Since the truth or falsity of the claim that x's judgement about a certain body of evidence is optimal cannot depend on whether, in the claim in question, the body of evidence is itemized or merely referred to, if the step from Spec (ATC*) to q is not of the defeasible kind, then the step from ATCe to q is not of the defeasible kind either. It in fact seems to us that, though there is an. important difference between the two cases residing in the fact that in the first case, but not in the second, the legitimacy of the inference is relative to a particular subject at a particular time, the irrationality of refusing to move from the appropriate ATC* judgement to q will be the same in kind as the irrationality involved in refusing to move (as, perhaps, Lewis Carroll's tortoise did) from 'given the fact that pand that if p, q'to 'q'; and furthermore, that the irrationality inquestion is not of a kind that either we or Davidson would wish to attribute to the typical incontinent man.  If the above argument is correct, to preserve as much as possible of Davidson's theses we should have to suppose that the typical incontinent man judges (unconditionally) that he should judge that he should do A, but does not actually judge that he should do A. If we try to take this position, we are at once faced with the following awkward questions: the position, like what we may call the 'naïve' view of incontinence, involves the supposition that for a certain substituend for @ it is true of a typical incontinent man that he judges that he should o but does not ; it differs from the 'naive' view in taking as the favoured substituend for o 'x judges that x should do a', rather than 'x does a'. Why should this departure from the 'naive' view be thought to give a better account of incon-tinence? On the face of it, the 'naïve' view scems superior. It seems casier to attribute to people a failure to act as they fully believe they ought to act than to attribute to them a failure to believe what they fully believe they ought to believe. What is there to prevent a man from judging that he should do a, when he judges that he should judge that he should do a, except his disinclination to do a, and would it not be more natural to suppose that this disinclination prevents his judgement that he should do a from being followed by his doing a than to suppose that it prevents his judgement that he should judge that he should do a from being followed by his judgement that he should do a?  So far as we can see, the only motivation for disallowing the possibility of incontinence with respect to action, as most straightforwardly conceived, while allowing the possibility of the realization of a similarly straightforward conception of incontinence of belief or judgement, lies in the supposed theoretical attractiveness of the equation of a decision or intention on the part of x to do a with a judgement on the part of x that x should do a or that it is best for x to do a. To examine the case for this theoretical idea would take us beyond the limits of the paper. But before concluding our discussion we shall mention one or two considerations which seem to tell against the account of incontinence which has just been formulated.  The actual logical situation is even more complex than we have represented it is being; but present complexities are perhaps sufficient for present purposes.For the purposes of this discussion, we should think of the incontinent man as being just a special case of someone who  is faced with a practical problem about what to do; envisages himself as settling the problem by settling what it is best for him to do (what he should do); and envisages himself as settling what it is best for him to do by deliberation. He is a special case in that his deliberation is defective in one or other of a number of special ways. There may be occasions in which one decides, or forms the intention, to do something without reference to the question what it is best to do, though some philo-sophers, who may include Davidson, have been disposed to deny this possibility. There may also be occasions in which one settles on something being the best thing to do, without any recourse to delib-eration, by an immediate or snap judgement. Both of these possible routes to the resolution of a practical problem may, perhaps, in certain circumstances involve incontinence, but it would not be the variety with which we and Davidson are primarily concerned. Any one who, in consequence of satisfying the three conditions speci-fied, has recourse to deliberation in the settlement of a practical problem, whether or not he ends up by exhibiting incontinence, engages in an undertaking which is generically similar to other kinds of undertaking in that there is a specifiable outcome or completion towards which the undertaking is directed. One who is engaged in fixing the supper, whether or not as a result of prior decision, completes his operations when he reaches his objective of having the supper ready, and if he breaks off his opcrations before completing it, some explanation is required. Similarly, one who deliberates in the face of a practical problem completes his operations when he reaches the objective of having settled what is unconditionally the best thing for him to do, and again, if he fails to complete the operation some explanation is required.  We must first distinguish a failure to complete deliberation from a miscompletion; for the present discussion a failure to complete due to interruption seems irrelevant. What we need to consider are the various ways in which a man may miscomplete deliberation; and here, it seems, attraction or revulsion, rather than externalsources which interrupt deliberation, are in play. Now there are forms of miscompletion which will present us with cases of incontinence which are net of the type with which we, and Davidson, are concerned; a man may see a number of initial considerations, all or some of which are favourabie to a, and because of the attractions of a or his reluctance to deliberate, seize on one of these considerations and jump to the unconditional conclusion that he ought to  a. This is not Davidson's case. Again, a man might deliberate and reach an 'all things before me' judgement which represents the totality of his evidence at that stage, though it is inadequate since more considerations are demanded. He jumps to a judgement that he ought to a, in line with the latest 'all things before me' judgement; this is not Davidson's case either, since here the relevant conditional judgement and the unconditional judgement are both favourable to doing a. This leaves us with the possibility of a man jumping to an unconditional judgement in favour of a at a point at which the relevant 'all things before him' judgement is in favour of something other than a. We shall discuss this possibility with some care since, in spite of the fact that if taken as a characterization of typical incontinence it is open to an objection which we briefly advanced earlier (pp. 34-5), we are not absolutely certain that it does not represent Davidson's view of the incontinent man.  Obviously, there is in general no conceptual difficulty attaching to the idea of someone who is in the midst of some undertaking and who, as a result of revulsion, tedium, or the appeal of some alter-native, breaks off what he is doing and instead embarks on some other undertaking or action. The miscompletion of deliberation which concerns us will, however, constitute a special case of this kind of phenomenon, in that the substituted performance has to be regarded as one with the same objective as the original undertaking, namely, finding the best thing to do. Again, there is no lack of examples which satisfy this more restrictive condition; one may break off one's own efforts to get one's car running and, instead, send for a mechanic to get the job done. But even this restriction is not restrictive enough in view of the special character of the objective involved in deliberation. While there are alternative routes to realizing the objective of getting one's car going besides working on it oneself, it is not clear that there are alternative routes to settling what is the best thing to do besides deliberating; or that if there are (for example, asking some one else's advice), they are at all germaneto the phenomenon of incontinence. One who arrives at a holiday resort and embarks on the undertaking of finding the best hotel to stay in may tire of his search and decide to register at the next presentable hotel that he encounters, but in doing so he can hardly regard himself as having adopted an alternative method of finding the best hotel to stay in. In fact, to provide a full parallel for cases of incontinence, if these are conceived of as cases of making an unconditional evaluation in a direction opposed to that of a current  'all things before me' judgement, the examples would have to be even more bizarre than that just offered. One would rather have to imagine someone who, with a view to winning a prize at a party later in the day, sets out to find and to buy the largest pumpkin on sale in any store in his neighbourhood. After inspecting the pumpkins at three of the local stores, he tires of his enterprise and decides to buy the largest pumpkin in the fourth store, which he is now inves-tigating, even though he knows that the evidence so far before him gives preference to the largest pumpkin at store number two, which is, of course, larger than the one he proposes to buy. It is obvious that such a man cannot regard himself as having adopted an alternative way to finding the largest pumpkin on sale. This elaboration is required since, on the scheme presently being considered, the incontinent man may typically substitute, for the continuation of deliberation, the formation of an intention to do b, to which he is prompted by its prospective pleasantness, in spite of the fact, of which he is aware, that the considerations so far taken into account (which include the prospective pleasantness of b) so far as they go favour a. The outcome of these attempts to find parallels suggests forcibly that it is logically impossible that one should without extreme logical incoherence make an unconditional judgement favour-ing b when one is fully conscious of the thought that the totality of evidence so far considered favours a, unless one thinks (reasonably or unreasonably) that the addition of further evidence, so far un-identified, would tilt the balance in favour of b. This last possibility must be regarded as irrelevant to our discussion of incontinence, since it is not a feature of the kind of incontinence with which we are concerned, if indeed of any kind of incontinence, that the incontinent man should think that further investigation and reflection would, or would have, justified the action which the incontinent man performs. We are then left with the conclusion that to suppose someone to make an unconditional judgement in a direction op-  posed to an 'all things before me' judgement, we must also suppose the latter jugdement not to be 'fully present' to the judger, on some suitable interpretation of that phrase. We can support this point directly without having to rely on analogies with other forms of undertaking. Mr and Mrs John Q. Citizen have decided they want a dog and are engaged in trying to settle what would be the best breed of dog for them to acquire. This enterprise involves them in such activities as perusing books about dogs, consulting friends, and reminding themselves of pertinent aspects of their own experience of dogs. At a certain point, not one at which they regard their deliberations as concluded, it looks to them as if the data they have so far collected favour the selection of a short-haired terrier, though there is something also to be said for a spaniel or a dachshund. At this point, Mrs Citizen says, 'My aunt's spaniel, Rusty, was such a lovely dog. Let's get a spaniel', and her husband says, 'All right.' This story arouses no conceptual stir. But suppose that (1) Mrs Citizen, instead of saying 'Let's get a spaniel' had said 'A spaniel's the best dog to get'  ', and that (2) previously in their deliberation  they had noted the endearing qualities of Rusty, but in spite of that had come to lean towards a short-haired terrier. The story, thus altered, will conform to the alleged course of the incontinent man's reflections; at a certain point it appears to him that the claims of prospective pleasure are, or are being, outweighed, but nevertheless he judges that the pleasant thing is the best thing for him to do and acts on the judgement. But in the altered story the judgement of Mr and Mrs Citizen that a spaniel is the best dog for them to buy, to which they are prompted by a consideration which has already been discounted in their deliberations, scems to us quite incredible, unless we suppose that they have somehow lost sight of the previous course of their deliberations. (The further possibility that they suddenly and irrationally changed their assessment of the evidence so far before them, even if allowable, will not exemplify the idea that there is some sense in which the incontinent man thinks that what he is doing is something which he should not be doing.)  The conceptual difficulty is hardly lessened if we suppose the example of Rusty to be a new consideration instead of one already discounted. The couple could not move from it to the judgement that a spaniel is best without weighing it in the balance together with the body of data which, so far as it goes, they have deemed to point towards a short-haired terrier in preference to a spaniel,unless again they had somehow lost sight of the course of their deliberation.  If, as we have been arguing, an unconditional judgement against a can be combined with an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a only if the latter judgement is not fully present to the judger, a precisely parallel conclusion will hold with respect to an  'all things considered' judgement (ATC*), since an ATC* judgement consists of an 'all things before me' judgement together with an 'optimality" judgement about it. Unless it should turn out to be otherwise logically indefensible, it would be preferable, as being more in accord with common sence, to attribute to the typical incontinent man (as we have been supposing Davidson to do) not merely an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a but also an ATC judgement in favour of a, with the additional proviso that the ATC* judgement is not fully present. On the face of it, this would not involve the attribution to the incontinent man of an unconditional judgement in favour of a, and so we leave room for an unconditional judgement, and so for an intention, against a.  Unfortunately, as has been partially foreshadowed by our discussion of the question whether an ATC* judgement is a conditional judgement, the position just outlined is, in our view, logically inde-fensible, as we shall now attempt to show.  We attach different numerical subscripts to particular occurences of the word 'justify' in order to leave open the possibility, without committing ourselves to its realization, that the sense of 'justify" varies in these occurrences; and we attach subscripts to the word  'optimality' in order to refer to some formulation (or reformula-tion) of the optimality condition previously sketched by us on page 38 which would be appropriate to whatever sense of 'justified' is distinguished by the subscript.  Let us suppose that:  (I) * judges at / that  (1) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimality,, justifies, x's doing a.  Unless we attribute to x extreme logical confusion or blindness, the supposition (I) seems tantamount to the supposition that:  (1l) x judges at / that  (2) x should do a.It seems, however, that we are merely reformulating the supposition already expressed by (I) if we suppose that:  (IlI) * judges at r that  (3) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimalitya, justifies, x's judging at t that x should do a.  Again, as in the case of supposition (Il), supposition (III) seems tantamount to supposition (IV):  (IV) x judges at !  (4) x should judge at t that x should do a.  This argument seems to us to establish the conclusion that, extreme logical confusion apart, one judges on what seems to one an adequate basis that one should judge that one should do a if and only if one judges on the same basis that one should do a. That is to say, any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as also a case of believing that one's belief that one should do a is a belief which one should hold: and any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should believe that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as a case of believing that one should do a. If this conclusion is correct it seems that we have excluded the possibility of finding a reasonable interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement that one should do a which would be distinct from, and would not involve, an unconditional judgement that one should do a.  We are left then with the conclusion that to attribute to the incontinent man an ATC* judgement in favour of a is, in effect, to attribute to him an unconditional judgement in favour of a; and so, presumably, to attribute to him a not fully present ATC® judgement in favour of a is to attribute to him a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a. If this is so, then there seem to be initially the following options:  1. To hold that an incontinent act, though voluntary, is not inten-tional: on this assumption we are free to hold, if we wish, both (i) that forming an intention to do a is identifiable with making a fullypresent unconditional judgement in favour of a, and (ii) that a not fully present judgement in favour of a is incompatible with a fully present unconditional judgement against a (more generally, patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible, even if one or both are not fully present to the judger). To adopt this option would seem heroic.  2. To allow that the incontinent man, at least sometimes, acts with an intention; in which case it must be allowed either that (i) patently conflicting unconditional value judgements are compossible, provided that at least one of them is not fully present to the judger; or that (ii) an intention to do a is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a; the most that could be maintained would be that making a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a entails forming an intention to do a or, altenatively and less strongly, is incompatible with having an intention to do b, where b patently conflicts with a.  The upshot of these considerations with respect to the search for an adequate theory of incontinence seems to be that the following contending theses remain in the field, though some of them, particularly the first, may not appear very strong contenders:  The typical incontinent man (who does not do a though in some sense he thinks that he should) reaches only a not fully present 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement against a, and (conse-quentially) with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that intention is identifiable with fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances. The typical incontinent man reaches a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement, and an intention, against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that an intention is identifi. able with a fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are compossible provided that at least one of them is not fully present.  3. The typical incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a, but not with a fully present unconditional judgementagainst a. Together with this thesis go the theses that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances and that an intention is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement, though it is perhaps true that a fully present unconditional judgement entails the presence of an intention (or at least excludes the presence of a contrary intention).  4. The 'naïve' view: the incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that the existence of a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a carries no implications with regard to the presence or absence of an intention to do a or, again, to do something which patently conflicts with a. The 'naive' view is uncommitted at this point with respect to the compossibility of patently conflicting unconditional value judgements.  A proper decision between these contending theses will clearly depend on the provision of a proper interpretation of the expression 'fully present', used by us a dummy, an undertaking which in turn will require a detailed examination of the phenomena of incontinence. These are matters which lie beyond the scope of this paper. H. P. Grice TEMPERANZA  I shall approach the topic of incontinence via consideration of Donald Davidson's recent admirable paper, 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' (EAE, pp. 21-42), and we begin by rather baldly summarizing what are for our purposes the salient points of that paper. An incontinent act is, in effect, initially defined as an act done intentionally, an alternative to which is both open to the agent and judged by the agent to be, all things considered, better than the act in question. A primary conceptual difficulty about incontinence is seen as being the inconsistency of a triad consisting of the statement (P3) that there are incontinent acts together with two further principles which state, in effect, (PI) given that a man does either x or y intentionally, preference in wanting (wanting x more than y) is always reflected in preference in intention (intentionally doing x rather than y) and (P2) that preference in wanting always follows preference in evaluative judgement judging x to be better than y) if such preference in evaluative judgement obtains. We have a suspicion that, though he does not say so, Davidson is committed by what seems to be the rationale for accepting these principles, as he does, to accepting also the converses at least of P1, and possibly also of P2; that is to say, to holding not only that if there is preference in wanting there is also preference in intention (if either act is done intentionally) but also that if x is preferred in intention to y then x is also preferred in wanting to y. And similarly, perhaps, not only if there is preference in evaluative judgement there is preference in wanting, but if there is preference in wanting there is preference in evaluative judgement. This suspicion however obviously will need further elaboration and substantiation.  Davidson's solution to this paradox utilizes a suggested analogy between evaluative statements and probability statements to reachand deploy a distinction between conditional and unconditional judgements which, it is contended, makes possible an interpretation of the members of the apparently inconsistent triad on which they are no longer inconsistent; suitably interpreted, all three principles can and should be accepted. More specifically, the man who incon-tinently does y rather than x does indeed judge that x is better than y, but the judgement is the conditional judgement that all things considered, x is better than y; but only an unconditional judgement that x is better than y would require to be reflected first in preference in wanting and second in preference in intention. The incontinent man does not judge unconditionally that x is better than y; indeed, if we interpret Davidson aright, the incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that, all things considered, x is better than y, with the unconditional judgement in line with his preference in intention, namely that y is better than x.  The attachment to the idea of preserving both Pl and P2 is, it seems, rooted in a view about the analysis of the notion of intentional action. The proper analysis of this notion is seen as requiring, in a way to be more fully discussed in a moment, that there should be some interpretation of the expression 'judges x to be better than y' such that such a preferential evaluative judgement should be reflected in an intention formed with respect to doing x or doing y.  Davidson's view of action seems to lead him to maintaining also, though the basis of this contention is less obvious, that if an action is done intentionally then it is done for a reason.  It emerges from Davidson's survey of previous discussion of the subject of incontinence that he considers there to be two themes which are liable to be confused, both of which, if we interpret him aright, are at least to some degree mistaken. To quote him: 'One is, that desire distracts us from the good, or forces us to the bad; the other is that incontinent action always favours the beastly, selfish passion over the call of duty and morality."' As presented, an exem-plification of the second theme would entail an exemplification of the first theme. This logical connection seems to us inessential; the statement of the themes can be recast in such a way as to make them logically distinct. The first theme would be that in incontinence it is always the case that desire or passion makes us act against our better judgement: desire or passion is always the victor over better  • 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?'  *, p. 29.judgement. The second theme would be that in incontinence what our better judgement calls for is always action in line with duty or morality; it is always duty or morality which is the loser. Davidson's example of the man who allegedly acts incontinently by getting out of his comfortable bed in order to remedy his forgetful failure to brush his teeth may be envisaged as a counter to these themes in certainly two, and possibly three, ways.  (1) It is not always the passion which wins, if we can take the reluctance to get out of bed as falling under the heading of desire or passion, because this is the element which loses in this case, thereby invalidating theme one. (2) If duty or morality is involved at all, that is, if we think brushing one's teeth to be a duty, duty or morality is involved not as a loser but as victor. This example may also be used to make the even stronger point that since the call upon me to brush my teeth is not a call of duty or morality but only the call of self-interest, in this case as in Davidson's reference to the man who acts incontinently when concerned to maximize his own pleasure (the allusion to Mill) duty or morality is not involved at all, on either side.  And we might say he might have produced (though he does not), as his example suggests, some cases in which desire or passion are not involved at all. We can imagine a case in which a man is diverted from what he knows to be his duty by what he judges to be in his self-interest. While someone who wished to distinguish wickedness from incontinence might wish to classify such cases as wickedness rather than as incontinence, it is clear that they would fall within the characterization of incontinence given by Davidson himself.  11  The conditional/unconditional distinction stems, as we have already remarked, from an attempt to provide for the logical possibility of incontinence while retaining the two principles Pl and P2, and to do so via a distinction of content between those evaluative judgements which carry with them intention or decision and those which do not. Crucial to this distinction is the analogy which Davidson finds between, on the one hand, probability judgements and those non-practical arguments within which they figure, and, on the other hand, evaluative judgements and the practical arguments in which they figure. The relevant type of probability judgement, for example, 'given that the skies are red this evening, it will probablyrain tomorrow', is seen by Davidson as exemplifying the canonical form pr(m,, p) where 'pr' represents a sentential connective, 'm;' represents a sentence specifying an evidentially relevant considera-tion, and 'p' represents a sentence specifying a state of affairs to which m, is claimed to be relevant. While a procedure is needed to enable us sometimes to infer by detachment from such a probability judgement, together with the premiss that my, to the conclusion that p, unrestricted detachment cannot be allowed since (1) pr(m,, p) and (2) pr(m, and mar -p) may both be true. As Hempel and others have noted, inferences of this type have, therefore, to be subject to a 'principle of total evidence', the proper formulation of which we do not at this point have to discuss, but which would prevent an inference by detachment from (1) when (2) is available. Analog-ously, some evaluative judgements are considered by Davidson as representable by the structure pf(my, a better than b) where  'pf' (pronounced 'prima facie') is a sentential connective which parallels 'pr'  ', and 'a' and 'b' represent possible actions. Inferences  from such conditional value judgements to the corresponding unconditional value judgement that a is better than b are, like their counterparts in the area of probability, and for the same reasons, subject to a principle of total evidence. A special case of a conditional value judgement is, according to Davidson, a judgement of the type 'all things considered, a is better than b', representable by the structure pfe, a better than b) where e represents the total available evidence. Davidson's solution to the problem of incontinence consists in the thesis that the typical incontinent man combines the conditional judgement that pfle, a better than b) with the unconditional judgement that b is better than a. The latter judgement is the one on which the incontinent man acts, and since the type of evaluative judgement which supposedly is in line both with preference in wanting and with intention to act is taken to be the unconditional value judgement, the phenomenon of incontinence is compatible with the principles Pl and P2. We may note here for future reference that on Davidson's account the unconditional judgement, which in the case of the incontinent man is in quasi-  2 Our notation for probability judgements reverses the standard form utilized by Davidson, in that we make the representation of the evidential base precede rather than follow the representation of that to which probability is ostensibly assigned.  We make this change in order to hint at, though not to affirm, the idea that probability and its practical analogue might be treated as attributes of conditional propositions (statements), on some suitable analysis of non-material conditionals.conflict with the 'all things considered' judgement, stems from a consideration which is an element in the set of considerations covered by the phrase 'all things considered', for example, from the thought that to do b would be more pleasant than to do a. Such a consideration is treated as being the incontinent man's reason for doing b and as being the cause of, though not his reason for, the unconditional judgement from which his act proceeds (EAE, p. 41).  While we agree with Davidson about the existence and importance of the analogy between probabilistic and evaluative statements and arguments, we are dubious about certain aspects of Davidson's characterization of it. A discussion of this question however, will not be undertaken on this occasion.3 This issue apart, two modifications of the Davidsonian scheme seem to us to be initially demanded if it is to be advanced as a model for practical reasoning.  The first of these does not seem in any way damaging to the essence of Davidson's treatment of the problem of incontinence, but the second leads us on to some serious objections. There seem to us to be cogent grounds for providing room for evaluative judgements to the effect not just that (1) relative to certain considerations a is better than b, but that (2) relative to certain considerations, a is best.  Given Davidson's conditional/unconditional distinction it looks as if for many, if not all, cases the final conditional evaluative judgement in practical argument should be thought of as being of formrather than form (1), and the same may be true of some of the non-final evaluative judgements contained in such an argument. It is true that in some cases the judgement that a is best is tantamount to the judgement that a is better than b, where b is the most promising alternative to a: but this is not always so. Sometimes we seem to decide that relative to certain evidence a is better than any of a range of alternatives without deciding on any evaluative ordering of the remainder of the range and sometimes even without identifying any of the elements in that remainder. If we are right in supposing that an 'all things considered' judgement would characteristically be of form (2), then clearly the incontinent man must be supposed to reach this type of judgement. It is tempting, but we suspect wrong, to suggest that a judgement to the effect that, relative to ma, a is best is to be represented as a special case of form (L), namely, that given by the schema recognized by Davidson, pf(m j, a is better thanDiscussed in Paul Grice, 'Probability, Desirability, and Modal Operators' (unpublished).-a) (for example, EAE, p. 38). The latter schema unfortunately can be read in either of two ways; as a way of saying that, relative to my, a is good, and as a way of saying that relative to my, a is better than any alternative. These readings are clearly distinct and examples of each of them may occur in practical argument.  Our second modification may have more awkward consequences  for Davidson's account. Davidson wishes 'pf", like 'pr'  • to be  treated as a special sentential connective. While this proposal may be adequate for dealing with many examples of conditional judge-ment, there are some important candidates which raise difficulties.  If judgements expressed by the sentence forms 'all things con-sidered, a is better than b' or 'relative to the available evidence, a is better than b' are to be regarded as instances of conditional judge-ment, as Davidson seems to demand, the proposal will have to be modified. For in the expression of these judgements the relevant considerations are not sententially specified but are referred to by a noun phrase, and in such cases characterization of 'pf", and for that matter of 'pr', as sentential connectives would seemingly flout syntax.  It would be no more legitimate to treat the phrases 'the available evidence' or 'all things considered' (or 'all things') as substituends for a sentential place marker (as 'e' should be to parallel 'm,') in one of Davidson's canonical forms than it would be to treat 'the premisses of your argument' (as distinet from 'The premisses of your argument are true') as a substituend for 'p' in the form 'if p then q'. So if the account of conditional judgement is to be both uniform and capable of accommodating 'all things considered' judgements (interpreted in the manner just suggested), 'pr' and 'pf" will have to be thought of as representing not connectives but relational expressions signitying relations between such entities as sentences, statements, propositions, or judgements, according to philosophical predilection.  These reflections, however, raise a doubt whether we have, after all, correctly interpreted Davidson's notion of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement. Such a judgement might, as we have suggested, be a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, relative to the available evidence, a is better than b', but, alterna-tively, it might be thought of as a judgement expressible in a sentence of the form 'Prima facie, given that p, and P2... and Pn, a is better than b', where the conjunctive schema 'P2... and Pn,represents a specification of what is, in fact, the available evidence.  If this alternative interpretation should prove sufficient for a Davidsonian solution to the problem of incontinence, its adoption would enable us to preserve the characterization of 'pr' and 'pf" as representing connectives. But is it sufficient for this purpose? The question whether, to discharge its role in Davidson's scheme, an  'all things considered' judgement can be regarded as specifying a set of propositions which in fact constitute the body of evidence, or whether it has to be regarded as referring to such a set of propositions as constituting the body of evidence, is, to our minds, bound up with the further question about the meaning of the expressions 'all things considered' and 'available evidence'. 'All things considered' might mean either 'relative to everything which has so far been considered' or 'relative to everything which should be con-sidered'. Similarly 'the available evidence' might mean 'the evidence of which I have so far availed myself' or 'all the evidence of which I should avail myself'. In each case the natural interpretation seems to us to be the second, but there is some indication (albeit in passages not altogether unambiguous) that Davidson intends the first.  It might be helpful, before we examine possible interpretations of 'all things considered' judgements, to consider what might be the maximal set of stages through which a man might pass in practical deliberation. We offer an expanded sequence of stages which we hope Davidson would not individually reject, although he might wish to claim that not all of them are distinct. As we note below, Davidson might himself argue that stage (7) is not distinct from stage (6), and we will later present as our first interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement one that corresponds to stage (3) (hence, on this interpretation stages (3), (4), and (5) would not be distinct) and as our second interpretation one that corresponds to stage (4) (hence on this interpretation stages (4) and (5) would not be distinct). These stages can be seen as occurring in non-practical deliberation as well, and we have included the non-practical analogues of the evaluative judgements. We may note that the labels are those of philosophical reflection and not the agent's and, most important, that the schema is of a provisional nature and, we think, will be seriously affected by criticisms offered later in this paper.(1) Single specificatory prima-facie (pf) (conditional) judge-ments:  [pf(4,z better than not-z)]  [prob(A,z)]  (2) Non-final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judge-ments:  (pf((A,B), z better than not-z)l  [prob((4, B), z)l  Final compound specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((A,B, C,D), z better than not-z)] (prob((A, B,C, D), z)I when (A,B,C,D) = set of relevant factors before me Summative non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: [pf((all things before me), z better than not-z) l [prob((all things before me), z)] Final non-specificatory pf (conditional) judgement: Ipf(all things considered), z better than not-z)] (prob(all things considered), z)] Unconditional judgement: (z better than not-z) Intention to do z Beliet that z (Note that Davidson might say that (7) is not distinct from (6).)  111  Let us now revert to the actual text of Davidson's paper. There seem to be four interpretations, or varieties of interpretation, of one or other of the phrases 'all things considered' and 'relative to the available evidence' which, in one way or another, need to be considered in connection with Davidson's account of incontinence. We shall argue that the first three both give unnatural accounts of an  'all things considered' judgement and, when incorporated into Davidson's framework, yield unsatisfactory accounts of inconti-nence; while the fourth, though it seems to represent correctly the nature of an 'all things considered' judgement, cannot be fittedinto Davidson's framework without modification to that framework which, we suspect, he would find unwelcome.  1. One possible interpretation, which has already been mentioned, is to take the 'all things considered' judgement as being of the form  'pf, given P,... Po, a is better than b', where Pr... Po are in fact the totality of the propositions which the agent believes to be both true and relevant. While this interpretation preserves Davidson's stipulation that 'pf' be treated as a connective, it fails to represent the incontinent man as thinking of his judgement in favour of a as being relativized to the totality of available evidence. For all that has been said, he might think this only a partial survey of the pieces of evidence which, severally, he has considered, in which case he would not have achieved the kind of judgement that a is better than b which, intuitively, we want to attribute to him.To avoid this difficulty, we might abandon the idea that 'pf' is a connective rather than a relational expression and, in line with what Davidson seems to suggest himself, interpret the 'all things con-sidered' judgement as being of the form 'pf, relative to the totality of propositions, each of which is believed by me to be true and rele-vant, a is better than b', or, to put it more succinctly, 'pf, relative to all that is now before me, a is better than b'. This seems to give one legitimate reading of the expression 'available evidence' (= 'everything I have at present under consideration) but ignores what seems to be a genuine distinction between 'relative to the available evidence' (so understood) and 'all things considered'. It ignores, that is, the possibility that a man, in his deliberation, might regard the evidence at present available to him as inadequate, in which case it would seem inappropriate to suppose him to be ready to make the judgement that 'all things considered, a is better than b' (as 'all things considered' is normally understood), Surely a general account of incontinence should provide for the possibility of this measure of scrupulousness in the deliberations of the man who subsequently acts incontinently.Our third candidate for the interpretation of an 'all things con-sidered' judgement is one which it is pretty evident that Davidson would, quite rightly, reject, but it is worth mentioning in order that it should be clear just why it should be rejected. In pursuit of the proper goal of accommodating a distinction between an *all things considered' judgement and a conditional probability judgement orevaluative judgement which is relativized to the totality of the evidence present before the judger (an 'all things before me' judge-ment), one might seek to understand the idea of an 'all things considered judgement as being the idea of a judgement to the effect that something is probable, or prima facie better than something else, relative to some totality of supporting facts, many of which would in a normal case be unavailable to the judger, at least at the time of judging, and possibly at any time. On this view, a standard piece of fully explicit practical reasoning might be supposed to contain two distinct steps: (a) a step from a (conditional) *all things before me' judgement (together with the reflective judgement that certain qualificatory conditions obtain which license this step) to a (conditional) 'all things considered' judgement, which is relativized to an ideal totality of evidence; and (b) a step from a (conditional)  'all things considered' judgement, so interpreted, to an unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Such a view would be open to two grave objections. First, as Davidson himself points out, if we stock this ideal totality of evidence too generously it will not merely support but will entail the content of the unconditional judgement. If I am investigating prob-abilistically the possibility that it is now raining in Timbuctoo, the relevant ideal totality of evidence should not include either the fact that it is raining in Timbuctoo or the fact that the residents of Tim-buctoo can now see that it is raining. Such a totality of evidence would have to occupy an intermediate position between the evidence before the judger and the totality of all relevant facts of any sort, and it is far from clear that there is any satisfactory characterization of such an intermediate totality. Second, even if the idea of such a totality could be defined, it seems plausible to suppose that at any given stage in the reasoning, a reasoner's best estimate at that stage of what conclusion such an ideal totality of evidence would support wouid have to coincide with the conclusion supported by the evidence, so far as it goes, which is before him at that stage. In so far as the evidence before me supports p, 1 am naturally at this point inclined to believe rather than disbelieve that the totality of evidence will support p. On the view considered, the crucial stage in probabilistic or practical reasoning will not be that at which we become entitled to attach some degree or other of credence to the content of some 'all things considered' judgement, as so interpreted (if we have any evidence at all we are always in that position); it would rather be the stage at which we are entitled,in the light of the judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, actually to judge, as opposed to, say, merely conjecture, that an ideal totality would support a certain conclusion. But now it is not clear what useful function the 'all things considered' judge-ment, so understood, can be supposed to fulfill. For if, as seems to be the case, a rational man will automatically make the second of our two steps once he has made the first, would it not be more economical, and therefore better, to suppose that the combination of an 'all things before me' judgement, together with a judgement that the qualificatory conditions obtain, directly entities a reasoner to make the appropriate unconditional judgement rather than to suppose it to entitle him to make an 'all things considered' judgement from which he is to be supposed, if rational, to make a further move to an unconditional judgement?  4. The argument of the last paragraph has led us directly to the final possibility to be here considered, namely, that for x to make an'all things considered' judgement that a is better than b is for * to judge that, since he has a certain body of evidence, e, in favour of the supposition that a is better than b, and since certain qualifi-catory conditions are satisfied, it is best for x to (* should, x ought to) make the unconditional judgement that a is better than b.  Whether or not this interpretation will succeed in preserving the idea than an 'all things considered' judgement is a special sort of conditional, or prima-facie, judgement is a question which we will discuss in a moment.  The only remaining alternative interpretation, so far as we can see, is one which although it might perhaps be thought to give a better representation of the meaning of the phrase 'all things considered' would certainly not preserve the conditional, or prima-facie, character of the 'all things considered' judgement. One might treat the statement that, all things considered, a is better than b, as expressing the judgement that a is better than b, with the gloss that this judgement is justified in the light of one's possession of a favourable body of evidence with respect to which the qualificatory conditions obtain; but since on this interpretation an 'all things considered' judgement would plainly involve the unconditional judgement that a is better than b, just as part of what would be expressed by saying  'Demonstrably, p' would be the judgement that p, no room would be left for the idea that an 'all things considered' judgement is a conditional judgement.  The crucial question to be considered is whether, if we interpret an'all things considered' judgement in what seems to us the most plausible way which does not represent it as patently involving a commitment to an unconditional evaluative judgement, we are still entitled to classify it as a conditional, or prima-facie, judgement.  Let us assume that we can facilitate exposition without introducing any relevant change in substance if we express a standard prima-facie evaluative judgement by the sentence form 'given that p. x should (ought to) do A'; the shift from 'a is better than b' to 'x should do A' seems for present purposes immaterial, and it is to be understood that the form we propose is not to be taken as entailing that p. To incorporate a commitment to the truth of p, the pattern might be varied to 'given the fact that p. x should do A'. In an attempt to assimilate an 'all things considered' judgement as closely as possible to this standard pattern, we might suppose its expansion to be of the general form 'given the fact that p. certain things are the case such that, given that they are the case, x should do A, and given the fact that certain qualificatory conditions are met, x should judge that x should do A'. The qualificatory conditions in question need not here be accurately specified; their effect would be to stipulate that 'the principle of total evidence' was satisfied, that, for example, x's judgement that, given certain facts, x should do A, had taken into account all the relevant facts in x's possession and that x had fulfilled whatever call there was upon him at the time in question to maximize his possession of relevant facts. Let us summarily express the idea that these qualificatory ,conditions are fulfilled by using the form 'x's judgement that, given the facts in question, & should do A, is optimal for x at the time in question'. Our question, then, is whether a judgement on the part of x expressible in the form, 'given the fact that  given certain facts, x should do A, and x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x, then & should judge that & should do A' is properly classifiable as a conditional or prima-facie judgement.  To put the matter more shortly, but less precisely, the kind of judgement whose status is in question is one such as 'given the fact that on my evidence I should do A, and that my judgement that this is so is optimal, I should judge that I should do A'. (Let us call a specially interpreted 'all things considered' judgement of this form ATC*.)The question we have to ask, then, is whether ATC* is properly classified as a conditional, rather than an unconditional, judge-ment. On one possible interpretation of conditional judgement it clearly has strong claims, inasmuch as it would be possible to replace, in its standard expression, the opening phrase given the fact that' by the word 'if' without any violence to the normal usage of 'if', and the resulting conditional sentence would express one part of the sense of the ATC* judgement, the other part being what would be expressed by the antecedent of this conditional sentence.  The ATC* judgement would then seem to be conditional in very much the same way as one might regard a judgement of the form  'since p, q' our conditional, on the grounds that its sense includes the sense of 'if p, g'. This sense of 'conditional' is plainly not that which we need in the present context. The sense which we need is one which carries with it the idea of being prima-facie in character, of being connected in some way with defeasibility. In an attempt to show that ATC* is not conditional in this further sense, let us characterize the sense more precisely.  Let 'p,' abbreviate 'x has told y that x will consider lending y $100  towards the purchase of a new car':  Let 'P,' abbreviate 'y is hard up and needs a car for work';  Let'p,' abbreviate 'y's spouse only too often gets hold of y's money';  Let 'q' abbreviate 'x should lend y $100'; and Let 'q" abbreviate 'x should not lend y $100'.  The judgement that 'given p, & Pz, @' is clearly prima facie in that the related argument form  Given p,& p2,9  P1&p2  q  is plainly defeasible, insofar as the addition of the premisses that p and that, given P1, Pr & Pa, q' to the premisses above gives us, without falsifying thereby p, or pz, a set of premisses from which it would be illegitimate to conclude that q. All of this is, of course, familiar. For purposes of comparison with ATC*, it is important to note that the argument just characterized as defeasible could have been expressed in a telescoped form, viz.  • The relevant interpretation of 'if' may, of course, not be any of those standardly selected by logicians or philosophers of logic.Given the fact that p, & pa, 9  q  Here too the inferential step will be upset without falsification of its premiss if we suppose x also to have judged that, given the fact that Pa, Pa, & Pa, Q. Let us as a first stage in examining the status of ATC make use of the notion of a specification of an ATC* judge-ment, that is, a judgement which differs from ATC* in that the relevant considerations are identified and not merely alluded to (Spec (ATC*)). The Spec (ATC*) appropriate for the present example will be X's judgement at / that given the fact that  given the fact that p, & Pz, 9; and that at t, x's judgement that (a) is optimal for x; then x should judge at t that q. That a step by x from this judgement to the detached conclusion that q would not be a step which is defeasible in the required sense is shown by the fact that if, at t, x had made the additional judgement  'given the fact that p, & p,& pa, q"', his making this judgement would have entailed that his judgement 'given the fact that p, & Pa, q' was not optimal for x at t. In this case he would not have been in a position to make the step from Spec (ATC*) to q, but this would be because a judgement by him in favour of Spec (ATC*) would, given the supposed additional judgement, be falsified. We do not, then, have the characteristic case of a defeasible inference in which the inference may be upset without falsification of any of its pre-misses. Since the truth or falsity of the claim that x's judgement about a certain body of evidence is optimal cannot depend on whether, in the claim in question, the body of evidence is itemized or merely referred to, if the step from Spec (ATC*) to q is not of the defeasible kind, then the step from ATCe to q is not of the defeasible kind either. It in fact seems to us that, though there is an. important difference between the two cases residing in the fact that in the first case, but not in the second, the legitimacy of the inference is relative to a particular subject at a particular time, the irrationality of refusing to move from the appropriate ATC* judgement to q will be the same in kind as the irrationality involved in refusing to move (as, perhaps, Lewis Carroll's tortoise did) from 'given the fact that pand that if p, q'to 'q'; and furthermore, that the irrationality inquestion is not of a kind that either we or Davidson would wish to attribute to the typical incontinent man.  If the above argument is correct, to preserve as much as possible of Davidson's theses we should have to suppose that the typical incontinent man judges (unconditionally) that he should judge that he should do A, but does not actually judge that he should do A. If we try to take this position, we are at once faced with the following awkward questions: the position, like what we may call the 'naïve' view of incontinence, involves the supposition that for a certain substituend for @ it is true of a typical incontinent man that he judges that he should o but does not ; it differs from the 'naive' view in taking as the favoured substituend for o 'x judges that x should do a', rather than 'x does a'. Why should this departure from the 'naive' view be thought to give a better account of incon-tinence? On the face of it, the 'naïve' view scems superior. It seems casier to attribute to people a failure to act as they fully believe they ought to act than to attribute to them a failure to believe what they fully believe they ought to believe. What is there to prevent a man from judging that he should do a, when he judges that he should judge that he should do a, except his disinclination to do a, and would it not be more natural to suppose that this disinclination prevents his judgement that he should do a from being followed by his doing a than to suppose that it prevents his judgement that he should judge that he should do a from being followed by his judgement that he should do a?  So far as we can see, the only motivation for disallowing the possibility of incontinence with respect to action, as most straightforwardly conceived, while allowing the possibility of the realization of a similarly straightforward conception of incontinence of belief or judgement, lies in the supposed theoretical attractiveness of the equation of a decision or intention on the part of x to do a with a judgement on the part of x that x should do a or that it is best for x to do a. To examine the case for this theoretical idea would take us beyond the limits of the paper. But before concluding our discussion we shall mention one or two considerations which seem to tell against the account of incontinence which has just been formulated.  The actual logical situation is even more complex than we have represented it is being; but present complexities are perhaps sufficient for present purposes.For the purposes of this discussion, we should think of the incontinent man as being just a special case of someone who  is faced with a practical problem about what to do; envisages himself as settling the problem by settling what it is best for him to do (what he should do); and envisages himself as settling what it is best for him to do by deliberation. He is a special case in that his deliberation is defective in one or other of a number of special ways. There may be occasions in which one decides, or forms the intention, to do something without reference to the question what it is best to do, though some philo-sophers, who may include Davidson, have been disposed to deny this possibility. There may also be occasions in which one settles on something being the best thing to do, without any recourse to delib-eration, by an immediate or snap judgement. Both of these possible routes to the resolution of a practical problem may, perhaps, in certain circumstances involve incontinence, but it would not be the variety with which we and Davidson are primarily concerned. Any one who, in consequence of satisfying the three conditions speci-fied, has recourse to deliberation in the settlement of a practical problem, whether or not he ends up by exhibiting incontinence, engages in an undertaking which is generically similar to other kinds of undertaking in that there is a specifiable outcome or completion towards which the undertaking is directed. One who is engaged in fixing the supper, whether or not as a result of prior decision, completes his operations when he reaches his objective of having the supper ready, and if he breaks off his opcrations before completing it, some explanation is required. Similarly, one who deliberates in the face of a practical problem completes his operations when he reaches the objective of having settled what is unconditionally the best thing for him to do, and again, if he fails to complete the operation some explanation is required.  We must first distinguish a failure to complete deliberation from a miscompletion; for the present discussion a failure to complete due to interruption seems irrelevant. What we need to consider are the various ways in which a man may miscomplete deliberation; and here, it seems, attraction or revulsion, rather than externalsources which interrupt deliberation, are in play. Now there are forms of miscompletion which will present us with cases of incontinence which are net of the type with which we, and Davidson, are concerned; a man may see a number of initial considerations, all or some of which are favourabie to a, and because of the attractions of a or his reluctance to deliberate, seize on one of these considerations and jump to the unconditional conclusion that he ought to  a. This is not Davidson's case. Again, a man might deliberate and reach an 'all things before me' judgement which represents the totality of his evidence at that stage, though it is inadequate since more considerations are demanded. He jumps to a judgement that he ought to a, in line with the latest 'all things before me' judgement; this is not Davidson's case either, since here the relevant conditional judgement and the unconditional judgement are both favourable to doing a. This leaves us with the possibility of a man jumping to an unconditional judgement in favour of a at a point at which the relevant 'all things before him' judgement is in favour of something other than a. We shall discuss this possibility with some care since, in spite of the fact that if taken as a characterization of typical incontinence it is open to an objection which we briefly advanced earlier (pp. 34-5), we are not absolutely certain that it does not represent Davidson's view of the incontinent man.  Obviously, there is in general no conceptual difficulty attaching to the idea of someone who is in the midst of some undertaking and who, as a result of revulsion, tedium, or the appeal of some alter-native, breaks off what he is doing and instead embarks on some other undertaking or action. The miscompletion of deliberation which concerns us will, however, constitute a special case of this kind of phenomenon, in that the substituted performance has to be regarded as one with the same objective as the original undertaking, namely, finding the best thing to do. Again, there is no lack of examples which satisfy this more restrictive condition; one may break off one's own efforts to get one's car running and, instead, send for a mechanic to get the job done. But even this restriction is not restrictive enough in view of the special character of the objective involved in deliberation. While there are alternative routes to realizing the objective of getting one's car going besides working on it oneself, it is not clear that there are alternative routes to settling what is the best thing to do besides deliberating; or that if there are (for example, asking some one else's advice), they are at all germaneto the phenomenon of incontinence. One who arrives at a holiday resort and embarks on the undertaking of finding the best hotel to stay in may tire of his search and decide to register at the next presentable hotel that he encounters, but in doing so he can hardly regard himself as having adopted an alternative method of finding the best hotel to stay in. In fact, to provide a full parallel for cases of incontinence, if these are conceived of as cases of making an unconditional evaluation in a direction opposed to that of a current  'all things before me' judgement, the examples would have to be even more bizarre than that just offered. One would rather have to imagine someone who, with a view to winning a prize at a party later in the day, sets out to find and to buy the largest pumpkin on sale in any store in his neighbourhood. After inspecting the pumpkins at three of the local stores, he tires of his enterprise and decides to buy the largest pumpkin in the fourth store, which he is now inves-tigating, even though he knows that the evidence so far before him gives preference to the largest pumpkin at store number two, which is, of course, larger than the one he proposes to buy. It is obvious that such a man cannot regard himself as having adopted an alternative way to finding the largest pumpkin on sale. This elaboration is required since, on the scheme presently being considered, the incontinent man may typically substitute, for the continuation of deliberation, the formation of an intention to do b, to which he is prompted by its prospective pleasantness, in spite of the fact, of which he is aware, that the considerations so far taken into account (which include the prospective pleasantness of b) so far as they go favour a. The outcome of these attempts to find parallels suggests forcibly that it is logically impossible that one should without extreme logical incoherence make an unconditional judgement favour-ing b when one is fully conscious of the thought that the totality of evidence so far considered favours a, unless one thinks (reasonably or unreasonably) that the addition of further evidence, so far un-identified, would tilt the balance in favour of b. This last possibility must be regarded as irrelevant to our discussion of incontinence, since it is not a feature of the kind of incontinence with which we are concerned, if indeed of any kind of incontinence, that the incontinent man should think that further investigation and reflection would, or would have, justified the action which the incontinent man performs. We are then left with the conclusion that to suppose someone to make an unconditional judgement in a direction op-  posed to an 'all things before me' judgement, we must also suppose the latter jugdement not to be 'fully present' to the judger, on some suitable interpretation of that phrase. We can support this point directly without having to rely on analogies with other forms of undertaking. Mr and Mrs John Q. Citizen have decided they want a dog and are engaged in trying to settle what would be the best breed of dog for them to acquire. This enterprise involves them in such activities as perusing books about dogs, consulting friends, and reminding themselves of pertinent aspects of their own experience of dogs. At a certain point, not one at which they regard their deliberations as concluded, it looks to them as if the data they have so far collected favour the selection of a short-haired terrier, though there is something also to be said for a spaniel or a dachshund. At this point, Mrs Citizen says, 'My aunt's spaniel, Rusty, was such a lovely dog. Let's get a spaniel', and her husband says, 'All right.' This story arouses no conceptual stir. But suppose that (1) Mrs Citizen, instead of saying 'Let's get a spaniel' had said 'A spaniel's the best dog to get'  ', and that (2) previously in their deliberation  they had noted the endearing qualities of Rusty, but in spite of that had come to lean towards a short-haired terrier. The story, thus altered, will conform to the alleged course of the incontinent man's reflections; at a certain point it appears to him that the claims of prospective pleasure are, or are being, outweighed, but nevertheless he judges that the pleasant thing is the best thing for him to do and acts on the judgement. But in the altered story the judgement of Mr and Mrs Citizen that a spaniel is the best dog for them to buy, to which they are prompted by a consideration which has already been discounted in their deliberations, scems to us quite incredible, unless we suppose that they have somehow lost sight of the previous course of their deliberations. (The further possibility that they suddenly and irrationally changed their assessment of the evidence so far before them, even if allowable, will not exemplify the idea that there is some sense in which the incontinent man thinks that what he is doing is something which he should not be doing.)  The conceptual difficulty is hardly lessened if we suppose the example of Rusty to be a new consideration instead of one already discounted. The couple could not move from it to the judgement that a spaniel is best without weighing it in the balance together with the body of data which, so far as it goes, they have deemed to point towards a short-haired terrier in preference to a spaniel,unless again they had somehow lost sight of the course of their deliberation.  If, as we have been arguing, an unconditional judgement against a can be combined with an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a only if the latter judgement is not fully present to the judger, a precisely parallel conclusion will hold with respect to an  'all things considered' judgement (ATC*), since an ATC* judgement consists of an 'all things before me' judgement together with an 'optimality" judgement about it. Unless it should turn out to be otherwise logically indefensible, it would be preferable, as being more in accord with common sence, to attribute to the typical incontinent man (as we have been supposing Davidson to do) not merely an 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a but also an ATC judgement in favour of a, with the additional proviso that the ATC* judgement is not fully present. On the face of it, this would not involve the attribution to the incontinent man of an unconditional judgement in favour of a, and so we leave room for an unconditional judgement, and so for an intention, against a.  Unfortunately, as has been partially foreshadowed by our discussion of the question whether an ATC* judgement is a conditional judgement, the position just outlined is, in our view, logically inde-fensible, as we shall now attempt to show.  We attach different numerical subscripts to particular occurences of the word 'justify' in order to leave open the possibility, without committing ourselves to its realization, that the sense of 'justify" varies in these occurrences; and we attach subscripts to the word  'optimality' in order to refer to some formulation (or reformula-tion) of the optimality condition previously sketched by us on page 38 which would be appropriate to whatever sense of 'justified' is distinguished by the subscript.  Let us suppose that:  (I) * judges at / that  (1) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimality,, justifies, x's doing a.  Unless we attribute to x extreme logical confusion or blindness, the supposition (I) seems tantamount to the supposition that:  (1l) x judges at / that  (2) x should do a.It seems, however, that we are merely reformulating the supposition already expressed by (I) if we suppose that:  (IlI) * judges at r that  (3) x has at / some body of evidence (e) which, in conformity with the requirements for optimalitya, justifies, x's judging at t that x should do a.  Again, as in the case of supposition (Il), supposition (III) seems tantamount to supposition (IV):  (IV) x judges at !  (4) x should judge at t that x should do a.  This argument seems to us to establish the conclusion that, extreme logical confusion apart, one judges on what seems to one an adequate basis that one should judge that one should do a if and only if one judges on the same basis that one should do a. That is to say, any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as also a case of believing that one's belief that one should do a is a belief which one should hold: and any case of believing, on what seems to one an adequate basis, that one should believe that one should do a is, logical confusion apart, to be regarded as a case of believing that one should do a. If this conclusion is correct it seems that we have excluded the possibility of finding a reasonable interpretation of an  'all things considered' judgement that one should do a which would be distinct from, and would not involve, an unconditional judgement that one should do a.  We are left then with the conclusion that to attribute to the incontinent man an ATC* judgement in favour of a is, in effect, to attribute to him an unconditional judgement in favour of a; and so, presumably, to attribute to him a not fully present ATC® judgement in favour of a is to attribute to him a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a. If this is so, then there seem to be initially the following options:  1. To hold that an incontinent act, though voluntary, is not inten-tional: on this assumption we are free to hold, if we wish, both (i) that forming an intention to do a is identifiable with making a fullypresent unconditional judgement in favour of a, and (ii) that a not fully present judgement in favour of a is incompatible with a fully present unconditional judgement against a (more generally, patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible, even if one or both are not fully present to the judger). To adopt this option would seem heroic.  2. To allow that the incontinent man, at least sometimes, acts with an intention; in which case it must be allowed either that (i) patently conflicting unconditional value judgements are compossible, provided that at least one of them is not fully present to the judger; or that (ii) an intention to do a is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a; the most that could be maintained would be that making a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a entails forming an intention to do a or, altenatively and less strongly, is incompatible with having an intention to do b, where b patently conflicts with a.  The upshot of these considerations with respect to the search for an adequate theory of incontinence seems to be that the following contending theses remain in the field, though some of them, particularly the first, may not appear very strong contenders:  The typical incontinent man (who does not do a though in some sense he thinks that he should) reaches only a not fully present 'all things before me' judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement against a, and (conse-quentially) with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that intention is identifiable with fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances. The typical incontinent man reaches a not fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a, which he combines with a fully present unconditional judgement, and an intention, against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that an intention is identifi. able with a fully present unconditional judgement and that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are compossible provided that at least one of them is not fully present.  3. The typical incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a, but not with a fully present unconditional judgementagainst a. Together with this thesis go the theses that patently conflicting unconditional judgements are not compossible in any circumstances and that an intention is not identifiable with a fully present unconditional judgement, though it is perhaps true that a fully present unconditional judgement entails the presence of an intention (or at least excludes the presence of a contrary intention).  4. The 'naïve' view: the incontinent man reaches a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a which he combines with an intention against a. Together with this thesis go the theses that the existence of a fully present unconditional judgement in favour of a carries no implications with regard to the presence or absence of an intention to do a or, again, to do something which patently conflicts with a. The 'naive' view is uncommitted at this point with respect to the compossibility of patently conflicting unconditional value judgements.  A proper decision between these contending theses will clearly depend on the provision of a proper interpretation of the expression 'fully present', used by us a dummy, an undertaking which in turn will require a detailed examination of the phenomena of incontinence. These are matters which lie beyond the scope of this paper. H. P. Grice.  I shall devote this Epilogue to a detailed review of the deeper aspects of the unity which I believe the essays in this volume to possess.  These deeper aspects are three in number, and I shall now enumerate them separately. The first is that the connections between the topics discussed are sometimes stronger and more interesting than the essays themselves make clear: partly this is due to the fact that these connections were not, I think, seen by me at the time at which the essays were written, and it is only in retrospect that I begin to see their number and their importance. The second aspect, on which I think the first is dependent, is that the various topics which interested me at the time at which these essays were written seem to be ones which are, first of all, important and second, topics which still interest me, and some of them, perhaps all of them, are matters which I still feel that I need to make up my mind about more thoroughly and clearly. Consequently these essays can perhaps be regarded as the first word but not the last word in a number of directions in which it is important that philosophers should go. The third and last of these deeper aspects is one that has already been remarked upon in the preface as providing the methodological theme which runs through the contents of this volume. It consists in the application of or illustration of a certain sort of way of doing philosophy, one which was one of the many ways in which philosophy was done in Oxford at the time at which I was there and which are connected with the application to philosophy of a particular kind of interest in language, particularly ordinary language. Such interest took more than one form, and I do not think that in any of the forms it has been very well articulated orexpressed or described by those who practised it; and I think it is of fundamental importance to philosophizing. The last part of this epilogue will be devoted to an attempt to make its character more clear.  I shall begin by listing the persistent or recurrent thematic strands which it seems to me I can discern in the essays appearing in this volume, and 1 shall then return after having listed them to consider them one by one in varying degrees of detail. I think I can detect eight such strands though some of them have more than one component and the components do not necessarily have to be accepted as a block.  The first of these main strands belongs to the philosophy of percep-tion; it involves two theses; first that the general notion of perception, the concept expressed by the verb "perceive," is properly treatable by means of causal analysis; and second that in the more specific notions connected with perception like those involving different modalities of perception like "seeing" and "hearing," various elements have to be considered but one which cannot be ignored or eliminated is the experiential quality of the sense-experiences perception involves. A third question, about the analysis of statements describing objects of perception like material objects, was also prominent in my thinking at the time at which these essays were written but does not figure largely in these pages. The second strand is a concern to defend the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction together perhaps with one or more of such closely related distinctions as that between necessary and contingent or between a priori and a posteriori. A third strand is a defense of the rights of the ordinary man or common sense vis-à-vis the professional philosopher, the idea being that for reasons which have yet to be determined and accurately stated the ordinary man has a right to more respect from the professional philosopher than a word of thanks for having got him started.  The fourth strand relates to meaning; it consists in two theses: first, that it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of meaning which is relativized to the users of words or expressions and one that is not so relativized; and second, of the two notions the unrelativized notion is posteriori to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized notion; what words mean is a matter of what people mean by them.  The fifth strand is the contention that in considering the notion of meaning we should pay attention to two related distinctions. First, a distinction between those elements of meaning which are present by virtue of convention and those which are present by virtue of something other than convention; and second, between those elements ofmeaning which standardly form part of what a word or form of words asserts (or its user asserts), and those elements of meaning which rather form part of what the words or their users imply or otherwise convey or are committed to. A distinction, that is to say, (a) between conventional and nonconventional meaning and (b) between assertive and nonassertive meaning. Strand six is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of rational activity and that those rational activities which do not involve the use of language are in various ways importantly parallel to those which do. This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational cooperation; the merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.  Strands seven and eight both relate to the real or apparent opposition between the structures advocated by traditional or Aristotelian logic, on the one hand, and by modern or mathematical logic, on the other. In a certain sense these strands pull in opposite directions.  Strand seven consists in the contention that it is illegitimate to repre-sent, as some modern logicians have done, such grammatical subject phrases as "the King of France," "every schoolboy," "a rich man," and even "Bismarck" as being only ostensibly referential; that they should be genuinely referential is required both for adequate representation of ordinary discourse and to preserve a conception of the use of language as a rational activity.  Strand eight involves the thesis that, notwithstanding the claims of strand seven, genuinely referential status can be secured for the subject phrases in question by supplementing the apparatus of modern logic in various ways which would include the addition of the kind of bracketing devices which are sketched within the contents of this volume.  Strand One  I now turn to a closer examination of the first of these eight thematic strands, the strand, that is, which relates to the analysis of per-ception.' The two essays involving this strand seem to me not to be devoid of merit; the essay on the Causal Theory of Perception served to introduce what later I called the notion of Conversational Impli-  1. Cf. esp. Essays 15-16.cature which has performed, I think, some useful service in the philosophy of language, and also provided an adequate base for the rejection of a bad, though at one time popular, reason for rejecting a causal analysis of perception; and the essay called "Some Remarks about the Senses," drew attention, I think, to an important and neglected subject, namely the criteria by which one distinguishes between one modality of sense and another. But unfortunately to find a way of disposing of one bad reason for rejecting a certain thesis is not the same as to establish that thesis, nor is drawing attention to the importance of a certain question the same as answering that question.  In retrospect it seems to me that both these essays are open to criticisms which so far as I know have not been explicitly advanced In "The Causal Theory of Perception" I reverted to a position about sense-datum statements which was originally taken up by philosophers such as Paul and Ayer and some others; according to it, statements to the effect that somebody was having a sense-datum, or had a sense-datum or was having a sense-datum of a particular sort, are to be understood as alternative ways of making statements about him which are also expressible in terms of what I might call phenomenal verbs like "seem" or, more specifically, like "looks," "sounds," and "feels."  This position contrasted with the older kind of view, according to which statements about sense-data were not just alternative versions of statements which could be expressed in terms of phenomenal verbs but were items which served to account for the applicability of such a range of verbs. According to the older view, to say that someone had a sense-datum which was red or mouselike was not just an outlandish alternative way of saying it looked to him as if there was a mouse or something red before him, but was rather to specify something which explained why it looked to him as if there was something red before him or as if there were a mouse before him. The proponents of the newer view of sense-data would have justified their suggestion by pointing to the fact that sense-data and their sensible characteristics are mysterious items which themselves stand in need of explanation, and so cannot properly be regarded as explaining rather than as being explained by the applicability of the phenomenal verb-phrases associated with them. It is not clear that these criticisms of the older view are justified; might it not be that while in one sense of the word "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to "rendered intelligible") sense-data are explained in terms of phenomenal verbs,in another sense of "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to  "accounted for") the priority is reversed, and the applicability of phenomenal verbs is explained by the availability of sense-data and their sensible feature. The newer view, moreover, itself may run into trouble. It seems to me to be a plausible view that the applicability of phenomenal verbs is itself to be understood as asserting the presence or occurrence of a certain sort of experience, one which would explain and in certain circumstances license the separate employment of a verb phrase embedded in the phenomenal verb-phrase; for it to look or seem to me as if there is something red before me is for me to have an experience which would explain and in certain unproblematic circumstances license the assertion that there is something red before me. It will be logically incoherent at one and the same time to represent the use of phenomenal verbs as indicating the existence of a ba-sis, of some sort or other, for a certain kind of assertion about percep tible objects and as telling us what that basis is. The older view of sense-data attempted to specify the basis; the newer view, apparently with my concurrence, seems to duck this question and thereby to render mysterious the interpretation of phenomenal verb-phrases.  Second, in "Some Remarks about the Senses" I allow for the possibility that there is no one criterion for the individuation of a sense, but I do not provide for the separate possibility that the critical candidates are not merely none of them paramount but are not in fact independent of one another. For example, sense organs are differentiated not by their material character, but by their function. Organs that are just like eyes would in fact be not eyes but ears if what they did was, not to see, but to hear; again, real qualities of things are those which underlie or explain various causal mechanisms, such as our being affected by vibrations or light rays. So criterial candidates run into one another; and indeed the experiential flavor or quality of experience to which 1 attach special importance is in fact linked with the relevant ranges of what Locke called secondary qualities which an observer attributes to the objects which he perceives; so we might end up in a position that would not have been uncongenial to Locke and Boyle, in which we hold that there are two ways of distinguishing between senses, one of which is by the character of their operations (processes studied by the sciences rather than by the ordinary citizen), and the other would be by the difference of their phenomenal char-acter, which would be something which would primarily be of interest to ordinary people rather than to scientists. These reflections sug-  gest to me two ideas which I shall here specify but not argue for. The first is that, so far from being elements in the ultimate furniture of the world, sense-data are items which are imported by theorists for various purposes; such purposes might be that one should have bearers of this or that kind of relation which is needed in order to provide us with a better means for describing or explaining the world. Such relations might be causal or spatial where the space involved is not physical space but some other kind of space, like visual space, or it might be a system of relations which in certain ways are analogous to spatial relations, like relations of pitch between sounds. This idea might lead to another, namely that consideration of the nature of perception might lead us to a kind of vindication of common sense distinct from those vindications which I mention elsewhere in this epilogue, for if sense-data are to be theoretical extensions introduced or concocted by theorists, theorists will need common sense in order to tell them what it is to which theoretical extensions need to be added. Philosophers' stories derive their character and direction from the nonphilosophical stories which they supplement.  Strand Two  The second of these eight strands consists in a belief in the possibility of vindicating one or more of the number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of "The analytic/syn-thetic distinction." I shall say nothing here about this strand not because I think it is unimportant; indeed I think it is one of the most important topics in philosophy, required in determining, not merely the answers to particular philosophical questions, but the nature of philosophy itself. It is rather that I feel that nothing less than an adequate treatment of the topic would be of any great value, and an adequate treatment of it would require a great deal of work which I have not yet been able to complete. This lacuna, however, may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that I provided some discussion of this topic in "Reply to Richards" contained in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality and by the fact that at the conclusion of this epilogue I shall also advance a slightly skittish hint of the direction in which I have some inclination to go. I hope that this treatment will serve as an interim indication of what my final position might be.  2. Cf. esp. Essay 13.  346  RetrospectiveThe third strand' consists in a disposition on my part to uphold in one form or another the rights of the ordinary man or of common sense in the face of attacks which proceed from champions of specialist philosophical or scientific theory. All parties would, I think, agree that specialist theory has to start from some basis in ordinary thought of an informal character; the question at issue is whether the contents and views contained in that thought have to continue to be respected in some measure or other by the specialist theorist even after the specialist theorist has embarked on his own work.  According to some, at that point, the contribution of ordinary thought and speech can be ignored, like a ladder to be kicked away once the specialist has got going. My support for common sense is not eroded by the failure of many attempts made by philosophers to give a justification or basis for such support; indeed the negative part of my contribution to the subject consists in the rejection of a number of such attempts. Some of these rejections appear in discussions contained in this volume, others in other places. One form of defense of common sense is one propounded by Moore in the famous paper on that subject. This seems to consist in the presumed acceptability of the obvious; it seems to consist in that because so far as I can see no other reason is given for the acceptance of what Moore counts as propositions of common sense. If I have read Moore aright I find this form of defense of common sense unsatisfactory on the grounds that the conception of the obvious is not in an appropriate sense an objective conception. This is pointedly illustrated by the famous story of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, who in a lecture announced that a certain mathematical proposition was obvious, at which point one of his audience demurred and said that it was not obvious to him.  Hardy then halted the lecture, paced outside the lecture room for a quarter of an hour, returned, and said "It is obvious." The trouble is that obviousness requires consent, on the part of the parties con-cerned, in the obviousness of what is thought of as obvious.  A second and different line of defense of common sense comes from Thomas Reid, who points to the need for first principles of human knowledge. Once these are secured, then various forms of derivation and deduction and inference can account for the accumulation of  3. Cf. esp. Essays 8-10.  Retrospectiveknown propositions which are as it were theorems in the system of knowledge; but theorems need to look back to axioms and these axioms are things which Reid regards as matters which it is the function of common sense to provide. The fault which I find here is a conflation of the notion of axioms as being organizational items from which nonaxiomatic propositions are supposed to be derivable with an epi-stemic interpretation of axioms as providing the foundations of human knowledge; whereas it seems to me arguable and indeed plausible to suppose that the grounds for the acceptance of the contents of this or that system do not lie in the prior evidence or self-evidence of the axioms of the system but in the general character of the system in containing what one thinks it ought to contain in the way of what is knowable.  From an epistemic point of view the justifiability of the system lies in its delivering, in general, what one wants it to deliver and thinks it should deliver, rather than in the availability of a range of privileged intuitions which, happily, provide us with a sufficiency of starting points for rational inference. If common sense comes into the picture at all in this connection it seems to me that it should be with regard to a recognition in some degree or other of what the system ought to be expected to deliver to us rather than as a faculty which assures us of starting points which form the axioms of the system.  A third attempt to justify common sense is that provided by Malcolm in his interpretation of Moore; Malcolm suggested that Moore's point should be thought of as being that standard descriptions of certain sorts of situations cannot be incorrect since the standards of correctness are set by the nature of the descriptions which are standardly used to describe those situations. The trouble with this line, to my mind, is that it confuses two kinds of correctness and incorrectness.  Correctness of use or usage, whether a certain expression is properly or improperly applied, gives us one kind of correctness, that of proper application, but that an expression is correct in that sense does not guarantee it against another sort of incorrectness, namely logical in-coherence.  The final form of an attempt to justify common sense is by an appeal to Paradigm or Standard Cases; cases, that is, of the application of an expression to what are supposedly things to which that expression applies if it applies to anything at all; for example, if the expression "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like "desks" and "walls" and "pavements." The difficulty with this attempt is thatit contains as an assumption just what a skeptic who is querying common sense is concerned to deny: no doubt it may be true that if the word "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like  "desks," but it is the contention of the skeptic that it does not apply to anything, and therefore the fact that something is the strongest candidate does not mean that it is a successful candidate for the application of that expression. On the positive side I offered as an alternative to the appeals I have just been discussing, a proposed link between the authority of common sense and the theory of meaning. 1 suggested roughly that to side with the skeptic in his questioning of commonsense beliefs would be to accept an untenable divorce between the meaning of words and sentences on the one hand, and the proper specification of what speakers mean by such words and sentences on the other. This attempt to link two of the eight strands to one another now seems to me open to several objections, at least one of which I regard as fatal.  I begin with two objections which I am inclined to regard as non-fatal; the first of these is that my proposed reply to the skeptic ignores the distinction between what is propounded as, or as part of, one's message, thus being something which the speaker intends, and on the other hand what is part of the background of the message by way of being something which is implied, in which case its acceptance is often not intended but is rather assumed. That there is this distinction is true, but what is, given perfect rapport between speaker and hearer, something which a speaker implies, may, should that rapport turn out to be less than perfect, become something which the speaker is committed to asserting or propounding. If a speaker thinks his hearer has certain information which in fact the hearer does not, the speaker may, when this fact emerges, be rationally committed to giving him the information in question, so what is implied is at least potentially something which is asserted and so, potentially, something the acceptance of which is intended.  A second (I think, nonfatal) objection runs as follows: some forms of skepticism do not point to incoherences in certain kinds of mes-sage; they rely on the idea that skeptical doubts sometimes have to have been already allayed in order that one should have the foundations which are needed to allay just those doubts. To establish that I am not dreaming, I need to be assured that the experiences on which I rely to reach this assurance are waking experiences. In response to this objection, it can be argued, first, that a defense of common sensedoes not have to defend it all at once, against all forms of skeptical doubts, and, second, it might be held that with regard to the kinds of skeptical doubts which are here alluded to, what is needed is not a well-founded assurance that one's cognitive apparatus is in working order but rather that it should in fact be in working order whatever the beliefs or suppositions of its owner may be.  The serious objection is that my proposal fails to distinguish between the adoption, at a certain point in the representation of the skeptic's proposed position, of an extensional and of an intensional reading of that account. I assumed that the skeptic's position would be properly represented by an intensional reading at this point, in which case I supposed the skeptic to be committed to an incoherence; in fact, however, it is equally legitimate to take not an intensional reading but an extensional reading in which case we arrive at a formulation of the skeptic's position which, so far as has been shown, is reasonable and also immune from the objection which I proposed.  According to the intensional reading, the skeptic's position can be represented as follows: that a certain ordinary sentence s does, at least in part, mean that p, second, that in some such cases, the prop osition that p is incoherent, and third, that standard speakers intend their hearers incoherently to accept that p, where "incoherently" is to be read as specifying part of what the speaker intends. That position may not perhaps be strictly speaking incoherent, but it certainly seems wildly implausible. However, there seems to be no need for the skeptic to take it and it can be avoided by an extensional interpretation of the appearance in this context, of the adverb "incoherently." According to this representation it would be possible for s to mean (in part) that p and for p to be incoherent and also for the standard speaker to intend the hearer to accept p which would be to accept something which is in fact incoherent though it would be no part of the speaker's intention that in accepting p the hearer should be accepting something which is incoherent. To this reply there seems to me to be no reply.  Despite this failure, however, there seem to remain two different directions in which a vindication of common sense or ordinary speech may be looked for. The first would lie in the thought that whether or not a given expression or range of expressions applies to a particular situation or range of situations is simply determined by whether or not it is standardly applied to such situations; the fact that in its application those who apply it may be subject to this or that form ofintellectual corruption or confusion does not affect the validity of the claim that the expression or range of expressions does apply to those situations. In a different line would be the view that the attributions and beliefs of ordinary people can only be questioned with due cause, and due cause is not that easy to come by; it has to be shown that some more or less dire consequences follow from not correcting the kind of belief in question; and if no such dire consequences can be shown then the beliefs and contentions of common sense have to be left intact.  Strand Four*  This strand has already been alluded to in the discussion of Strand 3, and consists in my views about the relation between what might roughly be described as word-meaning and as speaker's-meaning. Of all the thematic strands which I am distinguishing this is the one that has given me most trouble, and it has also engendered more heat, from other philosophers, in both directions, than any of its fellows. I shall attempt an initial presentation of the issues involved.  It has been my suggestion that there are two distinguishable meaning concepts which may be called "natural" meaning and "non-natural" meaning and that there are tests which may be brought to bear to distinguish them. We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of the verb "mean" is factive or nonfactive, that is to say whether for it to be true that so and so means that p it does or does not have to be the case that it is true that p; again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to enclose the specification of what is meant would be inappropriate or appropriate. If factivity is present and quotation marks would be inappropriate, we would have a case of natural meaning; otherwise the meaning involved would be nonnatural meaning. We may now ask whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of this dichotomy of uses to which the word "mean" seems to be subject. If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and in what direction such elucidation should proceed. I have fairly recently (in Essay 18) come to believe that there is such an overarching idea and that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The  4. Cf. esp. Essays 5-6, 7, 12.idea behind both uses of "mean" is that of consequence; if x means y then y, or something which includes y or the idea of y, is a consequence of x. In "natural" meaning, consequences are states of affairs; in "nonnatural" meaning, consequences are conceptions or complexes which involve conceptions. This perhaps suggests that of the two concepts it is "nonnatural" meaning which is more in need of further elucidation; it seems to be the more specialized of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate; we may, for example, ask how conceptions enter the picture and whether what enters the picture is the conceptions themselves or their justifiability. On these counts I should look favorably on the idea that if further analysis should be required for one of the pair the notion of "nonnatural" meaning would be first in line.  There are factors which support the suitability of further analysis for the concept of "nonnatural" meaning. "Meaningnn" ("non-natural meaning") does not look as if it names an original feature of items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually independent: (a) given suitable background conditions, meaningn can be changed by fiat; (b) the presence of meaningn is dependent on a framework provided by a linguistic, or at least a communication-engaged community.  It seems to me, then, at least reasonable and possibly even manda-tory, to treat the meaning of words, or of other communication ve-hicles, as analyzable in terms of features of word users or other com-municators; nonrelativized uses of "meaningnN  " are posterior to and  explicable through relativized uses involving reference to word users or communicators. More specifically, what sentences mean is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them; that is to say, what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users standardly intend (more precisely, M-intend) to produce by their utterance. Sentence-meaning then will be explicable either in terms of psychological attitudes which are standardly M-intended to produce in hearers by sentence utterers or to attitudes taken up by hearers toward the activities of sentence utterers.  At this point we begin to run into objections. The first to be considered is one brought by Mrs. J. Jack, whose position I find not wholly clear. She professes herself in favor of "a broadly 'Gricean' enter-  5. In an as yet unpublished paper entitled "The Rights and Wrongs of Grice on Mean-ing."prise" but wishes to discard various salient elements in my account (we might call these "narrowly Gricean theses"). What, precisely, is  "broad Griceanism"? She declares herself in favor of the enterprise of giving an account of meaning in terms of psychological attitudes, and this suggests that she favors the idea of an analysis, in psychological terms, of the concept of meaning, but considers that I have gone wrong, perhaps even radically wrong, in my selection of the ingredients of such an analysis.  But she also reproves me for "reductionism," in terms which suggest that whatever account or analysis of meaning is to be offered, it should not be one which is "reductionist," which might or might not be equivalent to a demand that a proper analysis should not be a proper reductive analysis. But what kind of analysis is to be provided?  What I think we cannot agree to allow her to do is to pursue the goal of giving a lax reductive analysis of meaning, that is, a reductive analysis which is unhampered by the constraints which characteristically attach to reductive analysis, like the avoidance of circularity; a goal, to which, to my mind several of my opponents have in fact addressed themselves. ((In this connection I should perhaps observe that though my earlier endeavors in the theory of meaning were attempts to provide a reductive analysis, I have never (I think) espoused reduction-ism, which to my mind involves the idea that semantic concepts are unsatisfactory or even unintelligible, unless they can be provided with interpretations in terms of some predetermined, privileged, and favored array of concepts; in this sense of "reductionism" a felt ad hoc need for reductive analysis does not have to rest on a reductionist foundation. Reductive analysis might be called for to get away from unclarity not to get to some predesignated clarifiers.)) I shall for the moment assume that the demand that I face is for a form of reductive analysis which is less grievously flawed than the one which I in fact offered; and I shall reserve until later consideration of the idea that what is needed is not any kind of reductive analysis but rather some other mode of explication of the concept of meaning.  The most general complaint, which comes from Strawson, Searle, and Mrs. Jack, seems to be that I have, wholly or partially, misidentified the intended (or M-intended) effect in communication; according to me it is some form of acceptance (for example, belief or desire), whereas it should be held to be understanding, comprehension, or (to use an Austinian designation) "uptaké." One form of the cavil (the more extreme form) would maintain that the immediate intended tar-get is always "uptake," though this or that form of acceptance may be an ulterior target; a less extreme form might hold that the immediate target is sometimes, but not invariably, "uptake." I am also not wholly clear whether my opponents are thinking of "uptake" as referring to an understanding of a sentence (or other such expression) as a sentence or expression in a particular language, or as referring to a comprehension of its occasion-meaning (what the sentence or expression means on this occasion in this speaker's mouth). But my bafflement arises primarily from the fact that it seems to me that my analysis already invokes an analyzed version of an intention toward some form of "uptake" (or a passable substitute therefor), when I claim that in meaning a hearer is intended to recognize himself as intended to be the subject of a particular form of acceptance, and to take on such an acceptance for that reason. Does the objector reject this analysis and if so why? And in any case his position hardly seems satisfactory when we see that it involves attributing to speakers an intention which is specified in terms of the very notion of meaning which is being analyzed (or in terms of a dangerously close relative of that notion). Circularity seems to be blatantly abroad.  This question is closely related to, and is indeed one part of, the vexed question whether, in my original proposal, I was right to embrace a self-denial of the use of semantic concepts in the specification of the intentions which are embedded in meaning, a renunciation which was motivated by fear of circularity. A clear view of the position is not assisted by the fact that it seems uncertain what should, or should not, be counted as a deployment of semantic notions.  So far we seem to have been repelling boarders without too much difficulty; but I fear that intruders, whose guise is not too unlike that of the critics whom we have been considering, may offer, in the end at least, more trouble. First, it might be suggested that there is a certain arbitrariness in my taking relativized meaning as tantamount to a speaker's meaning something by an utterance; there are other notions which might compete for this spot, in particular the notion of something's meaning something to a hearer. Why should the claims of "meaning to," that is of passive or recipient's meaning, be inferior to those of "meaning by" (that is, of acting or agent's meaning)? Indeed a thought along these lines might lie behind the advocacy of  "uptake" as being sometimes or even always the target of semantic intention.  A possible reply to the champion of passive meaning would run asfollows: (1) If we maintain our present program, relativized meaning is an intermediate analytic stage between nonrelativized meaning and a "semantics-free" ("s-free") paraphrase of statements about mean-ing. So, given our present course, the fact (if it should be a fact) that there is no obviously available s-free paraphrase for "meaning to" would be a reason against selecting "meaning to" as an approved specimen of relativized meaning. (2) There does however seem in fact to be an s-free paraphrase for "meaning to," though it is one in which is embedded that paraphrase which has already been suggested for  "meaning by"; "s means p to X" would be interpreted as saying  "X knows what the present speaker does (alternatively a standard speaker would) mean by an utterance of s"; and at the next stage of analysis we introduce the proffered s-free paraphrase for "meaning by." So "meaning to" will merely look back to "meaning by," and the cavil will come to naught.  At least in its present form. But an offshoot of it seems to be available which might be less easy to dispose of. I shall first formulate a sketch of a proposed line of argument against my analysis of mean-ing, and then consider briefly two ways in which this argumentation might be resisted.  First, the argument.  In the treatment of language, we need to consider not only the relation of language to communication, but also, and concurrently, the relation of language to thought. A plausible position is that, for one reason or another, language is indispensable for thought, either as an instrument for its expression or, even more centrally, as the vehicle, or the material, in which thought is couched. We may at some point have to pay more attention to the details of these seeming variants, but for the present let us assume the stronger view that for one reason or another the occurrence of thought requires, either invariably or at least in all paradigmatic cases, the presence of a "linguistic flow." The "linguistic flows" in question need to attain at least a certain level of comprehensibility from the point of view of the thinker; while it is plain that not all thinking (some indeed might say that no thinking) is entirely free from confusion and incoherence, too great a departure of the language-flow from comprehensibility will destroy its character as (or as the expression of) thought; and this in turn will undermine the primary function of thought as an explanation of bodily behavior. Attempts to represent the comprehensibility, to the thinker, of the expression of thought by an appeal to either of the relativized concepts of meaningn so far distinguished encounter serious, if not fatal, difficulties. While it is not impossible to mean something by what one says to oneself in one's head, the occurrence of such a phenomenon seems to be restricted to special cases of self-exhortation ("what I kept telling myself was......"), and not to be a general feature of thinking as such. Again, recognition of a linguistic sequence as meaning something to me seems appropriate (perhaps) when I finally catch on to the way in which I am supposed to take that se-quence, and so to instances in which I am being addressed by another not to those in which I address myself; such a phrase as "I couldn't get myself to understand what I was telling myself" seems dubiously admissible. So an admission of the indispensability of language to thought carries with it a commitment to the priority of nonrelativized meaning to either of the designated relativized conceptions; and there are no other promising relativized candidates. So nonrelativized meaning is noneliminable. The foregoing resistance to the idea of eliminating nonrelativized meaning by reductive analysis couched in terms of one or the other variety of relativized meaning might, perhaps, be reinforced by an attempt to exhibit the invalidity of a form of argument on which, it might be thought, the proponent of such reduction might be relying.  While the normal vehicles of interpersonal communication are words, this is not exclusively the case; gestures, signs, and pictorial items sometimes occur, at times even without linguistic concomitants. That fact might lead to the supposition that nonlinguistic forms of communication are pre-linguistic, and do not depend on linguistic mean-ing. A closely related form of reflection would suggest that if it is the case (as it seems to be) that sometimes the elements of trains of thought are nonlinguistic, then prelinguistic thinking is a genuine pos-sibility. (This was a live issue in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-tury.) But, it may be said, both of these lines of argument are incon-clusive, for closely related reasons. The fact that on occasion the vehicles of communication or of thought may be wholly nonlinguistic does not show that such vehicles are prelinguistic; it may well be that such vehicles could only fulfill their function as vehicles against a background of linguistic competence without which they would be lost. If, for example, they operate as substitutes for language, lan-guage for which they are substitutes needs perhaps to be available to their users.  We now find ourselves in a serious intellectual bind. (1) Our initial attention to the operation of language in communication has provided powerful support for the idea that the meaning of words or other communication devices should be identified with the potentiality of such words or devices for causing or being caused by particular ranges of thought or psychological attitudes. When we are on this tack we are inexorably drawn toward the kind of psychological reductionism exhibited in my own essays about Meaning. (2) When our attention is focused on the appearance of language in thinking we are no less strongly drawn in the opposite direction; language now seems constitutive of thought rather than something the intelligibility of which derives from its relation to thought.  We cannot have it both ways at one and the same time. This dilemma can be amplified along the following lines. (1) States of thought, or psychological attitudes cannot be prelinguistic in char-acter. (2) Thought states therefore presuppose linguistic thought-episodes which are constitutive of them. (3) Such linguistic thought-episodes, to fulfill their function, must be intelligible sequences of words or of licensed word-substitutes. (4) Intelligibility requires ap: propriate causal relation to thought states. (5) So these thought states in question, which lie behind intelligibility, cannot themselves be built up out of linguistic sequences or word-flows. (6) So some thought states are prelinguistic (a thesis which contradicts thesis 1).  It appears to me that the seemingly devastating effect of the preceding line of argument arises from the commission by the arguer of two logical mistakes-or rather, perhaps, of a single logical mistake which is committed twice over in substantially similar though superficially different forms. The first time round the victim of the mistake is myself, the second time round the victim is the truth. In the first stage of the argument it is maintained that the word-flows which are supposedly constitutive of thought will have to satisfy the condition of being significant or meaningful and that the interpretation of this notion of meaningfulness resists expansion into a relativized form, and resists also the application of any pattern of analysis proposed by me. The second time round the arguer contends that any word-flow which is held to be constitutive of an instance of thinking will have to be supposed to be a significant word-flow and that the fulfillment of this condition requires a certain kind of causal connection with ad-missible psychological states or processes and that to fulfill their function at this point neither the states in question nor the processes connected with them can be regarded as being constituted by further word-flows; the word-flows associated with thinking in order to provide for meaningfulness will have to be extralinguistic, or prelinguis-tic, in contradiction to the thesis that thinking is never in any relevant sense prelinguistic.  At this point we are surely entitled to confront the propounder of the cited argument with two questions. (1) Why should he assume that I shall be called upon to identify the notion of significance, which applies to the word-flows of thought, directly with any favored locution involving the notion of meaning which can be found in my work, or to any analysis suggested by me for such a locution? Why should not the link between the significance of word-flows involved in thinking and suggestions offered by me for the analysis of meaning be much less direct than the propounder of the argument envisages? (2) With what right, in the later stages of the argument, does the pro-pounder of the argument assume that if the word-flows involved in thought have to be regarded as significant, this will require not merely the provision at some stage of a reasonable assurance that this will be so but also the incorporation within the defining characterization of thinking of a special condition explicitly stipulating the significance of constitutive word-flows, despite the fact that the addition of such a condition will introduce a fairly blatant contradiction?  While, then, we shall be looking for reasonable assurance that the word-flows involved in thinking are intelligible, we shall not wish to court disaster by including a requirement that may be suggested as a distinct stipulated condition governing their admissibility as word-flows which are constitutive of thinking; and we may even retain an open mind on the question whether the assurance that we are seeking is to be provided as the conclusion of a deductive argument rather than by some other kind of inferential step.  The following more specific responses seem to me to be appropriate at this point.  (1) Since we shall be concerned with a language which is or which has been in general use, we may presume the accessibility of a class of mature speakers of that language, who by practice or by precept can generate for us open ranges of word-sequences which are, or again are not, admissible sentences of that language.  A favorable verdict from the body of mature speakers will establish particular sentences both as significant and, on that account, as expressive of psychological states such as a belief that Queen Anne is dead or a strong desire to be somewhere else. But the envisaged favorable verdicts on the part of mature speakers will only establish particular sentences as expressive of certain psychological states in general; they will not confer upon the sentences expressiveness of psychological states relative to particular individuals. For that stage to be reached some further determination is required Experience tells us that any admissible sentence in the language is open to either of two modes of production, which I will call "overt" and "sotto voce." The precise meaning of these labels will require further determination, but the ideas with which I am operating are as follows. (a) "Overt" production is one or another of the kinds of production, which will be characteristic of communication. (b) "Sotto voce" production which has some connection with, though is possibly not to be identified as, "unspoken production," is typically the kind of production involved in thinking. (c) Any creature which is equipped for the effective overt production of a particular sequence is also thereby equipped for its effective sotto voce production.  (4) We have reached a point at which we have envisaged an indefinite multitude of linguistic sequences certified by the body of mature speakers not merely as legitimate sentences of their language but also as expressive of psychological states in general, though not of psychological states relevant to any particular speaker. It seems then that we need to ask what should be added to guarantee that the sentences in the repertoire of a particular speaker should be recognized by him not merely as expressive of psychological states in general but as expressive of his psychological states in particular. I would suggest that what is needed to ensure that he recognizes a suitable portion of his repertoire of sentences as being expressive relative to himself is that he should be the center of a life story which fits in with the idea that he, rather than someone else, is the subject of the attributed psychological states. If this condition is fulfilled, we can think of him, perhaps, not merely as linguistically fluent but also as linguistically proficient; he is in a position to apply a favored stock of sentences to himself. It would of course be incredible, though perhaps logically conceivable, for someone to be linguistically fluent without being linguistically proficient.  It is of course common form, as the world goes, for persons who are linguistically fluent and linguistically proficient to become so by natural methods, that is to say, as a result of experience and training, but we may draw attention to the abstract possibility that the attributes in question might be the outcome not of natural but of artificial processes; they might, for example, be achieved by some sort of physiological engineering. Are we to allow such a fantasy as being con-ceivable, and if not, why not?  I shall conclude the discussion of Strand Four with two distinct and  seemingly unconnected reflections.  (A) We might be well advised to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.  (1) That representation by means of verbal formulations is an artificial and noniconic mode of representation. (2) That to replace an iconic system of representation by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.  (3) That every artificial or noniconic system is founded upon an antecedent natural iconic system.  Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation. That work will consist in the representation of objects and situations in the world in something like the sense in which a team of Australian cricketers may represent Aus-tralia; they do on behalf of Australia something which Australia cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket. Similarly our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable objects and situations in the world to do something which they cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behavior.  (B) It remains to inquire whether there is any reasonable alternative program for the problems about meaning other than of the provision of a reductive analysis of the concept of meaning. The only alternative which I can think of would be that of treating "meaning" as a theoretical concept which, together perhaps with other theoretical con-cepts, would provide for the primitive predicates involved in a semantic system, an array whose job it would be to provide the laws and hypotheses in terms of which the phenomena of meaning are to be explained. If this direction is taken, the meaning of particular express-sions will be a matter of hypothesis and conjecture rather than of intuition, since the application of theoretical concepts is not generally  thought of as reachable by intuition or observation. But some of those like Mrs. Jack who object to the reductive analysis of meaning are also anxious that meanings should be intuitively recognizable. How this result is to be achieved I do not know.  Strand Five  Strand Five is perhaps most easily approached through an inquiry whether there is any kind, type, mode, or region of signification which has special claims to centrality, and so might offer itself as a core around which more peripheral cases of signification might clus-ter, perhaps in a dependent posture. I suggest that there is a case for the supposition of the existence of such a central or primary range of cases of signification; and further that when the question of a more precise characterization of this range is raised, we are not at a loss how to proceed. There seem to be in fact not merely one, but two ways of specifying a primary range, each of which has equally good claim to what might be called "best candidate status." It is of course a question which will await final decision whether these candidates are distinct from one another. We should recognize that at the start we shall be moving fairly large conceptual slabs around a somewhat crudely fashioned board and that we are likely only to reach sharper conceptual definition as the inquiry proceeds.  We need to ask whether there is a feature, albeit initially hazy, which we may label "centrality, " which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of signification from nonprimary ranges.  There seems to be a good chance that the answer is "Yes." If some instances of signification are distinguishable from others as relatively direct rather than indirect, straightforward rather than devious, plain rather than convoluted, definite rather than indefinite, or as exhibiting other distinguishing marks of similar general character, it would seem to be not unreasonable to regard such significations as belonging to a primary range. Might it not be that the capacity to see through a glass darkly presupposes, and is not presupposed by, a capacity at least occasionally to achieve full and unhampered vision with the naked eye?  But when we come to ask for a more precise delineation of the initially hazy feature of centrality, which supposedly distinguishes primary from nonprimary ranges of signification, we find ourselves confronted by two features, which I shall call respectively "formality"and "dictiveness," with seemingly equally strong claims to provide for us a rationally reconstructed interpretation of the initially hazy feature of centrality.  Our initial intuitive investigation alerts us to a distinction within the domain of significations between those which are composite or complex and those which are noncomposite or simple; and they also suggest to us that the primary range of significations should be thought of as restricted to simple or noncomposite significations; those which are complex can be added at a later stage. Within the field left by this first restriction, it will be appealing to look for a subordinate central range of items whose signification may be thought of as being in some appropriate sense direct rather than in-direct, and our next task will be to clarify the meaning, or meanings, in this context of the word "direct." One class of cases of signification with a seemingly good claim to centrality would be those in which the items or situations signified are picked out as such by their falling under the conventional meaning of the signifying expression rather than by some more informal or indirect relationship to the signifying expression. "The President's advisers approved the idea" perhaps would, and "those guys in the White House kitchen said 'Heigh Ho'" perhaps would not, meet with special favor under this test, which would without question need a fuller and more cautious exposition.  Perhaps, however, for present purposes a crude distinction between conventional or formal signification and nonconventional or informal signification will suffice.  A second and seemingly not inferior suggestion would be that a special centrality should be attributed to those instances of signification in which what is signified either is, or forms part of, or is specially and appropriately connected with what the signifying expression (or its user) says as distinct from implies, suggests, hints, or in some other less than fully direct manner conveys. We might perhaps summarily express this suggestion as being that special centrality attaches to those instances of signification in which what is signi-ied is or is part of the "dictive" content of the signifying expres-ion. We should now, perhaps, try to relate these suggestions to one another.  Is the material just sketched best regarded as offering two different formulations of a single criterion of centrality, or as offering two distinct characterizations of such centrality? It seems fairly clear to me that, assuming the adequacy for present purposes of the formulationof the issues involved, two distinct criteria are in fact being offered.  One may be called the presence or absence of formality (whether or not the relevant signification is part of the conventional meaning of the signifying expression); the other may be called the presence or absence of dictive content, or dictiveness (whether or not the relevant signification is part of what the signifying expression says); and it seems that formality and informality may each be combined with dic-tiveness or again with nondictiveness. So the two distinctions seem to be logically independent of one another. Let us try to substantiate this claim.  If I make a standard statement of fact such as "The chairman of the Berkeley Philosophy Department is in the Department office.", what is signified is, or at least may for present purposes be treated as being, the conventional meaning of the signifying expression; so formality is present. What is signified is also what the signifying expression says; so dictiveness is also present. Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Dar-ien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I," his hearer might well be somewhat baffled; and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the onetime activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase "on the other hand." But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement. So we seem to have a case of a condition which is part of what the words conventionally mean without being part of what the words say; that is, we have formality without dictiveness. Suppose someone, in a suitable context, says "Heigh-ho." It is possible that he might thereby mean something like "Well that's the way the world goes." Or again if someone were to say "He's just an evangelist," he might mean, perhaps, "He is a sanctimonious, hypo-critical, racist, reactionary, money-grubber." If in each case his meaning were as suggested, it might well be claimed that what he meant was in fact what his words said; in which case his words would be dictive but their dictive content would be nonformal and not part of the conventional meaning of the words used. We should thus find dictiveness without formality. (4) At a Department meeting, one of my colleagues provides a sustained exhibition of temperamental perversity and caprice; at the close of the meeting I say to him, "Excuse me, madam," or alterna-tively, I usher him through the door with an elaborate courtly bow. In such a case perhaps it might be said that what my words or my bow convey is that he has been behaving like a prima donna; but they do not say that this is so, nor is it part of the conventional meaning of any words or gestures used by me that this is so. Here something is conveyed or signified without formality and without dictiveness.  There seems then to be a good prima-facie case for regarding formality and dictiveness as independent criteria of centrality. Before we pursue this matter and the questions which arise from it, it might be useful to consider a little further the details of the mechanism by which, in the second example, we achieve what some might regard as a slightly startling result that formality may be present independently of dictiveness. The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels. One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand." The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker's words.  We may note that a related kind of nonformal (as distinct from formal) implicature may sometimes be present. It may, for example, be the case that a speaker signals himself, by his use of such words as  "so" or "therefore," as performing the speech-act of explaining will be plausible only on the assumption that the speaker accepts as true one or more further unmentioned ground-floor matters of fact. His acceptance of such further matters of fact has to be supposed in order to rationalize the explanation which he offers. In such a case we mayperhaps say that the speaker does not formally implicate the matters of fact in question.  A problem which now faces us is that there seem to be two "best candidates," each of which in different ways suggests the admissibility of an "inner/outer" distinction, and we need to be assured that there is nothing objectionable or arbitrary about the emergence of this seemingly competitive plurality. The feature of formality, or conventional signification, suggests such a distinction, since we can foresee a distinction between an inner range of characteristics which belong directly to the conventional meaning of a signifying expression, and an outer range of characteristics which, although not themselves directly part of the conventional meaning of a given signifying expres-sion, are invariably, perhaps as a matter of natural necessity, concomitant with other characteristics which do directly belong to the conventional meaning of the signifying expression. Again, if there is an inner range of characteristics which belong to the dictive content of a signifying expression as forming part of what such an expression says, it is foreseeable that there will be an outer range of cases involving characteristics which, though not part of what a signifying expression says, do form part of what such an expression conveys in some gentler and less forthright manner-part, for example, of what it hints or suggests.  To take the matter further, I suspect that we shall need to look more closely at the detailed constitution of the two "best candidates." At this point I have confined myself to remarking that dictiveness seems to be restricted to the ground-floor level, however that may be determined, while formality seems to be unrestricted with regard to level. But there may well be other important differences between the two concepts. Let us turn first to formality, which, to my mind, may prove to be in somewhat better shape than dictiveness. To say this is not in the least to deny that it involves serious and difficult problems; indeed, if some are to be believed-for example, those who align themselves with Quine in a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion-these problems may turn out to be insuperable, and may drive us into a form of skepticism. But one might well in such an event regard the skepticism as imposed by the intractability of the subject-matter, not by the ineptitude of the theorist. He may well have done his best.  Some of the most pressing questions which arise concerning theconcept of formality will be found in a fourfold list, which I have compiled, of topics related to formality. First and foremost among these is the demand for a theoretically adequate specification of conditions which will authorize the assignment of truth conditions to suitably selected expressions, thereby endowing those expressions with a conventional signification. It is plain that such provision is needed if signification is to get off the ground; meanings are not natural growths and need to be conferred or instituted. But the mere fact that they are needed is insufficient to show that they are available; we might be left in the skeptic's position of seeing clearly what is needed, and yet being at the same time totally unable to attain it. We should not, of course, confuse the suggestion that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the exercise of rationality with the suggestion that there is no rationally acceptable theoretical account of what the exercise of rationality consists in; but though distinct these suggestions may not be independent; for it is conceivably true that the exercise of rationality can exist only if there is a theoretically adequate account, accessible to human reason, of what it is that constitutes rationality; in which case an acceptance of the second suggestion will entail an acceptance of the first suggestion. These remarks are intended to raise, but not to settle, the question whether our adoption of linguistic conventions is to be explained by appeal to a general capacity for the adoption of conventions (the sort of explanation offered by Stephen Schiffer in Meaning), here I intend neither to endorse nor to reject the possibility of such an explanation. Similar troubles might attend a superficially different presentation of the enterprise, according to which what is being sought and, one hopes, legitimately fixed by fat would be not conventional meanings for certain expressions, but a solid guarantee that, in certain conditions, in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so. The conditions in question would of course have to be conditions of truth.  Inquiries of the kind just mentioned might profitably be reinforced by attention to other topics contained in my fourfold list. Another of these would involve the provision of an inventory which will be an example of what I propose to call a "semi-inferential sequence." An example of such a sequence might be the following:  (I) It is, speaking extensionally, general practice to treat d as signifying F.  (Il) It is, speaking intensionally, general practice to treat @ as signifying F.  III) It is generally accepted that it is legitimate to treat @ as signifying F.  (IV) It is legitimate to treat d as signifying F.  (V) o does signify F.  Explanatory Remarks  What is involved in the phenomenon of treating & (an expres-sion) as signifying F has not been, and would need to be, explicitly stated. A "semi-inferential sequence" is not a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by its predecessor in the sequence. It is rather a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by a conjunction of its predecessor with an identifiable and verifiable supplementary condition, a condition which however has not been explicitly specified. Some semi-inferential sequences will be "concept-determining" sequences. In such sequences the final member will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure which has appeared previously in the sequence, though only as embedded within a larger structure which specifies some psychological state or practice of some rational being or class of rational beings. It is my suggestion that, for certain valuational or semantic con-cepts, the institution of truth-conditions for such concepts is possible only via the mediation of a semi-inferential concept-determining se-quence. To speak extensionally is to base a claim to generality on actual frequencies. To speak intensionally is to base a claim to generality on the adoption of or adherence to a rule the observance of which may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency. The practical modalities involved in (III) and (IV) may be restricted by an appended modifier, such as "from a logical point of view" or "from the point of view of good manners." It might also be valuable to relate the restricted field of inferences connected with semantic proprieties to the broader and quite possibly analogous field of inferences connected with practical proprieties in general, which it would be the business of ethics to systematize. If skepticism about linguistic proprieties could not be prevented fromexpanding into skepticism about improprieties of any and every kind, that might be a heavier price than the linguistic skeptic would be prepared to pay.  It would be unwise at this point to neglect a further direction of inquiry, namely proper characterization of the relation between words on the one hand, and on the other the sounds or shapes which constitute their physical realizations. Such reflections may be expected to throw light on the precise sense in which words are instru-ments, and may well be of interest both in themselves and as a needed antidote to the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-token distinc-tion. It is perhaps natural to assume that in the case of words the fundamental entities are particular shapes and sounds (word tokens) and that words, in the sense of word-types are properly regarded as classes or sets of mutually resembling word tokens. But I think that such a view can be seen to be in conflict with common sense (to whatever extent that is a drawback). John's rendering of the word "soot" may be indistinguishable from James's rendering of the word "suit"; but it does not follow from this that when they produce these render-ings, they are uttering the same word, or producing different tokens of the same word-type. Indeed there is something tempting about the idea that, in order to allow for all admissible vagaries of rendering, what are to count for a given person as renderings of particular words can only be determined by reference to more or less extended segments of his discourse; and this in turn perhaps prompts the idea that particular audible or visible renderings of words are only established as such by being conceived by the speaker or writer as realizations of just those words. One might say perhaps the words come first and only later come their realizations.  Together with these reflections goes a further line of thought.  Spades are commonly and standardly used for such purposes as digging garden beds; and when they are so used, we may speak indifferently of using a spade to dig the bed and of using a spade (simpliciter).  On a windy day when I am in the garden, I may wish to prevent my papers from blowing away, and to achieve this result, I may put my spade on top of them. In such a case I think I might be said to be using a spade to secure the papers but not to be using a spade (sim-pliciter) unless perhaps I were to make an eccentric but regular use of the spade for this purpose. When it comes, however, to the use for this or that purpose of words, it may well be that my freedom of speech is more radically constrained. I may be the proud possessor ofa brass plaque shaped as a written representation of the word  "mother." Maybe on a windy day I put this plaque on top of my papers to secure them. But if I do so, it seems to be wrong to speak of me as having used the word "mother" to secure my papers. Words may be instruments but if so, they seem to be essentially confined to a certain region of employment, as instruments of communication. To attempt to use them outside that region is to attempt the conceptually impossible. Such phenonema as this need systematic explanation.  On the face of it, the factors at work in the determination of the presence or absence of dictiveness form a more motley collection than those which bear on the presence of formality. The presence or absence of an appropriate measure of ardor on behalf of a thesis, a conscientious reluctance to see one's statements falsified or un-confirmed, an excessive preoccupation with what is actually or potentially noncontroversial background material, an overindulgence in caution with respect to the strength to be attributed to an idea which one propounds, and a deviousness or indirectness of expression which helps to obscure even the identity of such an idea, might well be thought to have little in common, and in consequence to impart an unappealing fragmentation to the notion of dictive content. But perhaps these factors exhibit greater unity than at first appears; perhaps they can be viewed as specifying different ways in which a speaker's alignment with an idea or thesis may be displayed or obscured; and since in communication in a certain sense all must be public, if an idea or thesis is too heavily obscured, then it can no longer be regarded as having been propounded. So strong support for some idea, a distaste for having one's already issued statements discredited, an unexciting harmony the function of which is merely to establish a reference, and a tentative or veiled formulation of a thesis may perhaps be seen as embodying descending degrees of intensity in a speaker's alignment to whatever idea he is propounding. If so, we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or an-other, have drawn a distinction between "phrastics" and "neustics,"  who, in one  philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or im-peratively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tenta-tively.  In this connection it would perhaps be appropriate to elaboratesomewhat the characters of tentativeness and obliqueness which are specially visible in cases of "low commitment." First "suggestion." Suggesting that so-and-so seems to me to be, with varying degrees of obviousness, different from (a) stating or maintaining that so-and-so  (b) asserting it to be likely or probable that so-and-so (c) asserting it to be possible that so-and-so, where presumably "it is possible" means "it is not certain that it is not the case that so-and-so." Suggesting that so-and-so is perhaps more like, though still by no means exactly like, asserting there to be some evidence that so-and-so. Stan-dardly, to suggest that so-and-so invites a response, and, if the suggestion is reasonable, the response it invites is to meet in one way or another the case which the maker of the suggestion, somewhat like a grand jury, supposes there to be in favor of the possibility that so-and-so. The existence of such a case will require that there should be a truthful fact or set of facts which might be explained by the hypothesis that so-and-so together with certain other facts or assumptions, though the speaker is not committed to the claim that such an explanation would in fact be correct. Suggesting seems to me to be related to, though in certain respects different from, hinting. In what seem to me to be standard cases of hinting one makes, explicitly, a statement which does, or might, justify the idea that there is a case for supposing that so-and-so; but what there might be a case for supposing, namely that so-and-so, is not explicitly mentioned but is left to the audience to identify. Obviously the more devious the hinting, the greater is the chance that the speaker will fail to make contact with his audience, and so will escape without having committed himself to anything.  Strand Sixt  Strand Six deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle. In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse. I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of  6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.  It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.  Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.  I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.  A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the following way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected. The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act. I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.  (1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.  False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.  (2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.  Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic. The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question.  Strands Seven and Eight?  These strands may be considered together, representing, as they do, what might be deemed a division of sympathy on my part between two different schools of thought concerning the nature and content of Logic. These consist of the Modernists, spearheaded by Russell and other mathematically oriented philosophers, and the Traditionalists, particularly the neo-Traditionalists led by Strawson in An Introduction to Logical Theory. As may be seen, my inclination has been to have one foot in each of these at least at one time warring camps. Let us consider the issues more slowly.  (A) Modernism  In their most severe and purist guise Modernists are ready to admit to the domain of Logic only first-order predicate logic with identity, though laxer spirits may be willing to add to this bare minimum some  7. Cf. esp. Essays 3, 17.more liberal studies, like that of some system of modalities. It seems to me that a Modernist might maintain any one of three different positions with respect to what he thinks of as Logic.  He might hold that what he recognizes as Logic reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives. Unless more is said, this position is perhaps somewhat low on initial plausibility. He might hold that though not every feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which deserve to be preserved, all features that is to say, which are not irremediably vitiated by obscurity or incoherence. Without claiming that features which are omitted from his preferred system are ones which are marred by obscurity or incoherence he might claim that those which are not omitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order, that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the "Cathedral of Learning." (B) Neo-Traditionalism  So far as I can now reconstruct it, Strawson's response to Modernism at the time of An Introduction to Logical Theory, ran along the following lines.  At a number of points it is clear that the apparatus of Modernism does not give a faithful account of the character of the logical connectives of ordinary discourse; these deviations appear in the treatment of the Square of Opposition, the Russellian account of Def-inite, and also of Indefinite, Descriptions, the analysis of conditionals in terms of material implication, and the representation of universal statements by universal quantifiers. Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements in Modernism are liable to involve not merely infidelity to the actual character of vulgar connectives, but also the obliteration of certain conceptions, like presupposition and the existence of truth-gaps, which are crucial to the nature of certain logically fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference. The aspects thus omitted by Modernists are not such that their presence would undermine or discredit the connectives in the analysis of which they would appear. Like Cyrano de Bergerac's nose, they are features which are prominent without being disfiguring. Though they are not, in themselves, blemishes, they do nevertheless impede the optimally comprehensive and compendious representation of the body of admissible logical inferences. We need, therefore, two kinds of logic; one, to be called the logic of language, in which in a relaxed and sometimes not fully determinate way the actual character of the connectives of ordinary discourse is faithfully represented; the other, to be called formal logic, in which, at some cost to fidelity to the actual character of vulgar logical connectives, a strictly regimented system is provided which represents with maximal ease and economy the indefinite multitude of admissible logical inferences. (C) My Reactions to These Disputes  I have never been deeply moved by the prospect of a comprehensive and compendious systematization of acceptable logical infer-ences, though the tidiness of Modernist logic does have some appeal for me. But what exerts more influence upon me is my inclination to regard propositions as constructed entities whose essential character lies in their truth-value, entities which have an indispensable role to play in a ration al and scientific presentation of the domain of logical inference. From this point of view a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects, perhaps, for the rational construction of at least part of the realm of propositions, even though the fact that many complex propositions seem plainly to be non-truth-functional ensures that many problems remain. A few years after the appearance of An Introduction to Logical Theory I was devoting much attention to what might be loosely called the distinction between logical and pragmatic inferences. In the first instance this was prompted as part of an attempt to rebuff objections, primarily by followers of Wittgenstein, to the project of using "phe-nomenal" verbs, like "look" and "seem," to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception, particularly that of explaining the problematic notion of sense-data, which seemed to me to rest on a blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction. (That is not to say, of course, that there might not be other good reasons for rejecting the project in question.) It then occurred to me that apparatus which had rendered good service in one area might be equally successful when transferred to another; and so I canvassed the idea that the alleged divergences between Modernists' Logic and vulgar logical connectives might be represented as being a matter not of logical but of pragmatic import.  The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or is not required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope; when a sentence which used in isolation stan-dardly carries a certain implicature, is embedded in a certain linguistic context, for example appears within the scope of a negation-sign, must the embedding operator, namely the negation-sign, be interpreted only as working on the conventional import of the embedded sentence, or may it on occasion be interpreted as governing not the conventional import but the nonconventional implicatum of the embedded sentence? Only if an embedding operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the conventional import but the noncon-ventional implicatum standardly carried by the embedded sentence can the first version of my account of such linguistic phenomena as conditionals and definite descriptions be made to work. The denial of a conditional needs to be treated as denying not the conventional import but the standard implicatum attaching to an isolated use of the embedded sentence. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding locution may govern the standard nonconventional implicatum rather than the conventional import of the embedded sentence; if a friend were to tell me that he had spent the summer cleaning the Augean stables, it would be unreasonable of me to respond that he could not have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle. But where the limits of a license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the standard implicata rather than to conventional meanings, I have to admit that I do not know. The second version of my mode of treatment of issues which, historically speaking, divide Modernists from Traditionalists, including neo-Traditionalists, offers insurance against the possibility that we do not have, or that we sometimes do not have, a license to treat embedding locutions as governing standard implicata rather than conventional import. It operates on the idea that even if it should prove necessary to supplement the apparatus of Modernist logic with additional conventional devices, such supplementation is in two respects undramatic and innocuous and does not involve a radical reconstruction of Modernist apparatus. It is innocuous and undramatic partly because the newly introduced conventional devices can be re- garded simply as codification, with a consequently enlarged range of utility, of pre-existing informal methods of generating implicature; and partly because the new devices do not introduce any new ideas or concepts, but are rather procedural in character. This last feature can be seen from the fact that the conventional devices which I propose are bracketing or scope devices, and to understand them is simply to know how sentences in which they initially appear can be restructured and rewritten as sentences couched in orthodox modernistic terms from which the new devices have been eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for.  Let see if we may devote ourselves to a detailed review of the deeper aspects of the *unity* which Grice believes the essays in the volume to possess.  These deeper aspects are *three* in number, and Grice enumerates them separately.     The first aspect is that the *connections* between the topics discussed are sometimes stronger and *more interesting* than the essays themselves make it clear.    Partly this is due to the fact that these connections were not, Grice thinks, seen by Grice at the time at which the essays were composed for this or that public occasion at Oxford — the seminars were open to any member of the Jniversity — not just Ryle!      ,It is only in retrospect that Grice begins to see the *number* of the connections and their .*importance.*    The second aspect, on which Grice thinks the first is dependent, is that the various topics which interest Grice at the time at which these essays were composed for this or that public occasion  seem to be ones which *are*, first of all, *important* and second, topics which still interest Grice, and some of them, perhaps all of them, are matters which Grice still feels that he needs to make up his mind about more thoroughly and clearly.     Consequently the essays may perhaps be regarded as maybe the first word but not the last word in a number of directions in which it is important that the Oxonian *philosopher* of Grice’s generation — never mind anyone else — should go.     The third, and last, of these deeper aspects is one that has already been remarked upon in the preface as providing the *methodological*, rather than topical or substantive  theme which runs through the contents of the volume.   It consists in the application of or illustration of a certain sort of way of doing *philosophy*, one which was one of the many ways in which philosophy is done in Oxford and which are connected with the application to philosophy of a particular kind of interest in language — particularly ‘ordinary’ language.     Such interest takes more than one form, and Grice do not think that  in *any* of the forms it has been very well articulated or expressed or described by those who practised it.    And Grice thinks it is of fundamental importance to philosophizing.     A second part of the epilogue is devoted to an attempt to make its character more clear.    Grice begins by *listing* the persistent or recurrent thematic strands which it seems to Grice Grice can discern in the essays appearing in the volume, and 1 shall then return after having listed them to consider them one by one in varying degrees of detail.     Grice thinks that he can detect eight such strands, though some of them have more than one component and the components do not necessarily have to be accepted as a block.    The first of these main strands belongs to the philosophy of perception;     it involves two theses;     first that the general notion of perception, the concept expressed by the verb "perceive," is properly treatable by means of causal analysis; and     second that, in the more specific notions connected with perception —like those involving different modalities of perception like "seeing" and "hearing," —various elements may be considered but one which cannot be ignored, or eliminated, is the *experiential* quality of the sense EXPERIENCE that perception involves.     A third question, about the conceptual analysis of a a statement describing an object of perception like a thing, is also prominent in Grice’s thinking at the time at which these essays were written but does not figure largely in these pages.     A second strand is a concern to defend the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction, together perhaps with one or more of such closely related distinctions as that between necessary and contingent, or between a priori and a posteriori.     A third strand is a *defense* of the rights of the ordinary man — such as Grice’s father was — or common sense — such as Grice’s mother displayed except when it came to Noel Coward - vis-à-vis the philosopher, the idea being that for reasons which have yet to be determined and accurately stated the ordinary man has a right to more respect from the Oxonian philosopher than a word of thanks for having got him started.    The fourth strand relates to signifying; it consists in two theses: first, that it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of signifying which is relativized, or ASCRIBED, to the the utterer of this or that expression and one that is not so relativized;     and second, of the *two* notions the unrelativized notion is posteriori to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized notion;     what an expression ‘signifies’ is a matter of what this or that utterer signifies by the uttering of a token of it.    The fifth strand is the contention that, in considering the notion of signifying we should pay attention to two related distinctions.     First, a distinction between this or that element of signifying which is present by virtue of convention and those which are present by virtue of something other than convention — say Human Reason    and second,     between this or that element of signifying which standardly form part of what a word or form of words asserts (or its user asserts or SAYS — Cicero, dicere), and this or that element of signifying which rather form part of what the words or their users imply or convey or to which he is committed OTHER than by Cicero’s dicere.     A distinction, that is to say, (a) between     conventional and nonconventional     signifying and (b)     between assertive     and nonassertive     non-dictive    signifying        Strand six is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of *rational* activity and     that this or that rational activity which does not involve the use of language is in various ways importantly parallel to that which does.    This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of *rational* activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational     co-operation —     the merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.    Strands seven and eight both relate to the real or apparent opposition between the structures advocated by traditional or Aristotelian ‘semantics’, on the one hand, and by non-traditional ‘semantics’, on the other.     In a certain sense these strands pull in opposite directions.    Strand seven consists in the contention that it is illegitimate to represent, as some non-traditionalists have done, such a syntactical *subject* phrase as     "the King of France,"     every schoolboy,"     a rich man," and even     Bismarck"     as being only ostensibly referential;     that they should be *genuinely* referential — CIcero REFERENTIA denotational — is *required* both for an adequate representation of ordinary discourse and to preserve this underlying conception of the use of language as a *rational* activity.    Strand eight involves the thesis that, notwithstanding the claims of strand seven, a genuinely referential or denotational status can be secured for this or that syntactically subject phrase in question by *supplementing* the apparatus of non-traditionalism in various ways which would include the addition of the kind of bracketing of numerically subscripting devices which are sketched within the contents of the volume.    Strand One    Grice now turns to a closer examination of the first of these eight thematic strands, the strand, that is, which relates to the analysis of per-ception.'     The two essays involving this strand seem to Grice not to be devoid of merit;   the essay on the Causal Theory of Perception served to introduce — publicly, at Cambridge — what later Grice calls the notion of Conversational Implicature  1. Cf. esp. Essays 15-16.    which has performed, Grice think, some useful methodological service in philosophy, and also provides an adequate base for the rejection of a bad, though at one time popular among Oxonian Wittgensteinisns, reason for rejecting a causal analysis of perception; and     the essay called "Some Remarks about the Senses," commissioned by Butler and where Grice credits O. P. Wood, drew attention, Grice thinks, to an important and neglected subject, namely the question of what criterion to use  by which one distinguishes between one modality of sense and another.     But, unfortunately, to find a way of disposing of one bad reason for rejecting a certain thesis — the causal analysis — is not the same as to establish that thesis, nor is drawing attention to the importance of a certain question, that of the modal criterion, the same as answering that question.    In retrospect it seems to Grice that both these essays are open to criticisms which, so far as Grice knows, have not been explicitly advanced.    In "The Causal Theory of Perception" Grice reverts to a position about a sense-datum statement which is originally taken up by philosophers such as Scots philosopher Paul — to restrict myself to Austin’s Play Group — and some others — Quinton, Grice’s pupil Snowdon;     according to it, a statement to the effect that someone is having a sense-datum of a particular sort is to be understood as an alternative way of making a statement about that someone which is expressible in terms of what Grice  call a phenomenalist verb  like "it seems to someone as if” — or, more specifically, like "looks," "sounds” — someone is not hearing a noise — and "feels."    This position contrastts with the kind of view, according to which a statement about sense-data is not just an alternative version of a statements which may be expressed in terms of such a phenomenalist verbs but are items which serve to account for the applicability of such a range of verbs.     According to this other view, to say that someone is having a sense-datum of a particular sort which is red, or not green, or mouselike, or noisy, is not just an outlandish alternative way of saying it looked to him as if there was a mouse or something red, or not green, or noise-provoking before him, but is rather to specify something which explained *why* (causally) it looked to him as if there was something red or not green or noise-provoking before him or as if there were a mouse or a cat called Sylvester before him.     The proponents of the newer view of sense-data would have justified their suggestion by pointing to the fact that sense-data and their sensible characteristics are mysterious items which themselves stand in need of explanation, and so cannot properly be regarded as explaining, rather than as being explained by, the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb-phrase associated with them.     It is not clear that these criticisms of the older view are justified.    Might it not be that while in one use of the verb "explain" (that which is roughly equivalent to "to render intelligible") sense-data *are* explained in terms of this or that phenomenalist verbs,    in another usd of "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to  "to account for") the priority is reversed, and the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb *is* explained by the availability of sense-data and their sensible feature?    The newer view, moreover, itself runs into trouble — at Oxford.    It seems to Grice to be a plausible view that the applicability of this or that phenomenalist verb is itself to be understood as asserting the presence or occurrence of a certain sort of *experience*, one which would explain and in certain circumstances license the separate employment of a verb phrase embedded in the phenomenalist verb-phrase;     for it to look or seem to Grice as if there is something red before Grice is for Grice to have an *experience* which would explain and, in certain unproblematic circumstances, license the assertion that there is something red before Grice.    It will be logically incoherent at one and the same time to represent the use of this or that phenomenalist verb as indicating the existence of a basis, of some sort or other, for a certain kind of assertion about perceptible objects and as telling us what that basis is.     The older view of sense-data attempts to specify the basis; the newer view, apparently with Grice’s concurrence, seems to duck this question and thereby to render mysterious the interpretation of this or that phenomenalist verb-phrase.    Second, in "Some Remarks about the Senses" Grice allows for the possibility that there is no one criterion for the individuation of a sense, but Grice does not provide for the separate possibility that the critical candidates are not merely none of them paramount but are not in fact independent of one another.     For example, this or that sense organ is differentiated not by their material character, but by their function.     Organs that are just like eyes would in fact be not eyes but ears if what they did was, not to see, but to hear;     again, the real quality of a things is that which underlies or explains various causal mechanisms, such as our being affected by vibrations or light rays.     So criterial candidates run into one another;     Indeed, and again, the *experiential* flavour or quality of, again, *experience* to which Grice attaches special importance is in fact linked with the relevant ranges of what Locke calls a secondary quality which an observer attributes to the objects which he perceives;     so we might end up in a position that would not have been uncongenial to Locke and Boyle,     in which we hold that there are *two* ways or criteria of distinguishing between the five senses, one of which is by the character of their operations (processes studied by the sciences rather than by the ordinary citizen), and the other would be by the difference of their phenomenal character, which would be something which would primarily be of interest to ordinary people rather than to scientists.     These reflections suggest to Grice two ideas which Grice shall here specify but not argue for.     The first is that, so far from being elements in the ultimate furniture of the world, a sense-datum is an item which is imported by theorists for various purposes;       such a purposes might be that one should have bearers of this or that kind of relation which is needed in order to provide us with a better means for describing or explaining Reality, or the world.     Such a relation might be causal or spatial where the space involved is not physical space but some other kind of space, like visual space, or it might be a system of relations which in certain ways are analogous to spatial relations, like an octave relations of a pitch between two sounds.     This idea might lead to another, namely that consideration of the nature of perception might lead us to a kind of vindication of common sense distinct from those vindications which Grice mentions elsewhere in this epilogue, for if a sense-datum is to be a theoretical extension introduced or concocted this or that theorist — say, Aristotle, who called it phantasmata — the theorist will need common sense in order to tell him what it is to which such theoretical extension need to be added.       A     Philosopher' story derives its character and direction from the nonphilosophical story which it supplement. I see with my eye.    A second of these eight strands consists in a belief in the possibility of vindicating one or more of a number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of "The analytic/synthetic distinction."    Grice says nothing here about this strand not because I think it is unimportant;     indeed I think it is one of the most important topics in philosophy, required in determining, not merely the answers to this or that particular philosophical question, but the nature of philosophy itself.     It is rather that Grice feels that nothing less than an adequate treatment of the topic would be of any great value, and an adequate treatment of it would require a great deal of work which Grice has not yet been able to complete.     This lacuna, however, may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that Grice provides some discussion of this topic in the volume Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions  Categories, Ends — PGRICE, Clarendon, and by the fact that at the conclusion of the epilogue he also advances a slightly skittish hint of the direction in which Grice has some inclination to go.     Grice hopes that this treatment will serve as an interim indication of what Grice’s final position might be.    2. Cf. esp. Essay 13.    A  third strand' consists in a disposition on Grice’s part to uphold, in one form or another, the rights of the ordinary man who speaks ordinary language — careless chatter -/ or of common sense in the face of attacks which proceed from this or that alleged champion — think Churchland or Place — of a *specialist* philosophical theory.     All parties would, Grice thinks, agree that this or that specialist philosophical theory has to start from some basis in ordinary thought of an informal character;     the question at issue is whether the contents and views contained in that thought have to continue to be respected, in some measure or other, by the specialist philosophical theorist even after the specialist philosophical theorist has embarked on his own work.    According to some, at that point, the contribution of ordinary thought and speech may be ignored, like a ladder to be kicked away once the specialist philosophical theorist has got going.     Grice’s Scottish support for Scottish common sense is not eroded by the failure of many attempts made by philosophers to give a justification or basis for such support;     indeed the negative part of Grice’s contribution to the subject consists in the rejection of a number of such attempts.     Some of these rejections appear in discussions contained in this volume — Malcolm professing on Moore at Cornell especially irritated both Grice and Woozley back at Oxford —, others in other places.     One form of defense of common sense is one propounded by Irish Moore in the famous essay on that subject.     This seems to consist in the presumed acceptability of the obvious;     it seems to consist in that, because — so far as Grice can see — no other reason is given for the acceptance of what Moore counts as a proposition of common sense, which he lacked.    If Grice has read Moore aright — implicature: not bloody likely, he hails from the other place — Grice finds this form of defense of common sense unsatisfactory on the grounds that the conception of the obvious is not in an appropriate sense an objective conception.    This is pointedly illustrated by the famous story of the English mathematician Hardy, who in a lecture announced, out of the blue, that a certain mathematical proposition was ‘obvious,’ at which point one of his audience demurred and said that it was not obvious *to him*.     At this point,   Hardy halts the lecture, paces outside the lecture room for a quarter of an hour, returns, and said     “It is obvious." — This was Jesus. At Oxford one may never leave the lecture room.    The trouble is that obviousness requires consent, on the part of the parties concerned, in the obviousness of what is thought of as obvious.    A second and different line of defense of common sense comes from Reid, who points to the need for a principle of human knowledge.     Once these is secured, various forms of derivation and deduction and inference can account for the accumulation of  3. Cf. esp. Essays 8-10.    known    propositions which are as it were theorems in the system of knowledge;     but theorems need to look back to axioms and these axioms are things which Reid regards as matters which it is the function of common sense to provide.    The fault which Grice finds here is a conflation of the notion of an axiom as being an organizational item from which nonaxiomatic propositions are supposed to be derivable with an epi-stemic interpretation of an axiom as providing the foundations of human knowledge;     it seems to Grice arguable  and indeed plausible to suppose that the grounds for the acceptance of the contents of this or that system do *not£ lie in the prior evidence or self-evidence of the axioms of the system, but in the general character of the system in containing what one thinks that system ought to contain in the way of what is knowable.    From an epistemic point of view the justifiability of the system lies in its delivering, in general, what one wants it to deliver and thinks it should deliver, rather than in the availability of a range of this or that privileged intuition which, happily, provides us with a sufficiency of starting points for rational inference.     If common sense comes into the picture at all in this connection it seems to Grice that it should be with regard to a recognition, in some degree or other,  of what the system ought to be expected to deliver to us rather than as a faculty which assures us of starting points which form the axioms of the system.    A third attempt to justify common sense is that provided by Malcolm notably at Cornell of all places in his interpretation of Moore;     Malcolm suggested that Moore's point should be thought of as being that a standard description of certain sorts of situations cannot be incorrect since the standards of correctness are set by the nature of the descriptions which are standardly used to describe those situations.     The trouble with this line, to Grice’s mind, is that it confuses two kinds of correctness and incorrectness — at Oxford and Athens, if not Ithaca!    Correctness of use or usage, whether a certain expression is properly or improperly applied, gives us one kind of correctness, that of proper application.    That an expression is correct in that way however hardly guarantees it against another sort of incorrectness, namely logical or semantic or categorial incoherence. Decapitation willed Charles I’s death.    Yet another form of an attempt to justify common sense is by an appeal to Paradigm or Standard Cases, as first deviced by Grice’s pupil Flew — cases, that is, of the application of an expression to what are supposedly things to which that expression applies if it applies to anything at all;     for example, if the expression "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like "desks" and "walls" and "pavements." — not to “reason”!    The difficulty with this attempt is that it contains as an assumption just what a sceptic who is querying common sense is concerned to deny:     no doubt it may be true that if the word "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like  "desks,"     but it is the contention of the sceptic that it does not apply to anything, and therefore the fact that something is the strongest candidate does not mean that it is a successful candidate for the application of that expression.    Cf. Eddington’s wavicle chair!      On the positive side Grice does offer as an alternative to the appeals he has just been discussing, a proposed link between the authority of common sense and the theory of signifying.     Grice suggests roughly that to side with the sceptic in his questioning of commonsense beliefs would be to accept an untenable divorce between the ‘signifying’ of this or that expression on the one hand, and the proper specification of what an utterer signifies by the uttering of a token of that expression (‘Impenetrability’) on the other.     Grice’s attempt to link two of the eight strands to one another seems to Grice open to several objections, at least one of which he regards as fatal.    Grice begins with two objections which he is inclined to regard as non-fatal; the first of these is that Gricd’s proposed reply to the sceptic ignores the distinction between what is propounded as, or as part of, one's message, thus being something which the utterer intends, and on the other hand what is part of the background of the message by way of being something which is implied, in which case its acceptance is often not intended but is rather assumed — often as non-controversial: My aunt’s boyfriend went to that concert!    That there is this distinction is true, but what is, given perfect rapport between utterer and addressee, something which an utterer implies, may, should that rapport turn out to be less than perfect, become something which the utterer is committed to asserting or propounding.     If the utterer thinks his addressee has certain information which in fact the addressee does not, the utterer may, when this fact emerges, be rationally committed to giving him the information in question, so what is implied is at least potentially something which is asserted — Cicero’s dictum, Varro’s prosloquium — and so, potentially, something the *acceptance* of which is intended.    A second (Grice thinks, nonfatal) objection runs as follows:     some forms of skepticism do not point to an incoherence in certain kinds of mes-sage;     they rely on the idea that a skeptical doubt sometimes has to have been already allayed in order that one should have the foundations which are needed to allay just those doubts.     To establish that I am *not* dreaming, I need to be assured that the *experience* on which I rely to reach this assurance is a waking experience.   In response to this objection, it can be argued,     first, that a defense of common sense does not have to defend it all at once, against all forms of skeptical doubts, and,     second, it might be held that with regard to the kinds of skeptical doubts which are here alluded to, what is needed is not a well-founded assurance that one's cognitive apparatus is in working order, but rather that it should in fact be in working order whatever the beliefs or suppositions of its owner - Descartes if not Ryle — may be.    The serious objection is that Grice’s proposal fails to distinguish between the adoption, at a certain point in the representation of the skeptic's proposed position, of an extensional and of a more correct *intensional* reading of that account.     Grice assumes that the skeptic's position would be properly represented by an *intensional* reading at this point, in which case I supposed the skeptic to be committed to an incoherence;     in fact, however, it is equally legitimate to take not an intensional reading but an *extensional* reading in which case we arrive at a formulation of the skeptic's position which, so far as has been shown, is reasonable and also immune from the objection which Grice proposes.    According to the *intensional* reading, the skeptic's position can be represented as follows:     that a certain ordinary sentence s does, at least in part, ‘signifies’  that the circle is square;     second, that in some such cases, the proposition that the circle is square is incoherent, and     third, that a standard utterer intends his addressee incoherently to *accept* that the circle is square, where "incoherently" is to be read as specifying part of what the utterer intends.     That position may not perhaps be strictly speaking incoherent, but it certainly seems wildly implausible.     However, there seems to be no need for the skeptic to take it.    It can be avoided by an *extensional* (transparent, substitutable salva veritate? interpretation of the appearance   in this context, of the adverb "incoherently."     According to this representation, it would be possible for s to ‘signify’ (in part) that the circle is square and for the proposition that the circle is square to be incoherent and also for a standard utterer to intend his addressee to ‘accept’ that the circle is square —     which would be to accept something which is in fact incoherent though it would be NO part of the utterer’s intention that in accepting that the circle is square the addressee should be accepting something which is incoherent.    He may have mislearned, or use the expression idiosyncratically.     To this reply there seems to me to be no reply.    Despite this failure, however, there seem to remain two different directions in which a vindication of common sense or ordinary speech may be looked for.   The first would lie in the thought that whether or not a given expression or range of expressions applies to a particular situation or range of situations is simply determined by whether or not it is standardly applied to such situations;     the fact that in its application those who apply it may be subject to this or that form of intellectual corruption or confusion or idiosyncrasy in the utterer’s inviolable liberty to utter as he pleases does not affect the validity of the claim that the expression or range of expressions does apply to those situations.     In a different line would be the view that the attributions and beliefs of ordinary people can only be questioned with due cause, and due cause is not that easy to come by;     it has to be shown that some more or less dire consequences follow from not correcting the kind of belief in question;     and, if no such dire consequences can be shown, the beliefs and contentions of common sense have to be left intact.    A fourth strand has already been alluded to in the discussion of the previous one  and consists in Grice’s views about the relation between what might roughly be described as an utterer properly signifying, and by allegorical extension, an expression ‘signifying.’    Of all the thematic strands which Grice is distinguishing this is the one that has given hin most trouble, and it has also engendered more heat, from other philosophers, in both directions, than any of its fellows.     Grice attempta a presentation of the issues involved.    It has been Grice’s suggestion that there are two distinguishable concepts of ‘signifying’ which have called "natural"  — signum naturale, phusei — and "non-natural" ‘signifying’ and that there are tests which may be brought to bear to distinguish them.     We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of the verb "signify" is factive or nonfactive, that is to say whether for it to be true that so and so signifies that p it does or does not have to be the case that it is true that p;     again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to enclose the specification of what is signified would be inappropriate or appropriate.     If factivity is present and quotation marks would be inappropriate, we would have a case of natural signifying; otherwise the dignifying involved would be nonnatural.     We may now ask whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of this dichotomy of uses to which “signify" seems to be subject.     If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and in what direction such elucidation should proceed.     Grice fairly recently (in Essay 18) cane to believe that there is such an overarching idea and that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The  4. Cf. esp. Essays 5-6, 7, 12.    The idea behind both uses of "signify" is that of consequence; if x signifies y  y, or something which includes y or the idea of y, is a consequence of x.     In "natural" signifying, consequences are states of affairs;     in "nonnatural" signifying , consequences are phantasmata — conceptions or complexes which involve conceptions.     This perhaps suggests that of the two concepts it is "nonnatural" signifying which is more in need of further elucidation;     it seems to be the more specialized of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate;     we may, for example, ask how conceptions enter the picture and whether what enters the picture is the conceptions themselves or their justifiability.     On these counts I should look favorably on the idea that if further analysis should be required for one of the pair the notion of "nonnatural" signifying  would be first in line.    There are factors which support the suitability of further analysis for the concept of "nonnatural" signifying.     "Signifying nn" ("non-natural signifying") does not look as if it names an original feature of items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually independent: (a)     given suitable background conditions, signifying nn can be changed by fiat; (    b) the presence of signifying nn is dependent on a framework provided by a communication-engaged community of at least a conversational dyad.    It seems to Grice, then, at least reasonable and possibly even mandatory, to treat the ‘signifying’ of this or that communication vehicle as analyzable in terms of features of com-municators;     A    Nonrelativised use of allegorical ‘signifying’  " is posterior to and  explicable through relativized uses involving reference to communicators.     More specifically, what an expression ‘signifies’ is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them;     that is to say,     what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users standardly intend (more precisely, M-intend) to produce by their utterance.   Sentence-meaning is thus explicable either in terms of psychological attitudes which are standardly M-intended to produce in a co-communicator  by sentence utterers or to attitudes taken up by hearers toward the activities of sentence utterers.    At this point we begin to run into objections.     The first to be considered is one brought by Jack, whose position I find not wholly clear.     She professes herself in favor of "a broadly 'Gricean' enter-  5. In an as yet unpublished paper entitled "The Rights and Wrongs of Grice on Signifying.    "prise" but wishes to discard various salient elements in Grice’s account (we might call these "narrowly Gricean theses").     What, precisely, is  "broad Griceanism"?     She declares herself in favour of the enterprise of giving an account of meaning in terms of psychological attitudes, and this suggests that she favors the idea of an analysis, in psychological terms, of the concept of meaning, but considers that I have gone wrong, perhaps even radically wrong, in my selection of the ingredients of such an analysis.    Jack also reproves Grice for "reductionism," in terms which suggest that whatever account or analysis of meaning is to be offered, it should not be one which is "reductionist," which might or might not be equivalent to a demand that a proper analysis should not be a proper reductive analysis.     But what kind of analysis is to be provided?    What Grice think we cannot agree to allow Jack to do is to pursue the goal of giving a lax reductive analysis of meaning, that is, a reductive analysis which is unhampered by the constraints which characteristically attach to reductive analysis, like the avoidance of circularity; a goal, to which, to Grice’s mind several of my opponents have in fact addressed themselves.     In this connection I should perhaps observe that though Grice’s earlier endeavors in the theory of meaning were attempts to provide a reductive analysis, he never (he thinks) espoused reduction-ism, which to Grice’s mind involves the idea that a semantic - gr semein, Cicero signare — concept is unsatisfactory or even unintelligible, unless they can be provided with interpretations in terms of some predetermined, privileged, and favored array of concepts;     in this sense of "reductionism" a felt ad hoc need for reductive analysis does not have to rest on a reductionist foundation.     Reductive analysis might be called for to get away from unclarity not to get to some predesignated clarifiers.    I shall for the moment assume that the demand that Grice faces is for a form of reductive analysis which is less grievously flawed than the one which I in fact offered;     and I shall reserve until later consideration of the idea that what is needed is not any kind of reductive analysis but rather some other mode of explication of the concept of signifying.    The most general complaint, which comes from Grice’s own pupil, Strawson, Searle, and Jack, seems to be that Grice has, wholly or partially, misidentified the intended (or M-intended) effect in communication; according to Grice it is some form of acceptance (for example, belief or desire), whereas it should be held to be understanding, comprehension, or (to use an Austinian designation) "uptaké."     One form of the cavil (the more extreme form) would maintain that the immediate intended tar-get is always "uptake," though this or that form of acceptance may be an ulterior target;     a less extreme form might hold that the immediate target is sometimes, but not invariably, "uptake."     I am also not wholly clear whether my opponents are thinking of "uptake" as referring to an understanding of a sentence (or other such expression) as a sentence or expression in a particular language, or as referring to a comprehension of its occasion-meaning (what the sentence or expression means on this occasion in this speaker's mouth).     But Grice’s bafflement arises primarily from the fact that it seems to him that my analysis already invokes an analyzed version of an intention toward some form of "uptake" (or a passable substitute therefor), when I claim that in meaning a hearer is intended to recognize himself as intended to be the subject of a particular form of acceptance, and to take on such an acceptance for that reason.     Does the objector reject this analysis and if so why?     And in any case his position hardly seems satisfactory when we see that it involves attributing to speakers an intention which is specified in terms of the very notion of meaning which is being analyzed (or in terms of a dangerously close relative of that notion).     Circularity seems to be blatantly abroad.    This question is closely related to, and is indeed one part of, the vexed question whether, in my original proposal, I was right to embrace a self-denial of the use of this or that ‘semantic’ concept in the specification of the intentions which are embedded in meaning, a renunciation which was motivated by fear of circularity.     A clear view of the position is not assisted by the fact that it seems uncertain what should, or should not, be counted as a deployment of such a ‘semantic’ notion.    So far we seem to have been repelling boarders without too much difficulty; but I fear that intruders, whose guise is not too unlike that of the critics whom we have been considering, may offer, in the end at least, more trouble.     First, it might be suggested that there is a certain arbitrariness in Grice’s taking relativized meaning as tantamount to a speaker's meaning something by an utterance;     there are other notions which might compete for this spot, in particular the notion of something's meaning something to a hearer.     Why should the claims of "meaning to," that is of passive or recipient's meaning, be inferior to those of "meaning by" (that is, of acting or agent's meaning)?     Indeed a thought along these lines might lie behind the advocacy of  "uptake" as being sometimes or even always the target of semantic intention.      A possible reply to the champion of passive meaning would run asfollows:     (1) If we maintain our present program, relativized meaning is an intermediate analytic stage between nonrelativized meaning and a "semantics-free" ("s-free") paraphrase of statements about mean-ing.     So, given our present course, the fact (if it should be a fact) that there is no obviously available s-free paraphrase for "meaning to" would be a reason against selecting "meaning to" as an approved specimen of relativized meaning. (2)     There does however seem in fact to be an s-free paraphrase for "meaning to," though it is one in which is embedded that paraphrase which has already been suggested for  "meaning by"; "s means p to X" would be interpreted as saying  "X knows what the present speaker does (alternatively a standard speaker would) mean by an utterance of s"; and at the next stage of analysis we introduce the proffered s-free paraphrase for "meaning by."     So "meaning to" will merely look back to "meaning by," and the cavil will come to naught.    At least in its present form.     But an offshoot of it seems to be available which might be less easy to dispose of.     I shall first formulate a sketch of a proposed line of argument against my analysis of mean-ing, and then consider briefly two ways in which this argumentation might be resisted.    First, the argument.    In the treatment of language, we need to consider not only the relation of language to communication, but also, and concurrently, the relation of language to thought.    A plausible position is that, for one reason or another, language is indispensable for thought, either as an instrument for its expression or, even more centrally, as the vehicle, or the material, in which thought is couched.   We may at some point have to pay more attention to the details of these seeming variants, but for the present let us assume the stronger view that for one reason or another the occurrence of thought requires, either invariably or at least in all paradigmatic cases, the presence of a "linguistic flow."    The "linguistic flows" in question need to attain at least a certain level of comprehensibility from the point of view of the thinker; while it is plain that not all thinking (some indeed might say that no thinking) is entirely free from confusion and incoherence, too great a departure of the language-flow from comprehensibility will destroy its character as (or as the expression of) thought; and this in turn will undermine the primary function of thought as an explanation of bodily behavior.    Attempts to represent the comprehensibility, to the thinker, of the expression of thought by an appeal to either of the relativized concepts of meaningn so far distinguished encounter serious, if not fatal, difficulties.     While it is not impossible to mean something by what one says to oneself in one's head, the occurrence of such a phenomenon seems to be restricted to special cases of self-exhortation ("what I kept telling myself was......"), and not to be a general feature of thinking as such.     Again, recognition of a linguistic sequence as meaning something to me seems appropriate (perhaps) when I finally catch on to the way in which I am supposed to take that se-quence, and so to instances in which I am being addressed by another not to those in which I address myself; such a phrase as "I couldn't get myself to understand what I was telling myself" seems dubiously admissible.    So an admission of the indispensability of language to thought carries with it a commitment to the priority of nonrelativized meaning to either of the designated relativized conceptions; and there are no other promising relativized candidates.     So nonrelativized meaning is noneliminable.    The foregoing resistance to the idea of eliminating nonrelativized meaning by reductive analysis couched in terms of one or the other variety of relativized meaning might, perhaps, be reinforced by an attempt to exhibit the invalidity of a form of argument on which, it might be thought, the proponent of such reduction might be relying.    While the normal vehicles of interpersonal communication are words, this is not exclusively the case; a gesture, a sign, and a pictorial item sometimes occur, at times even without linguistic concomitants.     That fact might lead to the supposition that nonlinguistic forms of communication are pre-linguistic, and do not depend on linguistic mean-ing.   A closely related form of reflection would suggest that if it is the case (as it seems to be) that sometimes the elements of trains of thought are nonlinguistic, prelinguistic thinking is a genuine pos-sibility.     This was a live issue in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-tury. At Oxford.    But, it may be said, both of these lines of argument are incon-clusive, for closely related reasons.     The fact that on occasion the vehicles of communication or of thought may be wholly nonlinguistic does not show that such vehicles are prelinguistic;     it may well be that such vehicles could only fulfill their function as vehicles against a background of linguistic competence without which they would be lost.     If, for example, they operate as substitutes for language, lan-guage for which they are substitutes needs perhaps to be available to their users.    We now find ourselves in a serious intellectual bind.     Our initial attention to the operation of language in communication has provided powerful support for the idea that the meaning of words or other communication devices should be identified with the potentiality of such words or devices for causing or being caused by particular ranges of thought or psychological attitudes.     When we are on this tack we are inexorably drawn toward the kind of psychological reductionism exhibited in Grice’s own essays about Meaning. (2)     When our attention is focused on the appearance of language in thinking we are no less strongly drawn in the opposite direction;     language now seems constitutive of thought rather than something the intelligibility of which derives from its relation to thought.    We cannot have it both ways at one and the same time.     This dilemma can be amplified along the following lines.      States of thought, or psychological attitudes cannot be prelinguistic in char-acter.     Thought states therefore presuppose linguistic thought-episodes which are constitutive of them.     Such linguistic thought-episodes, to fulfill their function, must be intelligible sequences of words or of licensed word-substitutes.     Intelligibility requires ap: propriate causal relation to thought states.     So these thought states in question, which lie behind intelligibility, cannot themselves be built up out of linguistic sequences or word-flows.     So some thought states are prelinguistic (a thesis which contradicts the first thesis     It appears to me that the seemingly devastating effect of the preceding line of argument arises from the commission by the arguer of two logical mistakes-or rather, perhaps, of a single logical mistake which is committed twice over in substantially similar though superficially different forms.     The first time round the victim of the mistake is myself, the second time round the victim is the truth.     In the first stage of the argument it is maintained that the word-flows which are supposedly constitutive of thought will have to satisfy the condition of being “significant” and that the interpretation of a notion of significance resists expansion into a relativized form, and resists also the application of any pattern of analysis proposed by me.     The second time round the arguer contends that any word-flow which is held to be constitutive of an instance of thinking will have to be supposed to be a “significant” word-flow and that the fulfillment of this condition requires a certain kind of causal connection with ad-missible psychological states or processes and that to fulfill their function at this point neither the states in question nor the processes connected with them can be regarded as being constituted by further word-flows;     the word-flows associated with thinking in order to provide for significance will have to be extralinguistic, or prelinguis-tic, in contradiction to the thesis that thinking is never in any relevant sense prelinguistic.    At this point we are surely entitled to confront the propounder of the cited argument with two questions.     Why should he assume that I shall be called upon to identify the notion of significance, which applies to the word-flows of thought, directly with any favored locution involving the notion of meaning which can be found in my work, or to any analysis suggested by me for such a locution?     Why should not the link between the significance of word-flows involved in thinking and suggestions offered by me for the analysis of meaning be much less direct than the propounder of the argument envisages?      With what right, in the later stages of the argument, does the pro-pounder of the argument assume that if the word-flows involved in thought have to be regarded as “significant,” this will require not merely the provision at some stage of a reasonable assurance that this will be so but also the incorporation within the defining characterization of thinking of a special condition explicitly stipulating the “significance” of constitutive word-flows, despite the fact that the addition of such a condition will introduce a fairly blatant contradiction?    While, then, we shall be looking for reasonable assurance that the word-flows involved in thinking are intelligible, or significant, we shall not wish to court disaster by including a requirement that may be suggested as a distinct stipulated condition governing their admissibility as word-flows which are constitutive of thinking;     and we may even retain an open mind on the question whether the assurance that we are seeking is to be provided as the conclusion of a deductive argument rather than by some other kind of inferential step.    The following more specific responses seem to me to be appropriate at this point.    Since we shall be concerned with a language which is or which has been in general use, we may presume the accessibility of a class of mature - as Timothy ain’t — speakers of that language, who by practice  or by precept, can generate for us open ranges of word-sequences which are, or again are not, admissible sentences of that language.    A favorable verdict from the body of mature speakers will establish particular sentences both as “significant” and, on that account, as expressive of psychological states such as a belief that Queen Anne is dead or a strong desire to be somewhere else.     But the envisaged favorable verdicts on the part of mature speakers will only establish particular sentences as expressive of certain psychological states in general;     they will not confer upon the sentences expressiveness of psychological states relative to particular individuals.     For that stage to be reached some further determination is required    Experience tells us that any admissible sentence in the language is open to either of two modes of production, which I will call "overt" and "sotto voce."   The precise meaning of these labels will require further determination, but the ideas with which I am operating are as follows.     Overt" production is one or another of the kinds of production, which will be characteristic of communication.     "Sotto voce" production which has some connection with, though is possibly not to be identified as, "unspoken production," is typically the kind of production involved in thinking.     Any creature which is equipped for the effective overt production of a particular sequence is also thereby equipped for its effective sotto voce production.    We have reached a point at which we have envisaged an indefinite multitude of linguistic sequences certified by the body of mature speakers not merely as legitimate sentences of their language but also as expressive of psychological states in general, though not of psychological states relevant to any particular speaker.     It seems then that we need to ask what should be added to guarantee that the sentences in the repertoire of a particular speaker should be recognized by him not merely as expressive of psychological states in general but as expressive of his psychological states in particular.     Grice suggests that what is needed to ensure that he recognizes a suitable portion of his repertoire of sentences as being expressive relative to himself is that he should be the center of a life story which fits in with the idea that he, rather than someone else, is the subject of the attributed psychological states.     If this condition is fulfilled, we can think of him, perhaps, not merely as linguistically fluent but also as linguistically proficient;     he is in a position to apply a favored stock of sentences to himself.     It would of course be incredible, though perhaps logically conceivable, for someone to be linguistically fluent without being linguistically proficient.    It is of course common form, as the world goes, for persons who are linguistically fluent and linguistically proficient to become so by natural methods, that is to say, as a result of experience and training, but we may draw attention to the abstract possibility that the attributes in question might be the outcome not of natural but of “artificial” processes;     they might, for example, be achieved by some sort of physiological engineering. — Pavlov’s dogs. Skinner’s pigeons.    Are we to allow such a fantasy as being con-ceivable, and if not, why not?    I shall conclude the discussion of this fourth Strand with two distinct and  seemingly unconnected reflections.    We might be well advised to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.    That representation by means of verbal formulations is an “artificial” — non-natural — and noniconic mode of representation.      That to replace an iconic system of representation by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.    That every “artificial” or noniconic system is founded upon an antecedent natural iconic system.    Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation.     That work will consist in the representation of things and situations in the world in something like the sense in which a team of Australian cricketers may represent Aus-tralia; they do on behalf of Australia something which Australia cannot do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket.     Similarly our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable things and situations in the world to do something which they cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behavior.     It remains to inquire whether there is any reasonable alternative program for the problems about meaning other than of the provision of a reductive analysis of the concept of meaning.     The only alternative which I can think of would be that of treating "meaning" as a theoretical concept which, together perhaps with other theoretical concepts, would provide for the primitive predicates involved in a “semantic” system, an array whose job it would be to provide the laws and hypotheses in terms of which the phenomena of meaning are to be explained.     If this direction is taken, the meaning of particular express-sions will be a matter of hypothesis and conjecture rather than of intuition, since the application of theoretical concepts is not generally  thought of as reachable by intuition or observation.     But some of those like Jack who object to the reductive analysis of meaning are also anxious that meanings should be intuitively recognizable.     How this result is to be achieved I do not know.    A fifth strand is perhaps most easily approached through an inquiry whether there is any kind, type, mode, or region of “signification” which has special claims to centrality, and so might offer itself as a core around which more peripheral cases of “signification” might clus-ter, perhaps in a dependent posture.     Grice suggest that there is a case for the supposition of the existence of such a central or primary range of cases of “signification;” and further that when the question of a more precise characterization of this range is raised, we are not at a loss how to proceed.     There seem to be in fact not merely one, but two ways of specifying a primary range, each of which has equally good claim to what might be called "best candidate status."     It is of course a question which will await final decision whether these candidates are distinct from one another.     We should recognize that at the start we shall be moving fairly large conceptual slabs around a somewhat crudely fashioned board and that we are likely only to reach sharper conceptual definition as the inquiry proceeds.    We need to ask whether there is a feature, albeit initially hazy, which we may label "centrality, " which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of “signification” from nonprimary ranges.    There seems to be a good chance that the answer is "Yes."     If some instances of “signification” are distinguishable from others as relatively direct rather than indirect, straightforward rather than devious, plain rather than convoluted, definite rather than indefinite, or as exhibiting other distinguishing marks of similar general character, it would seem to be not unreasonable to regard such “significations” as belonging to a primary range.   Might it not be that the capacity to see through a glass darkly presupposes, and is not presupposed by, a capacity at least occasionally to achieve full and unhampered vision with the naked eye?    But when we come to ask for a more precise delineation of the initially hazy feature of centrality, which supposedly distinguishes primary from nonprimary ranges of “signification,” we find ourselves confronted by two features, which I shall call respectively "formality"and "dictiveness," with seemingly equally strong claims to provide for us a rationally reconstructed interpretation of the initially hazy feature of centrality.    Our initial intuitive investigation alerts us to a distinction within the domain of “significations” between those which are composite or complex and those which are noncomposite or simple; and they also suggest to us that the primary range of “significations” should be thought of as restricted to simple or noncomposite “significations;” those which are complex can be added at a later stage.     Within the field left by this first restriction, it will be appealing to look for a subordinate central range of items whose “signification” may be thought of as being in some appropriate sense direct rather than in-direct, and our next task will be to clarify the meaning, or meanings, in this context of the word "direct."     One class of cases of “signification” with a seemingly good claim to centrality would be those in which the items or situations “signified” are picked out as such by their falling under the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression rather than by some more informal or indirect relationship to the “signifying” expression.     “The President's advisers approved the idea" perhaps would, and "those guys in the White House kitchen said 'Heigh Ho'" perhaps would not, meet with special favor under this test, which would without question need a fuller and more cautious exposition.    Perhaps, however, for present purposes a crude distinction between conventional or formal “signification” and nonconventional or informal “signification” will suffice.    A second and seemingly not inferior suggestion would be that a special centrality should be attributed to those instances of “signification” in which “what is signified” either is, or forms part of, or is specially and appropriately connected with what the “signifying” expression (or its user) says — INDICATES — as distinct from implies, suggests, hints, or in some other less than fully direct manner conveys.     We might perhaps summarily express this suggestion as being that special centrality attaches to those instances of “signification” in which “what is signified” is or is part of the "dictive" content of the “signifying” expres-ion.     We should now, perhaps, try to relate these suggestions to one another.    Is the material just sketched best regarded as offering two different formulations of a single criterion of centrality, or as offering two distinct characterizations of such centrality?     It seems fairly clear to me that, assuming the adequacy for present purposes of the formulationof the issues involved, two distinct criteria are in fact being offered.    One may be called the presence or absence of formality (whether or not the relevant “signification” is part of the conventional meaning of the “signifying”  expression);     the other may be called the presence or absence of dictive content, or dictiveness (whether or not the relevant “signification” is part of what the “signifying” expression says or indicates or its utterer does);     and it seems that formality and informality may each be combined with dictiveness or again with nondictiveness.     So the two distinctions seem to be logically independent of one another.     Let us try to substantiate this claim.    If I make a standard statement of fact such as "The chairman of the Philosophy Department is in the Department office.", “what is signified” is, or at least may for present purposes be treated as being, the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression; so formality is present.     “What is signified” is also what the “signifying” expression says;     so dictiveness is also present.    Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I,"     his hearer might well be somewhat baffled;     and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the onetime activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally “signified” by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase "on the other hand."     But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement.     So we seem to have a case of a condition which is part of what the words conventionally mean without being part of what the words say;     that is, we have formality without dictiveness.    Suppose someone, in a suitable context, says "Heigh-ho."     It is possible that he might thereby mean something like "Well that's the way the world goes."     Or again if someone were to say "He's just an evangelist," he might mean, perhaps, "He is a sanctimonious, hypo-critical, racist, reactionary, money-grubber." Cf. Stevenson athlete — tall     If in each case his meaning were as suggested, it might well be claimed that what he meant was in fact what his words said; in which case his words would be dictive but their dictive content would be nonformal and not part of the conventional meaning of the words used.     We should thus find dictiveness without formality.    At a Department meeting, one of my colleagues provides a sustained exhibition of temperamental perversity and caprice; at the close of the meeting I say to him, "Excuse me, madam," or alterna-tively, I usher him through the door with an elaborate courtly bow.     In such a case perhaps it might be said that what my words or my bow convey is that he has been behaving like a prima donna;     but they do not say that this is so, nor is it part of the conventional meaning of any words or gestures used by me that this is so.     Here something is conveyed or “signified” without formality and without dictiveness.    There seems then to be a good prima-facie case for regarding formality and dictiveness as independent criteria of centrality.     Before we pursue this matter and the questions which arise from it, it might be useful to consider a little further the details of the mechanism by which, in the second example, we achieve what some might regard as a slightly startling result that formality may be present independently of dictiveness.   The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels.     One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts.     He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand."   The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker's words.    We may note that a related kind of nonformal (as distinct from formal) “implicature” may sometimes be present.     It may, for example, be the case that a speaker signals himself, by his use of such words as  "so" or "therefore," as performing the speech-act of explaining will be plausible only on the assumption that the speaker accepts as true one or more further unmentioned ground-floor matters of fact.     His acceptance of such further matters of fact has to be supposed in order to rationalize the explanation which he offers.     In such a case we may perhaps say that the speaker does not formally “implicate” the matters of fact in question.    A problem which now faces us is that there seem to be two "best candidates," each of which in different ways suggests the admissibility of an "inner/outer" distinction, and we need to be assured that there is nothing objectionable or arbitrary about the emergence of this seemingly competitive plurality.     The feature of formality, or conventional “signification,” suggests such a distinction, since we can foresee a distinction between an inner range of characteristics which belong directly to the conventional meaning of a “signifying” expression, and an outer range of characteristics which, although not themselves directly part of the conventional meaning of a given “signifying” expres-sion, are invariably, perhaps as a matter of natural necessity, concomitant with other characteristics which do directly belong to the conventional meaning of the “signifying” expression.     Again, if there is an inner range of characteristics which belong to the dictive content of a “signifying” expression as forming part of what such an expression says, it is foreseeable that there will be an outer range of cases involving characteristics which, though not part of what a “signifying” expression says, do form part of what such an expression conveys in some gentler and less forthright manner-part, for example, of what it hints or suggests.    To take the matter further, I suspect that we shall need to look more closely at the detailed constitution of the two "best candidates."     At this point I have confined myself to remarking that dictiveness seems to be restricted to the ground-floor level, however that may be determined, while formality seems to be unrestricted with regard to level.     But there may well be other important differences between the two concepts.   Let us turn first to formality, which, to my mind, may prove to be in somewhat better shape than dictiveness.     To say this is not in the least to deny that it involves serious and difficult problems;     indeed, if some are to be believed-for example, those who align themselves with Quine in a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion-these problems may turn out to be insuperable, and may drive us into a form of skepticism.   But one might well in such an event regard the skepticism as imposed by the intractability of the subject-matter, not by the ineptitude of the theorist.     He may well have done his best.    Some of the most pressing questions which arise concerning the concept of formality will be found in a fourfold list, which I have compiled, of topics related to formality.     First and foremost among these is the demand for a theoretically adequate specification of conditions which will authorize the assignment of truth conditions to suitably selected expressions, thereby endowing those expressions with a conventional “signification.”    It is plain that such provision is needed if “signification” is to get off the ground;     meanings are not natural growths and need to be conferred or instituted.     But the mere fact that they are needed is insufficient to show that they are available;     we might be left in the skeptic's position of seeing clearly what is needed, and yet being at the same time totally unable to attain it.     We should not, of course, confuse the suggestion that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the exercise of rationality with the suggestion that there is no rationally acceptable theoretical account of what the exercise of rationality consists in;     but though distinct these suggestions may not be independent; for it is conceivably true that the exercise of rationality can exist only if there is a theoretically adequate account, accessible to human reason, of what it is that constitutes rationality; in which case an acceptance of the second suggestion will entail an acceptance of the first suggestion.     These remarks are intended to raise, but not to settle, the question whether our adoption of linguistic conventions is to be explained by appeal to a general capacity for the adoption of conventions (the sort of explanation offered by Schiffer in Meaning), alla Lewis as solution to co-ordination problem of arbitrariness.    here I intend neither to endorse nor to reject the possibility of such an explanation.     Similar troubles might attend a superficially different presentation of the enterprise, according to which what is being sought and, one hopes, legitimately fixed by fat would be not conventional meanings for certain expressions, but a solid guarantee that, in certain conditions, in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so.     The conditions in question would of course have to be conditions of truth.  Inquiries of the kind just mentioned might profitably be reinforced by attention to other topics contained in my fourfold list.     Another of these would involve the provision of an inventory which will be an example of what I propose to call a "semi-inferential sequence."     An example of such a sequence might be the following:    (I) It is, speaking extensionally, general practice to treat d as “signifying” F.    (Il) It is, speaking intensionally, general practice to treat @ as “signifying”  F.    III) It is generally accepted that it is legitimate to treat @ as “signifying” F.    (IV) It is legitimate to treat d as “signifying” F.    (V) o does “signify” F.    What is involved in the phenomenon of treating & (an expres-sion) as “signifying” F has not been, and would need to be, explicitly stated.    A "semi-inferential sequence" is not a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by its predecessor in the sequence.     It is rather a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by a conjunction of its predecessor with an identifiable and verifiable supplementary condition, a condition which however has not been explicitly specified.    Some semi-inferential sequences will be "concept-determining" sequences.   In such sequences the final member will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure which has appeared previously in the sequence, though only as embedded within a larger structure which specifies some psychological state or practice of some rational being or class of rational beings.    It is my suggestion that, for certain valuational or “semantic” con-cepts, the institution of truth-conditions for such concepts is possible only via the mediation of a semi-inferential concept-determining se-quence.    To speak extensionally is to base a claim to generality on actual frequencies.    To speak intensionally is to base a claim to generality on the adoption of or adherence to a rule the observance of which may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency.    The practical modalities involved in (III) and (IV) may be restricted by an appended modifier, such as "from a logical point of view" or "from the point of view of good manners."    It might also be valuable to relate the restricted field of inferences connected with “semantic” proprieties to the broader and quite possibly analogous field of inferences connected with practical proprieties in general, which it would be the business of ethics to systematize.     If skepticism about linguistic proprieties could not be prevented from expanding into skepticism about improprieties of any and every kind, that might be a heavier price than the linguistic skeptic would be prepared to pay.    It would be unwise at this point to neglect a further direction of inquiry, namely proper characterization of the relation between words on the one hand, and on the other the sounds or shapes which constitute their physical realizations.   Such reflections may be expected to throw light on the precise sense in which words are instru-ments, and may well be of interest both in themselves and as a needed antidote to the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-token distinc-tion. It is perhaps natural to assume that in the case of words the fundamental entities are particular shapes and sounds (word tokens) and that words, in the sense of word-types are properly regarded as classes or sets of mutually resembling word tokens.     But I think that such a view can be seen to be in conflict with common sense (to whatever extent that is a drawback). John's rendering of the word "soot" may be indistinguishable from James's rendering of the word "suit"; but it does not follow from this that when they produce these render-ings, they are uttering the same word, or producing different tokens of the same word-type. Indeed there is something tempting about the idea that, in order to allow for all admissible vagaries of rendering, what are to count for a given person as renderings of particular words can only be determined by reference to more or less extended segments of his discourse; and this in turn perhaps prompts the idea that particular audible or visible renderings of words are only established as such by being conceived by the speaker or writer as realizations of just those words.     One might say perhaps the words come first and only later come their realizations.    Together with these reflections goes a further line of thought.  Spades are commonly and standardly used for such purposes as digging garden beds; and when they are so used, we may speak indifferently of using a spade to dig the bed and of using a spade (simpliciter).    On a windy day when I am in the garden, I may wish to prevent my papers from blowing away, and to achieve this result, I may put my spade on top of them. In such a case I think I might be said to be using a spade to secure the papers but not to be using a spade (sim-pliciter) unless perhaps I were to make an eccentric but regular use of the spade for this purpose. When it comes, however, to the use for this or that purpose of words, it may well be that my freedom of speech is more radically constrained. I may be the proud possessor ofa brass plaque shaped as a written representation of the word  "mother."     Maybe on a windy day I put this plaque on top of my papers to secure them. But if I do so, it seems to be wrong to speak of me as having used the word "mother" to secure my papers. Words may be instruments but if so, they seem to be essentially confined to a certain region of employment, as instruments of communication. To attempt to use them outside that region is to attempt the conceptually impossible. Such phenonema as this need systematic explanation.    On the face of it, the factors at work in the determination of the presence or absence of dictiveness form a more motley collection than those which bear on the presence of formality.     The presence or absence of an appropriate measure of ardor on behalf of a thesis, a conscientious reluctance to see one's statements falsified or un-confirmed, an excessive preoccupation with what is actually or potentially noncontroversial background material, an overindulgence in caution with respect to the strength to be attributed to an idea which one propounds, and a deviousness or indirectness of expression which helps to obscure even the identity of such an idea, might well be thought to have little in common, and in consequence to impart an unappealing fragmentation to the notion of dictive content.     But perhaps these factors exhibit greater unity than at first appears; perhaps they can be viewed as specifying different ways in which a speaker's alignment with an idea or thesis may be displayed or obscured; and since in communication in a certain sense all must be public, if an idea or thesis is too heavily obscured, then it can no longer be regarded as having been propounded.     So strong support for some idea, a distaste for having one's already issued statements discredited, an unexciting harmony the function of which is merely to establish a reference, and a tentative or veiled formulation of a thesis may perhaps be seen as embodying descending degrees of intensity in a speaker's alignment to whatever idea he is propounding. If so, we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or an-other, have drawn a distinction between "phrastics" and "neustics,"  who, in one  philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or im-peratively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tenta-tively.    In this connection it would perhaps be appropriate to elaboratesomewhat the characters of tentativeness and obliqueness which are specially visible in cases of "low commitment."     First "suggestion."     Suggesting that so-and-so seems to me to be, with varying degrees of obviousness, different from (a) stating or maintaining that so-and-so  (b) asserting it to be likely or probable that so-and-so (c) asserting it to be possible that so-and-so, where presumably "it is possible" means "it is not certain that it is not the case that so-and-so."     Suggesting that so-and-so is perhaps more like, though still by no means exactly like, asserting there to be some evidence that so-and-so. Stan-dardly, to suggest that so-and-so invites a response, and, if the suggestion is reasonable, the response it invites is to meet in one way or another the case which the maker of the suggestion, somewhat like a grand jury, supposes there to be in favor of the possibility that so-and-so.     The existence of such a case will require that there should be a truthful fact or set of facts which might be explained by the hypothesis that so-and-so together with certain other facts or assumptions, though the speaker is not committed to the claim that such an explanation would in fact be correct. Suggesting seems to me to be related to, though in certain respects different from, hinting. In what seem to me to be standard cases of hinting one makes, explicitly, a statement which does, or might, justify the idea that there is a case for supposing that so-and-so; but what there might be a case for supposing, namely that so-and-so, is not explicitly mentioned but is left to the audience to identify.     Obviously the more devious the hinting, the greater is the chance that the speaker will fail to make contact with his audience, and so will escape without having committed himself to anything.    A sixth strand deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle.     In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse.     I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of  6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.  It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.  Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.  I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.  A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the following way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected. The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act. I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.  (1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.  False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.  (2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.  Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic. The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question.  Strands Seven and Eight?  These strands may be considered together, representing, as they do, what might be deemed a division of sympathy on my part between two different schools of thought concerning the nature and content of Logic. These consist of the Modernists, spearheaded by Russell and other mathematically oriented philosophers, and the Traditionalists, particularly the neo-Traditionalists led by Strawson in An Introduction to Logical Theory. As may be seen, my inclination has been to have one foot in each of these at least at one time warring camps. Let us consider the issues more slowly.  (A) Modernism  In their most severe and purist guise Modernists are ready to admit to the domain of Logic only first-order predicate logic with identity, though laxer spirits may be willing to add to this bare minimum some  7. Cf. esp. Essays 3, 17.more liberal studies, like that of some system of modalities. It seems to me that a Modernist might maintain any one of three different positions with respect to what he thinks of as Logic.  He might hold that what he recognizes as Logic reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives. Unless more is said, this position is perhaps somewhat low on initial plausibility. He might hold that though not every feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which deserve to be preserved, all features that is to say, which are not irremediably vitiated by obscurity or incoherence. Without claiming that features which are omitted from his preferred system are ones which are marred by obscurity or incoherence he might claim that those which are not omitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order, that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the "Cathedral of Learning." (B) Neo-Traditionalism  So far as I can now reconstruct it, Strawson's response to Modernism at the time of An Introduction to Logical Theory, ran along the following lines.  At a number of points it is clear that the apparatus of Modernism does not give a faithful account of the character of the logical connectives of ordinary discourse; these deviations appear in the treatment of the Square of Opposition, the Russellian account of Def-inite, and also of Indefinite, Descriptions, the analysis of conditionals in terms of material implication, and the representation of universal statements by universal quantifiers. Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements in Modernism are liable to involve not merely infidelity to the actual character of vulgar connectives, but also the obliteration of certain conceptions, like presupposition and the existence of truth-gaps, which are crucial to the nature of certain logically fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference. The aspects thus omitted by Modernists are not such that their presence would undermine or discredit the connectives in the analysis of which they would appear. Like Cyrano de Bergerac's nose, they are features which are prominent without being disfiguring. Though they are not, in themselves, blemishes, they do nevertheless impede the optimally comprehensive and compendious representation of the body of admissible logical inferences. We need, therefore, two kinds of logic; one, to be called the logic of language, in which in a relaxed and sometimes not fully determinate way the actual character of the connectives of ordinary discourse is faithfully represented; the other, to be called formal logic, in which, at some cost to fidelity to the actual character of vulgar logical connectives, a strictly regimented system is provided which represents with maximal ease and economy the indefinite multitude of admissible logical inferences. (C) My Reactions to These Disputes  I have never been deeply moved by the prospect of a comprehensive and compendious systematization of acceptable logical infer-ences, though the tidiness of Modernist logic does have some appeal for me. But what exerts more influence upon me is my inclination to regard propositions as constructed entities whose essential character lies in their truth-value, entities which have an indispensable role to play in a rational and scientific presentation of the domain of logical inference. From this point of view a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects, perhaps, for the rational construction of at least part of the realm of propositions, even though the fact that many complex propositions seem plainly to be non-truth-functional ensures that many problems remain. A few years after the appearance of An Introduction to Logical Theory I was devoting much attention to what might be loosely called the distinction between logical and pragmatic inferences. In the first instance this was prompted as part of an attempt to rebuff objections, primarily by followers of Wittgenstein, to the project of using "phe-nomenal" verbs, like "look" and "seem," to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception, particularly that of explaining the problematic notion of sense-data, which seemed to me to rest on a blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction. (That is not to say, of course, that there might not be other good reasons for rejecting the project in question.) It then occurred to me that apparatus which had rendered good service in one area might be equally successful when transferred to another; and so I canvassed the idea that the alleged divergences between Modernists' Logic and vulgar logical connectives might be represented as being a matter not of logical but of pragmatic import.  The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or is not required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope; when a sentence which used in isolation stan-dardly carries a certain implicature, is embedded in a certain linguistic context, for example appears within the scope of a negation-sign, must the embedding operator, namely the negation-sign, be interpreted only as working on the conventional import of the embedded sentence, or may it on occasion be interpreted as governing not the conventional import but the nonconventional implicatum of the embedded sentence? Only if an embedding operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the conventional import but the noncon-ventional implicatum standardly carried by the embedded sentence can the first version of my account of such linguistic phenomena as conditionals and definite descriptions be made to work. The denial of a conditional needs to be treated as denying not the conventional import but the standard implicatum attaching to an isolated use of the embedded sentence. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding locution may govern the standard nonconventional implicatum rather than the conventional import of the embedded sentence; if a friend were to tell me that he had spent the summer cleaning the Augean stables, it would be unreasonable of me to respond that he could not have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle. But where the limits of a license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the standard implicata rather than to conventional meanings, I have to admit that I do not know. The second version of my mode of treatment of issues which, historically speaking, divide Modernists from Traditionalists, including neo-Traditionalists, offers insurance against the possibility that we do not have, or that we sometimes do not have, a license to treat embedding locutions as governing standard implicata rather than conventional import. It operates on the idea that even if it should prove necessary to supplement the apparatus of Modernist logic with additional conventional devices, such supplementation is in two respects undramatic and innocuous and does not involve a radical reconstruction of Modernist apparatus. It is innocuous and undramatic partly because the newly introduced conventional devices can be re- garded simply as codification, with a consequently enlarged range of utility, of pre-existing informal methods of generating implicature; and partly because the new devices do not introduce any new ideas or concepts, but are rather procedural in character. This last feature can be seen from the fact that the conventional devices which I propose are bracketing or scope devices, and to understand them is simply to know how sentences in which they initially appear can be restructured and rewritten as sentences couched in orthodox modernistic terms from which the new devices have been eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. I shall conclude this Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of my attitude to ordinary language. In order to fulfill this task, I should say something about what was possibly the most notable corporate achievement of my philosophical early middle age, namely the so-called method of linguistic botanizing, treated, as it often was in Oxford at the time, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and philosophical analysis in particular. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated in Oxford. A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf correctly and playing golf properly. But also the method was commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in larger-scale attempts to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase which gives linguistic expression to just this concept; and one goal of linguistic botanizing may be to make this concept explicit and to show how the various subordinate concepts fall under it. This program is closely linked with Austin's ideas about the desirability of ture of the method is that no initial assumptions are made about the subdivisions involved in subordinate lexical entries united by a single word; "true friends," "true statements," "true beliefs," "true bills,"  "true measuring instruments," "true singing voices" will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving different uses of the word "true"; that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botanizing; subordinations and subdivisions are not given in advance. It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic proprieties and improprieties: and these may be of several different kinds; so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which proprieties and improprieties may be characterized and organized. Contradictions, incoherences, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botanizing, and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration. Not only may single words involve a multitude of lexical entries, but different idioms and syntactical constructions appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botanizing. Syntax must not be ignored in the study of se-mantics.  At this point we are faced with two distinct problems. The first arises from the fact that my purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually took place in Oxford some forty years ago but rather to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical methodology.  Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian methodol-ogy, such persons as Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Hampshire, Urmson, Warnock, and others (including myself) had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation; indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this group could have had a better idea than the members of the group since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedures which these people were seeking to deploy. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic methodology, for a fully adequate implementation of that methodology requires a good and clear representation of the methodology itself; the more fragmentary the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation; and it must be admitted  "going through the dictionary." In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the word "true"; for one fea-that the ability of many of us to say at the time what it was that we were doing was fragmentary in the extreme. This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity; to say what such an activity is presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and this in turn presupposes the ability to say what the activity in question is.  The second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing like Russell, Quine and others have exhibited strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study ordinary language. Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and the thinking of the layman is what scientific thinking is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on. The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.  Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed experts between "we" and "they"; between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the rabble on the other. But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar; they might think of themselves as qualified by extended application and education to pursue further and to handle better just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days; after all, most professionals begin as amateurs. Or they might think of themselves as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all. In any case, to recognize the rights of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority which forms the cultured elite is quite distinct from treating the majority as themselves constituting a cultured elite.  Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallels which seem to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception in the mid-twentieth century, and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of our discipline. The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of that earlier Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself. In Aristotle's writing the main sources are the beginning of the Topics, the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the end of the Posterior Analytics.  We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of fact and knowledge of reasons, where what the reasons account for are the facts. Knowledge proper involves both facts to be accounted for and reasons which account for them; for this reason Socrates claimed to know nothing; when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with many facts, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until explanations and reasons begin to become available. For explanations and reasons to be available, they must derive ultimately from first principles, but these first principles do not come ready-made; they have to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation. It is not done in one fell swoop; at any given stage researchers build on the work of their predecessors right back to their earliest predecessors who are lay inquirers. Such progressive scrutiny is called "dialectic," starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.  Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction. So first principles will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and most conceptually economical principles which will account for the data which the theory has to explain. The progress toward an acceptable body of first principles is not always tranquil; disputes, paradoxes, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress. So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many. I find it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie the twen-tieth-century Oxonian dialectic; the appeal to ordinary language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge. It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) were both skilled and enthusiastic students of Greek philosophy.  But this initially appealing comparison between what I have been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as "what is said" (ta le-gomena, ta heyóuena). The phrase "what is said" may be interpreted in either of two ways. (I) It may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought." (II) It may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these senses; sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running quickly" or "running slowly," it is not legitimate to speak of "being pleased quickly" or "being pleased slowly"; from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that running is, while pleasure is not (despite the opinions of some philosophers), a process as distinct from an activity. At other times he uses the phrase "what is said" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that people sometimes behave incontinently seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of Will, or the near-platitude that friends are worth having for their own sake seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech. In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. Though some philoso-phers, most notably G. E. Moore, have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's treatment of Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botanizing" carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, I think, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection. So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.  I am, however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison be-tween Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly. I would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration for G. E. Moore. "Some like Witters" he once said,  "but Moore is my man." It is not recorded what aspects of Moore's philosophy particularly appealed to him, but the contrast with Wittgenstein strongly suggests that Moore primarily appealed to him as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore was especially famous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Wittgenstein. The question which now exercises me is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore said on this matter seems to me to be plainly inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else. Moore's treatments of this topic seem to me to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna. The two glaring defects are: (1) he nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world"; (2) even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as I know, does Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct. The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that "Here is one human hand and here is another" and the seemingly general philosophical statement that material objects exist. Moore takes it for granted that the statement about the human hands entails the general statement that material objects exist; but as Wittgenstein remarked,  "Surely those who deny the reality of the material world do not wish to deny that underneath my trousers I wear underpants." Moore was by no means certainly wrong on this matter, but the question which comes first, interpretation or the assessment of truth-value, is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.  My explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic charity lies in my conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them. I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers. Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother. The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbor explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren. G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like the spirit of a particular language or even the spirit of language as such, the Common Man, the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth. A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers. Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes. They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.  So what G* suggested to Grice ran approximately as follows. A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as the Common Man. More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between the Common Man and other abstractions; but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1) the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2) the appeal to the structure and content of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic, which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs. G* conjectured that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botanizing, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botanizing; it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity of the instrument of language. It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due; this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's; his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.  e also have to consider the strength or weakness of my secon large against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeede in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.  Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs, (2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true. But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.  It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender of knowledge with certainty, namely Cook Wilson. Cook Wilson took the view that the very nature of knowledge was such that items which were objects of knowledge could not be false; the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object. The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object. This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Cook Wilson's position must be rejected; for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p. This difficulty led Cook Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹nowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth. Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to den that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"? But while Cook Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad; and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to bad answers seems to me a question hardly worth debating.  It is in any case my firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error. I think, moreover, that he would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as I know Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases. I think Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments were attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs. Austin plainly viewed ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use. So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one. That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.  At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother. She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable. The proper view will be that analytic propositions are among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge. Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight. As Plato once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity. Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice  Grice concludes the Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of Grice’s attitude to “ordinary language,” as Austin called it.  In order to fulfill this task, Grice feels he should say something about what is possibly the most notable *corporate* achievement of Grice’s philosophy, namely the so-called method of linguistic botany, treated, as it often is at Oxford, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and *philosophical analysis* in particular.   Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and ‘linguistic’ analysis.  So far as Grice knows, however, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ‘ordinary’ language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere  — before, — or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated at Oxford.   A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf *correctly* — Cicero: correctum — and playing golf *properly.* — Cicero: proprium.  This method is also commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in a larger-scale attempt to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. Consider: signification in conversation.    It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase — or EXPRESSION — which gives linguistic, er, expression or manifestation, to just this concept.    One goal of linguistic botaniy may be to make this or that concept explicit and to show how various subordinate concepts fall under it.   This programme is closely linked with Austin's — but not Ryle’s — ideas about the desirability of  "going through the dictionary." — The Little Oxford Dictionary.    In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the  "true".    For one feature of the method is that no initial assumption is to be made by the philosopher — who KNOWS — about any subdivision that may be involved in any subordinate lexical entry united by a single expression;     true friend    true statement,"     true belief    true bill    "true measuring instrument    ," "true singing voice    " will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving a different use of “true";     that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botany;     subordination and subdivision is not given in advance.     It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic ‘proprieties’ and improprieties:     and these may be of several different kinds;     so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which any propriety or lack of it may be characterized and organized.     A Contradiction, an incoherence, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botany.    and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration.     Not only may a single exoression involve a multitude of lexical entries, but   An idioms or a syntactical construction appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botany.    Syntax must not be ignored in the study of ‘semantics.’    At this point we are faced with two distinct problems.     The first arises from the fact that Grice’s purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually take place iat Oxford     but     rather     to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical method.    Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian method — such philosophers as in order of seniority     Ryle,     Austin,   Grice,   Hampshire,   Urmson,   Strawson, and   Warnock —     had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation;     indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this set could have had a better idea than the members of the set since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedure which *these* philosophers are seeking to deploy.     Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic method,     for a fully adequate implementation of that method requires a good and clear representation of the method itself;     the more ‘fragmentary’ — to use Bradley’s idiom — the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation;     and it must be admitted    that the ability of many of us to say what it is that we are doing is fragmentary in the extreme.     This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity;     to say what such an activity *is* presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and     this in turn     presupposes the ability to _say_ or demonstrate, successfully, what the activity in question is.    A second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing — like Russell and others — have exhibited a strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study *ordinary* language. — the silly things silly people say.    Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and     the thinking of the lay is what the learned, scientific thinking, is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on.     The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like this devilish scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.    Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed expert between "us” and "them.”    between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the riff raff rabble on the other.     But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar;     they might think of themselves as qualified, by extended application and education, to pursue further, and to handle better, just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days;     after all, a ‘professional’ usually begins as a amateur — gone wrong!    Or he might think of himself as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all.     In any case, to recognize the alleged right of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority — which forms the cultured elite — is quite distinct from treating the majority as itself constituting a cultured elite.    Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallel which seems to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of the discipline of philosophy.    The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of the Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotle but also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself.     In Aristotle, the main sources are     the Topics,   the Nicomachean Ethics, and   the Posterior Analytics.    We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of a fact and the knowledge of a reason, where what the reason account for is the fact.    Knowledge proper involves both a fact to be accounted for and a reason which account for it;     for this reason Socrates claims to know nothing;     when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with the fact, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until the explanation and the reason begin to become available.    For the explanation and the reason to be available, they must derive ultimately from a principle, but this principle does not come ready-made;     It has to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation.      The principle is not devised by the philosopher in one fell swoop;     at any given stage a researcher build on the work of his predecessor right back to the earliest predecessor who is a LAY inquirer. The Stone Age metaphysician who was Thales.    Such progressive scrutiny is called  "dialectic,"     starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.    Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction.     So the principle will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and conceptually most economical item which will account for the data, the fact, which the theory has to explain.    This progress toward an acceptable principle is not always tranquil;     disputes, paradoxes, aporiae, and obstructions to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress.    So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many.    Grice finds it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie Oxonian dialectic;     the appeal to ‘ordinary’ language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge.     It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) are both skilled and enthusiastic students of Ancient philosophy.    But this initially appealing comparison between what Grice has been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as ta heyóuena.    The phrase ta legomena may be interpreted in either of two ways.     Ta legomena may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought."     But ta legomena may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." — their careless chatter.     In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these ways;   sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running” “quickly" or "slowly," it is not legitimate or appropriate or polite to speak of "being pleased”  “quickly" — a quickie — or "slowly";     from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that     running is, while being pleased is not     — despite the opinions of some philosophers, obviously — a process as distinct from an activity.     At other times, however, Aristotle uses the phrase "ta legomena" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that     people sometimes behave incontinently     seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of the Will, or the near-platitude that     friends are worth having for their own sake     seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing.     In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech.     In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain.     Though some philoso-phers, most notably Moore at Cambridge have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's or Grice’s pupil Flew’s treatment of a Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botany” carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, Grice thinks, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection.    Was the truth-value True taken for granted as per some form of transcendental argument?     So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.    Grice is however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison between Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly.     Grice would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration fMoore.     Some like Witters" Austin would say,   "but Moore’s MY man."     It is not recorded what aspect of Moore's philosophy particularly appeals to Austin, but the contrast with Witters strongly suggests that Moore primarily appeals to Austin as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore is especially infamous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Witters.     Oddly, Grice’s collaborator, Pears, would say: Some like Augustine, but Witters’s MY man.    The question which now exercises Grice is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore says on this matter seems to me to be *plainly* inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else.     Was it just a dismissing of the Witters?    Moore's treatments — and worse, Malcolm’s — of this topic seem to Grice to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna.     The two glaring defects are: (    1) Moore nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world";     even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as Grice knows, does apostolic Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct.     The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that     "Here is one hand and here is another"     and the seemingly general philosophical statement that a thing exists.    Moore takes it for granted that the statement about his hands entails the general statement that a thing exists, but as Witters   remarked,    "He who denies the reality of the material world may not wish to deny that he wears underpants underneath his trousers.    Moore was by no means *certainly* wrong, mistaken, or confused, on this matter, but the question which comes first,     interpretation     or     the assessment of truth-value    , is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.    Grice’s explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic *charity* towards Moore lies in Grice’s conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them.     I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophical Never-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers.     Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M*, Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G*, Grice's fairy godmother.     The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbour explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren.     G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like     the spirit — or genio — of a particular language or even     the spirit of language as such, the Common Man,     the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth.     A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers.     Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes.     They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.    So what G* suggests to Grice ran approximately as follows.     A*, with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as The Common Man.     More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between The Common Man and other abstractions;     but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1)     the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2)     the appeal to the structure — and content  — of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for     (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic,     which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs.     G* conjectures that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botany, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botany;     it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity — cleverness — of the instrument of language.     It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due;     this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's;     his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.    We also have to consider the strength or weakness of my second charge against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeede in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.    Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting     (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs,     2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true.     But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.    It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender at OXFORD of knowledge with certainty, namely Wilson.     Wilson takes the view that the very nature of knowledge is such that items which is an object of knowledge could not be false;     the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object.     The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object.   This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Wilson's position must be rejected;     for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p.     This difficulty led Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from ‹knowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth.     Bui his modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking for granted"?     But while Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad;     and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to a bad answer seems to me a question hardly worth debating.    It is in any case Grice’s firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error.     Grice thinks, moreover, that Austin would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson of Grice’s pupil Flew who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as Grice knows Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases.     Grice thinks Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments are attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs.     Austin plainly views ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use.     So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one.     That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.    At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother.     She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable.     The proper view will be that an analytic proposition is among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge.     Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight.     As Socrates once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity.     Such considerations as these are said to lie behind reports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P.  Grice   I am greatly honoured and much moved by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to me. 1 am especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues; every one of them is a personal friend of mine, though I have to confess that some of them I see, these days, less frequently than I used to, and much less frequently than I should like to. So this collection provides me with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its best, a friendly subject. Twish that I could respond individually to each contribution; but I do not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to me. The editors of this volume, Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, have contributed an editorial which provides a synoptic view of my work; in view of the fact that I have so far published no book, that the number of my publications is greatly exceeded by the number of my unpublications, and that even my publications include some papers which are not easily accessible, their undertaking fulfills a crying need. But it does more than that; it presents a most perceptive and sympathetic picture of the spirit which lies behind the parts of my work which it discusses; and it is my feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. So I make my contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them I allow myself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections. For convenience I fuse the editors into a multiple personality called 'Richards',  , whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.As I look back upon my former self, it seems to me that when, fifty years ago, I began the serious study of philosophy, the temperament with which I approached this enterprise was one of what I might call dissenting rationalism.' The rationalism was probably just the interest in looking for reasons which would be found in any intelligent juvenile who wanted to study philosophy; the tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, my father. My father, who was a gentle person, a fine musician, and a dreadful business man, exercised little personal influence over me but quite a good deal of cultural influence; he was an obdurate nineteenth-century liberal nonconformist, and I witnessed almost daily, without involvement, the spectacle of his religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household-my mother, who was heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who was a Catholic convert. But whatever their origins in my case, I do not regard either of the elements in this dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at my stage of intellectual development. I mention them more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance; it seems to me that they have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded, over my philosophical life, and this I am inclined to regard as a much less usual phenomenon.  I count myself wonderfully fortunate to have begun my philosophical studies as a pupil of W. F. R. Hardie, later President of my then college, Corpus Christi, the author of a work on Plato which both is and is recognized as a masterpiece, whose book on the Nicomachean Ethics, in one of its earlier incarnations as a set of lecture-notes, saw me through years of teaching Aristotle's moral theory. It seems to me that 1 learnt from him just about all the things which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself. More specifically, my initial rationalism was developed under his guidance into a belief that philosophical questions are to be settled by reason, that is to say by argument; I learnt also from him how to argue, and in learning how to argue I came to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than  1 As I read what I find myself to have written in this Reply, I also find myself ready to expand this description to read "irreverent, conservative, dissenting rationalism'.an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised). I came also to see that though philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonizing labours, it is worth achieving; and that the difficulties involved in achieving it offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like rabble-rousing. His methods were too austere for some, in particular the long silences in tutorials were found distressing by some pupils (though as the years went by I believe the tempo speeded up). There is a story, which I am not sure that I believe, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was Hardie's turn to speak, which was at long last broken by Hardie saying. 'And what did you mean by "of"*? There is another story, which 1 think 1 do believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, who was a pupil of Hardie's two or three years before me, decided that the next time a silence developed in one of his tutorials he was not going to be the one to break it. In the next tutorial, after Berlin had finished reading his essay to Hardie, there followed a silence which lasted twenty-five minutes, at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.  These tutorial rigours never bothered me. If philosophizing is a difficult operation (as it plainly is) then sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as chess-players are only too well aware). The idea that a professional philosopher should either have already solved all questions, or should be equipped to solve any problem immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess. I liked the slow pace of discussion with Hardie; I liked the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which he would sometimes emit when he had caught you in, or even pushed you into, a patently untenable position (though I preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself): and I liked his resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which he once told me about himself. He had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema. Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights were at that time controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.  The police decided to prosecute. I indicated to him that this didn'tsurprise me at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off?  Lasked him how on earth he managed that. 'Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference, They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and I answered that since my car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been my car which caused the obstruction.*  Hardie never disclosed his own views to students, no doubt wishing them to think their own thoughts (however flawed and immature) rather than his. When one did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of his own position, what one got was liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly conservative in tone; not surprisingly, it would not contain much in the way of battle-cries or campaign-material. Aspiring knights-errant require more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: they require a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of Damsels in Distress.  In the later 1930s Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by  A. J. Ayer, at that time the enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy.  Many people, including myself, were greatly interested by the methods, theses, and problems which were on display, and some were, at least momentarily, inspired by what they saw and heard. For my part, my reservations were never laid to rest; the crudities and dogmatisms seemed too pervasive. And then everything was more or less brought to a halt by the war.  After the war the picture was quite different, as a result of the dramatic rise in the influence of Austin, the rapid growth of Oxford as a world-centre of philosophy (due largely to the efforts of Ryle), and of the extraordinarily high quality of the many young philosophers who at that time first appeared on the Oxford scene. My own profes. sional life in this period involved two especially important aspects. The first was my prolonged collaboration with my former pupil, Peter Strawson. Our efforts were partly directed towards the giving of joint seminars; we staged a number of these on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form. But our association was much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. We consumed vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical explorations, and from these discussions sprang our joint published paper In Defense of a Dogma, and also a long uncompletedwork on predication and Aristotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's book Individuals. Our method of composition was laborious in the extreme: work was constructed together sentence by sentence, nothing being written down until agreement had been reached, which often took quite a time. The rigours of this procedure eventually led to its demise. During this period of collaboration we of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions; but to my mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; other people sometimes complained that our mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. The potentialities of such joint endeavours continued to lure me; the collaboration with Strawson was followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example) Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, with Warnock on perception, with David Pears and with James Thomson on philosophy of action, with Fritz Staal on philosophical-linguistic questions, and most recently with George Myro on metaphysics, and with Judith Baker on Ethics. I shall return shortly to the importance which I attribute to this mode of philosophical activity.  The other prominent feature of this period in my philosophical life was participation in the discussions which took place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which were conducted by a number of the younger Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.  This  group which continued to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death was christened by me 'The Play Group', and was often so referred to, though so far as I know never by, or in the presence of.  Austin himself. I have little doubt that this group was often thought of outside  Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *Ordinary Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of Ordinary Language Philosophy'. As such it no doubt absorbed its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example Gellner, and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.  Yet, as I look back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium. To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who were concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage; besides those who, initially at least, gravitated towards Austin, there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle, and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein; and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another. But even within the Play Group, great diversity was visible, as one would expect of an association containing people with the ability and independence of mind of Austin, Strawson.  Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a few). There was no 'School'; there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism. It has, I think, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction. It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid; the sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread. We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition). But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.  Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacrosanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgements or world-pictures may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse. Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense', It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore. 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man', I once heard him say: and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, thought that some sort of metaphysic is embedded in ordinary language. But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable. Any such further step would need justification by argument.  In fact, the only position which to my mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from person to person, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses. It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.  Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain non-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency. It was in this spirit that in early days we investigated rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning). Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.  It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing was founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage. It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style were to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the characterof language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality. Such persons do, to my mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply. Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious. The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.  But, to my mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.  That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language. Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. 'Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.  The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions). Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.  The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space. I have three comments.  (1) The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.  Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.  But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice.  Grice was greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such it no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example Gellner, and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.  Yet, as I look back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium. To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who were concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage; besides those who, initially at least, gravitated towards Austin, there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle, and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein; and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another. But even within the Play Group, great diversity was visible, as one would expect of an association containing people with the ability and independence of mind of Austin, Strawson.  Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a few). There was no 'School'; there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism. It has, I think, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction. It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid; the sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread. We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition). But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.  Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacrosanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgements or world-pictures may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse. Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense', It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore. 'Some like Witters, but Moore's my man', I once heard him say: and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, thought that some sort of metaphysic is embedded in ordinary language. But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable. Any such further step would need justification by argument.  In fact, the only position which to my mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking; and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from person to person, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses. It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.  Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain non-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency. It was in this spirit that in early days we investigated rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning). Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.  It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing was founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage. It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style were to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the characterof language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality. Such persons do, to my mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply. Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious. The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.  But, to my mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.  That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language. Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. 'Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.  The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions). Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.  The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space. I have three comments.  (1) The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.  Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.  But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice. A strand deals with the idea of a Conversational Maxim and its alleged connection with the Principle of Conversational Co-operation.   This Strand is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of RATIONAL activity, and that any rational activity which does NOT involve the use of language is in various ways importantly parallel to that which does.    This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of *rational* *cooperation.*    The merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.  In his extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice Grice distinguishes this or that maxims, of this or that principle, observance of which Grice regards as providing, for his Oxford pupils, this or that standard of RATIONAL  discourse.   Grice seeks to represent this or that principles, or this of that axiom, which Grice distinguishes as being themselves dependent on one over-all super-principle enjoining conversational co-operation.   While this or that conversational maxim has on the whole been quite well received by his Oxford pupils — except Strawson — the same cannot, Grice thinks, be said about Grice’s invocation of a supreme principle of conversational co-operation.   One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that, even in the talk-exchanges of civilised people and Oxonian pupils, brow-beating disputation or conversational sharp practice are far too common or widespread — Grice is talking Oxford philosophy — to be deemed an offense against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice.  A second source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward *any* end — cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey. Never mind the too abstract maximally efficient mutual influencing!  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for.     First, it is only this or that ASPECT of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to the RATIONALITY of our conversational practice, rather than to whatever other merits or demerits that practice may possess.    Therefore, nothing on which Grice lectures should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of this or that particular issue for conversational exploration.    It is then specifically or particularly the RATIONALITY — or irrationality — of conversational conduct which Grice has been concerned to track down rather than any more *general* characterisation of conversational adequacy.     Therefore, we may expect this or that principle of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of this or that conversational interest.     Second, Grice takes it as a working assumption that, whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communication, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.    Do not multiply the critiques of reason beyond necessity.    It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew — whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.    Finally, we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises.     Grice takes it as being obvious that, insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production.   A Genuine monologue is free from the utterer’s implication.     Therefore, since we are concerned, as theorists, only with concerted talking, we should recognize that, within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us), collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may co-exist with a high degree of English Oxonian upper-class reserve, hostility, and chicanery, and with a high degree of diversity in this or that ultimate motivation underlying this or that quite meagre common objective.     Moreover, we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases, like cross-examination — in which even this or that common objective is spurious, apparent rather than real.     The joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational cooperation.    But such an exchange honours the principle of conversational co-operation — at least to the extent of aping its application.     A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.    Grice is now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational practice.    A list is presented of this or that conversational maxim — or this or that “conversational imperative” or imperative of conversational conduct — which is such that, in a paradigmatic case, observance of the maxim or imperative promotes — and its violation dispromotes — conversational rationality;     these include this or that principle as this or that maxims — under the conversational supra-categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modus.    Somewhat like a moral *commandment* — or decalogue thereof —, this or that maxim, or counsel of conversational prudence — is prevented from being just some member of some disconnected heap of this or that conversational obligation or DUTY — by its dependence on a single supreme Conversational Principle, that of cooperativeness.    An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to this or that maxim thus *generated* — or deduced as Saint Matthew’s prefers — by the Principle of Conversational Cooperation.    Another class of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class.    Conversational signification is thought of as arising in the tollowing way;     a significatum (indicative or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to the conversationalist  in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a)     that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifiable, at least in his eyes, or     b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, violation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is respected.    Surely the spirit of the overall principle of conversational cooperation IS respected.    The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature.     It was in effect there suggested that what we may call a conversational significatum is just those assumptions which have to be attributed or ascribed to a conversationalist to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being *rationalized* — to echo Anna Freud — by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act.    Rationalisation is not rationality — an action caused by no concern for rationality may be rationalized ex post facto.    Grice has so far been a monist, and talking as if the right ground *plan* is to identify, or made manifest, and formulate, for his Oxford pupils, a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to *generate* or yield by deduction — as St. Matthew deduces the ten commandments from just one injunction — and justify a range of this or that more specific, but still highly general,  conversational maxim which, in turn, could be induced to yet again yield this or that particular conversational directive — applying to a particular subject matter, a context, and a conversational procedure, and Grice has been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Principle of Conversational Cooperation is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle.     Grice has tried to give reasons for thinking, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate.     So far so good.    But Grice does in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested monistic layout.     It is not at all clear to Grice that this or that conversational maxim, at least if he has correctly identified them as such, does in fact operate as a distinct peg from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of this or that fully specific conversational directive.     And if Grice did misidentify any of them as this or that conversational maxim, it is by no means clear to Grice what substitutes he could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better.     What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims of conversational conduct, but the monistic concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate.     The monistic layout has four possible problems.    The maxims do not seem to be coordinate.     The maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.    Especially if the shared goal is that of a maximally efficacious mutual influencing.    False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.    The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested monistic layout seems to require.     To judge whether a conversationalist has been undersupplied or oversupplied with information *seems* to require that he should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate.    Only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made.    The force of this consideration seems to be blunted by those who seem to be disposed to sever the notion of relevance from the specification of this or that  particular *direction* of relevance.    Though the specification of this or that direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made.     Information will *also* be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action.    While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon conversational signification of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic.    The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as conversational signification is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim under the conversational category of Quantity.    The remaining maxim distinguished by Grice, that of or under the conversational category of Modus, which Grice represented as prescribing perspicuous presentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational propriety, but its potentialities as a generator of conversational signification seem to be somewhat open to question. H. P. Grice  Grice was greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such a core or hot-bed, the new play group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example a Hebrew from France, Gellner — Austin’s pupil — and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.    Yet, as Grice looks back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium.     To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage;     besides those who, initially at least — until Grice replaced Austin upon Austin’s death — gravitated towards Austin,     there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle,     and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein;     and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another.     But even within the new Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of     Austin,   Strawson,   Hampshire,   Paul,   Pears,   Warnock, and   Hare     (to name a few).    — very few!     There was no 'School';     there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that     an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism.     It has, Grice thinks, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction.     It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid.    The sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread.     We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition).     But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.    Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement or world-picture may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse.     Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense.’    It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore.     ‘Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man', Grice once heard Austin say:     and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, as Priscianus did, thought that some sort of metaphysic *is* embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.     But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable.     Any such further step would need justification by argument.    In fact, the only position which to Grice’s mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking;     and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from philosopher to philosopher, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses.     It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.    Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain *non*-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.     It was in this spirit that in early days they investigate rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning or signification.     Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.    It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary’language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing is founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage.     It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style are to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality.     Such persons do, to Grice’s mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply.     Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious.     The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.    But, to Grice’s mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.    That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language.     Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. '    Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but  "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:     and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.    The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions).     Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.    The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space.     Grice has three comments.    The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.    Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.    But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extract-able from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research; for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, twentieth-century physics. Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any belief about how the world goes which such language reflects; it might, for example, be derived somehow from the categorial structure of the language.  Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science. rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise; so might some highly general theory in formal semantics, though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:  To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary language philosophy might have to press into service the argument which I represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct. He might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general semantic theory based squarely on data provided by ordinary discourse by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction.  (2) With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science or some particular favoured science, I should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner was such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions: and I should start with a lively expectation that this would not be the case. But even if this negative expectation was disappointed. I should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist. If those standards are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so not dictated by scientists, then there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy might be to discover  or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language, And even if the requisite kind of purity were to consist in what I might term such logico-methodological virtues as consistency and systematicity, which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ordinary language? In which case, the ordinary-language philosopher would be back in business. So far as I can see, once again the enemy of ordinary-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ordinary language would have to presuppose the viability of the analytic/synthetic distinction.  (3) With regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, let me first remark that it is my present view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory.  For example, Quine's original argument that attempts to define 'analytic' end up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to my mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment. And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Strawson and myself to defend the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by a population of speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question can survive rigorous theoretical scrutiny. To my mind, the mistake made by both parties has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of natural language; it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of concepts pointed to by Quine, and to regard an analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in natural language, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of natural language. The viability of the distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as 1 can see, remains to be decided; and the decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.  Two further comments seem to me relevant and important. A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is (or was) to treat as acceptable the forms of ordinary discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it. A common alternative proposed by enemies of  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ordinary language; in the words of Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.  But why should our vulgar speech be retained? Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with the learned? After all, if my house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that 1 need a new one, it is not essential that I construct the new one within the outer shell of the old one, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper or aesthetically preferable. An attachment to the forms of ordinary discourse even when the substance is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ordinary discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies.  Second, whether or not a viable analytic/synthetic distinction exists, I am not happy with the claim that *ordinary language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction. It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable: but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which theories are supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would be vindicated not pre-supposed. For the distinction to be entailed by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be presupposed by that programme. For if it is to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, I imagine, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction; and how this allegation could be made out I cannot for the life of me discover.I turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI turn now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which at the time, or (in some instances) subsequently, seemed to me to be particularly appealing. First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones). I was once dining with Strawson at his college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was an undergraduate, sat at the feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.  We asked him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'. This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth; but a long time later I realized that mirth was quite inappropriate. Indeed the message was a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages: for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service. Austin's message was another platitude; it in effect said that if in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage is and of what lies behind it. This sophisticated but remorseless literalism was typical of Austin.  When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's play it as a game': with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each week to play that week's improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'  Another appealing element was the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument. By this I do not mean merely that he saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules. He may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualHoly of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies. What I am imputing to him is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion. It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose or point of some feature of ordinary discourse.  When put to work, this conception of ordinary language seemed to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems, the appeal of which approaches, in my eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Aristotle in relation to rà Xeyouera (what is said"). When properly regulated and directed, 'linguistic botanizing' seems to me to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts. Indeed, I will go further, and proclaim it as my belief that linguistic botanizing is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned. That is not to say that I have ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for linguistic botanizing, namely (as one might put it) to go through the dictionary and to believe everything it tells you.  Indeed, I once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't care what the dictionary said, and drew the rebuke, 'And that's where you make your big mistake.' Of course, not all these explorations were successful; we once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion. This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?' For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from me, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical importance, with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries. Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.  Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of linguistic usage, provided a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include linguistie botanizing in their professional armoury. I shall recount three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim. Geoffrey Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted, even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's first remark to him was, "What would be the difference between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and my saying to you that he is not playing golf properly?' On a certain occasion we were discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase on principle'. Nowell Smith recalled that a pupil of Patrick Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'. At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied, 1 do not take bribes on principle.' Austin responded by saying '1 should not say that; I should just say "No, thanks". On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offered as an example of non-understandable English an extract from a sonnet of Donne:  From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.  Austin said, 'It is perfectly clear what that means; it means "angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."  These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why I should have turned away from this style of philosophy. Well, as I have already indicated, in a certain sense I never have turned away, in that I continue to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing; for just how much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer. That linguistic information should not be just a quantity ofcollector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic theory, is a proposition which would, I suspect, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent; the trouble began when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory this underlying theory should be. The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which I have already mentioned; by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not. It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions; but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of categories, remains to be determined. At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by me; if it is necessary to invoke the notion of categories. are we to suppose these to be linguistic categories (categories of expres-sion) or metaphysical categories (categories of things), a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent, semantic theory, or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct. Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright. In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply: a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin.  My own efforts to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned derived much guidance from the work of Quine and of Chomsky on syntax. Quine helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology; Chomsky showed vividly the kind of way in which a region for long foundtheoretically intractable by scholars (like Jesperson) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control. I should add that Quine's influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical posi-tions. I have to confess that I found it a little sad that my two chief theoretical mentors could never agree, or even make visible contact, on the question of the theoretical treatment of natural language; it seemed a pity that two men who are about as far removed from dumbness as any that I have ever encountered should not be equally far removed from deafness. During this time my philosophizing revealed a distinct tendency to appear in formal dress; indeed the need for greater contact with experts in logic and in linguistics than was then available in Oxford was one of my main professional reasons for moving to the United States. Work in this style was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form. This undertaking involved the construction, for a language which was a close relative of a central portion of English (including quantification), of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-semantics which made minimal use of transformations. This project was not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material was presented in lectures and seminars both inside and outside Berkeley, including a memorable summer colloquium at Irvine in 1971. An interest in formalistic philosophizing seems to me to have more than one  source. It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development; not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system. I have never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate logic together with set theory, and in any case this kind of formal enterprise would overtax my meagre technical equipment. It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality. This latter kind of interest is the one which engages me, and will, I think, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.  It is nevertheless true that in recent years my disposition to resortto formalism has markedly diminished. This retreat may well have been accelerated when, of all people, Hilary Putnam remarked to me that 1 was too formal; but its main source lay in the fact that I began to devote the bulk of my attentions to areas of philosophy other than philosophy of language: to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics; and to ethics, in which my pre-existing interest which was much enlivened by Judith Baker's capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples.  Such areas of philosophy seem, at least at present, much less amenable to formalistic treatment. I have little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by tech-nology; to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism. But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.  A2. Opinions  The opinions which I shall voice in this sub-section will all be general in character: they will relate to such things as what I might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology. I shall reserve for the next section anything I might have to say about my views on specific philosophical topics, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.  (tI shall first proclaim it as my belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun. I would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny. One should of course be serious about philosophy: but being serious does not require one to be solemn.  Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy; there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church. The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave me; but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party; each one has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit andstimulated the intellect. To my mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth; and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors, then so much the better.  But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in the philosophical world. It was said of the late H. W. B. Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery; he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.  Though this comment referred to his proper severity in teaching, he was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable H. A. Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with students; philosophical productivity among his junior contemporaries in Oxford was low, and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. (Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the undergraduates of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.) The tradition did not die with Joseph; to take just one example, I have never been very happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant. And similar incidents have been reported not so long ago from the USA. So far as I know, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.  Though it is no doubt plain that 1 am not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, I have to confess that I am not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus. The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending: indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher, is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims. To my stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person or a philosophical creed; zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship. Rational and dispassionate commendation and criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth: but passion directed towards either philosophers or philosophies is outof place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured. What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.  I have little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement. But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution. One of these factors is, 1 suspect, a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.  It is, 1 am inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or raises a certain question. At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it; and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.  Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.  It is, however, my hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals. I shall refer to this issue again later when I come to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument. The kind of metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epago-gic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation. Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people; and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.  A second possible source of atmospherie amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry. An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (how-ever difficult the realization of this index might be to determine). Of course one must try to be right, but even so I doubt whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons. An eminent topologist whom I knew was regarded withsomething approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake. Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.  The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar. Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.  (I) The cause which I have just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy. There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which I also believe. These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline: the first I shall call the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity. With regard to the first, it is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline. By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principles fall within the epistemological classification of a priori knowledge, I mean (or hope I mean) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others; to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens) L am introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), I am immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff. Philosophy, like virtue, is entire. Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them. At this point, however, I must admit a double embarassment; I do not know exactly what the thesis is which I want to maintain, and I do not know how to prove it, though I am fairly sure that my thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarass-ments may not be independent of one another. So the best 1 can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.  (i) It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter ofof a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry. On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S. (ii) There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines. (iii) Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline. For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics; some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking: some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on. All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.  (iv) It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.  (v) There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline. There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual. This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain. (Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).) (III) In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', I am referring to the unity of Philosophy through time. Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries; and it is only a little less obvious that often substantiallysimilar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates. Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another, for example between Western European and Indian philosophy. If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead. And when I say proper consideration I am not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame; I mean rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now; and, further, that in order to do this we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking: indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves. I might add at this point that it seems to me that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology. By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed. I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.  Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while; but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding. But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from person to person; and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.This reflection leads me to one of my favourite fantasies. Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved. As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else. My fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark; in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times; that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems. The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject; but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright. Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.  (IV) As I thread my way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, I find myself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like Extensionalism, Nominalism, Positiv-ism, Naturalism, Mechanism, Phenomenalism, Reductionism, Physical-ism, Materialism, Empiricism, Scepticism, and Functionalism; menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey. The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another; and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.  There are many persons, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism; and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.  After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. I have come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to me a good deal more than they do now.  But how would I justify the hardening of my heart?  The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that I can think of myself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies. To this question my answer is that all the items are forms of what I shall call Minimalism, a propensity which secks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertized philosophical commodity, suchas abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth. In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.  In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'. But such an appeal I would regard as inappropriate; we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape; we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time; to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer. To change the image some-what, what bothers me about what I am being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.  I am also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess. Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission: they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.  They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation; some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away; and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs. My own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this. I am inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.  I am conscious that all I have so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.  This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same I should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack. I can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism'; the best I can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what I would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject. My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of ais no more informative as an answer to the question Why is an English mail-box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Paul Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Paul Grice"T, and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of Set-theory. The picture which, I suspect, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong; and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs. As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system. Explanation of the actual presence of a particular feature in a particular subject depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such features in that subject, regardless of whether the features in question even do appear in that subject, or indeed in any subject. On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set; but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of in fact unexemplified features would be invariably the same, no matter how different in meaning the expressions used to specify such features would ordinarily be judged to be. This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.  I can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to me to suffer from serious drawbacks. The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas. In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to empiricist principles through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived; somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve certain vacuous predicates or general terms from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of other predicates or general terms which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms. (a) Start with two vacuous predicates, say (ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (oz) is a climber on hands and knees of a29,000 foot mountain. (8) If aj and a z are vacuous, then the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y) Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8) We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees. These sequences are certainly distinet, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.  My chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.  For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using vacuous predicates in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of non-empty sets.  This is a condition which, I suspect, might not be met by every vacuous predicate. But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of would-be explanatory terms.  The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first; it certainly seems simpler. The admissibility of vacuous predicates in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition. And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, wouldcertainly be trivial. Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1) they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2) these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of non-vacuous predicates.  The explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system.  My doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.  I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides. But now a problem arises: the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability scems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact. It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom I know or know of have not seemed anxious to confer. But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege? (If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.)  I have, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted; I have been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed. I should be less than honest if I pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained. I should, however, also be less than honest if I concealed the fact that, should I be left without an argument, it is very likely that I should not be very greatly disturbed. For my antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experiencein a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.  (VI) But at this point some people, I think, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way. For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with me, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with me. Now I certainly do wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and I also wish to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.  But perhaps I had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.  (1) I believe (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of rational beings, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.  I also believe that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.  | believe that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value. Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination. The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes). The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere: The adoption of a constructivist approach makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism. That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have reasons for our beliefs (rationes cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed). Such reasons will be rationes essendi.  It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure. Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which I shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply: for I shall need to invoke specifie theses within particular departments of philosophy. I hope to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.  B. COMMENTARY ON RICHARDS  Richards devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in my work; to questions about meaning, to questions in and about philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, and finally to questions about value, including ethical questions. I shall first comment on what they have to say about meaning, and then in my concluding section I turn to the remaining topics.  B1. Meaning  In the course of a penetrating treatment of the development of my views on this topic, they list, in connection with what they see as the third stage of this development three problems or objections to which my work might be thought to give rise. I shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order; I shall also add a fourth problem which I know some people have regarded as acute, and I shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in my thinking, which Richards have presented and which may not be generally familiar.  As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, I may remark that the treatment of the topic by Richards seems to offer strong support to my thesis about the unity (latitudinal unity) of philo-sophy: for the problems which emerge about meaning are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and I hope that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.  (1) The first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of propositions as entities: 'In the explication of utterance-type meaning. what does the variable "p" take as values? The values of "p" are theobjects of meaning, intention, and belief-propositions, to call them by their traditional name. But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory of meaning to give an account of what propositions are?.. + Much of the recent history of philosophy of language consists of attacks on or defences of various conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the relation of thought and language to reality... How can Grice offer an explication of utterance-type meaning that simply takes the notion of a proposition more or less for granted?'  A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition of meaning which I would be willing to countenance, the letters 'p', q', etc. operate simply as 'gap signs; if they appear in a definiendum they will reappear in the corresponding definiens. If someone were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to feel F is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is or might be F. it would surely be ridiculous to criticize him on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to feelings, or to modes of feeling. If quantifiers are covertly involved at all, they will only be universal quantifiers which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a substitutional account of quantification. My situation vis-a-vis propositions is in no way different.  Moreover, if this last part of the cited objection is to be understood as suggesting that philosophers have been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of propositions with a view to using them, in this or that way, as a key to the relationships between language. thought, and reality, I rather doubt whether this claim is true, and if it is true, I would regard any attempt to use propositions in such a manner as a mistake to which I have never subscribed. Propositions should not, I think, be viewed as tools, gimmicks, or bits of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality. The furthest I would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition, and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of propositions would undermine the enterprise within which they made an appearance.  It is, however, not apparent to me that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over my head. In my most recently published work onmeaning (Meaning Revisited, 1981), I do in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for between language, thought, and reality, and offer three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences between the members of any pair selected from this trio. I suggest that without correspondences between thought and reality, individual members of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, or function of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another; that, without correspondences between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated; and that without direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for beliefs to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us. So far as I can see, the foregoing justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the reality of propositions; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption  —then the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to me the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.  Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to propositions in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what propositions are, 1 think this obligation could be discharged. It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way. One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item. Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, John is wise', might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of wise persons, or (alternatively) the attribute wisdom, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be John or the singleton of John; and the sentence, 'Martha detests Mary', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is detestation (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of Martha and Mary, in that order. We can define a property of factivity which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate predication relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.  Propositions may now be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context, This idea will in a moment be expanded.  The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification. In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification. A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object; to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf. We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate. So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.  The apparatus which I have just sketched is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification. Itwill not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification; it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant. To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for semantic purposes, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl; and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems not to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its semantic function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value. But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus; it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers. The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects which it invokes as metaphysically disreputable.  Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, I think that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available. The one which I have immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme. The new proposal, like its predeces-sor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a subject-item and a predicate-item, and will, there-fore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification. Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow individual objects, like grasshoppers, girls, and boys, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets or attributes, Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, I think, available, I shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.  According to this version, we associate with the subject-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order. If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name. The treatment of singular terms which are not names will be parallel, but is here omitted. If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the predicate to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper. If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached; thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions. It now remains to specify the predication-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be factive. A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element; so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), then the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.  A dozen years or so ago, I devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and 1 convinced myself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which I shall not here discuss. Before moving on, however, I might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal. First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements. Second, individual names are in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic. Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:as I envisage them, propositions will be regarded as families of propositional complexes. Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty'; indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.  The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine propositional identity remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.  It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched. We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of propositions used to be that propositions are needed to give us something for logic to be about; sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of language.  Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards propositions if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.  If our thought proceeds along these lines, propositions might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for logical laws to hang from, but as things whose nature determines the content of the logical system. It might even be possible (as George Myro has suggested to me) to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of propositions; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display propositions as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as contents, or objects of propositional attitudes. How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear; but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What are propositions?", not by identificatory dissec tion but rather by pointing to the work that propositions of their very nature do.  1 have little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on somefundamental issues in metaphysical methodology. What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respect-ability? What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing? What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output? Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?  Two further objections cited by Richards may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to my treatment of the idea of linguistic procedures'. One of these objections disputes my right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of linguists by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of basic procedures underlying other semantic procedures which are, supposedly, derivative from them. The other objection starts from the observation that my account of linguistic communication  involves the attribution to communicators of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning the procedures possessed and utilized by their conversational partners, notes that these steps and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness, and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit rather than explicit. Richards suggest that answers to these objections can be found in my published and unpublished work.  Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to me with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reason-ing. which Richards illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in meaning, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods-by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think' (p. 13 of this book). Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered. But I think that I would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines. Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of some particular langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of languages, is a matter for linguists except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principles. But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do,and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever. Now one might argue for the existence of such a body of principles on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible linguistic performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of primitive procedures in accordance with the general principles in question.  One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in these general principles, is guaranteed by metaphysical considerations, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  linguistic categories on the one hand and metaphysical, or real categories on the other. I will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.  As regards the second objection, I must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply Richards envisage me as wishing to make, but I will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view. They first very properly refer to my discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in my John Locke Lectures, and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition; the suggested conditions are that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly present material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.  Richards are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided; indeed, I never supposed that 1 had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of my John Locke Lectures is published. Richards then bring to bear some further material from my writings, and sketch, on my behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I) That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification; if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2) We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.  The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum. The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings. (5) We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question. So (6) it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way. We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.  Now whether or not it was something of this sort which Richards had it in mind to attribute to me, the argument as I have sketched it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration; it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of mine, and exerts upon me at least, some degree of seductive appeal. But whether I would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, I am not sure. There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought. Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to the reader to judge how closely what I say when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of Richards. I would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.  (1) There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p; if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.  (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '. We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.  If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess. I am strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination. I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise. On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard. Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence: The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician. Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.  That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a rule-governed language. There are two kinds of magic travel. In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go. The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second. But problems still remain. Deductive systems concocted by professional logicians vary a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors the procedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases. But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances. They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.  That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize linguistic performances; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.  There is one further objection, not mentioned by Richards, which seems to me to be one to which I must respond. It may be stated thus:  One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language. Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending. Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough. For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.  A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later. According to my most recent speculations about meaning, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present). The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose. At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise. Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language. But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.  B2. Metaphysies, Philosophical Psychology, and Value  In this final section of my Reply to Richards, I shall take up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section. I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them. Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines. I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures. So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima. The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology. Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology? Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?  If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it. That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another. One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory. The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  • In these reflections I have derived much benefit from discussions with Alan Code.turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.  A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us. We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us. Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.  I have at this point three comments to make. First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.  Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.  Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.  Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded. But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics. But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality. In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics. Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.  The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach. The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements. That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.  But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties. Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often? These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?  Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction, My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.  Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed. As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place. One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.  Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment. A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'. It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers. But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.  Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics. One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.  I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago. Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question. The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it. But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets. It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness. All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.  The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline. Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.  To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.  Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A. It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept. Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions. It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves); properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them. But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of material things and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction. It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap. The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language. So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.  I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question ofhow metaphysical principles are ultimately to be established. A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argu-ment, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a transcendental argument. Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argu-ment. Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis or category of items as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep; and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach. My view (and my view of Kant) takes a different tack. One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing. Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of rationality, or the notion of a rational being.  Precisely what remedy I should propose for these omissions is far from clear to me; I have to confess that my ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state. But I will do the best I can.  I suspect that there is no single characterization of Transcendental Arguments which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind; indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.  (1) One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic. This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt; and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self. destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that he does not exist), and on the other hand the possession by his act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character (being the expression of a doubt) which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have. It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression ofdoubt the exercise of rationality will be impossible; but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.  Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what I might call 'epistemological nominalism'; that is against someone who proposes to admit ys but not xs on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys but not for anything like xs, which supposedly go beyond ys; we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events. The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy; that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure; if material objects or causes go, sense-data and datable events go too. In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of the third pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of rationality will have to go. A third pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic were allowed to fall, then something else would have to fall which is a pre-condition of the exercise of rationality; it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever. It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic. But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect. Some less ambitious arguments might threaten a local breakdown of rationality, a breakdown in some particular area. It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of rationality in the practical domain. While such arguments may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality; he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason from the area of action. The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of rationality; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though I would prefer to abandon the term 'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument. In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted; alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain or likely to be true. But sometimes we are led to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by considerations other than the likelihood of its truth. Things that are matters of faith of one sort of another, like fidelity of one's wife or the justice of one's country's cause, are typically not accepted on evidential grounds but as demands imposed by loyalty or patriotism; and the arguments produced by those who wish us to have such faith may well not be silent about this fact. Metaphysical argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith. In the metaphysical region, too, the practical aspect may come first; we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of rationality. But in the case of metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability. Proof of the pudding comes from the need to eat it, not vice versa. These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some people, including myself, have felt with respect to transcendental arguments. It has seemed to me, in at least some cases, that the most that such arguments could hope to show is that rationality demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.  This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.  It is now time for me to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical construction is effected, and I shall attempt to sketch three of these. But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines. It is pretty obvious that metaphysical construction needs to be disciplined, but this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all. The list of available routines determines what metaphysical construction is; so it is no accident that itemploys these routines. This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to me, and to others, as a difficult problem in the methodology of metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical construction from scientific construction of such entities as electrons or quarks? What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?  Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical construction, including hypostasis, we reach new entities (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical construction; when we are scientists and hypothesize, we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoreti. cal change.  I shall first introduce two of these construction routines; before I introduce the third I shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to my task in other ways. The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.  Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the mind's propensity to spread itself on objects'; but he seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, our nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason. In my version of the routine, one can distinguish four real or apparent stages, the first of which, perhaps, is not always present. At this first stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word 'or' or "not', or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value. We can think of these initial items as, at this stage, intuitive and unclarified elements in our conceptual vocabu-lary. At the second stage we reach a specific mental state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier, we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying), and  'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving). These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concepts. At the third stage, reference to these specific states is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in sub-clauses. So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'. At the fourth and last stage, the restriction imposedby the demand that the operators at stage three should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed; there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in subordinate clauses.  With regard to this routine I would make five observations:  The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, concepts (in something like a Fregean sense of the word) rather than objects. To generate objects we must look to other routines. The provision, at the fourth stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operators which correspond to the initial concepts is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuations, for statements within which the operators appear. Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible. Because of (2), the difference between the second and third stages is apparent rather than real. The third stage provides only a notational variant of the second stage, at least unless stage four is also reached. It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine must not be merely formal or arbitrary. The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for. Subject to these provisos, application of this routine to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with a metaphysical reconstruction of that concept; or, if the first stage is missing, we are given a metaphysical construction of a new concept. The second construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and categories, and I will present my version of it as briefly as I can. Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing new objects, new subjects of discourse, by a procedure reminiscent of the linguists' operation of nominalization, I might also refer to it as sub-jectification (or, for that matter, objectification). Given a class of primary subjects of discourse, namely substances, there are a number of  *slots' (categories) into which predicates of these primary subjects may fit; one is substance itself (secondary substance), in which case the predication is intra-categorial and essential; and there are others into which the predicates assigned in non-essential or accidental predication may fall; the list of these would resemble Aristotle's list of quality,quantity, and so forth. It might be, however, that the members of my list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, would not be fully co-ordinate: the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows; we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to (quantity) and non-quantitative attribute (quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.  Now though substances are to be the primary subjects of predication, they will not be the only subjects. Derivatives of, or conversions of, items which start life (so to speak) as predicable, in one non-substantial slot or another, of substances, may themselves come to occupy the first slot; they will be qualities of, or quantities of, a particular type or token of substantials: not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities simpliciter. (It is my suspicion that only for substances, as subjects, are all the slots filled by predicable items.) Some of these substantials which are not substances may derive from a plurality of items from different original categories; events, for example, might be complex substantials deriving from a substance, an attribute, and a time.  My position with regard to the second routine runs parallel to my position with regard to the first, in that here too I hold strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a new category of entities must not be arbitrary. It has to be properly motivated; if it is not, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking. What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear; one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up new applications for existing modes of explanation: it may be, for example, that the substantial introduction of abstract entities, like properties, makes possible the application to what Kneale called secondary induc-tion' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principles at work in primary induction. But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question. When I discussed metaphysical argument, it seemed that to achieve reality the acceptance of a category of entities had to be mandatory: whereas the recent discussion has suggested that apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated? Which view would be correct? Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency? Or is there just one sort of admission require-ment, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?Before characterizing my third construction-routine I must say a brief word about essential properties and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular, but for which I want to find metaphysical room. In their logical dress, essential properties would appear either as properties which are constitutive or definitive of a given, usually substantial, kind; or as individuating properties of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself. It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of individual members of a kind, properties such that if an individual were to lose them, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist. (A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the third construction routine might require, we subscribed to the Grice-Myro view of identity.) Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio temporal continuity as a definitive property for substantial kinds, indeed for all substantial kinds.  But there is another more metaphysical dress which essential properties may wear. They may appear as Keynesian generator-properties,  *core' properties of a substantive kind which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional features of members of that kind. On the face of it this is a quite different approach; but on reflection I find myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear. Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are, the logically essential properties and the fundamentally explanatory properties of a substantial kind come together; substances are essentially (in the logical' sense) things such that in circumstances C they manifest feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic laws of the theory.  So perhaps, at this level of theory, substances require theories to give expression to their nature, and theories require substances to govern them.  Finality, particularly detached finality (functions or purposes which do not require sanction from purposers or users), is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with final causes. I am somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of superstitions and priesteraft. That, in my view, it is certainly not; the concepts andvocabulary of finality, operating as if they were detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedures for recognizing and describing what goes on around us. This point is forcibly illustrated by William Golding in The Inheritors. There he describes, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people. In the description functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age couple is vividly shared by the reader. Now finality is sometimes active rather than passive; the finality of a thing then consists in what it is supposed to do rather than in what it is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not dependent on some ulterior end which the thing is envisaged as realizing. Sometimes the finality of a thing is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous to the thing. And sometimes the finality of a thing is not subordinate to the finality of some whole of which the thing is a component, as the finality of an eye or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which it belongs. When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier. I will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous finality, which may attach to sub-stances, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous, and which will attach to the conception of kinds of substance or of other constructed entities. The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre. It is this latter kind of finality which I have been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of construction-routines.  Now it is my position that what I might call finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous finality, may find a place within the essential properties of at least some kinds of substances (for example, persons). Some substances may be essentially 'for doing such and such'. Indeed I suspect we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous finality not merely can fall within a substances essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature. If a substance has a certain métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the motivation to fulfil the métier  should it choose to follow that motivation. And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature. But however that may be, once we have finality features enrolled among the essential properties of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory or system of conduct for that kind of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's essential descriptive properties.  I can now give a brief characterization of my third construction-  routine,  which is called Metaphysical Transubstantiation. Let us suppose that the Genitor has sanctioned the appearance of a biological type called Humans, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called Rationality, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist its possessors in coping speedily and resourcefully with survival problems posed by a wide range of environments, which they would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain themselves in. But, perhaps unwittingly, he will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians; and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves. They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as humans possess, but they redistribute them; properties which they possess essentially as humans become properties which as substances of a new psychological type called persons they possess accidentally; and the property or properties called rationality, which attaches only accidentally to humans, attaches essentially to persons. While each human is standardly coincident with a particular person (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that person are no longer identical, when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist. But though logic is insufficient, it may be that other theories will remedy the deficiency. Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.  My final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which I have been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value;  I shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with unsolvedproblems and unformulated supporting arguments. What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.  (1) The details of the logic of value-concepts and of their possible relativizations are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog; so I shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, I regard as two distinct dichotomies. First, there is a dichotomy between value-concepts which are relativized to some focus of relativization and those which are not so relativized, which are absolute. If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type. With regard to this dichotomy I am inclined to accept the following principles. First, the presence in me of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a  "bite" on me, that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to me does, or should, carry weight for me; only if I care for my aunt can I be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden. Second, the fact that a relativized value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on my part for the focus of relativization, engages me does not imply that the original relativization has been cancelled, or rendered absolute. If my concern for your health stimulates in me a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medica-tion, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still relativized to your health; without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a transmitting relation which links thecurrent bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'. In the case of the transmission of relativized value-concepts, the transmitting relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the relation which is embodied in the relativization, The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to promise-keeping or to my keeping a promise, and to attach indirectly or by transmission to my digging your garden for you, should that be something which I have promised to do; it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and indirectly or by transmission to the payment of doctor's bills, an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativizing relation are one and the same.  (2) The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.  It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value then the notion of finality would be in a certain sense dispensable; and further, that if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of attributions of relativized value, is mechanistic-ally substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics and on the fact that the non-pursuit of certain goals such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanations are replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, explanations of a sort congenial to mechanists.  But if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwick-ian in character, then it is required that it be supported by a kind of finality which extends beyond the 'overlap' with mechanistically substitutable finality; autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so, as will shortly be indicated, he is committed to a denial of absolute value.  (3) That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand. To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction. It is rather to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be true that the notion is acceptable. There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire. It might be that we feel a need to appeal to absolute value in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (forexample) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself.  Or again, it might be that, by Leibnizian standards for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires relatively simple principles, is richer and so better than one which does not.  But granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limits are imposed by metaphysical constructions already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimize the conception of absolute value; what it is proper to believe to be true may depend in part on what one would like to be true. Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of positive freedom, a dignity which as rational beings we enjoy, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of rationality, to fix its rules as well. In any case a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one. I have some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with my earlier ideas about the quasi-practical character of metaphysical argument.  On the assumption that the operation of Metaphysical Transub-stantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of biological creatures has been 'invented' into a class of psychological substances, namely persons, who possess as part of their essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of rationality, and who have only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realize their métier. The degree to which they fulfil that métier will constitute them good persons (good qua' persons); and while the reference to the substantial kind persons undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization. Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of substances, the way is opened for the appearance of transmitting relationships which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to suitably qualified non-substantial aspects if members of a kind, such as actions and characteristies. While it cannot be assumed that persons will be the only original instances of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instances there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Humean Projection. It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Humean Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in Aristotelian style, to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating in conditions of freedom. Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than persons.  (6) In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to persons as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value. Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.  Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not find this thought daunting.  If philosophy generated no new problems it would be dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of new problems never dries  up. H. P. Grice. Grice is greatly honoured, and much moved, by the fact that such a distinguished company of philosophers should have contributed to this volume work of such quality as a compliment to him.  Grice is especially pleased that the authors of this work are not just a haphazard band of professional colleagues.  Every one of them is a personal friend of Grice, though I have to confess that some of them Grice sees, these days, less frequently than Grice used to, and *much* less frequently than Grice _should_ like to.   So this collection provides Grice with a vivid reminder that philosophy is, at its *best*, a friendly subject.    Grice wishes that he could respond individually to each contribution; but he does not regard that as feasible, and any selective procedure would be invidious.  Fortunately an alternative is open to Grice.     The editors of the volume contribute an editorial which provides a synoptic view of Grice’s work;     in view of the fact that the number of Grice’s publications is greatly exceeded by the number of his *unpublications* — read: teaching material qua tutorial fellow —  and that even my publications include some items which are not easily accessible — who reads Butler? — the editors’s undertaking fulfills a crying need.     But it does more than that;     it presents a most perceptive and *sympathetic* picture or portrayal of the spirit which lies behind the parts of Grice’s work which it discusses;     and it is Grice’s feeling that few have been as fortunate in their contemporary commentators as I have been in mine. Think Heidegger!    So Grice goes on to make his own contribution a response to theirs, though before replying directly to them Grice allows himself to indulge in a modicum of philosophical autobiography, which in its own turn leads into a display of philosophical prejudices and predilections.     For convenience Grice fuses the editors into a multiple personality,  whose multiplicity is marked by the  use of plural pronouns and verb-forms.    As Grice looks back upon his former self, it seems to Grice that when he does begin his ‘serious’ (if that’s the word) study of philosophy, the temperament with which he approaches this enterprise is one of what he might call dissenting rationalism.    The rationalism is probably just the interest in looking for this or that reason;    Grice’s tendency towards dissent may. however, have been derived from, or have been intensified by, Grice’s father.     Grice’s father was a gentle person.    Grice’s father, being English, exercised little *personal* influence over Grice     But Grice’s father exercised quite a good deal of *cultural* or intellectual  influence.    Grice’s father was an obdurate — ‘tenacious to the point of perversity’ — liberal non-conformist.    Grice witnesses almost daily, if without involvement — children should be seen — the spectacle of his father’s religious nonconformism coming under attack from the women in the household: Grice’s mother, who is heading for High Anglicanism and (especially) a resident aunt who is a Catholic convert.   But whatever their origins in Grice’s case, I do not regard either of the elements in his dissenting rationalism as at all remarkable in people at his stage of intellectual development.     And recall, he wasn’t involved!    Grice mention the rationalism and the dissent more because of their continued presence than because of their initial appearance.    It seems to me that the rationalism and the dissent have persisted, and indeed have significantly expanded!    And this Grice is inclined to regard as a more curious phenomenon.    Grice counts hinself — as Oxford goes — wonderfully fortunate, as a Scholar at Corpus, to have been adjudicated as tutor W. F. R. Hardie, the author of a recognised masterpiece on PLATO, and whose study on ARISTOTLE’s Nicomachean Ethics, in an incarnation as a set of notes to this or that lecture, sees Grice through this or that term of himself lecturing — with Austin and Hare — on the topic.    It seems to Grice that he learnt from his tutor just about every little thing which one can be taught by someone else, as distinct from the things which one has to teach oneself — as Mill did!    More specifically, Gricd’s rationalism was developed under his tutor’s guidance into a tenacity to the point of perversity and the belief that this or that philosophical question is to be answered with an appeal to reason — Grice’s own — that is to say by argument.    Grice also learns from his tutor *how* to argue alla Hardie, and in learning how to argue alla Hardie — and not the OTHER tutor who complained about Grice’s tenacity to the point of perversity — Grice comes to learn that the ability to argue is a skill involving many aspects, and is much more than    As Grice re-reads what he finds myself to have written, Grice also find himself ready to expand this description to read     1  irreverent,    2  conservative - not liberal, like Herbert Grice —     3 dissenting     4 rationalism'.    an ability to see logical connections (though this ability is by no means to be despised).     Grice comes also to see that, although philosophical progress is very difficult to achieve, and is often achieved only after agonising labours — recall Socrates’s midwifery! — it is worth achieving;     and that the difficulties involved in achieving philosophical progress offer no kind of an excuse for a lowering of standards, or for substituting for the goals of philosophical truth some more easily achievable or accessible goal, like — to echo Searle, an American then studying at Oxford — rabble-rousing, or hamburgers!     The methods of Grice’s tutor for those four years are too austere for some,     in particular his tutor’s very long silences in tutorials are found distressing by some other pupils (though as the four years go by, Grice feelsthe tempo speeded up quite a bit    There is a story, which Grice is sure that he believes, that at one point in one tutorial a very long silence developed when it was the tutor’s turn to speak, which is at long last broken by the tutor asking his pupil:    And what did you mean by "of"*?     There is another story, which Grice thinks he does believe, according to which Isaiah Berlin, an expatriate Hebrew from Russia, who was a pupil of Grice’s tutor three years before Grice, decides that the next time a silence develops during a tutorial, Berlin was NOT going to be the one to break it.    Games Russians play.     In the next tutorial, after Berlin did finish reading his essay, there follows a silence which lasted exactly twenty-four minutes, and 32 seconds — at which point Berlin could stand it no longer, and said something.    “I need to use the rest-room.”    Grice’s tutor’s tutorial rigours never quite bothered Grice.    If philosophising is a difficult operation (as it plainly is)  sometimes time, even quite a lot of time, will be needed in order to make a move (as  to change the idiom, chess-players are only too well aware).     The idea that a philosopher such as Socrates, or Thales, or Kant — well, Grice is less sure about Kant, ‘being a Hun’ — should either have already solved or answered satisfactorily every question — which is impossible - or should be equipped to solve or answer duccessfukly every problem or question immediately, is no less ridiculous than would be the idea that Karpoy ought to be able successfully to defend his title if he, though not his opponent, were bound by the rules of lightning chess.     Grice enjoys the slow pace of discussion with his tutor;     He lenjoyed the breath-laden "Ooohhh!" which Grice’s tutor would sometimes emit when he catches the pupil in, or even perversely pushes his pupil, into, a patently untenable position (though Grice preferred it when this ejaculation was directed at someone other than myself):     and Grice liked his tutor’s resourcefulness in the defence of difficult positions, a characteristic illustrated by the foilowing incident which Grice’s tutor once told Grice about himself.     Grice’s tumor had, not long since, parked his car and gone to a cinema.   Unfortunately he had parked his car on top of one of the strips on the street by means of which traffic-lights are controlled by the passing traffic; as a result, the lights were jammed and it required four policemen to lift his car off the strip.    The Oxford police decided to prosecute.     Grice indicated to his tutor that this didn'tsurprise Gricd at all and asked him how he fared. 'Oh', he said, 'I got off.’    Grice asks his tutor how on earth he managed that.     ‘Quite simply," he answered, I just invoked Mill's Method of Difference,     They charged me with causing an obstruction at 4,00 p.m.; and the tutor answers, sophistically, that since his car had been parked at 2.00 p.m., it couldn't have been his car which caused the obstruction.    Gricd’s tutor never disclosed his own views to Grice, no doubt wishing a Grice  to think his own thoughts (however flawed) rather than his tutor’s! It happens! Witness some of Grice’s OWN pupils — from Unger to Nozick and back! Never mind Strawson!    When Grice did succeed, usually with considerable diffi-culty, in eliciting from him an expression of manifestation of his own position, what Grice gets is liable to be, though carefully worked out and ingeniously argued, distinctly CONSERVATIVE in tone - in a Scots sort of fashion —; not surprisingly, what Grice gets would not contain much in the way of a battle-cry or a piece of campaign-material.     An Aspiring knight-errant requires more than a sword, a shield, and a horse of superior quality impregnated with a suitable admixture of magic: he also requires  a supply, or at least a procedure which can be relied on to maximize the likelihood of access to a supply, of this or that Damsel in Distress.    And then, talking of Hebrews, Oxford was rudely aroused from its semi-peaceful semi-slumbers by the barrage of Viennese bombshells hurled at it by a Cockney surnamed Ayer, — a village in Switzerland, he claimed — at that time philosophy’s enfant terrible at Oxford.    Not a few philosophers, including Grice, disllay rather an initial interest by this Viennese method, this or that Viennese theses, and this of that Viennese problem which were on display.    Some — and English too — were, at least momentarily, ‘inspired’ by what they saw and heard from this bit of an outsider!    For Grice’s part, Grice’s reservations are never laid to rest.    The cruditiy and the dogmatism seem too pervasive.     And then everything is brought to a halt by the war.    After the war, the picture was quite different, as a result of     — the dramatic rise in the influence of J. L. Austin,     — the rapid growth of Oxford as a centre of philosophy, due largely to the efforts of Ryle, who atrociously had ‘tutored’ the Viennese refugee —  and     — the extraordinarily high quality of the many philosophers who appeared on the Oxford scene.     Grice’s own life in this period involved at least two especially important aspects of facets.     The first is Grice’s prolonged collaboration with his own pupil, for one term, and for the PPE logic paper — Mabbott shared the tutelage — Strawson.    Paul’s and Peter’s robbing one to pay the other — efforts are partly directed towards the giving of this or that joint seminars.    Grice and Strawson stage a number of these seminars on topics related to the notions of meaning, of categories, and of logical form.     But our association is much more than an alliance for the purposes of teaching. — Strawson had become a university lecturer, too.    Grice and Strawson consume vast quantities of time in systematic and unsystematic philosophical exploration.    From these discussions — a joint seminar attended by the culprit — springs their  joint “In Defense of a Dogma,” — a counterattack on Manx Quine’s moxie to claim Empiricism bore a dogma or two — and     also a long uncompletedwork on predication and pretty much Aristotelian or Kantotelian categories, one or two reflections of which are visible in Strawson's essay in descriptive metaphysics  pompously titled Individuals.    — that memorable Third programme ending with revisionary metaphysics only!     Grice’s and Strawson’s method of composition is laborious in the extreme: and no time of the day excluded!    work is constructed together, sentence by sentence, nothing being written down — usually by Strawson — until agreement had been reached — or if Quine was attending the Monday seminar, in which case Strawson finished it off on the previous Sunday — which often takes quite a time.     The rigours of this procedure eventually leads to its demise. Plus, Strawson had Galen!    During this period of collaboration Gricd and Strawson of course developed a considerable corpus of common opinions;     but to Gricd’s mind a more important aspect of it was the extraordinary closeness of the intellectual rapport which we developed; — except on the topic of truth value gaps and the conventional implicature of “so”    other philosophers would sometimes complain that Grice’s and Strawson’s mutual exchanges were liable to become so abbreviated in expression as to be unintelligible to a third party. — unless it was Strawson’s dog!     The potentialities of such joint endeavours continue to lure Grice     the collaboration with Strawson is followed by other collaborations of varying degrees of intensity, with (for example)     Austin on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione,     Austin and Hard on Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea    with Warnock and Quinton on the philosophy perception, and with Pears and with Thomson on philosophy of action    Such is the importance which Grice adjudicates to this mode of philosophical activity: the Oxford joint seminar, open to every member of the university that cares to attend! Pupils NEED to attend three per week!    The other prominent feature of this period in Grice’s philosophical life was participation in the discussions which take place on Saturday mornings in term-time and which are conducted by a number of Oxford philosophers under the leadership of Austin.    This  group  continues in fact to meet up to, and indeed for some years after, Austin's death     It was christened by Grice and Hampshire The New Play Group', — the old Play Group was pre-war, and Hampshire, but not Grice (having born on the wrong side of the tracks) attended it — and was often so referred to, though so far as Grice sudoects, never by, or in the presence of the kindergarten master himself!    Grice has little doubt that the new play group is often thought of outside of without   Oxford, and occasionally, perhaps even inside or within Oxford, as constituting the core, or the hot-bed, of what became known as  *’Ordinary’ Language Philosophy, or even *The Oxford School of ‘Ordinary’-Language Philosophy' — a joke usually well taken, even at Cambridge!    As such a core or hot-bed, the new play group no doubt absorbs its fair share of the hatred and derision lavished upon this 'School' by so many people, like for example a Hebrew from France, Gellner — Austin’s pupil — and like Gustav Bergmann who (it was said), when asked whether he was going to hear a paper delivered on a visit by an eminent British philosopher, replied with characteristic charm that he did not propose to waste his time on any English Futilitarian.    Yet, as Grice looks back on our activities, I find it difficult to discern any feature of them which merited this kind of opprobrium.     To begin with,there was more than one group or ill-defined association of Oxford philosophers who are concerned, in one way or another, with  'ordinary' linguistic usage;     besides those who, initially at least — until Grice replaced Austin upon Austin’s death — gravitated towards Austin,     there were those who drew special illumination from Ryle,     and others (better disciplined perhaps) who looked to Wittgenstein;     and the philosophical gait of people belonging to one of these groups would, characteristically, be markedly different from that of people belonging to another.     But even within the new Play Group, great diversity is visible, as one would expect of an association containing philosophers with the ability and independence of mind of     Austin,   Strawson,   Hampshire,   Paul,   Pears,   Warnock, and   Hare     (to name a few).    — very few!     There was no 'School';     there were no dogmas which united us, in the way, for example, that an unflinching (or almost unflinching) opposition to abstract entities unified and inspired what I might call the American School of Latter-day Nominalists, or that     an unrelenting (or almost unrelenting) determination to allow significance only to what is verifiable united the School of Logical Positivism.     It has, Grice thinks, sometimes been supposed that one dogma which united us was that of the need to restrict philosophical attention to 'ordinary" language, in a sense which would disqualify the introduction into, or employment in, philosophical discourse of technical terminology or jargon, a restriction which would seem to put a stranglehold on any philosophical theory-construction.     It is true that many, even all, of us would have objected (and rightly objected) to the introduction of technical apparatus before the ground had been properly laid.    The sorry story of deontic logic shows what may happen when technologists rush in where a well-conducted elephant would fear to tread.     We would also (as some of us did from time to time) have objected to the covert introduction of jargon, the use of seemingly innocent expressions whose bite comes from a concealed technical overlay (as perhaps has occurred with words like 'sensation' or 'volition).     But one glance at 'How to talk: Some Simple Ways', or at "How to Do Things with Words' should be enough to dispel the idea that there was a general renunciation of the use of technical terminology, even if certain individuals at some moments may have strayed in that direction.    Another dogma to which some may have supposed us to be committed is that of the sanctity, or sacro-sanctity, of whatever metaphysical judgement or world-picture may be identified as underlying ordinary discourse.     Such a dogma would, I imagine, be some kind of counterpart of Moore's 'Defence of Common Sense.’    It is true thatAustin had a high respect for Moore.     ‘Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man', Grice once heard Austin say:     and it is also true that Austin, and perhaps some other members of the group, as Priscianus did, thought that some sort of metaphysic *is* embedded in ‘ordinary’ language.     But to regard such a 'natural metaphysic' as present and as being worthy of examination stops a long way short of supposing such a metaphysic to be guaranteed as true or acceptable.     Any such further step would need justification by argument.    In fact, the only position which to Grice’s mind would have commanded universal assent was that a careful examination of the detailed features of ordinary discourse is required as a foundation for philosophical thinking;     and even here the enthusiasm of the assent would have varied from philosopher to philosopher, as would the precise view taken (if any was taken) about the relationship between linguistic phenomena and philosophical theses.     It is indeed worth remarking that the exhaustive examination of linguistic phenomena was not, as a matter of fact, originally brought in as part of a direct approach to philosophy.    Austin's expressed view (the formulation of which no doubt involved some irony) was that we 'philosophical hacks' spent the week making. for the benefit of our pupils, direct attacks on philosophical issues. and that we needed to be refreshed, at the week-end, by some suitably chosen 'para-philosophy' in which certain *non*-philosophical conceptions were to be examined with the full rigour of the Austinian Code, with a view to an ultimate analogical pay-off (liable never to be reached) in philosophical currency.     It was in this spirit that in early days they investigate rules of games (with an eye towards questions about meaning or signification.     Only later did we turn our microscopic eyes more directly upon philosophical questions.    It is possible that some of the animosity directed against so-called  'ordinary’language philosophy' may have come from people who saw this 'movement' as a sinister attempt on the part of a decaying intellectual establishment, an establishment whose home lay within the ancient walls of Oxford and Cambridge (walls of stone, not of red brick) and whose upbringing is founded on a classical education, to preserve control of philosophy by gearing philosophical practice to the deployment of a proficiency specially accessible to the establishment, namely a highly developed sensitivity to the richness of linguistic usage.     It is, I think, certain that among the enemies of the new philosophical style are to be found defenders of a traditional view of philosophy as a discipline concerned with the nature of reality, not with the character of language and its operations, not indeed with any mode of representation of reality.     Such persons do, to Grice’s mind, raise an objection which needs a fully developed reply.     Either the conclusions which 'ordinary language philosophers' draw from linguistic data are also linguistic in character, in which case the contents of philosophy are trivialized, or the philosopher's conclusions are not linguistic in character, in which case the nature of the step from linguistic premisses to non-linguistic conclusions is mysterious.     The traditionalists, however, seem to have no stronger reason for objecting to 'ordinary language philosophy than to forms of linguistic philosophy having no special connection with ordinary language, such as that espoused by logical positivists.    But, to Grice’s mind, much the most significant opposition came from those who felt that 'ordinary language philosophy* was an affront to science and to intellectual progress, and who regarded its exponents as wantonly dedicating themselves to what Russell, in talking about common sense or some allied idea, once called 'stone-age metaphysics'.    That would be the best that could be dredged up from a 'philosophical' study of ordinary language.     Among such assailants were to be found those who, in effect, were ready to go along with the old description of philosophy as the queen of the sciences', but only under a reinterpretation of this phrase. '    Queen' must be understood to mean not  *sovereign queen, like Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II, but "queen consort', like Queen Alexandra or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother:     and the sovereign of which philosophy is the queen-consort might turn out to be either science in general or just physical science.    The primary service which would be expected of philosophy as a consort would be to provide the scientist with a pure or purified language for him to use on formal occasions (should there be such occasions).     Some, I suspect, would have been ready to throw in, for good measure, the charge that the enterprise of 'ordinary language philosophy is in any case doomed, since it presupposes the admissibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction which in fact cannot be sustained.    The issues raised in this attack are both important and obscure, and deserve a much fuller treatment than I can here provide, but I will do my best in a short space.     Grice has three comments.    The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics' may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.    Certainly 'stone-age' physics, if by that we mean a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which might(conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in ordinary language, would not be a proper object for first-order devotion.    But this fact would not prevent something derivable or extractable from stone-age physics, perhaps some very general characterization of the nature of reality, from being a proper target for serious research;     for this extractable characterization might be the same as that which is extractable from, or that which underlies, Eddington’s physics.     Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ‘ordinary’ language (should there be such a thing) might not have to be derived from any *belief* about how the world goes — which such ‘ordinary’ language reflects;     The metaphysic might, for example, be derived somehow from the *categorial* structure of the language. Aristotle: kata agora.    Furthermore, the discovery and presentation of such a metaphysic might turn out to be a properly scientific enterprise, though not, of course, an enterprise in physical science.    A  rationally organized and systematized study of reality might perhaps be such an enterprise;     so might some highly general theory in formal ‘semantics’ — Aristotle, semein, signify.     though it might of course be a serious question whether these two candidates are identical:    To repel such counter-attacks, an opponent of 'ordinary’ language philosophy such as that practised by Ryle, Austin, or Grice — to narrow down to Oxonian dialectic vintage — might have to press into service the argument which Grice represented him as throwing in for good measure as an adjunct.     The anti-Oxonian might, that is, be forced to rebut the possibility of there being a scientifically respectable, highly general ‘semantic’ theory based squarely on data provided by ‘ordinary’ discourse — ta legomena — by arguing. or asserting. that a theory of the sort suggested would have to presuppose the admissibility of Leibniz’s unforgettable invention: the analytic/synthetic distinction.    With respect to the suggested allocation to philosophy of a supporting role vis-d-vis science — or some particular favoured science — Grice should first wish to make sure that the metaphysical position of the assigner is such as to leave room for this kind of assessment of roles or functions.    Grice should start with a lively expectation that this would NOT be the case.     But even if this negative expectation is disappointed. Grice should next enquire by what standards of purity a language is to be adjudged suitable for use by a scientist.     If those standards of purity are supposed to be independent of the needs of science, and so NOT dictated by Eddington and the scientists, there seems to be as yet no obstacle to the possibility that the function of philosophy —or the métier of such a philosopher as Grice — might be to discover or devise a language of that sort, which might even turn out to be some kind of 'ordinary' language — only it would include wavicles, whattings, izzings and hazzings!    And even if the requisite kind of purity of the language were to consist in what Grice might term such logico-methodological virtues — such as consistency and systematicity —  which are also those looked for in scientific theories, what prevents us, in advance, from attributing these virtues to ‘ordinary’ language?     How clever language is — and Grice didn’t mean Eddington’s!    In which case, an ‘ordinary’-language philosopher such as Grice would be back in business.     So far as Grice can see, once again the enemy of ‘ordinary’-language philosophy might be forced to fall back on the allegations that such an attempt to vindicate ‘ordinary’ language would have to presuppose the viability of (originally) Leibniz’s  analytic/synthetic distinction.    With regard to Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction itself, Grice first remarks that it is his view that neither party, in the actual historical debate, has exactly covered itself with glory — a knock-down argument, that is!    For example, Quine's original argument against Leibniz that every attempt, since Leibniz — Quine has no German — to define 'analytic' ends up in a hopelessly circular tour of a group of intensional concepts disposes, at best, of only one such definitional attempt, and leaves out of consideration the (to Grice’s mind) promising possibility that this type of definition may not be the right procedure to follow an idea which I shall  expand in a moment.     And, on the reverse side of the coin, the attempt by Grice and Strawson to defend Leibniz’s dogma of the distinction by a (one hopes) sophisticated form of Paradigm Case argument fails to meet, or even to lay eyes on, the characteristic rebuttal of such types of argument, namely that the fact that a certain concept or distinction is frequently deployed by an individual such as Leibniz - or a population of Leibnizisns — speakers and thinkers offers no guarantee that the concept or distinction in question survives a rigorous theoretical scrutiny.     To Grice’s mind, the mistake made by both parties — the anti-Leibnizians and the Leibnizisns — has been to try to support, or to discredit, the analytic/synthetic distinction as something which is detectably present in the use of a natural language such as Leibniz’s native Teutonick — only he wrote in Gallic!    it would have been better to take the hint offered by the appearance of the "family circle' of this or that concept — signify —  pointed to by Quine, and to regard Leibniz’s analytic/synthetic distinction not as a (supposedly) detectable element in a natural language such as Gallic, but rather as a theoretical device which it might, or again might not, be feasible and desirable to incorporate into some systematic treatment of a natural language, such as Gallic!    The viability of Leibniz’s analytic-synthetic distinction, then, would be a theoretical question which,so far as Grice can see, remains to be decided;   The decision is not likely to be easy, since it is by no means apparent what kind of theoretical structure would prove to be the home of such a distinction, should it find a home.    Two further comments seem to Grice relevant and important.     A common though perhaps not universally adopted practice among  "ordinary  language philosophers' is to treat as acceptable the forms of ‘ordinary’ discourse and to seek to lay bare the system, or metaphysic, which underlies it.     A common alternative proposed by this or that enemy of Oxonian dialectic or  *ordinary language philosophy has been that of a rational reconstruction of ‘ordinary’ language;     in the words of that wise Irishman, Bishop Berkeley, it is proposed that we should speak with the vulgar but think with the learned.    But why should the Bishop’s vulgarities be retained?     Why should we not be told merely not to think but also to speak with ‘the learned’?    Is that an Irishism?    After all, if Grice’s house is pronounced uninhabitable to the extent that he needs another one, it is not essential that Grice construct the new house within the outer shell of his old house, though this procedure might sometimes be cheaper — or aesthetically preferable?    This happened to Peano — who moved from a nice villa in the Piedmont to a literal shack — or was it the other way round?    An attachment to the form or frame of ordinary discourse even when the substance or matter is discarded suggests, but of course does not demonstrate, an adherence to some unstated principle of respect for ‘ordinary’ discourse even on the part of its avowed enemies such as the Irish bishop — it may be claimed that he claimed that he was, like Warnock, an ANGLO-Irish!    Second, whether or not a viable Leibnizian analytic/synthetic distinction exists, Grice is not happy with the claim that ‘ordinary’ language philosophy presupposes the existence of such a distinction, or of the present king of France!     It might be that a systematic theoretical treatment of the facts of ‘ordinary usage would incorporate, as part of its theoretical apparatus, material which could be used to exhibit such a distinction as intelligible and acceptable:     but in that case, on the assumption that the theoretical treatment satisfied the standards which a theory is supposed to satisfy, it would appear that the analytic/synthetic distinction would NOT be pre-supposed, even by Collingwood’s substandards — Leibniz’s distinction, and therefore Leibniz himself, would be VINDICATED!    For Leibniz’s distinction to be *entailed* — to use another Irishism, Moore’s! — by the execution of a programme is plainly not the same as it to be Collingwoodisnly presupposed by that programme.     For, if it IS to be presupposed by the programme of "ordinary language philosophy, it would, Grice imagines, have to be the case that the supposition that anything at all would count as a successful execution of the programme would require a prior assumption of the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction;     — and how this allegation could be made out Grice cannot for the life of him discover.    Cf Owen on existence of pigs presupposing that pigs exist!    Grice turns now to the more agreeable task of trying to indicate the features of the philosophical operations of the Play Group which — especially subsequently — are to Grice, but not Nowell-Smith — to be particularly appealing.     First, the entire idea that we should pay detailed attention to the way we talk seems to me to have a certain quality which is characteristic of philosophical revolutions (at least minor ones).     Grice was once dining with Strawson at Strawson’s college when one of the guests present, an Air Marshal, revealed himself as having, when he was a scholar, sat at the tutorial feet of Cook Wilson, whom he revered.    Grice asks him what he regarded as specially significant about Cook Wilson as a philosopher; and after a good deal of fumbling. he answered that it was Cook Wilson's delivery of the message that 'what we know, we know'.     This provoked in me some genteel silent mirth;    Grice realizes that mirth was quite inappropriate.     Indeed the message is  a platitude, but so are many of the best philosophical messages:     for they exhort us to take seriously something to which, previously, we have given at best lip service.     Austin's message is another platitude;     it in effect says that, if in accordance with prevailing fashion, one wants to say that every philosophical proposition is ultimately about ‘usage’ — never signification -/ one had better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what that usage — never signification — is and of what lies behind it.     A principle of conversation as rational co-operation!    Sophisticated but remorseless literalism is typical of Austin.    When seeking a way of organizing a discussion group to entertain a visiting American (of course — what else are they good at?) logician, he said, *They say that logic is a game; well then, let's see if we can play it':     with the result that we spent a fascinating term, meeting each Saturday morning to play that Saturday’s improved version of a game called by Austin 'Symbolo', a sequence (Grice suspects) of less thrilling ancestors of the game later profitably marketed under the name of *Wff n'Proof'    Another appealing element is the fact that Austin had, and at times communicated, a prevalent vision of ordinary language as a wonderfully intricate instrument.     By this Grice does not mean merely that Austin saw, or hoped one day to be able to see, our language conforming to a Leibnizian ideal of exhibiting an immense variety of linguistic phenomena which are capable of being elegantly and economically organized under a relatively small body of principles or rules.     Austin may have had such a picture of language, and may indeed have hoped that some extension or analogue of Chomsky's work on syntax, which he greatly admired, might fill in the detail for us, thus providing new access to the Austinian science of grammar, which seemed to reside in an intellectualI   Holy of Holies, to be approached only after an intensive discipline of preliminary linguistic studies.     What Grice imputes to Austin is a belief in our everyday language as an instrument, as manifesting the further Leibnizian feature of purpose or métier as Leibniz typically put it in Gallic; a belief in it as something whose intricacies and distinctions are not idle, but rather marvellously and subtly fitted to serve the multiplicity of our needs and desires in communica-tion.     It is not surprising, therefore, that our discussions not infrequently involved enquiries into the purpose, or point, as Winch preferred  of this or that feature of ordinary discourse.    When put to work, this purposeful  finalist, conception of ‘ordinary’ language seems to offer fresh and manageable approaches to philosophical ideas and problems or aporiae, the appeal of which approaches, in Grice’s eyes at least, is in no way diminished by the discernible affinity between them on the one hand and, on the other, the professions and practice of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in relation to Eleatic to rà Xeyouera.    When properly regulated and directed, this botany of uses' seems to Grice to provide a valuable initiation to the philosophical treatment of a concept, particularly if what is under examination (and it is arguable that this should always be the case) is a family of different but related concepts.     Indeed, Grice will go further, and proclaim it as his belief that a botany of usage is indis-pensable, at a certain stage, in a philosophical enquiry, and that it is lamentable that at Oxford — never mind Athens — this lesson has been forgotten, or has never been learned.     That is not to say, of course, the very obvious idea that Grice ever subscribed to the full Austin-ian prescription for a botany of usage, namely (as one might put it) to go through the Little Oxford dictionary and to believe everything it tells you. It has an entry for ‘pirot’!    Indeed, Austin once remarked to him in a discussion (with I fear, provocative intent) that I personally didn't give a hoot what the little Oxford dictionary said, and drew the rebuke from Austin: “And that is, Grice, where you keep making your gross mistake!’    Of course, not all these explorations are successful;     The play group once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word 'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning, the substitution of the word 'highly" (as in  "very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very depressed" or  "very wicked'): and we reached no conclusion.     This episode was ridiculed by some as an ultimate embodiment of fruitless frivolity; but that response was as out of place as a similar response to the medieval question, 'How many angels can sit on the point of a pin?'     For much as this medieval question was raised in order to display, in a vivid way, a difficulty in the conception of an immaterial substance, so our discussion was directed, in response to a worry from Grice, no less, towards an examina-tion, in the first instance, of a conceptual question which was generallyagreed among us to be a strong candidate for being a question which had no philosophical ‘importance,’with a view to using the results of this examination in finding a distinction between philosophically important and philosophically unimportant enquiries.     Unfortunately the desired results were not forthcoming.    Little did Grice cared that Austin found importance UNimportant!    Austin himself, with his mastery in seeking out, and his sensitivity in responding to, the finer points of usage, provides a splendid and instructive example to those who were concerned to include a botany of usage in his armoury.     Grice recounts three authentic anecdotes in support of this claim.     Warnock was being dined at Austin's college with a view to election to a Fellowship, and was much disconcerted — he is a practical Irishman —  even though he was already acquainted with Austin, when Austin's *first* remark to him was not ‘Pleased to see you’ (Boring) but:    “What would you say the difference lies between my saying to you that someone is not playing golf correctly and that he is not playing golf properly?'   On a certain occasion the play group is discussing the notion of a principle, and (in this connection) the conditions for appropriate use of the phrase ‘on principle'.     Nowell- Smith recalls that a pupil of Gardiner, who was Greck, wanting permission for an overnight visit to London, had come to Gardiner and offered him some money, saying *I hope that you will not be offended by this somewhat Balkan approach'.     At this point, Nowell Smith suggested, Gardiner might well have replied,     ‘1 do not take bribes on principle.'     Austin responded by saying     '1 would never have gone into the trouble!      "No, thanks" seems more than enough — and surely less offensive.    On another occasion, Nowell Smith (again cast in the role of straight man) offers as an example of non-understandable propositio  an extract from a sonnet of Donne:    From the round earth's imagined corners, Angels, your trumpets blow.    Austin said, '    nay. PERFECTLY intelligible, our Donne    Donne means, but it wouldn’t scan,     angels, blow your trumpets from what persons less cautious than I would call the four corners of the earth"."    These affectionate remembrances no doubt prompt the question why Grice should have turned away from this style of philosophy.     Well, as Gricd hasalready indicated, in a certain sense Gricd never have turned away, in that he continues to believe that a more or less detailed study of the way we talk, in this or that region of discourse, is an indispensable foundation for much of the most fundamental kind of philosophizing;     for *just how* much seems to me to be a serious question in need of an answer.     That linguistic information should not be just a quantity of collector's items, but should on occasion at least, provide linguistic Nature's answers to questions which we put to her, and that such questioning is impossible without hypotheses set in an at least embryonic THEORY of conversation as rational cooperation, is a proposition which would, Grice suspects, have met general, though perhaps not universal, assent;     the trouble begins when one asked, if one actually ever did ask, what sort of a theory of conversation as rational cooperation this underlying theory of conversation as rational cooperation should be.     The urgency of the need for such an enquiry is underlined by one or two problems which Grice has already mentioned;     by, for example, the problem of distinguishing conceptual investigations of ordinary discourse which are philosophical in character from those which are not.     It seems plausible to suppose that an answer to this problem would be couched in terms of a special generality which attaches to philosophical but not to non-philosophical questions;     but whether this generality would be simply a matter of degree, or whether it would have to be specified by reference to some further item or items, such as (for example) the idea of a category — kata agora — , remains to be determined.     At this point we make contact with a further issue already alluded to by Grice;    if it is necessary to invoke the notion of a category — kata agora — . are we to suppose these to be this or that category of conversation or expression — a conversational category — or a metaphysical or ontological category (this or that category of this or that thing — substance and attributes — a question which is plainly close to the previously-mentioned burning issue of whether the theory behind ordinary discourse is to be thought of as a highly general, language-indifferent — not just Oxonian —  ‘semantic’ theory — of signification — or a metaphysical  theory about the ultimate nature of things, if indeed these possibilities are distinct.     Until such issues as these are settled, the prospects for a determination of the more detailed structure of the theory or theories behind ordinary discourse do not seem too bright.     In Grice’s own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the provision of a visible theory of conversation as rational cooperation underlying ordinary discourse comes from my work on the idea of Conversational significance, which emphasises the radical importance of FOCUSING on what a *conversationalist* attempts to communicate in uttering his conversational moves.    Grice’s own efforts allowed him to arrive at a more theoretical treatment of  on conversational phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford the group is concerned.     Grice felt like throwing light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory would be, and attempted to reach the virtues of a strong methodology;     Grice aldo wanted to show vividly the kind of way in which a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right kind of apparatus, be brought under control.     During this time Grice’s philosophizing developed a distinct tendency to appear in analytically formal dress;     Work in this formal analytical style  — Austin dead — was directed to a number of topics, but principally to an attempt to show, in a constructive way, the shntax of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell's words, a pretty good guide to what Russell at Cambridge called “logical form,” — Grice prefers ‘semantic representation’ — or to a suitable representation of logical form via semantic representation.     This undertaking involved the construction, for a language — System G of Deutero-Esperanto — with quantification, of a hand-in-hand syntax-cum-‘semantics’ which makes minimal use of transformations.     This project is not fully finished and has not so far been published, though its material is  presented in lectures  seminars, and colloquia - some of them pretty memorable (for those who were into that kind of thing).    An interest in analytic formalistic philosophizing seems to Grice to have more than one  source.     It may arise from a desire to ensure that the philosophical ideas which one deploys are capable of full and coherent development;     not unnaturally, the pursuit of this end may make use of a favoured canonical system.     Grice has never been greatly attached to canonicals, not even those of first-order predicate calculus, together with set theory    in any case this kind of analytical blue-collared formal enterprise would overtax the meagre technical equipment of Gricd who had proudly earned at Oxford via a Clifton scholarship a privileged CLASSICAL education, rather!    It may, on the other hand, consist in the suggestion of a notational device together with sketchy indications of the law or principle to be looked for in a system or theory incorporating these devices;     the object of the exercise being to seek out a hitherto unrecognized analogiy and to attain a higher level of generality.     This latter kind of interest is the one which engages Grice, and will, he thinks, continue to do so, no matter what shifts occur in my philosophical positions.    It is nevertheless true that in recent years Grice’s disposition to resort to analytical formalism has markedly diminished.     This retreat may well have been accelerated when some Oxoniansremarked to me that Grice was TOO formal; but its main source lay in the fact that Grice began to devote the bulk of his attentions to areas of philosophy other than semantics — to philosophical psychology, seen as an off. shoot of philosophical biology and as concerned with specially advanced apparatus for the handling of life; to metaphysics — ontology and eschatology — and to ethics, in which Grice’s pre-existing interest was much enlivened by an inborn capacity for presenting vivid and realistic examples in such an otherwise dull field!    Such areas of philosophy — especially biological philosophy - seem, at least at present, much less amenable to an analytical formalistic treatment.     Grice has  little doubt that a contribution towards a gradual shift of style was also made by a growing apprehension that philosophy is all too often being squeezed out of operation by technology;     to borrow words from Ramsey, that apparatus which began life as a system of devices to combat woolliness has now become an instrument of scholasticism.     But the development of this theme will best be deferred until the next sub-section.    The opinions which Grice voices are all be general in character:     they relate to such things as what he might call, for want of a better term, style in philosophizing and to general aspects of methodology.     He reserves for the next section anything hd might have to say about his views on the specific philosophical topic of Minimalism, or about special aspects of methodology which come into play within some particular department of philosophy.    Grice first proclaims it as his belief that doing philosophy ought to be fun.     He would indeed be prepared to go further, and to suggest that it is no bad thing if the products of doing philosophy turn out, every now and then, to be funny.     One should of course be serious about philosophy:     but being serious does not require one to be solemn.    Laughter in philosophy is not to be confused with laughter at philo-sophy;   there have been too many people who have made this confusion, and so too many people who have thought of merriment in philosophical discussion as being like laughter in church.     The prime source of this belief is no doubt the wanton disposition which nature gave Grice    but it has been reinforced, at least so far as philosophy is concerned, by the course of every serious and prolonged philosophical association to which I have been a party;     each one — Austin, Strawson, Warnock, Pears, Thompson, Hare, … has manifested its own special quality which at one and the same time has delighted the spirit and stimulated the intellect.     To Grice’s mind, getting together with others to do philosophy should be very much like getting together with others to make music: lively yet sensitive interaction is directed towards a common end, in the case of philosophy a better grasp of some fragment of philosophical truth;     and if, as sometimes happens, harmony is sufficiently great to allow collaboration as authors published or unpublished — with Strawson and Pears  and Warnock— then so much the better.    But as some will be quick to point out, such disgusting sentimentality is by no means universal in Oxford’s philosophical world.     It was said of the Joseph that he was dedicated to the Socratic art of midwifery;     he sought to bring forth error and to strangle it at birth.    Though this comment referred to his proper severity in tutorials, Joseph was in fact, in concert with the much more formidable Prichard, no less successful in dealing with colleagues than he was with his scholars;     philosophical productivity among his contemporaries in Oxford was low,     and one philosopher of considerable ability even managed to complete a lifetime without publishing a single word. He unpublished quite a few, though!    Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the scholars of his college once crucified him bloodlessly with croquet hoops on the college lawn.     The tradition does not die with Joseph;     to take just one example, Grice has never been as happy about Austin's Sense and Sensibilia as with Austen’s eponym, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality —- it’s all about Ayer and Berkeley — and two Penguin books, too — , but *more* because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant.   . So far as Grice knows, no one has ever been the better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such episodes.   There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.    Though it is no doubt plain that Grice is not enthusiastic about odium theologicum, he has to confess when it comes to Witters that Grice is not very much more enthusiastic about amor theologicus.     The sounds of fawning are perhaps softer but hardly sweeter than the sounds of rending:     indeed it sometimes happens that the degree of adulation, which for a time is lavished upon a philosopher such as Witters is in direct proportion to the degree of savagery which he metes out to his victims.     To Grice’s stomach it does not make all that much difference whether the recipient of excessive attachment is a person like Witters or a philosophical creed like Wittersianism.    zealotry and bandwagoning seem to me no more appealing than discipleship.   Rational and *dispassionate* commendation or criticism are of course essential to the prosecution of the discipline, provided that they are exercised in the pursuit of philosophical truth:     but passion directed towards either philosophers like Witters or philosophies like Wittersianism is out of place, no matter whether its object is favoured or disfavoured.     What is in place is respect, when it is deserved.    Grice has little doubt that it is the general beastliness of human nature which is in the main responsible for the fact that philosophy, despite its supposedly exalted nature, has exhibited some tendency to become yet another of the jungles in which human beings seem so much at home, with the result that beneath the cloak of enlightenment is hidden the dagger of diminution by disparagement.     But there are perhaps one or two special factors, the elimination of which, if possible, might lower the level of pollution.     One of these factors is, Gricd suspects   a certain view of the proper procedure for establishing a philosophical thesis.    It is, Grice is inclined to think, believed by many philosophers that, in philosophical thinking, we start with certain material (the nature of which need not here concern us) which poses a certain problem or aporia or raises a certain question.     At first sight, perhaps, more than one distinct philosophical thesis would appear to account for the material and settle the question raised by it;     and the way (generally the only way) in which a particular thesis is established is thought to be by the elimination of its rivals, characteristically by the detection of counter-examples.    Think signification — think rule utilitarianism! Think Gettier!    Philosophical theses are supported by elimination of alternative theses.    It is, however, Grice’s hope that in many cases, including the most important cases, theses can be established by direct evidence in their favour, not just by elimination of their rivals.     Grice refers to this issue again later when he comes to say something about the character of metaphysical argument and its connection with so-called transcendental argument.     The kind of metaphysical argument which Grice has in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify a 'diagogic' as opposed to 'epagogic' or inductive approach to philosophical argumentation.     Now, the more emphasis is placed on justification by elimination of rivals, the greater is the impetus given to refutation, whether of theses or of people;     and perhaps a greater emphasis on 'diagogic' procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an eirenic effect.    A second possible source of atmospheric amelioration might be a shift in what is to be regarded as the prime index of success, or merit, in philosophical enquiry.     An obvious candidate as an answer to this question would be being right, or being right for the right reasons (however difficult the realization of this index might be to determine).     Of course one must try to be right, but even so Grice doubts whether this is the best answer, unless a great deal is packed into the meaning of "for the right reasons.     An eminent topologist whom Grice knew was regarded with something approaching veneration by his colleagues, even though usually when he gave an important lecture either his proofs were incomplete, or if complete they contained at least one mistake.     Though he was often wrong, what he said was exciting, stimulating, and fruitful.    The situation in philosophy seems to me to be similar.     Now if it were generally explicitly recognized that being interesting and fruitful is more important than being right, and may indeed co-exist with being wrong, polemical refutation might lose some of its appeal.     The cause which Grice has just been espousing might be called, perhaps, the unity of conviviality in philosophy.     There are, however, one or two other kinds of unity in which Grice also believes.    These relate to the unity of the subject or discipline:     the first I Grice calls the latitudinal unity of philosophy, and the second, its longitudinal unity.     With regard to the first, it is Grice’s firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments, philosophy is one subject, a single discipline.     By this I do not merely mean that between different areas of philosophy there are cross-references, as when, for example, one encounters in ethics the problem whether such and such principle falls within the epistemological classification of A PRIORI knowledge.    Gricd means (or hopes he means) something a good deal stronger than this, something more like the thesis that it is not possible to reach full understanding of, or high level proficiency in, any one department without a corresponding understanding and proficiency in the  others;     to the extent that when I visit an unfamiliar university and occasionally happens Grice is introduced to, 'Mr Puddle, our man in Political Philosophy (or in 'Nineteenth-century Continental Philosophy' or 'Aesthetics', as the case may be), Grice is immediately confident that either Mr Puddle is being under-described and in consequence maligned, or else Mr Puddle is not really good at his stuff.     Philosophy, like virtue, is entire.     Or, one might even dare to say, there is only one problem in philosophy, namely all of them.     At this point, however, Grice must admit a double embarassment;     He does not know exactly what the thesis is which he wants to maintain, and he does not know how to prove it, though he is fairly sure that his thesis, whatever it is, would only be interesting if it were provable, or at least strongly arguable; indeed the embarassments may not be independent of one another.     So the best Grice can now do will be to list some possibilities with regard to the form which supporting argument might take.    It might be suggested that the sub-disciplines within philosophy are ordered in such a way that the character and special problems of each sub-discipline are generated by the character and subject-matter of a prior sub-discipline; that the nature of the prior sub-discipline guarantees or calls for a successor of a certain sort of dealing with such-and-such a set of questions; and it might be added that the nature of the first or primary sub-discipline is dictated by the general nature of theorizing or of rational enquiry.     On this suggestion each posterior sub-discipline S would call for the existence of some prior sub-discipline which would, when specified, dictate the character of S.     There might be some very general characterization which applies to all sub-disciplines, knowledge of which is required for the successful study of any sub-discipline, but which is itself so abstract that the requisite knowledge of it can be arrived at only by attention to its various embodiments, that is to the full range of sub-disciplines.     Perhaps on occasion every sub-discipline, or some element or aspect of every sub-discipline, falls within the scope of every other sub-discipline.     For example, some part of metaphysics might consist in a metaphysical treatment of ethics or some element in ethics;     some part of epistemology might consist in epistemological consideration of metaphysics or of the practice of metaphysical thinking:     some part of ethics or of value theory might consist in a value-theoretical treatment of epistemology: and so on.     All sub-disciplines would thus be inter-twined.    It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of this rational nature.     But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-tight compartments;     each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.    There is a common methodology which, in different ways, dictates to each sub-discipline.     There is no ready-made manual of methodology, and even if there were, knowing the manual would not be the same as knowing how to use the manual.     This methodology is sufficiently abstract for it to be the case that proficient application of it can be learned only in relation to the totality of sub-disciplines within its domain.     Suggestion (v) may well be close to suggestion (ii).    In speaking of the 'Longitudinal Unity of Philosophy', Grice is referring to the unity of Philosophy through time.     Any Oxford philosophy tutor who is accustomed to setting essay topics for his pupils, for which he prescribes reading which includes both passages from Plato or Aristotle and articles from current philosophical journals, is only too well aware that there are many topics which span the centuries;     and it is only a little less obvious that often substantially similar positions are propounded at vastly differing dates.     Those who are in a position to know assure me that similar correspondences are to some degree detectable across the barriers which separate one philosophical culture from another,     for example between Western European and Indian philosophy.     If we add to this banality the further banality that it is on the whole likely that those who achieve enduring philosophical fame do so as a result of outstanding philosophical merit, we reach the conclusion that, in our attempts to solve our own philosophical problems, we should give proper consideration to whatever contributions may have been provided by the illustrious dead.       And when Grice says proper consideration Grice is not referring to some suitably reverential act of kow-towing which is to be performed as we pass the niche assigned to the departed philosopher in the Philosopher's Hall of Fame;     Grice means rather that we should treat those who are great but dead as if they were great and living, as persons who have something to say to us now;   and, further, that, in order to do this, we should do our best to 'introject' ourselves into their shoes, into their ways of thinking:     indeed to rethink their offerings as if it were ourselves who were the offerers: and then, perhaps, it may turn out that it is ourselves.     Groce might add at this point that it seems to him that one of the prime benefits which may accrue to us from such introspection lies in the region of methodology.     By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists;     indeed. Grice is tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers.     So whether we are occupied in thinking on behalf of some philosopher other than ourselves, or in thinking on our own behalf, we should maintain a constant sensitivity to the nature of the enterprise in which we are engaged and to the character of the procedures which are demanded in order to carry it through.    Of course, if we are looking at the work of some relatively minor philosophical figure, such as for example Wollaston or Bosanquet or Wittgenstein, such 'introjection' may be neither possible nor worth-while;     but with Aristotle and Kant, and again with Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and others, it is both feasible and rewarding.     But such an introjection is not easy, because for one reason or another, idioms of speech and thought change radically from time to time and from philosopher to philosopher;     and in this enterprise of introjection transference from one idiom to another is invariably involved, a fact that should not be bemoaned but should rather be hailed with thanksgiving, since it is primarily this fact which keeps philosophy alive.    This reflection Griceme to one of his favourite fantasies.     Those who wish to decry philosophy often point to the alleged fact that though the great problems of philosophy have been occupying our minds for 2 millennia or more, not one of them has ever been solved.     As soon as someone claims to have solved one, it is immediately unsolved by someone else.     Grice’s fantasy is that the charge against us is utterly wide of the mark;     in fact many philosophical problems have been (more or less) solved many times;     that it appears otherwise is attributable to the great difficulty involved in moving from one idiom to another, which obscures the identities of problems.   The solutions are inscribed in the records of our subject;     but what needs to be done, and what is so difficult, is to read the records aright.     Now this fantasy may lack foundation in fact; but to believe it and to be wrong may well lead to good philosophy, and, seemingly, can do no harm; whereas to reject it and to be wrong in rejecting it might involve one in philosophical disaster.    As he threads his way unsteadily along the tortuous mountain path which is supposed to lead, in the long distance, to the City of Eternal Truth, Grice finds himself beset by a multitude of demons and perilous places, bearing names like     Extensionalism,   Nominalism,   Positiv-ism,   Naturalism,   Mechanism,   Phenomenalism,   Reductionism,   Physical-ism,   Materialism,   Empiricism,   Scepticism, and   Functionalism;     — menaces which are, indeed, almost as numerous as those encountered by a traveller called Christian on another well-publicized journey.     The items named in this catalogue are obviously, in many cases, not to be identified with one another;     and it is perfectly possible to maintain a friendly attitude towards some of them while viewing others with hostility.    There are not few philosophers, for example, who view naturalism with favour while firmly rejecting nominalism;     and it is not easy to see how any one could couple support for phenomenalism with support for physicalism.    After a more tolerant (permissive) middle age. Grice has come to entertain strong opposition to all of them, perhaps partly as a result of the strong connection between a number of them and the philosophical technologies which used to appeal to Grice a good deal more than they do now.    But how would Grice justify the hardening of his heart?    The first question is, perhaps, what gives the list of items a unity, so that Grice can think of himself as entertaining one twelvefold antipathy, rather than twelve discrete antipathies.     To this question Grice’s answer is that all the items are forms of what Grice calls isms — or Minimalism, — cf Griceianism —  a propensity which seeks to keep to a minimum (which may in some cases be zero) the scope allocated to some advertised philosophical commodity, such as abstract entities, knowledge, absolute value, and so forth.     In weighing the case for and the case against a trend of so high a degree of generality as Minimalism, kinds of consideration may legitimately enter which would be out of place were the issue more specific in character, in particular, appeal may be made to aesthetic considerations.    In favour of Minimalism, for example, we might hear an appeal, echoing Quine, to the beauty of "desert landscapes'.     But such an appeal Grice would regard as inappropriate;     we are not being asked by a Minimalist to give our vote to a special, and no doubt very fine, type of landscape;     we are being asked to express our preference for an ordinary sort of landscape at a recognizably lean time;     to rosebushes and cherry-trees in mid-winter, rather than in spring or summer.     To change the image some-what, what bothers Grice about what he is being offered is not that it is bare, but that it has been systematically and relentlessly undressed.    Grice is also adversely influenced by a different kind of unattractive feature which some, or perhaps even all of these bétes noires seem to possess.   Many of them are guilty of restrictive practices which, perhaps, ought to invite the attention of a Philosophical Trade Commission:     they limit in advance the range and resources of philosophical explanation.    They limit its range by limiting the kinds of phenomena whose presence calls for explanation;     some prima facie candidates are watered down, others are washed away;   and they limit its resources by forbidding the use of initially tempting apparatus, such as the concepts expressed by psychological, or more generally intensional, verbs.     Grice’s own instinets operate in a reverse direction from this.     Grice is inclined to look first at how useful such and such explanatory ideas might prove to be if admitted, and to waive or postpone enquiry into their certificates of legitimacy.    Grice is conscious that all he has  so far said against Minimalsim has been very general in character, and also perhaps a little tinged with rhetoric.    This is not surprising in view of the generality of the topic; but all the same Grice should like to try to make some provision for those in search of harder tack.    Grice can hardly, in the present context, attempt to provide fully elaborated arguments against all, or even against any one, of the diverse items which fall under my label 'Minimalism';     the best Grice can do is to try to give a preliminary sketch of what he would regard as the case against just one of the possible forms of minimalism, choosing one which 1 should regard it as particularly important to be in a position to reject.     My selection is Extensionalism, a position imbued with the spirit of Nominalism, and dear both to those who feel that Because it is redis no more informative as an answer to the question Why is a pillar box called "red"? than would be 'Because he is Grice' as an answer to the question 'Why is that distinguished-looking person called  "Grice"T,     and also to those who are particularly impressed by the power of set theory.     The picture which, Grice suspects, is liable to go along with Extensionalism is that of the world of particulars as a domain stocked with innumerable tiny pellets, internally indistinguishable from one another, but distinguished by the groups within which they fall, by the 'clubs' to which they belong;     and since the clubs are distinguished only by their memberships, there can only be one club to which nothing belongs.     As one might have predicted from the outset, this leads to trouble when it comes to the accommodation of explanation within such a system.   Explanation of the actual presence of a particular PREDICATE in a particular SUBJECT depends crucially on the possibility of saying what would be the consequence of the presence of such and such a PREDICATE in that SUBJECT, regardless of whether the PREDICATE in question even do appear in that SUBJECT, or indeed in any subject.     On the face of it, if one adopts an extensionalist viewpoint, the presence of a feature in some particular will have to be re-expressed in terms of that particular's membership of a certain set;     but if we proceed along those lines, since there is only one empty set, the potential consequences of the possession of an in fact unexemplified PREDICATE would be invariably the same, no matter how different in significance the expressions used to specify such a PREDICATE would ordinarily be judged to be.     This is certainly not a conclusion which one would care to accept.    Grice can think of two ways of trying to avoid its acceptance, both of which seem to Grice to suffer from serious drawbacks.     The first shows some degree of analogy with a move which, as a matter of history, was made by empiricists in connection with simple and complex ideas.     In that region an idea could be redeemed from a charge of failure to conform to the empiricist principle through not being derived from experience of its instantiating particulars (there being no such particu-lars) if it could be exhibited as a complex idea whose component simple ideas were so derived;   somewhat similarly, the first proposal seeks to relieve this or that vacuous predicate or general term from the embarrassing consequences of denoting the empty set by exploiting the non-vacuousness of some other predicate or general term which are constituents in a definition of the original vacuous terms.      Start with two vacuous predicates, say     ay) 'is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope' and (    oz) is a climber on hands and knees of  of a29,000 foot mountain. (8)     If aj and a z are vacuous, the following predicates are satisfied by the empty set @: (B) 'is a set composed of daughters of an English queen and a pope, and (Ps) 'is a set composed of climbers on hands and knees of a 29.000 foot mountain. (y)     Provided  'R, and 'R,' are suitably interpreted, the predicates A, and , may be treated as coextensive respectively with the following revised predicates  (y) Stands in R, to a sequence composed of the sets married to, daughters, English queens and popes; and (72) 'stands in Rz to a sequence composed of the sets climbers, 29,000 foot mountains, and things done on hands and knees'. (8)     We may finally correlate with the two initial predicates o1 and a2, respectively, the following sequences derived from 7, and Yz: (S,) the sequence composed of the relation R, (taken in extension), the set married to, the set daughters, the set English queens, and the set popes: and (&2) the sequence composed of the relation Rz, the set climbers, the set 29,000 foot mountains, and the set things done on hands and knees.     These sequences are certainly distinct, and the proposal is that they, rather than the empty set, should be used for determining, in some way yet to be specified, the explanatory potentialities of the vacuous predicates a, and a2.    Grice’s chief complaint against this proposal is that it involves yet another commission of what I regard as one of the main minimalist sins, that of imposingin advance a limitation on the character of explanations.    For it implicitly recognizes it as a condition on the propriety of using a vacuous predicate in explanation that the terms in question should be representable as being correlated with a sequence of this or that non-empty set.    This is a condition which, Grice suspects, might not be met by every vacuous predicate.     But the possibility of representing an explanatory term as being, in this way or that, reducible to some favoured item or types of items should be a bonus which some theories achieve, thereby demonstrating their elegance, not a condition of eligibility for a particular class of this or that would-be explanatory term.    The second suggested way of avoiding the unwanted consequence is perhaps more intuitive than the first;     it certainly seems simpler.     The admissibility of a vacuous predicate in explanations of possible but non-actual phenomena (why they would happen if they did happen), depends, it is suggested, on the availability of acceptable non-trivial generalizations wherein which the predicate in question specifies the antecedent condition.   And, we may add, a generalization whose acceptability would be unaffected by any variation on the specification of its antecedent condition, provided the substitute were vacuous, would certainly be trivial.     Non-trivial generalizations of this sort are certainly available, if (1)     they are derivable as special cases from other generalizations involving less specific antecedent conditions, and (2)     these other generalizations are adequately supported by further specifies whose antecedent conditions are expressed by means of this or that non-vacuous predicate.    The explanatory opportunities for a vacuous predicate depend on their embodiment in a system.    Grice’s doubts about this second suggestion relate to the steps which would be needed in order to secure an adequately powerful system.    Grice conjectures, but cannot demonstrate, that the only way to secure such a system would be to confer special ontological privilege upon the entities of physical science together with the system which that science provides.     But now a problem arises:     the preferred entities seem not to be observable, or in so far as they are observable, their observability seems to be more a matter of conventional decision to count such and-such occurrences as observations than it is a matter of fact.     It looks as if states of affairs in the preferred scientific world need, for credibility, support from the vulgar world of ordinary observation reported in the language of common sense. Eddington’s solid chair.     But to give that support, the judgements and the linguistic usage of the vulgar needs to be endowed with a certain authority, which as a matter of history the kind of minimalists whom Grice knows or knows of have not seemed anxious to confer.     But even if they were anxious to confer it, what would validate the conferring, since ex hypothesi it is not the vulgar world but the specialist scientific world which enjoys ontological privilege?     If this objection is sound, the second suggestion, like the first, takes something which when present is an asset, bonus, or embel-lishment, namely systematicity, and under philosophical pressure converts it into a necessity.    Grice has, of course, not been attempting to formulate an argument by which minimalism, or indeed any particular version of minimalism, could be refuted;   Grice has been trying only to suggest a sketch of a way in which, perhaps, such an argument might be developed.     Grice should be less than honest if he pretended to any great confidence that even this relatively unambitious objective has been attained.     Grice should, however, also be less than honest if he concealed the fact that, should Gricd be left without an argument, it is very likely that Grice should not be very greatly disturbed.     For Grice’s antipathy to minimalism depends much more on a concern to have a philosophical approach which would have prospects of doing justice to the exuberant wealth and variety of human experience in a manner seemingly beyond the reach of minimalists, than on the availability of any argument which would show the theses of minimal. ists to be mistaken.     But at this point some people, Grice thinks, would wish to protest that I am treating minimalism in much too monolithic a way.     For, it might be said, while many reasonable persons might be willing to align themselves with Grice, for whatever reasons, in opposition to exten-sionalism and physicalism, when such persons noticed that I have also declared my opposition to mechanism and to naturalism, they might be prompted to enquire whether I wished to declare support for the ideas of the objectivity of value and of the presence of finality in nature, and to add that should I reply affirmatively, they would part company with Grice.     Now Grice certainly does wish to affirm, under some interpretation, 'the objectivity of value, and Grice also wishes to maintain, again under some interpretation, 'the presence of finality in nature'.    But perhaps Grice had better formulate in a somewhat more orderly way, one or two of the things which I do believe or at least would like to believe.    Grice believes (or would like to believe) that it is a necessary feature of a rational being, either as part of or as a consequence of part of, their essential nature, that they have a capacity for the attribution of value.    Grice also believes that it follows from this fact, together perhaps with one or more additional assumptions, that there is objective value.    Grice believes that value, besides being objective, has at the same time intrinsic motivational force, and that this combination is rendered possible only by a constructivist approach rather than a realist approach to value.     Only if value is in a suitable sense 'instituted by us' can it exhibit the aforesaid combination.    The objectivity of value is possible only given the presence of finality or purpose in nature (the admissibility of final causes).    The fact that reason is operative both in the cognitive and in the practical spheres strongly suggests, if it does not prove, that a constructivist approach is in order in at least some part of the cognitive sphere as well as in the practical sphere:    The adoption of a constructivist approach  makes possible,  perhaps even demands, the adoption of a stronger rather than merely a weaker version of rationalism.     That is to say, we can regard ourselves, qua rational beings, as called upon not merely to have this or that reason for our beliefs (ratio cognoscendi) and also for other attitudes like desires and intentions, but to allow and to search for, reasons for things to bethe case (at least in that area of reality which is constructed).     Such a reason will be, in Cicero’s parlance, a ratio essendi.    It is obvious that much of the terminology in which this programme is formulated is extremely obscure.     Any elucidation of it, and any defence of the claims involved which Grice shall offer on this occasion, will have to wait until the second main section of this Reply:     for Grice shall need to invoke specific theses within particular departments of philosophy.     Grice hopes to engage, on other occasions, in a fuller examination of these and kindred ideas.    The editors of the volume Grounds. Rationality, Intention, Category, End — — G. R. I. C. E. — devote most of their ingenious and perceptive attention to three or four topics which they feel to be specially prominent in Grice’s work; to questions about conversational significance,  philosophical psychology, rationality, and metaphysics, value, including ethical questions.     Grice first comments on what the editors have to say about conversational significance, and then in his concluding section Grice turrns to the remaining topics.    In the course of a penetrating treatment of the ‘development’ of Grice’s views on the topic of conversational significance, the editors list, in connection with what they see as a third stage of this development three objections to which Grice’s work might be thought to give rise.    Grice shall say something about each of these, though in an altered order;     Grice shall also add a fourth objection which Grice knows some philosophers have regarded as acute, and Grice shall briefly re-emphasize some of the points about the most recent developments in his thinking, which the editors have presented and which may not be generally familiar.    As a preliminary to enumerating the question for discussion, Grice may remark that the treatment of the topic by the editors seems to offer strong support to Grice’s thesis about the latitudinal unity of philosophy:     for the problems which emerge about conversational significance are plainly problems in psychology and metaphysics, and Grice hopes that as we proceed it will become increasingly clear that these problems in turn are inextricably bound up with the notion of value.    A first difficulty relates to the alleged ly dubious admissibility of the propositio as an entities:     In the explication of the ‘significance’ of an TYPE of utterance — or Emmissio or Profferatii. what does the variable "that p" or  “that S is P” take as values?     The values of "that p" or “that S is P” — S est P — are the objects of conversational significance, intention, and belief- a proposition, to call it by its traditional name since Boezio. Varrone calls it proloquium.    But isn't one of the most central tasks of a theory or philosophical analysis  or philosophical conceptual analysis to give an account of what such a proposition is?.. +     Much of the history of philosophy of language or ‘semantics’ consists of attacks on or defences of this or that conceptions of what a proposition is, for the fundamental issue involved here is the triangular relation Aristotle proposed in De Interpretatione to hold anong language, thought, and reality.    How can Grice offer an explication of the type of ‘significance’ of a profferatio that simply takes the notion of a proposition that p or that S is P more or less for granted?    A perfectly sound, though perhaps somewhat superficial, reply to the objection as it is presented would be that in any definition or philosophical analysis of conversational significance which Grice qua semanticist would be willing to countenance, the letter 'p', in that p or S and P in that S is P — the dog is shaggy — operate simply as this or that gap sign;     if Alpha and Beta appear in a definiendum or analysandum alpha and beta appears in the corresponding definiens or analysans.    If Grice were to advance the not wholly plausible thesis that to ‘feel’ Byzantine is just to have a Rylean agitation which is caused by the thought that one is, or might *be*  Byzantine, it would surely be ridiculous to criticize Grice on the grounds that he had saddled himself with an ontological commitment to a feeling, or to a mode of a feeling.     If a quantification of the predicate is covertly or implicaturally involved at all, it will only be a total or universal quantification of the predicate which could in such a case as this be adequately handled by a SUBSTITUTONAL account of such quantification of the predicate.    Grice’s situation vis-a-vis a proposition that p  or that the alpha is beta — Fidus est hirsutus — is in no way different.    Moreover, if this last part of this rather commissioned — by the Clarendon — objection is to be understood as suggesting that a philosopher such as Grice has been most concerned with the characterization of the nature of a proposition with a view to using it, in this or that way, as a key to the triangular relationship that, since Aristotle’s DE INTERPRETATIONE, holds among language. thought, and reality, Grice rather doubtswhether this claim is true, and if it is true, Grice would regard any attempt to use the proposition in such a manner as a gross mistake to which Boezio did but Grice never subscribed.     A Proposition should not, Grice thinks, be viewed as a tool, a gimmick, or a bit of apparatus designed to pull off the metaphysical conjuring-trick of relating language, thought, and reality!    For one, Aristotle’s treatment in DE INTERPRETATIONE is quite its own trick!    The furthest Grice, who lectured on DE INTERPRETATIONE for years — for Oxonian pupils earning their Lit. Hum. — would be prepared to go in this direction would be to allow it as a possibility that one or more substantive treatments of the relations between language, thought, and reality might involve this notion of a proposition,     and so might rely on it to the extent that an inability to provide an adequate theoretical treatment of a proposition would undermine the enterprise within which it makes an appearance.    It is, however, not apparent to Grice that any threat of this kind of disaster hangs over Grice’s head.     In his “Meaning Revisited” Grice does in fact discuss the topic of the correspondences to be looked for language, thought, and reality,  - an in Aristotle’s footsteps in DE INTERPRETATIONS offers three suggestions about the ways in which, in effect, a rational enterprises could be defeated or radically hampered should there fail to be correspondences of the members of any pair selected from this trio.     Grice suggests that without a correspondence between thought and reality, any individual member of such fundamental important kinds of psychological states as desires and beliefs would be unable to fulfil their theoretical role, purpose, function, or métier, of explaining behaviour, and indeed would no longer be identifiable or distinguishable from one another;     that, without a correspondence between language and thought, communication, and so the rational conduct of life, would be eliminated;     and that without a direct correspondence between language and reality over and above any indirect correspondence provided for by the first two suggestions, no generalized specification, as distinct from case-by-case specification, of the conditions required for a belief to correspond with reality, that is to be true, would be available to us.     So far as I can see, the foregoing transcendental or metaphysical justification of this acceptance of the correspondences in question does not in any obvious way involve a commitment to the *reality* of a proposition; and should it turn out to do so in some unobvious way perhaps as a consequence of some unnoticed assumption, the very surreptitiousness of the commitment would indicate to Grice the likelihood that the same commitment would be involved in any rational account of the relevant subject matter, in which case, of course, the commitment would be ipso facto justified.    Indeed, the idea of an inescapable commitment to a proposition in no way frightens me or repels me; and if such a commitment would carry with it an obligation to give an account of what a propositions is, Grice thinks this obligation could be discharged.     It might, indeed, be possible to discharge it in more than one way.     One way would involve, as its central idea, focusing on a primitive range of simple statements, the formulation of which would involve no connectives or quantifiers, and treating each of these as 'expressing' a propositional complex, which in such cases would consist of a sequence whose elements would be first a general item (a set, or an attribute, according to preference) and second a sequence of objects which might, or might not, instantiate or belong to the first item.     Thus the propositional complex associated with the sentence, Fidus est hirsutus  might be thought of consisting of a sequence whose first (general' member would be the set of hairy-coated things, or (alternatively) the attribute Hairy-Coatedness, and whose second('instantial' or 'particular") member would be Fidus or the singleton of Fidus;     and the sentence, 'John wants Martha', could be represented as expressing a propositional complex which is a sequence whose first element is wanting (considered either extensionally as a set or non-extensionally as an attribute) and whose second element is a sequence composed of john and Martha, in that order.     We can define a property of factual or alethic satisfactoriness which will be closely allied to the notion of truth! a (simple) propositional complex will be factive just in case its two elements (the general and instantial elements) are related by the appopriate PREDICATION relation, just in case (for example) the second element is a member of the set (possesses the attribute) in which the first element consists.    A Proposition may be represented as each consisting of a family of propositional complexes, and the conditions for family unity may be thought of either as fixed or as variable in accordance with the context,     This idea will in a moment be expanded.    The notorious difficulties to which this kind of treatment gives rise will begin with the problems of handling connectives and of handling quantification.     In the present truncated context I shall leave the first problem on one side, and shall confine myself to a few sketchy remarks concerning quantification.     A simple proposal for the treatment of quantifiers would call for the assignment to each predicate, besides its normal or standard extension, two special objects associated with quantifiers, an 'altogether' object and a 'one-at-a-time' object;     to the epithets 'grasshopper', ['boy', 'girl'], for example, will be assigned not only ordinary individual objects like grasshoppers [boys, girls] but also such special objects as the altogether grasshopper [boy, girl| and the one-al-a-time grasshopper [boy, girlf.     We shall now stipulate that an  'altogether' special object satisfies a given predicate just in case every normal or standard object associated with that special object satisfies the predicate in question, and that a 'one-at-a-time' special object satisfies a predicate just in case at least one of the associated standard objects satisfies that predicate.     So the altogether grasshopper will be green just in case every individual grasshopper is green, and the one-at-a-time grasshopper will be green just in case at least one individual grasshopper is green, and we can take this pair of statements about special grasshoppers as providing us with representations of (respec-lively) the statement that all grasshoppers are green and the statement that some grasshopper is green.    The apparatus which Grice sketches is plainly not, as it stands, adequate to provide a comprehensive treatment of quantification.     It will not, for example, cope with well-known problems arising from features of multiple quantification;     it will not deliver for us distinct representations of the two notorious (alleged) readings of the statement  'Every girl detests some boy', in one of which (supposedly) the universal quantifier is dominant with respect to scope, and in the other of which the existential quantifier is dominant.     To cope with this problem it might be sufficient to explore, for this or that ‘semantic’ purpose, the device of exportation, and to distinguish between, (    i) 'There is some boy such that every girl detests him', which attributes a certain property to the one-at-a-time boy, and (ii) 'Every girl is such that she detests some boy', which attributes a certain (and different) property to the altogether girl;     and to note, as one makes this move, that though exportation, when applied to statements about individual objects, seems NOT to affect truth-value, whatever else may be its ‘semantic’ function, when it is applied to sentences about special objects it may, and sometimes will, affect truth-value.     But however effective this particular shift may be, it is by no means clear that there are not further demands to be met which would overtax the strength of the envisaged apparatus;     it is not, for example, clear whether it could be made adequate to deal with indefinitely long strings of 'mixed' quanti-fiers.     The proposal might also run into objections of a more philosophical character from those who would regard the special objects or things  which it invokes as metaphysically — ontologically — disreputable.    Should an alternative proposal be reached or desired, Grice thinks that one (or, indeed, more than one) is available.     The one which Grice has immediately in mind could be regarded as a replacement for, an extension of, or a reinterpretation of the scheme just outlined, in accordance with whatever view is finally taken of the potency and respectability of the ideas embodied in that scheme.     The new proposal, like its predecessor, will treat propositional complexes as sequences, indeed as ordered pairs containing a SUBJECT-item and a PREDICATE-item, and will, therefore, also like its predecessor, offer a subject-predicate account of quantification.     Unlike its predecessor, however, it will not allow an individual thing, like a grasshopper, a girl, and a boy, to appear as elements in propositional complexes, such elements will always be sets — or attributes,     Though less restrictive versions of this proposal are, Grice thinks, available, Grice shall, for convenience, consider here only a set-theoretic version.    According to this version, we associate with the SUBJECT-expression of a canonically formulated sentence a set of at least second order.     If thesubject expression is a singular name, its ontological correlate will be the singleton of the singleton of the entity which bears that name.     The treatment of a singular term which is not a name will be parallel, but is here omitted.     If the subject-expression is an indefinite quantificational phrase, like 'some grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an item belonging to the extension of the PREDICATE to which the indefinite modifier is attached; so the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' will be the set of all singletons whose sole element is an individual grasshopper.     If the subject expression is a universal quantificational phrase, like 'every grasshopper', its ontological correlate will be the singleton whose sole element is the set which forms the extension of the predicate to which the universal modifier is attached;     thus the correlate of the phrase  'every grasshopper' will be the singleton of the set of grasshoppers.  Predicates of canonically formulated sentences are correlated with the sets which form their extensions.     It now remains to specify the PREDICATION-relation, that is to say, to specify the relation which has to obtain between subject-element and predicate-element in a propositional complex for that complex to be alethically satisfactory.     A propositional complex will be factive just in case its subject-element contains as a member at least one item which is a subset of the predicate-element;     so if the ontological correlate of the phrase 'some grasshopper' (or, again, of the phrase every grasshopper') contains as a member at least one subset of the ontological correlate of the predicate 'x is green' (viz. the set of green things), the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'some grasshopper is green' (or again with the sentence every grasshopper is green') will be factive.    Grice devoted a good deal of time to this second proposal, and he convinced himself that it offered a powerful instrument which, with or without adjustment, was capable of handling not only indefinitely long sequences of 'mixed' quantificational phrases, but also some other less obviously tractable problems which he shall not here discuss.     Before moving on, however, Grice might perhaps draw attention to three features of the proposal.     First, employing a strategy which  might be thought of as Leibnizian, it treats subject-elements as being of an order higher than, rather than an order lower than, predicate elements.   Second, an individual name is in effect treated like universal quantificational phrases, thus recalling the practice of old-style traditional logic.     Third, and most importantly, the account which is offered is, initially, an account of propositional complexes, not of propositions:    as I envisage them, a proposition will be regarded as a family of propositional complexes.     Now the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence 'Some grasshoppers are witty', will be both logically equivalent to and numerically distinet from the propositional complex directly associated with the sentence Not every grasshopper is not witty';     indeed for any given propositional complex there will be indefinitely many propositional complexes which are both logically equivalent to and also numerically distinct from the original complex.    The question of how tight or how relaxed are to be the family ties which determine the identity of a proposition — what is said — remains to be decided, and it might even be decided that the conditions for such identity would vary according to context or purpose.    Wilson is a great man  The British Prime minister is a great man.    It seems that there might be an approach to the treatment of propositions which would, initially at least, be radically different from the two proposals which I have just sketched.     We might begin by recalling that one of the stock arguments for the reality of a proposition used to be that a proposition is needed to give us something for logic to be about;     sentences and thoughts were regarded as insufficient, since the laws of logic do not depend on the existence of minds or of communication.    Now one might be rendered specially well-disposed towards a proposition if one espoused, in general, a sort of Aristotelian view of theories, and believed that for any particular theory to exist there has to be a class of entities, central to that theory, the essential nature of which is revealed in, and indeed accounts for, the laws of the theory in question.    If our thought proceeds along these lines, a proposition might be needed not just as pegs (so to speak) for a logical law to hang from, but as the thing whose nature determines the content of the logical system.     It might even be possible to maintain that more than one system proceeds from and partially exhibits the nature of a proposition; perhaps, for example, one system is needed to display a proposition as the bearers of logical properties and another to display them in their role as the content or the object of a psychological attitude.    How such an idea could be worked out in detail is far from clear;     but whatever might be the difficulties of implementa-tion, it is evident that this kind of approach would seek to answer the question, "What is a proposition?", not by identificatory dissection but rather by pointing to the work that a proposition of their very nature does.    Grice has little doubt that a proper assessment of the merits of the various proposals now before us would require decisions on some fundamental issues in metaphysical methodology.     What, for example, determines whether a class of entities achieves metaphysical respectability?     What conditions govern the admission to reality of the products of ontological romancing?     What is the relation, in metaphysical practice, between two possible forms of identification and characterization, that which proceeds by dissection and that which proceeds by specification of output?     Are these forms of procedure, in a given case, rivals or are they compatible and even, perhaps, both mandatory?    Two further objections cited by the editors may be presented together (in reverse order), since they both relate to Grice’s treatment of the idea of a conversational procedure.    One of these objections disputes Grice’s right, as a philosopher, to trespass on the province of science by attempting to deliver judgement, either in specific cases or even generally, on the existence of this or that basic procedure underlying other this or that ‘semantic’ procedure which is, supposedly, derivative from the former.     The other objection starts from the observation that Grice’s account of communication  involves the attribution to this or that communicator of more or less elaborate inferential steps concerning this or that procedure possessed and utilised by his conversational partner,     notes that these steps, and the knowledge which, allegedly, they provide, are certainly not as a rule explicitly present to consciousness,     and then questions whether any satisfactory interpretation can be given of the idea that the knowledge involved is implicit of tacit rather than explicit.     The editors suggest that answers to these objections can be found  in Grice’s published and unpublished work.    Baldly stated, the reply which they attribute to Grice with respect to the first of these objections is that the idea that a certain sort of reasoning. which the editors illustrate by drawing on as yet unpublished work, is involved in conversational significance, is something which can be made plausible by philosophical methods — by careful description, reflection, and delineation of the ways we talk and think.’    Now I certainly hope that philosophical methods can be effective in the suggested direction, which case, of course, the objections would be at least partially answered.     But Grice thinks that he would also aim at a sharper and more ambitious response along the following lines.     Certainly the specification of some particular set of procedures as the set which governs the use of this or that langauge, or even as a set which participates in the governance of some group of this or that language, is a matter for the scientist except in so far as it may rely upon some ulterior and highly general principle.    But there may be general principles of this sort, principles perhaps which specify forms of procedure which do, and indeed must, operate in the use of any language whatsoever.     Now one might argue for the existence of this or that principle on the basis of the relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar, idea that, so far as can be seen, our infinite variety of actual and possible communicative performances is feasible only if such performances can be organized in a certain way, namely as issuing from some initial finite base of this or that primitive procedure in accordance with the general principle in question.    One might, however, set one's sights higher, and try to maintain that the presence in a language, or at least in a language which is actually used, of a certain kind of structure, which will be reflected in this general principle, is guaranteed by this or that metaphysical or ontological consideration, perhaps by some rational demand for a correspondence between  this or that conversational categorry on the one hand and this or that metaphysical, or, ontological, or real category — of REALITY — on the other.     Grice will confess to an inclination to go for the more ambitious of these enterprises.    As regards the second objection, Grice must admit to being by no means entirely clear what reply the editors of the G. R. I. C. E. compilation envisage Grice as wishing to make, but he will formulate what seems to me to be the most likely representation of their view.     They first very properly refer to Grice’s discussion of 'incomplete reasoning in his Kant Lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning and discover there some suggestions which, whether or not they supply necessary conditions for the presence of formally incomplete or implicit reasoning, cannot plausibly be considered as jointly providing a sufficient condition;     the suggested conditions are     that the implicit reasoner intends that there should be some valid supplementation of the explicitly presen t material which would justify the 'conclusion' of the incomplete reasoning, together perhaps with a further desire or intention that the first intention should be causally efficacious in the generation of the reasoner's belief in the aforementioned conclusion.    The G. R. I. C. E. editors are plainly right in their view that so far no sufficient condition for implicit reasoning has been provided;     indeed, Grice never supposed that he had succeeded in providing one, though I hope to be able to remedy this deficiency by the (one hopes) not too distant time when a revised version of his Kant Lectures is published.     The G. R. I. C. E. editors then bring to bear some further material from Grice’s writings, and sketch, on his behalf, an argument which seems to exhibit the following pattern: (I)     That we should be equipped to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions is something which could be given a genitorial justification;     if the Genitor were constructing human beings with an eye to their own good, the institution in us of a capacity to deployM-intentions would be regarded by him with favour. (2)     We do in fact possess the capacity to form, and to recognize in others, M-intentions.    The attribution of M-intentions to others will at least sometimes have explanatory value with regard to their behaviour, and so could properly be thought of as helping to fulfil a rational desideratum.    The exercise of rationality takes place primarily or predominantly in the confirmation or revision of previously established beliefs or practices; so it is reasonable to expect the comparison of the actual with what is ideal or optimal to be standard procedure in rational beings.     We have, in our repertoire of procedures available to us in the conduct of our lives, the procedure of counting something which approximates sufficiently closely to the fulfillment of a certain ideal or optimum as actually fulfilling that ideal or optimum, the procedure (that is to say) of deeming it to fulfil the ideal or optimum in question.    So it is reasonable to attribute to human beings a readiness to deem people, who approximate sufficiently closely in their behaviour to persons who have ratiocinated about the M-intentions of others, to have actually ratiocinated in that way.     We do indeed deem such people to have so ratiocinated, though we do also, when called upon, mark the difference between their deemed ratiocinations and the 'primitive step-by-step variety of ratiocination, which provides us with our ideal in this region, by characterizing the reasoning of the 'approximators' as implicit rather than explicit.    Now whether or not it was something of this sort which the G. R. I. C. E. editors had it in mind to attribute to Grice, the argument as Grice sketches it seems to me to be worthy of serious consideration;     it brings into play, in a relevant way, some pet ideas of Grice’s, and exerts upon Grice at least, some degree of seductive appeal.     But whether Grice would be willing to pass beyond sympathy to endorsement, Grice is not sure.     There are too many issues involved which are both crucially important and hideously under-explored, such as the philosophical utility of the concept of deeming, the relations between rational and pre-rational psychological states, and the general nature of implicit thought.     Perhaps the best thing for me to do at this point will be to set out a line of argument which I would be inclined to endorse and leave it to others to judge how closely what Grice says when speaking for myself approximates to the suggested interpretation which I offer when speaking on behalf of the G. R. I. C. E. editors.     Grice would be prepared to argue that something like the following sequence of propositions is true.    There is a range of cases in which, so far from its being the casethat, typically, one first learns what it is to be a @ and then, at the next stage, learns what criteria distinguish a good o from a @ which is less good, or not good at all, one needs first to learn what it is to be a good o, and then subsequently to learn what degree of approximation to being a good o will qualify an item as a p;     if the gap between some item x and good ps is sufficently horrendous, then x is debarred from counting as a @ at all, even as a bad p. I have elsewhere called concepts which exhibit this feature value-oriented concepts. One example of a value-oriented concept is the concept of reasoning: another, I now suggest, is that of sentence.    (2) It may well be that the existence of value-oriented concepts  (Ф.. Ф2. ...Ф.) depends on the prior existence of pre-rational concepts (Фі, Ф2.. + • n), such that an item x qualifies for the application of the concept a if and only if a satisfies a rationally-approved form or version of the corresponding pre-rational concept '.     We have a (primary) example of a step in reasoning only if we have a transition of a certain rationally approved kind from one thought or utterance to another.    If p is value-oriented concept then a potentiality for making or producing ds is ipso facto a potentiality for making or producing good ps, and is therefore dignified with the title of a capacity; it may of course be a capacity which only persons with special ends or objectives. like pick-pockets, would be concerned to possess.    Grice is strongly inclined to assent to a principle which might be called a Principle of Economy of Rational Effort.     Such a principle would state that where there is a ratiocinative procedure for arriving rationally at certain outcomes, a procedure which, because it is ratiocinative, will involve an expenditure of time and energy, then if there is a non-ratiocinative, and so more economical procedure which is likely, for the most part, to reach the same outcomes as the ratiocinative procedure, then provided the stakes are not too high it will be rational to employ the cheaper though somewhat less reliable non-ratiocinative procedure as a substitute for ratiocination.     I think this principle would meet with Genitorial approval, in which case the Genitor would install it for use should opportunity arise.    On the assumption that it is characteristic of reason to operate on pre-rational states which reason confirms, revises, or even (some-times) eradicates, such opportunities will arise, provided the rational creatures can, as we can, be trained to modify the relevant pre-rational states or their exercise, so that without actual ratiocination the creatures  can be more or less reliably led by those pre-rational states to the thoughts or actions which reason would endorse were it invoked; with the result that the creatures can do, for the most part, what reason requires without, in the particular case, the voice of reason being heard.     Indeed in such creatures as ourselves the ability to dispense in this way with actual ratiocination is taken to be an excellence:     The more mathematical things I can do correctly without engaging in overt mathematical reasoning, the more highly I shall be regarded as a mathematician.     Similar considerations apply to the ability to produce syntactico-semantically satisfactory utterances without the aid of a derivation in some syntactico-semantic theory. In both cases the excellence which 1 exhibit is a form of judgement: I am a good judge of mathematical consequences or of satisfactory utterances.    That ability to produce, without the aid of overt ratiocination, transitions which accord with approved standards of inference does not demand that such ratiocination be present in an unconscious or covert form; it requires at most that our propensity to produce such transitions be dependent in some way upon our acquisition or possession of a capacity to reason explicitly, Similarly, our ability to produce satisfactory utterances does not require a subterranean ratiocination to account for their satisfactory character; it needs only to be dependent on our learning of, or use of, a procedure-governed system of communication.     There are two kinds of magic travel.     In one of these we are provided with a magic carpet which transports us with supernatural celerity over a route which may be traversed in more orthodox vehicles; in the other, we are given a magic lamp from which, when we desire it, a genie emerges who transports us routelessly from where we are to where we want to go.     The exercise of judgement may perhaps be route-travelling like the first: but may also be routeless like the second.    But problems still remain.     A deductive system concocted by this or that logician varies a good deal as regards their intuitiveness: but with respect to some of them (for example, some suitably chosen system of natural deduction) a pretty good case could be made that they not only generate for us logically valid inferences, but do so in a way which mirrors this or thprocedures which we use in argument in the simplest or most fundamental cases.     But in the case of linguistic theories even the more intuitive among them may not be in a position to make a corresponding claim about the production of admissible utterances.    They might be able to claim to generate (more or less) the infinite class of admissible sentences or this or that conversational move, together with acceptable interpretations ofeach (though even this much would be a formidable claim); but such an achievement would tell us nothing about how we arrive at the produc tion of sentences, and so might be thought to lack explanatory force.    That deficiency might be thought to be remediable only if the theory reflects, more or less closely, the way or ways in which we learn, select. and criticize conversational performance; and here it is clear neither what should be reflected nor what would count as reflecting it.    There is one further objection, not mentioned by the editors of G. R. I. C. E., which seems to me to be one to which Grice must respond.     It may be stated thus:    One of the leading ideas in my treatment of meaning was that meaning Is not to be regarded exclusively, or even primarily, as a feature of language or of linguistic utterances; there are many instances of non-linguistic vehicles of communication, mostly unstructured but sometimes exhibiting at least rudimentary structure; and my account of meaning was designed to allow for the possibility that non-linguistic and indeed non-conventional 'utterances', perhaps even manifesting some degree of structure, might be within the powers of creatures who lack any linguistic or otherwise conventional apparatus for communication, but who are not thereby deprived of the capacity to mean this or that by things they do. To provide for this possibility, it is plainly necessary that the key ingredient in any representation of meaning, namely intending. should be a state the capacity for which does not require the possession of a language.     Now some might be unwilling to allow the possibility of such pre-linguistic intending.     Against them, I think I would have good prospects of winning the day; but unfortunately a victory on this front would not be enough.     For, in a succession of increasingly elaborate moves designed to thwart a sequence of Schifferian counter-examples. I have been led to restrict the intentions which are to constitute utterer's meaning to M-intentions; and, whatever might be the case in general with regard to intending, M-intending is plainly too sophisticated a state to be found in a language-destitute creature. So the unavoidable rearguard actions seem to have undermined the raison-d'etre of the campaign.    A brief reply will have to suffice; a full treatment would require delving deep into crucial problems concerning the boundaries between vicious and innocuous circularity, to which I shall refer again a little later.     According to Grice’s speculations about conversational significance, one should distinguish between what I might call the factual character of an utterance (meaning-relevant features which are actually present in the utterance), and what I might call its titular character (the nestedM-intention which is deemed to be present).     The titular character is infinitely complex, and so cannot be actually present in toto; in which case to point out that its inconceivable actual presence would be possible, or would be detectable, only via the use of language would seem to serve little purpose.     At its most meagre, the factual character will consist merely in the pre-rational counterpart of meaning, which might amount to no more than making a certain sort of utterance in order thereby to get some creature to think or want some particular thing, and this condition seems to contain no reference to linguistic expertise.     Maybe in some less straightforward instances of meaning there will be actually present intentions whose feasibility as intentions will demand a capacity for the use of language.     But there can be no advance guarantee when this will be so, and it is in any case arguable that the use of language would here be a practically indispensable aid to thinking about relatively complex intentions, rather than an element in what is thought about.    In a final section of my Reply to the editors of G. R. I. C. E., Grice takes up, or take off from, a few of the things which they have to say about a number of fascinating and extremely important issues belonging to the chain of disciplines listed in the title of this section.     I shall be concerned less with the details of their account of the various positions which they see me as maintaining than with the kind of structure and order which, albeit in an as yet confused and incomplete way I think I can discern in the disciplines themselves and, especially, in the connection between them.     Any proper discussion of the details of the issues in question would demand far more time than I have at my disposal; in any case it is my intention, if I am spared, to discuss a number of them, at length, in future writings. I shall be concerned rather to provide some sort of picture of the nature of metaphysics, as I see it, and of the way or ways in which it seems to me to underlie the other mentioned disciplines.     I might add that something has already been said in the previous section of this Reply about philosophical psychology and rationality, and that general questions about value, including metaphysical questions, were the topic of my 1983 Carus lectures.     So perhaps I shall be pardoned if here 1 concentrate primarily on metaphysics. I fear that, even when I am allowed the advantage of operating within these limitations, what I have to say will be programmatic and speculative rather than well-ordered and well-argued.    At the outset of their comments on my views concerning meta-physics, Richards say, 'Grice's ontological views are at least liberal'; and they document this assertion by a quotation from my Method In Philosophical Psychology, in which I admit to a taste for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.' I have no wish to challenge their representation of my expressed position, particularly as the cited passage includes a reference to the possibility that certain sorts of entities might, because of backing from some transcendental argument, qualify as entia realissima.     The question I would like to raise is rather what grounds are there for accepting the current conception of the relationship between metaphysics and ontology.     Why should it be assumed that metaphysics consists in, or even includes in its domain, the programme of arriving at an acceptable ontology?     Is the answer merely that that enterprise is the one, or a part of the one, to which the term "metaphysics' is conventionally applied and so that a justification of this application cannot be a philosophical issue?    If this demand for a justified characterization of metaphysics is to be met, I can think of only one likely strategy for meeting it.     That will be to show that success within a certain sort of philosophical under-taking, which I will with striking originality call First Philosophy, is needed if any form of philosophy, or perhaps indeed any form of rational enquiry, is to be regarded as feasible or legitimate, and that the contents of First Philosophy are identical with, or at least include, what are standardly regarded as the contents of metaphysics! I can think of two routes by which this result might be achieved, which might well turn out not to be distinct from one another.     One route would perhaps involve taking seriously the idea that if any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise, its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the possibly different types of theory; that characterizations of the nature and range of possible kinds of theory will be needed; and that such a body of characterization must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and so must itself exemplify whatever requirements it lays down for theories in general; it must itself be expressible as a theory, to be called (if you like) Theory-theory.     The specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed by any theory, whether such account falls within or outside the bounds of Theory-theory, would be properly called First Philosophy, and might  turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as belonging to the subject matter of metaphysics. It might, for example, turn out to be establishable that every theory has to relate to a certain range of subject items, has to attribute to them certain predicates or attributes, which in turn have to fall within one or another of the range of types or categories.     In this way, the enquiry might lead to recognized metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of categories.    A second approach would focus not on the idea of the expressibility of the outcomes of rational enquiry in theories but rather on the question of what it is, in such enquiries, that we are looking for, why they are of concern to us.   We start (so Aristotle has told us) as laymen with the awareness of a body of facts; what as theorists we strive for is not (primarily) further facts, but rational knowledge, or understanding, of the facts we have, together with whatever further facts our investigations may provide for us.     Metaphysics will have as its concern the nature and realizability of those items which are involved in any successful pursuit of understanding; its range would include the nature and varieties of explanation (as offered in some modification of the Doctrine of Four Causes), the acceptability of principles of logic, the proper standards of proof, and so on.    I have at this point three comments to make.     First, should it be the case that, (1) the foregoing approach to the conception of metaphysics is found acceptable, (2) the nature of explanation and (understood broadly) of causes is a metaphysical topic, and (3) that Aristotle is right (as I suspect he is) that the unity of the notion of cause is analogi-cal in character, then the general idea of cause will rest on its standard particularizations, and the particular ideas cannot be reached as specifications of an antecedent genus, for there is no such genus, In that case, final causes will be (so to speak) foundation members of the cause family, and it will be dubious whether their title as causes can be disputed.    Second, it seems very likely that the two approaches are in fact not distinct; for it seems plausible to suppose that explanations, if fully rational, must be systematic and so must be expressible in theories.    Conversely, it seems plausible to suppose that the function of theories is to explain, and so that whatever is susceptible to theoretical treatment is thereby explained.    Third, the most conspicuous difficulty about the approach which I have been tentatively espousing seems to me to be that we may be in danger of being given more than we want to receive; we are not, forexample, ready to regard methods of proof or the acceptability of logical principles as metaphysical matters and it is not clear how such things are to be excluded.     But perhaps we are in danger of falling victims to a confusion, Morality, as such, belongs to the province of ethics and does not belong to the province of metaphysics.     But, as Kant saw (and I agree with him), that does not preclude there being metaphysical questions which arise about morality.     In general, there may be a metaphysics of X without it being the case that X is a concept or item which belongs to metaphysics.     Equally, there may be metaphysical questions relating to proof or logical principles without it being the case that as such proof or logical principles belong to metaphysics. It will be fair to add, however, that no distinction has yet been provided, within the class of items about which there are metaphysical questions, between those which do and those which do not belong to metaphysics.    The next element in my attitude towards metaphysics to which I would like to draw attention is my strong sympathy for a constructivist approach.     The appeal of such an approach seems to be to lie essentially in the idea that if we operate with the aim of expanding some set of starting points, by means of regulated and fairly well-defined procedures, into a constructed edifice of considerable complexity, we have better prospects of obtaining the explanatory richness which we need than if, for example, we endeavour to represent the seeming wealth of the world of being as reducible to some favoured range of elements.     That is, of course, a rhetorical plea. but perhaps such pleas have their place.    But a constructivist methodology, if its title is taken seriously, plainly has its own difficulties.     Construction, as normally understood, requires one or more constructors; so far as a metaphysical construction is concerned, who does the constructing? *We"? But who are we and do we operate separately or conjointly, or in some other way? And when and where are the acts of construction performed, and how often?     These troublesome queries are reminiscent of differences which arose, I believe, among Kantian commentators, about whether Kant's threefold synthesis (perhaps a close relative of construction) is (or was) a datable operation or not. I am not aware that they arrived at a satisfactory solution. The problem becomes even more acute when we remember that some of the best candidates for the title of constructed entities, for example numbers, are supposed to be eternal, or at least timeless. How could such entities have construction dates?    Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn our eyes towardsthe authors of fiction,     My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798.     Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity.     We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.    Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character.     It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed.     As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place.     One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are notthe authors of fiction,     My next novel will have as its hero one Caspar Winebibber, a notorious English highwayman born (or so 1 shall say) in 1764 and hanged in 1798, thereby ceasing to exist long before sometime next year, when I create (or construct) him. This mind-boggling situation will be dissolved if we distinguish between two different occurrences; first, Caspar's birth (or death) which is dated to 1764 (or 1798), and second, my creation of Caspar, that is to say my making it in 1985 fictionally true that Caspar was born in 1764 and died in 1798. Applying this strategem to metaphysics, we may perhaps find it tolerable to suppose that a particular great mathematician should in 1968 make it true that (let us say) ultralunary numbers should exist timelessly or from and to eternity. We might even, should we so wish, introduce a 'depersonalized" (and "detemporalized') notion of construction; in which case we can say that in 1968 the great mathe. matician, by authenticated construction, not only constructed the timeless existence of ultralunary numbers but also thereby depersonalized and detemporalized construction of the timeless existence of ultra-lunary numbers, and also the depersonalized construction of the depersonalized construction of ... ultralunary numbers. In this way, we might be able, in one fell swoop, to safeguard the copyrights both of the mathematician and eternity.    Another extremely important aspect of my conception of metaphysical construction (creative metaphysical thinking) is that it is of its nature revisionary or gradualist in character. It is not just that, since metaphysics is a very difficult subject, the best way to proceed is to observe the success and failures of others and to try to build further advance upon their achievements. It is rather that there is no other way of proceeding but the way of gradualism. A particular bit of metaphysical construction is possible only on the basis of some prior material; which must itself either be the outcome of prior constructions, or perhaps be something original and unconstructed.     As I see it.  gradualism enters in in more than one place.     One point of entry relates to the degree of expertise on the theorist or investigator. In my view, It is incumbent upon those whom Aristotle would have called 'the wise' in metaphysics, as often elsewhere, to treat with respect and build upon the opinions and the practices of the many'; and any intellectualist indignation at the idea of professionals being hamstrung by amateurs will perhaps be seen as inappropriate when it is reflected that the amateurs are really (since personal identities may be regarded as irrele-vant) only ourselves (the professionals) at an earlier stage; there are nottwo parties, like Whigs and Tories, or nobles and the common people, but rather one family of speakers pursuing the life of reason at different stages of development; and the later stages of development depend upon the ealier ones.    Gradualism also comes into play with respect to theory develop-ment.     A characteristic aspect of what I think of as a constructivist approach towards theory development involves the appearance of what I call overlaps'.     It may be that a theory or theory-stage B, which is to be an extension of theory or theory-stage A, includes as part of itself linguistic or conceptual apparatus which provides us with a restatement of all or part of theory A, as one segment of the arithmetic of positive and negative integers provides us with a restatement of the arithmetic of natural numbers.     But while such an overlap may be needed to secure intelligibility for theory B, theory B would be pointless unless its expressive power transcended that of theory A, unless (that is to say) a further segment of theory B lay beyond the overlap. Gradualism sometimes appears on the scene in relation to stages exhibited by some feature attaching to the theory as a whole, but more often perhaps in relation to stages exemplified in some department of, or some category within, the theory. We can think of metaphysics as involving a developing sequence of metaphysical schemes; we can also locate developmental features within and between particular metaphysical categories.    Again, I regard such developmental features not as accidental but as essential to the prosecution of metaphysics.     One can only reach a proper understanding of metaphysical concepts like law or cause if one sees, for example, the functional analogy, and so the developmental connection, between natural laws and non-natural laws (like those of legality or morality). "How is such and such a range of uses of the word (the concept) x to be rationally generated?' is to my mind a type of question which we should continually be asking.    I may now revert to a question which appeared briefly on the scene a page or so ago.     Are we, if we lend a sympathetic ear to con-structivism, to think of the metaphysical world as divided into a constructed section and a primitive, original, unconstructed section? I will confess at once that I do not know the answer to this question.     The forthright contention that if there is a realm of constructs there has to be also a realm of non-constructs to provide the material upon which the earliest ventures in construction are to operate, has its appeal, and I have little doubt that I have been influenced by it.     But I am by no means sure that it is correct. I am led to this uncertainty initially by thefact that when I ask myself what classes of entities I would be happy to regard as original and unconstructed, I do not very readily come up with an answer. Certainly not common objects like tables and chairs; but would I feel better about stuffs like rock or hydrogen, or bits thereof? I do not know, but I am not moved towards any emphatic yes!' Part of my trouble is that there does not seem to me to be any good logical reason calling for a class of ultimate non-construets.     It seems to me quite on the cards that metaphysical theory, at least when it is formally set out, might consist in a package of what I will call ontological schemes in which categories of entities are constructively ordered, that all or most of the same categories may appear within two different schemes with different ordering, what is primitive in one scheme being non-primitive in the other, and that this might occur whether the ordering relations employed in the construction of the two schemes were the same or different. We would then have no role for a notion of absolute primitiveness.     All we would use would be the relative notion of primitiveness-with-respect-to-a-scheme. There might indeed be room for a concept of authentic or maximal reality: but the application of this concept would be divorced from any concept of primitiveness, relative or absolute, and would be governed by the availability of an argument, no doubt transcendental in character, showing that a given category is mandatory, that a place must be found for it in any admissible ontological scheme. I know of no grounds for rejecting ideas along these lines.    The complexities introduced by the possibility that there is no original, unconstructed, area of reality, together with a memory of the delicacy of treatment called for by the last of the objections to my view on the philosophy of language, suggest that debates about the foundations of metaphysics are likely to be peppered with allegations of circu-larity: and I suspect that this would be the view of any thoughtful student of metaphysics who gave serious attention to the methodology of his discipline.     Where are the first principles of First Philosophy to come from, if not from the operation, practised by the emblematic pelican, of lacerating its own breast. In the light of these considerations it seems to me to be of the utmost importance to get clear about the nature and forms of real or apparent circularity, and to distinguish those forms, if any, which are innocuous from those which are deadly.    To this end I would look for a list, which might not be all that different from the list provided by Aristotle, of different kinds, or interpretations, of the idea of priority with a view to deciding when the suppositionthat A is prior to B allow or disallows the possibility that B may also be prior to A, either in the same, or in some other, dimension of priority.    Relevant kinds of priority would perhaps include logical priority. definitional or conceptual priority, epistemic priority, and priority in respect of value. I will select two examples, both possibly of philosophical interest, where for differing m and n, it might be legitimate to suppose that the prioritym of A to B would not be a barrier to the priorityn of B to A.     It seems to me not implausible to hold that, in respect of one or another version of conceptual priority, the legal concept of right is prior to the moral concept of right: the moral concept is only understandable by reference to, and perhaps is even explicitly definable in terms of, the legal concept. But if that is so, we are perhaps not debarred from regarding the moral concept as valua-tionally prior to the legal concept; the range of application of the legal concept ought to be always determined by criteria which are couched in terms of the moral concept.     Again, it might be important to distinguish two kinds of conceptual priority, which might both apply to one and the same pair of items, though in different directions.     It might be, perhaps, that the properties of sense-data, like colours (and so sense-data themselves), are posterior in one sense to corresponding properties of material things, (and so to material things themselves);   properties of material things, perhaps, render the properties of sense-data intelligible by providing a paradigm for them.     But when it comes to the provision of a suitably motivated theory of a thing and their properties, the idea of making these definitionally explicable in terms of sense-data and their properties may not be ruled out by the holding of the aforementioned conceptual priority in the reverse direction.     It is perhaps reasonable to regard such fine distinction as indispensable if we are to succeed in the business of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.   In this connection it will be relevant for me to reveal that I once invented (though I did not establish its validity) a principle which I labelled as Bootstrap.     The principle laid down that when one is introducing the primitive concepts of a theory formulated in an object language, one has freedom to use any battery of concepts expressible in the meta-language, subject to the condition that counterparts of such concepts are subsequently definable or otherwise derivable in the object-language.     So the more economically one introduces the primitive object-language concepts, the less of a task one leaves oneself for the morrow.    I must now turn to a more direct consideration of the question of how a metaphysical principle is ultimately to be established.     A prime candidate is forthcoming, namely a special metaphysical type of argument, one that has been called by Kant and by various other philosophers since Kant a ‘transcendental’ argument.     Unfortunately it is by no means clear to me precisely what Kant, and still less what some other philosophers, regard as the essential character of such an argument.     Some, I suspect, have thought of a transcendental argument in favour of some thesis — or category of items — as being one which claims that if we reject the thesis or category in question, we shall have to give up something which we very much want to keep;     and the practice of some philosophers, including Kant, of hooking a transcendental argument to the possibility of some very central notion, such as experience or knowledge, or communication or conversation or (the existence of) language, perhaps lends some colour to this approach.     Grice’s view (and Grice’s view of Kant) takes a different tack.    One thing which seems to be left out in the treatments of a transcendental argument just mentioned is the idea that a Transcendental Argument involves the suggestion that something is being undermined by one who is sceptical about the conclusion which such an argument aims at establishing.     Another thing which is left out is any investigation of the notion of reason, or the notion of a rational being or person.    Precisely what remedy Grice should propose for these omissions is far from clear to Grice    Grice has to confess that his ideas in this region of the subject are still in a very rudimentary state.     But I will do the best I can.    I suspect that there is no single characterization of a Transcendental Argument which will accommodate all of the traditionally recognized specimens of the kind;     indeed, there seem to me to be at least three sorts of argument-pattern with good claims to be dignified with the title of Transcendental.    Strong — impossibility of a conversational move  weak — impossibility of an appropriate conversational move    One pattern fits Descartes's cogito argument, which Kant himself seems to have regarded as paradigmatic.     This argument may be represented as pointing to a thesis, namely his own existence, SVM  to which a real or pretended sceptic is thought of as expressing enmity, in the form of doubt;     and it seeks to show that the sceptic's procedure is self-destructive in that there is an irresoluble conflict between, on the one hand, what the sceptic is suggesting (that it is not the case that Descartes exists), and on the other hand the possession by Descartes’s act of suggesting, of the illocutionary character — being the expression of a doubt — which it not only has but must, on the account, be supposed by the sceptic to have.     It might, in this case, be legitimate to go on to say that the expression of doubt cannot be denied application, since without the capacity for the expression of doubt the exercise of reason will be impossible;     but while this addition might link this pattern with the two following patterns, it does not seem to add anything to the cogency of the argument.    Another pattern of argument would be designed for use against applications of what Grice might call 'epistemological nominalism';     that is against someone who proposes to admit ys (phenomenalist proposition) but not xs (noumenalist proposition? on the grounds that epistemic justification is available for ys phenomenalist proposition  but not for anything like xs, noumenalist proposition thing which supposedly go beyond ys;     Cf Grice Strawson Pears Metaphysics    we can, for example, allow sense-data but not material objects, if they are thought of as 'over and above' sense-data; we can allow particular events but not, except on some minimal interpretation, causal connections between events.     The pattern of argument under consideration would attempt to show that the sceptic's at first sight attractive caution is a false economy;     that the rejection of the 'over-and-above' entities is epistemically destructive of the entities with which the sceptic deems himself secure;     if a thing or a cause goes, a sense-datum and a datable event goes  too.     In some cases it might be possible to claim, on the basis of the lines of this pattern of argument, that not just the minimal categories, but, in general, the possibility of the exercise of reason will have to go.    Another pattern of argument might contend from the outset that if such-and-such a target of the sceptic is allowed to fall, something else would have to fall, which is a pre-condition of the exercise of reason;     it might be argued, for example, that some sceptical thesis would undermine freedom, which in turn is a pre-condition of any exercise of rationality whatsoever.  It is plain that arguments of this third type might differ from one another in respect of the particular pre-conditon of rationality which they brandished in the face of a possible sceptic.     But it is possible that they might differ in a more subtle respect.     Some less ambitious argument might threaten a local breakdown of reason, a breakdown in some particular area.     It might hold, for instance, that certain sceptical positions would preclude the possibility of the exercise of reason in a practical domain, such as conversation!     While such an argument may be expected to carry weight with some philosophers, a really doughty sceptic is liable to accept the threatened curtailment of rationality;     he may, as Hume and those who follow him have done, accept the virtual exclusion of reason — if not instrumental, or strategical, or utilitarian reason — from the area of action, or conversation.    The threat, however, may be of a total breakdown of the possibility of the exercise of reason; and here even the doughty sceptic might quail, on pain of losing his audience if he refuses to quail.    A very important feature of these varieties of 'transcendental argument (though Grice would prefer to abandon the adjective  'transcendental and just call them 'metaphysical arguments') may be their connection with practical argument.     In a broadened sense of 'practical', which would relate not just to action but also to the adoption of any attitude or stance which is within our rational control, we might think of all argument, even alethic argument, as practical perhaps with the practical tail-piece omitted;     alethic or evidential argument may be thought of as directing us to accept or believe some proposition on the grounds that it is certain, or likely, to be true.     But sometimes one may be lled to rational acceptance of a proposition (though perhaps not to belief in it) by a consideration other than the likelihood of its truth. Think Cicero’s disloyalty to Mark Antony!    This or that Thing that is a matters of faith of one sort of another —  like fidelity of one's wife, or the justice of England’s cause, us typically not accepted on evidential grounds — but as a demand imposed by loyalty, or patriotism;     and the argument produced by those who wish us to HAVE such a faith may well not be silent about this fact.     A Metaphysical or ontological argument and acceptance may exhibit a partial analogy with these examples of the acceptance of something as a matter of faith.     In the metaphysical or ontological region, too, the practical aspect of tag may come first;     we must accept such and such thesis or else face an intolerable breakdown of reason.    But in the case of this or that metaphysical argument the threatened calamity is such that the acceptance of the thesis which avoids it is invested with the alethic trappings of truth and evidential respectability.     Proof of the pudding comes from the NEED to eat it, not vice versa.     These thoughts will perhaps allay a discomfort which some philosophers, including himself, have felt with respect to this of that transcendental argument.     It has seemed to Grice, in at least some cases, that the most that such an argument can hope to show is that reason demands the acceptance, not the truth, of this or that thesis.    This feature would not be a defect if one can go on to say that this kind of demand for acceptance is sufficient to confer truth on what is to be accepted.    It is now time for Grice to turn to a consideration of the ways in which metaphysical or ontological construction of this or that thing is effected, and Gric shall attempt to sketch three of these: projection, category shift, and transubstantiation.    But before I do so, I should like to make one or two general remarks about such construction routines.     It is pretty obvious that metaphysical or ontological  construction needs to be disciplined,     this is not because without discipline it will be badly done, but because without discipline it will not be done at all.     The list of available routines determines what metaphysical or ontological construction is; so it is no accident that it employs this or that routine for the construction of a thing.    This reflection may help us to solve what has appeared to Grice, and to other philosophers such as Kneale or Keynes, as a difficult problem in the methodology of ontology and metaphysics, namely, how are we to distinguish metaphysical or ontological construction of a thing from the mere cursory discovery of an electrons or a quark?    What is the difference between hypostasis and hypothesis?    Tha answer may lie in the idea that in metaphysical or ontological construction, including hypostasis, we reach a thing or entity (or in some cases, perhaps, suppose them to be reachable) by application of the routines which are essential to metaphysical or ontological construction;     A scientist on the other hand merely hypothesizes.     we do not rely on these routines at least in the first instance; if at a later stage we shift our ground, that is a major theoretical change.    Grice shall first introduce two of these construction routines. Projection and Caregory Shift.     before Grice introduces the third of transubstantiation he shall need to bring in some further material, which will also be relevant to his task in other ways.     The first routine is one which I have discussed elsewhere, and which I call Humean Projection.    Something very like it is indeed described by Hume, when he talks about "the soul’s propensity to spread or cast itself on things';     but Hume seems to regard it as a source, or a product, of confusion and illusion which, perhaps, his human  nature renders unavoidable, rather than as an achievement of reason.     In Grice’s version of the routine of projection, one can distinguish different stages.     At this initial stage we have some initial concept, like that expressed by the word Wood’s 'or' or "not' — as in someone is not hearing a noise  or (to take a concept relevant to my present under-takings) the concept of value.     We can think of this or that  initial item as, at this stage, an intuitive and unclarified element in Grice’s conceptual vocabulary.     At a later stage we reach a specific psychological state, in the specification of which it is possible though maybe not necessary to use the name of the initial concept as an adverbial modifier,     we come to 'or-thinking' (or disjoining), "not-thinking' (or rejecting, or denying that someone is hearing a noise or   'value-thinking' (or valuing, or approving).     These specific states may be thought of bound up with, and indeed as generating, some set of responses to the appearance on the scene of instantiation of the initial concept.    At a later stage, reference to this specific state is replaced by a general (or more general) psychologial verb together with an operator corresponding to the particular specific stage which appears within the scope of the general verb, but is still allowed only maximal scope within the complement of the verb and cannot appear in this or that sub-clause.    So we find reference to "thinking p or q' or 'thinking it valuable to learn Greek'.     At a later stage, the restriction imposed by the demand that the operators at this stage should be scope-dominant within the complement of the accompanying verb is removed;     there is no limitation on the appearance of the operation in this or that subordinate clause.    With regard to this routine of construction Grice would make a few observations:    The employment of this routine may be expected to deliver for us, as its end-result, a concepts (in something like a Fregean sense — or SINN) rather than a thing.     To generate a thing we must look to other routines.    The provision, at a later stage, of full syntactico-semantical freedom for the operator which correspond to the initial concept is possible only via the provision of truth-conditions, or of some different but analogous valuation, for statements within which the operators appear.     Only thus can the permissible complexities be made intelligible.    Because of this, the difference between these stages is apparent rather than real.     The latter  stage provides only a notational variant of the former stage, at least unless a later stage is also reached.    It is important to recognize that the development, in a given case, of the routine of projection must not be merely formal or arbitrary.     The invocation of a subsequent stage must be exhibited as having some point or purpose, as (for example) enabling us to account for something which needs to be accounted for.    Subject to these provisos, application of this routine of construction to our initial concept (putting it through the mangle') does furnish one with an ontological *reconstruction* of this or that concept;     or, if the first stage is missing, we are given an ontological *construction* not reconstruction of a concept.    A different construction routine harks back to Aristotle's treatment of predication and the category, and Grice presents his version of it as briefly as he can.     Perhaps its most proper title would be Category Shift, — as in paradigm switch — but since I think of it as primarily useful for introducing this or that subject of discourse of conversation, by a procedure reminiscent of the operation of nominalization, Grice might also refer to it as subjectification.    Given a class of this or that primary subject of discourse or conversation, namely, a substance such as Bunbury — he is in the next room —, there are a number of this or that ‘slot’ — this or other category — which predicates of this or that substantia prima like Unbury of this or that primary subject may fit;   One slot is substance itself (substantia seconda, secondary substance), in which case the PREDICATION  is intra-categorial or SUB-categorial and essential — Bunbury is an Englishman —     Theee are other categories into which the predicate assigned in non-essential or accidental PREDICATION hazzing may fall.    The catalogue, table, or list of these would resemble Aristotle's of Kant’s list of the category of quality affirmation negation infinity, the category of quantity, totality partiality infinity the category of relation categorial disjunctive conditional and the category of modus necessary possible contingent.    It might be, however, that the members of Grice’s list, perhaps unlike that of Aristotle, or Kant, or Kantotle, would not be fully co-ordinate:     the development of the list might require not one blow but a succession of blows;     we might for example have to develop first the category of arbitrary.     It has to be properly motivated;     if it is not, perhaps it fails to quantitive and non-quantitative attribute (the category of quality), or again the category of event before the subordinate category of action.    Now, though it is to be the primary subjects of PREDICATION, this or that substance will not be the only subject.    A Derivatives of, or a conversions of, an item which start life (so to speak) as a PREDICABLE, in one NON-SUBSTANTIAL slot or another, of this of that substance, may themselves come to occupy the first slot;     Disinterestedness doesn’t exist    they will be a qualitiy of, or a quantity of, or a relation of, or a modus of, a particular type or token of this or that substantial:     not being qualities or quantities of substances, they will not be qualities or quantities *simpliciter*.    It is Grice’s suspicion that only for a PRIMARY SUBSTANCE substantia prima as a subject, are all the slots filled by PREDICABLE items.    Some of this or that substantial which which is not a substance may derive from a plurality of items from this or that DIFFERENT original CATEGORY;   An action, even concerted like conversation, or an event, for example, might be a complex substantial deriving from a subject or substance, a predicate or attribute, and a time or occasion of utterance.    Grice’s position with regard to thus routine of metaphysical construction runs parallel to his position with regard to projection, in that here too Grice holds strongly to the opinion that the introduction of a CATEGORY of this or that entitiy must not be blindly arbitrary.     It has to be visually arbitrary, i. e. properly motivated;     if it is not properly motivated, perhaps it fails to be a case of entity-construction altogether, and becomes merely a way of speaking — which this or that Italian rhetorician would call allegory or metaphor — you’re the cream in my coffee.    What sort of motivation is called for is not immediately clear;     one strong candidate would be the possibility of opening up this or that secondary application for this or that existing primary mode of explanation:     it may be, for example, that the *substantial* introduction of this of that abstract entitiy, like a property or predicate — a quality, a quantity, a relation, a modus, makes possible the application to what Kneale calls secondary induction' (Probability and Induction, p. 104 for example), the principle at work in boring primary induction.     But it is not only the sort but the degree of motivation which is in question.     When Grice discusses metaphysical argument, it seems that to achieve reality the acceptance of a CATEGORY of entities has to be mandatory:   whereas the recent discussion has suggested that, apart from conformity to construction-routines, all that is required is that the acceptance be well-motivated?     Which view would be correct?     Or is it that we can tolerate a division of constructed reality into two segments, with admission requirements of differing degrees of stringency?     Or is there just one sort of admission requirement, which in some cases is over-fulfilled?    Before characterizing a construction routine Grice must say a brief word about the essential propertiy and about finality, two Aristotelian ideas which at least until recently have been pretty unpopular — especially after Anglo-Jewish Ayer attacked Oxford — but for which Gricd wants to find or restore the metaphysical room they once held at Oxford and still do at Cambridge due to Keynes.    In its logical dress, an essential property would appear either as a property which is constitutive or definitive of a given, usually subject or substantial, kind; or as an individuating property of this or that individual member of a kind, a property such that if an ‘individual’ or specimen were to lose it, it would lose its identity, its existence, and indeed itself.     It is clear that if a property is one of the properties which define a kind, it is also an individuating property of each individual member of a kind, a property such that if an individual or specimen were to lose it, it would cease to belong to the kind and so cease to exist.    A more cautious formulation would be required if, as the construction routine might require, we subscribed to Grice’s view of chronologically-relative identity.     Whether the converse holds seems to depend on whether we regard spatio- temporal continuity or continuancy as Wiggins did  as a definitive property for a subject substantial kinds, indeed for any subject of substantial kind.    But there is another more metaphysical dress which an essential property may wear.     An essential property or predicate may appear as a Keynesian generator-property,  *core' propertiy of a substantive kind or genus of subject item which co-operate to explain the phenomenal and dispositional feature of this or that member of that kind.     Keynes observes that induction is only rational if there is a finite a priori probability in favour of what he calls the Hypothesis of Limited Independent Variety; i.e., that all properties arise out of a finite number of this or that generator property.     If this is to be taken literally, ie., "property" interpreted in the wide sense = propositional function of one variable, it is clearly equivalent to the hypothesis that the classes of things of the type considered are finite in number, since equivalent properties define the same class and on the hypothesis any property is equivalent to one of a finite number of properties (i.e., this or that generator propertiy and negations conjunctions and alternations of them).   And this hypothesis that the classes of things are finite in number, since, if n be the number of things, 2" is the number of classes of things; so that the Hypothesis of Limited Variety is simply equivalent to the contradictory of the Axiom of Infinity.    On the face of it, this is a quite different approach;     but on reflection Grice finds myself wondering whether the difference is as large as it might at first appear.     Perhaps at least at the level of a type of theorizing which is not too sophisticated and mathematicized, as maybe these days the physical sciences are,a logically essential property and the fundamentally explanatory property of a substantial kind come together;     A subject or substance is essentially (in the logical' sense) a thing — res — such that in circumstances C it manifests feature F, where the gap-signs are replaced in such a way as to display the most basic law of the theory.      So perhaps, at this level of theory, a subject or substance requires a theory to give expression to the nature of that substance or subject, and a theory — say, of inter-subjectivity — requires a substance or subject to govern that theory.    Finality, particularly detached finality — a function or a purpose which does not require sanction from purposers or users — is an even more despised notion than that of an essential property, especially if it is supposed to be explanatory, to provide us with this or that final cause.    Grice, qua Oxonian of the Old Guard — pre-Anglo-Jewish Ayer — is somewhat puzzled by this contempt for detached finality, as if it were an unwanted residue of an officially obsolete complex of this or that superstition and priestcraft.     That, in Grice’s view, derached finslity is certainly not.    The concepts (Aristotelian ta legomena) and vocabulary (Austinian ta legomena) of finality, operating as if they are detached, are part and parcel of our standard procedure for recognizing and describing what goes on around us.     This point is forcibly illustrated by Golding in The Inheritors.     There Golding describes, borrowing from the myth of Tantalus, as seen through the eyes of a stone-age metaphysical couple who do not understand at all what they are seeing, a scene in which (I am told) their child is cooked and eaten by iron-age people.     In the description, functional terms are eschewed, with the result that the incomprehension of the stone-age metaphysical couple is vividly shared by the reader.     Now an end, finis, métier or finality is sometimes active rather than passive;     the finality of a thing then consists in what the thing is supposed or meant by the Genitor to do rather than in what the thing is supposed to suffer, have done to it, or have done with it.     Sometimes the finality of a thing such as Howard is not dependent on some ulterior end, goal, finis, or métier which the thing is envisaged as realizing.     Sometimes the finality — finis — of a thing — res — is not imposed or dictated by a will or interest extraneous or extrinsic to the thing.     And sometimes the finality of a thing — res — is not subordinate to the finality of some whole TOTUM — of which the thing is a component or PARS —, as the finality of one of Grice’s two eyes or a foot may be subordinate to the finality of the organism to which that eye or foot belongs. — see or walk.    When the finality of a thing satisfies all of these overlapping conditions and exclusions, I shall call it a case of autonomous finality; and I shall also on occasion call it a métier.     Grice will here remark that we should be careful to distinguish this kind of autonomous or extrindically weighed finality, which may attach to a subject or a substance, from another kind of finality which seemingly will not be autonomous — but is only intrinsically-weighed — and which will attach to the conception of kinds or genera of substance or of this or that other constructed entity.    The latter sort of finality will represent the point or purpose, from the point of view of the metaphysical theorist, of bringing into play, in a particular case, a certain sort of metaphysical manœuvre.     It is this latter kind of finality which Grice has been supposing to be a requirement for the legitimate deployment of a construction routine.    Now it is Grice’s position that what ge might call Howard’s end  goal, finis, or finality-features, at least if they consist in the possession of autonomous or extrinsically-weighed finality, may find a place as an essential property or predicate of at least some kinds of substances of subject — for example, a tiger or a person.     This or that subject or substance may be essentially 'for doing such and such'.     Indeed Grice suspects we might go further than this, and suppose that autonomous or extrinsic finis, goal  métier, or finality not merely can fall within a substance’s essential nature, but, indeed, if it attaches to a substance at all must belong to its essential nature.     Tigers tigerise.    If a substance has a certain end, finis, or métier, it does not have to seek the fulfilment of that métier, but it does have to be equipped with the MOTIVE alla Pritchard or motivation to fulfil the métier should it choose to follow that motive or motivation.     And since autonomous finality is independent of any ulterior end, métier or FINIS, that motivation must consist in respect for the idea that to fulfil the métier would be in line with its own essential nature.     But however that may be, once we have this or that end FINIS or finality feature enrolled as an essential HAZZING property of a kind of substance, we have a starting point for the generation of a theory, or system of conduct, for that kind or GENUS of substance, which would be analogous to the descriptive theory which can be developed on the basis of a substance's this or that essential descriptive property.    Grice now gives a brief characterization of another metaphysical construction routine, Trans-Substantiation.    Let us suppose that the Genitor sanctions the appearance of a biological type called a HOMO, into which, considerate as always, he has built an attribute, or complex of attributes, called REASON — of RATIONALITAS —, perhaps on the grounds that this would greatly assist any possessor of it in coping speedily and resourcefully with this or that survival problem posed by a wide range of environments, which each HOMO would thus be in a position to enter and to maintain himself in.     But, perhaps unwittingly, the Genitof will thereby have created a breed of potential metaphysicians;    and what they do is (so to speak) to reconstitute themselves from a mere HOMO to a full PERSON.    They do not alter the totality of attributes which each of them as a human or HOMO possesses — hazzes — but they re-distribute them.    An attribute, predicate, or property which they possess HAZZES essentially — digestion, excretion — as a human become a predicate, attribute, or property, which, as a substance of a new psychological type, A PERSON, the person possesses accidentally.    On the other hand, a predicate, attribute, differentia, or property or properties called REASON, which attaches only accidentally to homo, pace the Lycaeum, attaches essentially to a PERSON.     While each human is standardly coincident with a particular PERSON — cf. Locke —  (and is indeed, perhaps, identical with that person over a time — cf. REID), logic is insufficient to guarantee that there will not come a time when that human and that PERSON are no longer identical —  when one of them, perhaps, but not the other, has ceased to exist.     But though logic is insufficient, it may be that this or that other theory will remedy the deficiency.     Why, otherwise than from a taste for mischief, the humans (or persons) should have wanted to bring off this feat of transubstantiation will have to be left open until my final section, which I have now reached.    Grice’s final undertaking will be an attempt to sketch a way of providing metaphysical backing, drawn from the material which he has been presenting, for a reasonably unimpoverished theory of value — what Oxonians of Grice’s scholar days used to call Axiology — after Hartmann — Barnes, Duncan-Jones, and others at Corpus.    Grice shall endeavour to produce an account which is fairly well-ordered, even though it may at the same time be one which bristles with this or that unsolved problem or this or that unformulated supporting argument.     What I have to offer will be close to and I hope compatible with, though certainly not precisely the same as the content of my third Carus Lecture (original version, 1983). Though it lends an ear to several other voices from our philosophical heritage, it may be thought of as being, in the main, a representation of the position of that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle, It involves six stages.    The details of the logic of this or that value-concept and of its possible relativisation are unfortunately visible only through thick intellectual smog;     so Grice shall have to help myself to what, at the moment at least, Grice regards as two distinct dichotomies.     First, there is a dichotomy between a value-concept which is relativized to some focus of relativization, and that which is not so relativized, which is absolute.     If we address ourselves to the concept being of value there are perhaps two possible primary foci of relativization; that of end or potential end, that for which something may be of value, as bicarbonate of soda may be of value for health (or my taking it of value for my health), or dumbbells may be of value (useful) for bulging the biceps; and that of beneficiary or potential beneficiary, the person (or other sort of item) to whom (or to which) something may be of value, as the possession of a typewriter is of value to some philosophers but not to me, since I do not type.     With regard to this dichotomy Grice is inclined to accept the following theses.    First, the presence in GRICE of a concern for the focus of relativization is what is needed to give the value-concept a "bite" on GRICE,  that is to say, to ensure that the application of the value-concept to Grice does, or should, carry weight for Grice.    Only if Grice cares for his aunt can Grice be expected to care about what is of value to her, such as her house and garden.     Second, the fact that a RELAT-ivised value-concept, through a de facto or de jure concern on Grice’s part for the focus of relativization, engages Grice does not imply that the original RELAT-ivisation has been cancelled, or rendered absolute.     If Grice’s concern for your health stimulates in Grice a vivid awareness of the value to you of your medication, or the incumbency upon you to take your daily doses, that value and that incumbency are still RELAT-ivised to your health.    Without a concern on your part for your health, such claims will leave you cold.    The second dichotomy, which should be carefully distinguished from the first, lies between those cases in which a value-concept, which may be either relativized or absolute, attaches originally, or directly, to a given bearer, and those in which the attachment is indirect and is the outcome of the presence of a *transmitting* transitive relation which links the current bearer with an original bearer, with or without the aid of an intervening sequence of 'descendants'.     In the case of the transmission or transition of a relativized value-concept, the transmitting of transitive relation may be the same as, or may be different from, the RELAT-ion which is embodied in the RELAT-ivisation.    The foregoing characterization would allow absolute value to attach originally or directly to ‘do not say what you believe to be false’ or promise-keeping or to GRICE’s keeping a promise, and to attach, indirectly or by transmission, to GRICE’s digging your garden for you, should that be something which Grice has promised to do;     it would also allow the relativized value-concept of value for health to attach directly to medical care and, indirectly or by transmission, to the payment of doctor's bills — an example in which the transmitting relation and the relativising relation are one and the same.    The second stage of this metaphysical defence of the authenticity of the conception of value will involve a concession and a contention.    It will be conceded that if the only conception of value available to us were that of relativized value, the notion of an END or GOAL or métier or finality would be in a certain sense *dispensable*, or eliminable via reduction, and further, that, if the notion of finality is denied authenticity, so must the notion of value be denied authenticity.    A certain region of ostensible finality, which is sufficient to provide for the admissibility of an attributions of relativised value, is mechanistically substitutable'; that is to say, by means of reliance on the resources of cybernetics, and on the fact that the non-pursuit of this or that goal such as survival and reproduction is apt to bring to an end the supply of potential pursuers, some ostensibly final explanation is replaceable by, or reinterpretable as, or reduced to, an explanation of a sort congenial to this or that mechanicist philosopher.    But, if the concept of value is to be authentic and not merely 'Pickwickian’ in character, it is required that it be supported by a kind of END, métier, or finality which extends beyond any overlap with mechanistically-substitutable finality;     autonomous finality will be demanded and a mechanist cannot accommodate and must deny this kind of finality; and so he is committed to a denial of absolute value.    That metaphysical house-room be found for the notion of absolute value is a rational demand.     To say this is not directly to offer reason to believe in the acceptability of the notion, though it makes a move in that direction.     It is, rather, to say that there is good reason for wanting it to be accepted that the notion is acceptable.     There might be more than one kind of rational ground for this desire.     It might be that we FEEL a need to appeal to absolute value, in order to justify some of our beliefs and attributes with regard to relativized value, to maintain (for example) that it is of absolute value that everyone should pursue, within certain limits, what he regards as being of value to himself, or that one should pay his creditors, or do not say what he believes to be false.    Or again, it might be that, by this or that Leibnizian standard for evaluating possible worlds, a world which contains absolute value, on the assumption that its regulation requires this or that relatively simple principle, is richer and so better than a flat world which does not.    But, granted that there is a rational demand for absolute value, one can then perhaps argue that within whatever limit is imposed by a metaphysical construction already made, we are free to rig our metaphysics in such a way as to legitimise the conception of absolute value;     what it is proper to accept to be accepted may depend in part on what one would like to be accepted.     Perhaps part of the Kantian notion of freedom, a dignity which as a rational being a HUMAN enjoys, is the freedom not merely to play the metaphysical game but, within the limits of reason, to fix its rules as well.     In any case, a trouble-free metaphysical story which will safeguard the credentials of absolute value is to be accepted should it be possible to devise one.     Grice has some hopes that the methodology at work here might link up with Grice’s ideas about the practical character of metaphysical argument.    On the assumption that the operation of Trans-Substantiation has been appropriately carried through, a class of this or that biological creature has been 'invented' into a class of this or that psychological substance, namely this or that PERSON, who possess as part of the essential nature a certain métier or autonomous finality consisting in the exercise, or a certain sort of exercise, of REASON, and who has only to recognize and respect a certain law of their nature, in order to display in favourable circumstances the capacity to realise that métier.     The degree to which the PERSON fulfils the métier will constitute the PERSON a good person (good qua' person); and while the reference to the substantial kind of a person undoubtedly introduces a restriction or qualification, it is not clear (if it matters) that this restriction is a mode of relativization.    Once the concept of value-qua-member-of-a-kind has been set up for a class of this or that substance, the way is opened for the appearance of a transmitting relationship which will extend the application of value-in-a-kind to this or that suitably qualified NON-SUBSTANTIAL aspect if members of a kind, such as this or that action, — or inter-action, like conversation qua rational cooperation, and characteristies.     While it cannot be assumed that this or that PERSON will be the only original instance of value-in-a-kind, it seems plausible to suggest that whatever other original instance there may be will be far less fruitful sources of such extension, particularly if a prime mode of extension will be by the operation of Projection.     It seems plausible to suppose that a specially fruitful way of extending the range of absolute value might be an application or adaptation of the routine of Projection, whereby such value is accorded, in the style of the Lycaeum to whatever would seem to possess such value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge.    And a duly accredited judge might be identifiable as a good PERSON operating in conditions of freedom.     Cats, adorable as they may be, will be less productive sources of such extension than this or that PERSON.    In the light of these reflections, and on the assumption that to reach the goal of securing the admissibility of the concept of absolute value we need a class of primary examples of an unqualified version of that concept, it would appear to be a rational procedure to allot to this or that PERSON as a substantial type not just absolute value qua members of their kind, but absolute value tout court, that is to say unqualified absolute value.    Such value could be attributed to the kind, in virtue of its potentialities, and to selected individual members of the kind, in virtue of their achievements.    Such a defence of absolute value is of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems.     Grice does not find this thought daunting.    If philosophy generated no problem it would be dead, because it would be finished.    And if philosophy recurrently regenerated the same old problem it would not be alive because it could never begin.     So those who still look to philosophy for this or that should pray that the supply of this or that problem never dries up.     H. P. Grice.  There is a familiar and, to many, very natural maneuvre which is of frequent occurrence in conceptual inquiries, whether of a philosophical or of a nophilosophical character.   It proceeds as follows:     one begins with the observation that a certain range of expressions E, in each of which is embedded a subordinate expression a—let us call this range E(a)—is such that its members would NOT be used in application to certain specimen situations, that their use would be odd or inappropriate or even would make no sense;     one then suggests that the relevant feature of such situations is that they fail to satisfy some condition C (which may be negative in character); and     one concludes that it is a characteristic of the concept expressed by a, a feature of the meaning or signification or significance or use of a, that E(a) is applicable only if C is satisfied.  Such a conclusion may be associated with one or more of the following more specific claims:     that the schema E(a) logically ENTAILS alla Moore C,     that it implies or presupposes C,     or that C is an applicability/appropriateness-condition (in a specially explained sense) for a and that a is misused unless C obtains.    Before mentioning suspect examples of this type of maneuver, Grice would like to make two general remarks.     First, if it is any part of one's philosophical concern, as it is of Grice’s, to give an accurate general account of the actual meaning, signification  or significance, of this or that expression in nontechnical discourse, one simply cannot afford to abandon this kind of maneuver altogether.     So there is an obvious need for a method (which may not, of course, be such as to constitute a clear-cut decision procedure) for distinguishing its legitimate from its illegitimate applications.     Second, various persons, including Grice himself, have pointed to this or that philosophical mistake which allegedly have arisen from an uncritical application of the maneuver;     indeed, the precept that one should be careful not to confuse meaning signification or significance and use is perhaps on the way toward being as handy a philosophical vade-mecum as once was the precept that one should be careful to identify them.     Though more sympathetic to the new precept than to the old, Grice is not concerned to campaign for or against either.    Grice’s primary aim is rather to determine how any such distinction between meaning, signification, of significance, and use is to be drawn, and where lie the limits of its philosophical utility.     Any serious attempt to achieve this aim will, Gricd thinks, involve a search for a systematic philosophical theory of language or conversation as rational cooperation, and Grice shall be forced to take some tottering steps in that direction.     Grice shall also endeavour to inter-weave, in the guise of illustrations, some discussions of topics relevant to the question of the relation between the apparatus of formal logic and ordinary language.    Some of you may regard some of the examples of the maneuver which Grice is about to mention as being representative of an outdated style of philosophy.     Grice does not think that one should be too quick to write off such a style.     In Grice’s eyes the most promising line of answer lies in building up a theory which will enable one to distinguish between the case in which an utterance is inappropriate because it is false or fails to be true, or more generally fails to correspond with the world in some favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for reasons of a different kind.     I see some hope of ordering the conversational phenomena on these lines.     But Grice does not regard it as certain that such a theory can be worked out, and I think that some of the philosophers in question were sceptical of just this outcome;     Grice thinks also that sometimes these philosophers were unimpressed by the need to attach special importance to such notions as that of truth.     So one might, in the end, be faced with the alternatives of either reverting to something like their theoretically unambitious style or giving up hope altogether of systematizing the conversational phenomena of natural discourse or conversation.     To Grice, neither alternative is very attractive.    Now for some suspect examples, many of which are likely to be familiar.    An example has achieved some notoriety.     In “The Concept of Mjnd,” Ryle maintains:    "In their most ordinary employment 'voluntary' and 'involuntary' are used, with a few minor elasticities, as adjectives applying to actions which ought NOT to be done.     We discuss whether someone's action was voluntary or not only when the action seems to have been his fault."     From this Ryle draws the conclusion that     “in ordinary use, then, it is absurd to discuss whether satisfactory, correct or admirable performances are voluntary or involuntary";     and he characterized the application of these adjectives to such performances as an "unwitting extension of the ordinary sense of "voluntary' and 'involuntary,' on the part of the philosophers.”    In “Defending common sense” - The Philosophical Review, Malcolm, an American, accuses Moore, a Cantabrian, of misusing the word "know" when he said that he knew that this was one human hand and that this was another human hand;     Malcolm claimed, Grice thinks, that an essential part of the concept "know" is the implication that an inquiry is under way.?     The Austrian philosopher Witters makes a similar protest against the philosopher's application of the word "know" to supposedly paradigmatic situations.    In “Remembering”, in Mjnd, The Australasian philosopher Benjamin, commenting on Broad, remarked:   "One could generate a sense of the verb  'remember' such that from the demonstration that one has not forgotten p, i.e. that one has produced or performed p, it would follow that one remembers p... Thus one could speak of Englishmen conversing or writing in English as 'remembering' words in the English language; of accountants doing accounts as 'remembering how to and one might murmur as one signs one's name 'I've remembered my name again? The absurd inappropriateness of these ex-amples, if 'remember' is understood in its usual sense, illustrates the opposition between the two senses."3     There is an analogy here with  "know": compare the oddity of     “The hotel clerk asked me what my name was, and fortunately I KNEW the answer.")    Further examples are to be found in the area of the philosophy of perception.   One is connected with the notion of "seeing ... as."     In Philosophical Investigations, Witters observed that one does not see a knife and fork as a knife and fork.     The idea behind this remark was not developed in the passage in which it occurred, but presumably the thought was that, if a pair of objects plainly are a knife and fork, then while it might be correct to speak of someone as seeing them as something different (perhaps as a leaf and a flower), it would always (except possibly in very special circumstances) be incorrect (false, out of or-der, devoid of sense) to speak of seeing an x as an x, or at least of seeing what is plainly an x as an x.     “Seeing... as," then, is seemingly represented as involving at least some element of some kind of imaginative construction or supplementation.    Another example which occurred to Grice in “Causal Theory of Perception," Aristotle Society Supplementary Volume (as to others before him) is that the old idea that perceiving a thing involves having (sensing) a sense-datum (or sense-data) might be made viable by our rejecting the supposition that a sense-datum statement reports the properties of entities of a special class, whose existence needs to be demonstrated by some form of the Argument from Illusion, or the identification of which requires a special set of instructions to be provided by a philosopher;     and by supposing, instead, that "sense-datum statement" is a class-name for statements of some such form as "* looks (feels, etc.) $ to A" or "it looks (feels, etc.) to A as if."s     Grice hopes by this means to rehabilitate a form of the view that the notion of perceiving a thing is to be analyzed in causal terms.     But Grice had to try to meet an objection, which Grice found to be frequently raised by those sympathetic to Wittgenstein, to the effect that for many cases of perceiving the required sense-datum statements are not available;     for when, for example, I see a plainly red object in ordinary daylight, to say "it looks red to me," far from being, as my theory required, the expression of a truth, would rather be an incorrect use of words.    According to such an objection, a feature of the meaning, signification, or significance of  of     "x looks é to A"     is that such a form of words is correctly used only if either it is false that x is , or there is some doubt (or it has been thought or it might be thought that there is some doubt) whether x is .    Another crop of examples is related in one way or another to action.    Trying.     Is it always correct, or only sometimes correct, to speak of a man who has done something as having eo ipso tried to do it?    Witters and others adopt the second view.     Their suggestion is that if, say, I now perform some totally unspectacular act, like scratching my head or putting my hand into my trouser pocket to get my handkerchief out, it would be inappropriate and incorrect to say that I tried to scratch my head or tried to put my hand into my pocket.     It would be similarly inappropriate to speak of me as not having tried to do each of these things.     From these considerations there emerges the idea that for "A tried to do x" to be correctly used, it is required either that A should not have done x (should have been prevented) or that the doing of x was something which presented A with some problems, was a matter of some difficulty.     But a little reflection suggests that this condition is too strong.     A doctor may tell a patient, whose leg has been damaged, to try to move his toes tomor-row, and the patient may agree to try; but neither is committed to holding that the patient will fail to move his toes or that it will be difficult for him to do so.     Moreover, someone else who has not been connected in any way with, or even was not at the time aware of, the damage to the patient's leg may correctly say, at a later date, "On the third day after the injury the patient tried to move his toes (when the plaster was removed), though whether he succeeded I do not know."     So to retain plausibility, the suggested condition must be weakened to allow for the appropriateness of "A tried to do x" when the speaker, or even someone connected in some way with the speaker, thinks or might think that A was or might have been prevented from doing x, or might have done x only with difficulty. (I am not, of course, maintaining that the meaning of "try" in fact includes such a condition.)    Carefully. It seems a plausible suggestion that part of what is required in order that A may be correctly said to have performed some operation (a calculation, the cooking of a meal) carefully is that A should have been receptive to (on alert for) circumstances in which the venture might go astray (fail to reach the desired outcome), and that he should manifest, in such circumstances, a disposition to take steps to maintain the course towards such an outcome.     Grice has heard it maintained by  Hart that such a condition as I have sketched is insufficient; that there is a further requirement, namely that the steps taken by the performer should be reasonable, individually and collectively.     The support for the addition of the supplementary condition lies in the fact (which I shall not dispute) that if, for example, a man driving down a normal road stops at every house entrance to make sure that no dog is about to issue from it at breakneck speed, we should not naturally describe him as "driving care-fully," nor would we naturally ascribe carefulness to a bank clerk who counted up the notes he was about to hand to a customer fifteen times.   The question is, of course, whether the natural reluctance to apply the adverb "carefully" in such circumstances is to be explained by the suggested meaning-restriction, or by something else, such as a feeling that, though "carefully" could be correctly applied, its application would fail to do justice to the mildly spectacular facts.     Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling examples in this area are those provided by Austin,  . "A Plea for Excuses," Philosophical Papers, ed. Urmson and Warnock, .particularly as he propounded a general thesis in relation to them.     The following quotations are extracts from the paragraph headed "No modification without aberration":     “When it is stated that X did A, there is a temptation to suppose that given some, indeed, perhaps an, expression modifying the verb we shall be entitled to insert either it or its opposite or negation in our statement: that is, we shall be entitled to ask, typically, 'Did X do A Mly or not Mly?' (e.g., 'Did X murder Y voluntarily or involuntarily?'), and to answer one or the other. Or as a minimum it is supposed that if X did A there must be at least one modifying expression that we could, justifiably and informatively, insert with the verb. In the great majority of cases of the great majority of verbs ('murder' is perhaps not one of the majority) such suppositions are quite unjustified.     The natural economy of language dictates that for the standard case covered by any normal verb... (e.g. 'eat, 'kick, or 'croquet') ... no modifying expression is required or even permissible.     Only if we do the action named in some special way or circumstances is a modifying expression called for, or even in order ... It is bedtime, I am alone, I yawn; but I do not yawn involuntarily (or voluntarily!) nor yet deliberately.    To yawn in any such peculiar way is just not to just yawn."    The suggested general thesis is then, roughly, that for most action-verbs the admissibility of a modifying expression rests on the action described being a nonstandard case of the kind of action which the verb designates or ‘signifies.’    Examples involve an area of special interest to me, namely that of expressions which are candidates for being natural analogues to logical constants and which may, or may not, "diverge" in meaning from the related constants (considered as elements in a classical logic, standardly interpreted).     It has, for example, been suggested that because it would be incorrect or inappropriate to say "He got into bed and took off his trousers" of a man who first took off his trousers and then got into bed, it is part of the meaning, or part of one meaning, of "and" to convey temporal succession.     The fact that it would be inappropriate to say "My wife is either in Oxford or in London" when I know perfectly well that she is in Oxford has led to the idea that it is part of the meaning of "or" (or of "either... or") to convey that the speaker is ignorant of the truth-values of the particular disjuncts.     Again, in Introduction to Logical Theory,  Strawson maintained that, while "if p , g" entails "p→ q," the reverse entailment does not hold; and he characterized a primary or standard use of "if" as follows:     “each hypothetical statement made by this use of 'if' is acceptable (true, reasonable) if the antecedent statement, if made or accepted, would in the circumstances be a good ground or reason for accepting the consequent statement; and the making of the hypothetical statement carries the implication either of uncertainty about, or of disbelief in, the fulfillment of both antecedent and consequent."     Grice’s final group of suspect examples involves a latter-day philosophical taste for representing words, which have formerly, and in some cases naturally, been taken to have, primarily or even exclu-sively, a descriptive function, as being, rather, pseudo-descriptive devices for the performance of some speech-act, or some member of a range of speech-acts.     Noticing that it would, for example, be unnatural to say "It is true that it is raining" when one merely wished to inform someone about the state of the weather or to answer a query on this matter, Strawson advocates "Truth," Analysis the view (later to be considerably modified) that the function (and therefore presumably the meaning signification or significance) of the word "true" is to be explained by pointing out that to say "it is true that p" is not just to assert that p but also to endorse, confirm, concede, or agree to its being the case that p."     Somewhat analogous theses, though less obviously based on cases of alleged conversational inappropriateness, have been, at one time or another, advanced with regard to such words as     "know" ("To say 'I know' is to give one's word, to give a guarantee")   and     "good" ("To say that something is 'good" is to recommend it").     H. P. Grice.  The issue with which Grice has been mainly concerned in ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ may be thought rather a fine point.    But it certainly is NOT an *isolated* point.  There are several philosophical theses, or dicta, which Grice would think may need to be examined - in order to see whether or not these philosophical theses or dicta are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which Grice has been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind.     Examples which occur to Grice are the following:     It is not the case that you can see a knife as a knife; you only may see what is NOT a knife as a knife.     When he says he KNOWS that the objects before him are human hands, Moore is guilty of misusing the verb "know".     For an occurrence or event to be properly said to have a CAUSE, it must be something abnormal — or unusual.     For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is RESPONSIBLE, it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned.     It is not the case that what is actual is also possible.    It is not the case that what is KNOWN by me to be the case is also BELIEVED by me to be the case.     Grice has no doubt that there will be other candidates besides the six which Grice has mentioned.    Grice must emphasize that he is not saying that all these examples are importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all Grice knows, they may be.     To put the matter more generally,     the position adopted by Grice’s objector seems to Grice to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing — but notably ordinary-language philosophy, as Austin calls it.    Grice is not condemning this kind of manoeuvre.    Grice is merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts.     Before we rush ahead to exploit this or that conversational nuances — of conversational significance —  which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of conversational nuances of conversational significance they are.     H. P. Grice.  The main object of Grice’s lecture is to explore the possibility of providing some kind of metaphysical or ontological account of, and positive backing for, the notion of value — the axiological.    Tto begin it, Grice thinks it would be appropriate for Grice to voice one or two methodological reflections.   But some have told you a story about Grice, which has indeed the ring of truth;     so Grice shall pause to tell you another story which I hope will ring equally true.     When Grice was still quite a little nipper, his mother gave me a china beer-mug, which Grice liked enormously;   in fact Grice used it not only to drink beer from, but for a whole lot of other purposes, like carrying gasoline (or as we used to call it, 'petrol') to a neighbour's house when Grice wanted to set the place on fire.     One day Grice dropped it, and there it lay in fragments.     Just at that point Grice’s mother appeared on the scene, and reproached Grice for destroying the mug which she had given Grice and which Grice so dearly loved.   Grice said to her, 'Mother [in my family we used to address one another in somewhat formal style], mother, I haven't destroyed anything; I have only rearranged it a little.     She, being too wise, and insufficiently nimble, to take me on in dialectical jousting, looked at Grice sadly and said,  'You will have to learn as you grow older.'     This encounter, it now seems to Grice, shaped Grice’s later philosophical life;     it seems that Grice did, indeed, learn in the end.    For first, the metaphysical programme which Grice shall be seeking to follow will be a constructivist programme and not a reductionist programme.     The procedure which Grice envisages, if carried out in full, would involve beginning with certain elements which would have a claim to be thought of as metaphysically or ontologically primary, and then to build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical or ontological theory or concatenation of theories.     It would be no part of Grice’s plan to contend that what we end up with is really only such and suches, or that talking about what my enterprises produce is really only a compressed way of talking about the primary materials, or indeed to make any other claim of that relatively familiar kind.     Grice suspects that many of those who have thought of themselves, like Carnap, as engaged in a programme of construction are really reductionists in spirit and at heart;     they would like to be able to show that the multifarious world to which we belong reduces in the end to a host of complexes of simple ingredients.     That is not Grice’s programme at all;     Grice does not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware;     Grice hopes to preserve it in all its richness.     Grice would seek, rather, to understand the metaphysical or ontological processes by which one arrives at such richness from relatively simple points of departure.     Grice would not seek to exhibit anything as 'boiling down' to any complex of fundamental atoms.    In order to pursue a constructivist programme of the kind which Grice has in mind, Grice will need three things:     first, a set of metaphysical starting-points, things which are metaphysically primary;     second, a set of recognized construction routines or procedures, by means of which non-primary items are built up on the basis of more primary items;     and third, a theoretical motivation for proceeding from any given stage to a further stage, so that the mere possibility of applying the routines would not beitself enough to give one a new metaphysical layer;     one would have to have a justification for making that move; it would have to serve some purpose.    The way Grice imagines himself carrying out this programme in detail (on some day quite a bit longer than today) is roughly as follows.     First, I would start by trying to reach a full-dress characterization of what a theory is (an exercise in what I think of as theory-theory);     I would be hoping that the specification of what theorizing is would lead in a non-arbitrary way to the identification of some particular kind of theorizing (or theory) as being, relative to all other kinds of theorizing, primary and so deserving of the title of First Theory (or First Philosophy).     I would expect this primary theorizing to be recognizable as metaphysical theorizing, with the result that a specification of the character and content of metaphysics would be reached in a more systematic way than by just considering whether some suggested account of metaphysics succeeds in fitting our intuitive conception of that discipline.     The implementation of this kind of metaphysical programme would, I hope, lead one successively through a series of entities (entity-types), such as a series containing at one stage particulars, followed by continuants, followed by a specially privileged kind of continuants, namely SUBSTANTIA or Subject, substances, and so on.     Each newly introduced entity-type would carry with it a segment of theory which would supplement the body of theory already arrived at, and which would serve to exhibit the central character of the type or types of entity associated with it.    The application of these programmatic ideas to the determination of the conception of value would be achieved in the following way.     The notion of value, or of some specially important or fundamental kind of value, like absolute value, would be shown as occupying some indispensable position in the specification of some stage in this process of metaphysical evolution.     Such a metaphysical justification of the notion of value might perhaps be comparable to the result of appending, in a suitably integrated way, the Nicomachean Ethics as a concluding stage to the De Anima.     One would first set up a specification of a series of increasingly complex creatures; and one would then exhibit the notion of value as entering essentially into the theory attending the last and most complex type of creature appearing in that series.     The un-Carnapian character of my constructivism would perhaps be evidenced by my idea that to insist with respect to each stage in metaphysical development upon the need for theoretical justification might carry with it the thought that to omit such a stage would be to fail to do justice to some legitimate metaphysical demand    I propose to start today's extract from this metaphysical story at a point at which, to a previously generated stock of particulars which would include things which some, though not all, would be prepared to count as individual substances, there is added a sequence of increasingly complex items, which (as living things) would be thought of by some (perhaps by Aristotle) as the earliest items on the ascending metaphysical ladder to merit the title of substances proper.     Grice’s first metaphysical objective, at this stage of my unfolding story, would be to suggest a consideration of the not unappealing idea that the notion of living things presupposes, and cannot be understood without an understanding of, the notion(s) of purpose, finality, and final cause.     In Grice’s view this idea is not only appealing but correct;     I recognize, however, that there are persons with regrettable deflationary tendencies who would insist that while reference to the notions of finality or final cause may provide in many contexts a useful and illuminating manner of talking about living things, these notions are not to be taken seriously in the metaphysics of biology and are not required in a theoretical account of the nature of life and of living things.     A finalistic (or  "vitalistic" account of the nature of living things might take as a ruling idea (perhaps open to non-vitalists as well)that life consists (very roughly) in the possession of a no doubt interwoven set of capacities the fulfilment, in some degree, of each of which is required for the set of capacities, as a whole, to be retained; a sufficiently serious failure in respect of any one capacity will result in the currently irreversible loss of all the rest; and that would be, as one might say, death.     The notion of finality might be thought to be unavoidably embedded in the notion of life for more than one reason.     One reason would be that if it is in one way or another of the essence of living creatures that one has, instead of an indefinitely extended individual thing, an indefinitely long sequence of living things, each individual being produced by, and out of, predecessors in the sequence, then to avoid having individuals which are of outrageous bulk because they contain within themselves the actual bodies of all their descendants, it will be necessary to introduce the institutions of growth and maturity; and with these institutions will come finality, since the states reached in the course of growth and maturity will have to be states to which the creatures aspire and strive, though not necessarily in any conscious way.     Another way in which it might be suggested that the notion of finality has to enter will be that at least in a creature of any degree of complexity, the discharge of its vital functions will have to be effected by the operations of various organs or parts, or combinations of such; and each of these organs or parts will have, so to speak, its job to do, and indeed its status as a part (a working functional part, that is to say, and not merely a spatial piece) is determined by its being something which has such-and-such a job or function (eyes are things to see with, feet to walk on, and so forth); and these jobs or functions have to be distinguished by their relation to some feature of the organism as a whole, most obviously to such things as its continued existence.     The organism's continuance, though not ordin-arily, perhaps, called a function of the organism, will nevertheless be required as something which the organismstrives for, in order that we should be able to account for the nature of the parts as parts; it will be that thing, or one of the things, to which in their characteristic ways the parts are supposed to contribute. It is worth noting, with regard to the first of these reasons for the appearance of finality on the scene, that for the idea of actual containment of a creature within its forebears there is substituted the idea of potential containment, an idea which can be extended backwards (so to speak) without any attendant inflation of the bodies of ancestral creatures.    Perhaps I might at this point make two marginal comments on the scheme which I am proposing.     First, if Grice allows himself in discussing the notion of life to ascribe purpose or finality to creatures, parts of creatures, or operations of creatures, such purposes or finalities are to be thought of as detached from any purposers, from any creature or being, mundane or celestial, which consciously or unconsciously harbours that purpose or finality. If the walrus or the walrus's moustache has a purpose, that purpose, though it would be the purpose of the walrus, or of its moustache, would not be the walrus's purpose, its moustache's purpose, or even God's purpose.     A failure to appreciate this point has been, I think, responsible for some of the disrepute into which serious application, within the philosophy of biology, of the concept of finality has fallen.     Second, if one relies on finality as a source of explanation (if one does not, what is the point of appealing to it?), if indeed one wishes to use as modes of explanation all, or even more than one, of Aristotle's "Four Causes", one should not be taken to be supposing that there is a single form of request for explanation, a proper response to which will, from occasion to occasion, be now of this type and now of that type, and maybe sometimes of more than one type.     It is not that there would be just one kind of  "Why?" question with alternative and possibly at times even rival kinds of answer; there would be several kinds of  "Why?" question, different kinds of question being perhapslinked to categorially different kinds of candidates for explanation, and each kind calling for its own kind of  'cause', its own type of explanation.     And it might even be that, so far from being rivals, different types of 'cause' worked together, or one through another; it might be, for example, that the operation of final causes demanded and was only made possible by the operation, say, of efficient or material causes with respect to a suitably linked explicandum; the success of a "finality" explanation to a question asking why a certain organ is present in a certain kind of organism might depend upon the availability of a suitable "efficient cause" explanation of how that organ came to be present.    Nevertheless, these assuaging and anodyne representations are,  , I fear, unlikely to appease a dyed-in-the-wool  mechanist.     Such a one would be able to elicit from any moderately sensible vitalist an admission that the mere fact that the presence of a certain sort of feature or capacity would be advantageous to a certain type of creature offers no guarantee that the operation of efficient causes would in fact provide for the presence of that feature or capacity in that type of creature.     So a vitalist would have to admit that a "finality" explanation would be non-predictive in character; and at this point the mechanist can be more or less counted on to respond that a non-predictive explanation is not really an explanation at all.     While a mechanist might be prepared to allow that survival is a consequence (in part) of those features which, as one might say, render a type of creature fit to survive, and perhaps also allow that this consequence is a beneficial consequence, or pay-off, arising from the presence of those features, he would not be ready to concede that the creature comes to have those features in order that it should survive.     To refine the terms of this discussion a little: one might try to distinguish between the question why a certain teature is present, and the question why (or how) that feature comes to be present; the mechanistically minded philosopher might berepresented as doubting whether the first question is intelligible if it is supposed to be distinct from the second, and as being ready to maintain that if, atter all, the two questions are distinct and are both legitimate, the provision of an answer to the first cannot be held to require the existence of an answer to the second, and indeed is possible at all only given independent information that that feature has come to be present.    Furthermore, in respect of other areas where a vitalist (or finalist) is liable to invoke finality as a tool for explanation, the mechanist will say that one can quite adequately explain the phenomena which lead the vitalist to appeal to finality, without having recourse to such an appeal;     one will use a particular kind of explanation by efficient causes, one which deploys such cybernetic notions as negative feedback and homoeostasis;     as one mechanistic philosopher, Armstrong, suggests, people  will be like guided missiles.    At this the vitalist might argue that to demand the presence of biological explanation as embodying finalistic apparatus casts no disrespect on the capacity of "prior" sciences (such as physics and chemistry) in a certain sense to explain everything. In a certain sense I can explain why there are seventeen people in the market-place, if in respect of each person who is in the market-place I can explain why he is there, and I can also explain why anyone else who might have been in the market-place is in fact somewhere else.     But there is an understandable sense in which to do all that does not explain, or at least does not explain directly, why there are seventeen people in the market-place.     To fill the "explanation-gap", to explain not just indirectly but directly the presence of seventeen people in the market-place, to explain it qua being the presence of seventeen people in the market-place, I might have to introduce a new theory, perhaps some highly dubitable branch of social psychology; and I suspect that some scientific theories, like perhaps catastrophe-theory, havearisen in much this kind of way on the backs (so to speak) of perfectly adequate, though not omnipotent, pre-existing theories, in order to explain, in a stronger sense of  "explain"  ", things which are already explained in some  sense by existing theory.    To this, the mechanist might reply that there is (was) indeed good reason for us to strengthen our explanatory potentialities by adding to the science(s) of physics and chemistry the explanatory apparatus of biology, thus giving ourselves the power to explain directly rather than merely indirectly such phenomena as those of animal behaviour; but it does not follow from that that the apparatus brought to bear by biology should include any finalistic concepts or explanations; explanations given in biological terms are perfectly capable of being understood in cybernetic terms, without any appeal to concepts whose respectability is suspect or in question.    In response to this latest tiresome intervention by the mechanist, I now introduce a reference to something which is, I think, a central feature of the procedures leading to the development of a cumulative succession of theories or theory-stages, each of which is to contain its predecessor.  This is the appearance of what I will call overlaps.     In setting out some theory or theory-stage B, which is to succeed and include theory or theory-stage A, it may be that one introduces some theoretical apparatus which provides one with a redescription of a certain part of theory A.     I may, for instance, in developing arithmetic, introduce the concept of positive and negative integers; and if I were to restrict myself to that part of the domain of this 'new' concept which involves solely positive integers, I would have a class of formula each of which provides a redescription of what is said by a formula relating to natural numbers; and since the older way of talking (or writing) would be that much more economical, if it came to a fight the natural numbers would win; the innovation would be otiose, since theorems relating solely to positiveintegers would precisely mirror already available theorems about natural numbers.     But of course, to attend in a myopic or blinkered way only to positive integers would be to ignore the whole point of the introduction of the  'new' class of positive and negative integers, which as a whole provides for a larger domain than the domain of natural numbers for a single battery of arithmetical operations, and so for a larger range of specific arithmetical laws.   That is the ratio essendi of the newly introduced integers, to extend the range of these arithmetical opera-tions.     Somewhat similarly, if one paid attention only to examples of universal statements which related to finite classes of objects, one might reasonably suppose the expressions of universal statements to be equivalent to a conjunction of, or to be a 'compendium' of, a set of singular statements; and indeed, at times philosophers have been led by this idea, notably in the case of Mill.     But of course, at least part of the point of introducing universal statements is to get beyond the stage at which one is restricted to finite classes, and therefore beyond a stage at which one can regard universal statements as being simply compendia of singular statements.    In the present connection, one might suggest that discourse about detached finality might be regarded as belonging to a system which is an extension or enlargement of a system which confines itself to a discussion of causal connections (efficient or material), including the special kind of causal connections with which cybernetics is concerned; and that this being so, not only is it not surprising but it is positively required, for the extension to be successfully instituted, that finality should enjoy an overlap with some special form of causal connection, like that which is the stock-in-trade of cybernetics.   To test the relation between these two conceptual forms — finality and  cybernetical causal connection —, it will be necessary to see whether there is an area beyond the overlap, in which talk about finality is no longer mappable onto talk about causal connection; and the place where it seems to Grice that it would be natural to look for this divorce to occur, if it occurs at all, would be in the area to which attributions of absolute value belong, and in which talk about finality goes along with attributions of absolute value.     If one then denies, as Foot and others have done, that there is any metaphysical region in which absolute value is a lawful resident, one seems to be cutting oneself off, maybe not without good reason, from just that testing-ground which is needed to determine the conceptual relationship between finality and causal connection.     To this point Grice shall return.    As Grice is talking, in this lecture, about finality, of Cicero DE FINIBVS Grice is always referring to what he has been calling detached finality, that is, to this or that purpose which is detached from any purposer — a purpose which can exist without there being any conscious being who has, as his purpose, whatever the content of those purposes may be.     Now there are some distinctions in relation to finality which Grice wants to make.     First, it may be either an essential property IZZING of something — or an accidental property HAZZIZnG of it that it has a certain finality.     Grice’s conception of essential IZZING property is of a property which is a defining property of a certain sort or kind and also, at one and the same time, intimately bound up with the identity conditions for an entity of thing which belong to that kind. [    It might indeed be taken as a criterion of a kind's being a substantial kind that its defining properties should enter into the identity conditions for its members.    The essential propertiy of a thing is a property which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).    It is clear that the essential IZZING property of a sort are not to be identified with the necessary properties of that sort, the properties which things of that sort must have; for those properties whose presence is guaranteed by logical or metaphysical necessity, given the presence of the essential IZZING property,  would not thereby be constituted as an essential IZZING propertiy of the sort, that is, as properties which are constitutive of the sort.     Moreover, in the case of a sort of a living thing, a property which is essential to a sort might not be invariably present in every specimen of instance of the sort, and so might fail to be necessary properties of that sort.     This possibility, if it is realized, would arise from the fact that membership in a VITAL sort of category may be conferred not (or not merely) by character but by ancestry;     so a freakish or degenerate species or instance of such a sort or species might even lack some essential feature of the sort, provided that its parents or suitably proximate ancestors do exhibit that feature.    The link between the two strands in the idea of essential property, that of being definitive of a kind and that of constituting an identity condition for members of that kind, becomes eminently intelligible if one takes Aristotle's view that to BE and to BE a member of a certain kind — such as ascribed in praedicatio — are one and the same thing — with appropriate consequences about the multiplicity contained within the notion of being.    Now Grice’s idea, and Grice thinks also the idea of Aristotle, is that the range of the essential propertiy of this or that kind of thing would sometimes, or perhaps even always, include what Cicero called FINIS — cf Prichard — and Grice might call a property of finality - that is, a propertiy which consist in the possession of a certain detached finality.    A second distinction which Grice wants to make is between active or agentive  and passive finality, a distinction between what it is that, as it were, certain things are supposed to do, and (on the other hand) what it is that certain things are supposed to suffer, have done to them, have done with them, and such-like, including particularly uses to which they are supposed to be put.     One might, as a bit of jargon, label the active kind of property of finality as a métier — or role.     It would of course be possible, within the area of active finality, to allow for different versions of activity.    The activity of a tiger, for example, while legitimately so-called, might be, as one would be inclined to say, an activity different from the activity of a Homo sapiens who happens to be, as Grice was, a scholar of Corpus.    Grice’s idea would be that every sort of creature, and every specimen individual belonging to any such sort, must, in virtue of the fact that it is a sort of this or that living creature, or a sort of living creature, possess as an essential property an active finality.     To be a tiger, or to be a human being, is to possess as an essential property the capacity to tigerise, or the capacity to humanise, in whatever those things may be thought to consist.    Grice will now try to connect up the material which I have been very sketchily presenting, with the range or corpus of metaphysical ontological routines or operations which it will be proper for a philosopher to deploy in the course of what I would call the metaphysical evolution — logically developing series ala Joachim — of entities or types of entity.     One of these manoeuvres will be, Grice thinks, a manoeuvre which grice call Trans-Substantiation, as opposed to a mere Category Shift.    There might well be specifically variant forms which this operation might take.    The central idea behind TRANS-SUBSTANTIATON would be that you might have two entity-types — (substantia seconda A and substantia seconda B — ) such that it is perfectly possible for a particular instance of one type to share exactly the same property as a particular specimen or instance of another, for them to be in fact indiscernible — in Leibniz’s jargon.    The selection of this or that property — say The activity of REASONING — , however, from that total set which would be essential to a specinen or individual entity qua member of one substantial type substantia seconda A would not be the same selection as the selection which would be essential to it qua member of the second type substantia seconda B.    Therefore, it would be a possibility that something which at one time exhibited the essential property of both types substantia seconda A Homo sapiens and substantia seconda B PERSON should at a different time exhibit the essential property - the activity of reason — of only one of these types: substantia seconda B PERSON.    There will be an S, PERSON which existed both at time t, and at time tz, and an S, which existed at time t, when it was identical with the aforementioned S, HUMAN - Locke Homo sapiens     but at time t2 the S2 specimen Homo sapiens of human no longer exists and so of course is not then identical with the Sy. Person    It is this kind of mind-twister which lies at the heart of Hobbes's problem about the ship and the timber, and also lies at the centre of what Grice might call the Grice Geachian theory of time-relative identity, which would allow a thing x and a thing y to be identical at a certain time but to be not identical at a different time, when indeed one of the things may have ceased to exist.     The Execution of the manoeuvre of Transubstantiation would consist in taking a certain sort of substance Si, person to which a certain property or set of properties P would be essential, and then introducing a type of substance S2, human Homo sapiens an instance of which may indeed possess property or properties P, but if it does, does not possess them essentially.     What will be essential to S will be some other set of properties P', properties which even might ATTACH, though not essentially, hazzing, to some, or even to all, instances of S,.     Grice is not sure what examples of this manoeuvre are to be found     But the one which Grice has it in mind to make use of is one in which the manoeuvre is employed to erect, on the basis of the substance-type human (Locke) being, or Homo sapiens, afurther substance-type: a person.     It is imperative at this point to remember that the general principles of entity-construction, which I adumbrated at the start of this lecture, will dictate that if we are to suppose the manoeuvre to be executed in order to generate, in this way, the substance-type PERSON, we must be able to specify an adequate theoretical motivation for the enterprise in which the manoeuvre is employed   The time has now come to consider the introduction, into a sequence of substantial types being designed by the philosopher, of the attribute of REASONING, which Grice shall take, when he comes to it, as consisting, in the first instance, of a concern on the part of the creature which has it that its acceptances, and perhaps - more generally —  its psychological attitudes which belong to some specifiable particular class should be well grounded, based on this of that reason, or (getting closer to the notion of value) VALIDATED;     a concern, that is, on the part of the reason-seeker that the attitudes, positions, and acceptances which he (voluntarily) takes up should have attached to them this or that certificate of value of some appropriate kind.     The creature's reasoning will consist in the having of this concern together with a capacity, or faculty, to echo Wolff, to this or that degree, to give effect to that concern.     It will be convenient to consider the introduction of this RATIO into a metaphysical scheme in terms of the idea of "construction by a genitor" which I used in an earlier essay?     I will ask first why the genitor should be drawn at all towards the idea of adding RATIO to any of his sequence of constructed creatures.    The answer to that question might be that what the Genitor is engaged in constructing are the essential and non-essential features of a sequence of biological types which have to cope with the world and maintain themselves in being, and that a certain range of the exercises of RATIO would have biological utility, would improve the chances of a creature which possessed it.   One would have to be careful at this point not to go too far, and suppose, for example, that any kind of creature in any kind of circumstances would be biologically improved by the admixture of a dose of ratio:     gnats and mosquitoes, for example, might be hindered rather than helped by being rationalized.     But ratio might be a biological boon to creatures whose biological needs are complex and whose environment is subject to considerable variation, either because the world is unstable, or because the world though stable combines a high degree of complexity with a reluctance to make easy provisions for its denizens.     If a creature's survival depends on the ability to produce differing responses to a vast and varied range of stimuli, it will become more and more difficult and 'expensive' to equip the creature with a suitably enormous battery of instincts of natural drive, and the substitution of a measure of ratio will be called for.    Two questions now confront us with regard to the genitor's introduction of ratio.     First, is he to be thought of as introducing a relatively unlimited, unrestricted capacity, a capacity perhaps for being concerned about and for handling a general range of "Why?"questions, or, indeed, simply of questions;     where the capacity itself is unlimited, though the genitor's interest in it is restricted to certain applications of it?     Or is he rather to be thought of as introducing a limited capacity, a capacity (perhaps) for being concerned about and handling just a small, potentially useful range of questions (just those which are biologically relevant)?    The second question is, is the genitor to be thought of as introducing whatever kind or degree of ration he does introduce as an essential characteristic of the substantial types) which he is designing and endowing with it, which we will think of as Homo sapiens, or as an accidental (non-essential) feature of that type?    To answer these questions in the reverse order, I conjecture, though I cannot establish, that the right procedure is to think of him as introducing ratio  as a non-essential hazzing feature of Homo sapiens, though perhaps as a feature which, despite its being non-essential, one can be reasonably assured that instances of Homo sapiens will possess.     Grice’s characteristic candour forces him to admit that he should like to be able to find that the genitor would install ratio as an accidental feature, because then there would be scope for a profitable deployment of his toy, Transubstantiation, the application of which by the genitor would deliver as a constructed substantial type the type person, to which ratio could be supposed to belong as an essential property; a result which to my mind would be intuitively congenial.     But wishful thinking is not an argument.     Perhaps an argument could be found for attributing to the genitor the seemingly circuitous manoeuvre of first instituting a biological type (Homo sapiens) to which ratio attaches non-essentially though predictably, and then converting this biological type into a further NON-vital, non-biological type (person) by a subsequent metaphysical operation which installs ratio as, in this case, an essential feature, by reflecting that the programme which in the first instance is engaging the genitor's attention is that of constructing a sequence, or kingdom, of vital biological substantial types, and that ratio is not a feature of the right kind to be a differentiating essential feature in any type falling under that naturalistic programme.     If a *substantial* type is needed to which ratio attaches essentially, that type must be generated by a further step. — in the realm or kingdom not of nature — Homo as within the Animal Kingdom —but of ends.    With regard to the first question, whether the ratio being introduced by the genitor is to be thought of as an unlimited or as a limited capacity, while Grice thinks it would be an acceptable general principle that when the genitor wants to achieve a certain objective, of *two* capacities which would achieve that objective, the Genitor would (or should) install the weaker capacity on grounds of economy, or so that nothing which he does should be lacking in motivation or deficient with respect to Sufficient Reason, this general principle should not apply to cases in which the weaker capacity could only be generated by initially building a stronger capacity and then subsequently fitting in curbs to restrict the initially installed stronger capacity.    The suggestion, therefore, would be that the installation of a limited ratio would be a case of the second kind, achievable only by building in additional special restrictions, and so would be exempted from the scope of the proposed general principle.     Grice thinks that reaching a decision on this issue would be both rewarding and arduous;     and Grice must regretfully allow the matter to wait.    The way has now been more or less cleared for Grice to begin to unveil the main idea lying behind this prolonged build-up.     This idea is that, given the foregoing assumptions, when the genitor installs ratio into his substantial type Homo sapiens sapiens in order to further a biological end, he gets more than for which he bargained, in that the installed ratio is capable of raising more questions than that limited range of questions in the answering of which the biological utility of that ratio at least initially consists.     The term "Homo sapiens sapiens" was first used in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist. He chose the scientific name "Homo sapiens" (Latin for "wise man") to classify the human species. While "Homo sapiens" was the initial designation, the subspecies designation "sapiens" was later added to further clarify modern humans as a subspecies within the Homo sapiens species.    The creature which the Genitor creates will not merely be capable of raising and answering a range of questions about how certain ends are to be achieved, of exhibiting, that is, what Aristotle called SEvotns, but will also have both the ability and the requisite concern to raise questions about the desirability or propriety of the ends or results which his ratio enables him to realize.     That is to say, the genitor has designed a creature which is capable of asking questions about the value of ends, and so of enquiring about the possible availability of any categorical imperative over and above this or that hypothetical imperative which the creature was initially scheduled to deliver.   Of course, to say that the creature has the capacity and the concern needed to raise, and desire answers to, certain questions is not to say that the creature is in a position to *answer* those questions;     indeed, we can be sure that initially he will NOT  be in a position to answer those questions, since the procedures for getting answers to them have not been designed and installed in advance, and so will have to be evolved or constructed, presumably by Homo sapiens sapiens himself.     But given that such a creature is equipped to formulate a legitimate demand for this or that solution to this or that question, any set of procedures which it could devise which are such that there is no objection to them, and which if they were accepted as proper procedures could then be used to deliver answers to these questions, will be procedures which it will be REASONABLE (rational) for the rational creature to accept as proper, — provided that there are no other equally unobjectionable candidates with equally good prospects of delivering answers to the same questions.    Should there indeed be two or more sets of procedures, where each set could be put to work, with full success, to provide an answer to a RATIONAL demand, and should it be required, for some reason or other, that one and only one such set should be left in the field, and should there be no non-arbitrary way of deciding between the surviving candidates, Grice would allow it as rational to decide, alla Crazey Bayesy, by the toss of a coin.     But Grice hopes to avoid being faced with having to accept so hilarious a mode of decision.     Grice might dub the principle which allows credence to a set of procedures the adoption and use of which will most satisfactorily meet a RATIONAL need, "The Metaphysical Principle of Supply and Demand".    The second part of Grice’s leading idea would be that, for reasons which have not yet been specified, the   "generated" creature Homo sapiens sapiens finds it metaphysically suitable/fitting to perform the operation of Transubstantiation on, so to speak, himself, and to set it up so that the attribution of ratio, which originally (thanks to the genitor) attaches non-essentially to one substantial type, namely, Homo sapiens sapiens, now attaches essentially to a different but standardly coincident substantial type, to himself as a Locke-PERSON;     and that when we come to consider the application of such notions as value and finality to Locke-PERSON — Lockeian PERSONS, where the notions of value in question are not questions of relativised value but rather of absolute non-relativised value, we find that a 'paraphrase'  'translation' of whatever it is we have to say concerning these notions into some rigmarole, or other, couched in terms of a causal connection of a cybernetic kind is no longer available;     — and this would be where the end of the overlap is located;     when it comes to questions of absolute non-relativised value and about Lockeian persons, the overlap has ceased.     The reasons why the overlap should end at this point might, Grice suspects, turn on the propriety of supposing Lockeian persons (essentially rational beings) to be necessarily, and perhaps for that reason, free from the realm of natural causes.    Before Grice fills out the attempted justification for the application of the notion of absolute non-relativised value on which Grice has started, Grice would like to do two things.     Grice would like first to introduce a piece of abbreviatory jargon; and     second, Grice would like to introduce, or reintroduce, a metaphysical construction routine which I referred to in a previous essay, which Grice called "Projection".     The bit of abbreviatory jargon is the phrase "Mechanistically Substitutable";     Grice shall call an idea or concept "Mechanistically Substitutable" when it is one which initially appears not to be amenable to interpretation in terms agreeable to a mechanist, but which is found to be, after all, so amenable.    So for an idea or concept NOT to be mechanistically substitutable would be for it to resist reinterpretation — read: elimination via reduction, dispensation — by a mechanist such as Patricia Churchland.    As regards "Projection", its title is perhaps somewhat misleading, since though some such operation does seem to be described by a project of a philosopher — who wrote A Brief History of Engand, instead, he seemingly regards it as a way of accounting for certain mistakes which he saw others made, of a deep-seated variety, rather than as a way of validating some of the things which we should like to be able to say.     In this respect Grice thinks we find Mackie — straight from Australasia — and Armstrong — never mind Patricia Churchland — going along with Hume — finding Home for Hume.     As Grice sees it, this operation consists in taking something which starts life, so to speak, as a specific mode of thinking, and then transforming it into an attribute which is ascribed not to thinking but to the thing thought about and indeed is, in a given case, attributed either correctly or incorrectly.     To take an example with which I am presently concerned, we might start with a notion of valuing, or of (hyphenatedly, so to speak) within a psychological attitude, thinking-of-as-valuable some item x;     and, subject to the presence of certain qualifying conditions, we should end up with the simple thought, or belief, or desire, that the item x IS valuable or validated — or ‘worth it’; and     in thinking of it as valuable, or validated, or worth it,  we should now be thinking, correctly or incorrectly, that the item x has the attribute of being valuable, validated, or worth it — Hartmann would use the Greek: axion.    Grice now proceeds to the amplification of the idea, which Grice introduced a few minutes ago, of seeking to legitimize, and to secure validation or satisfactoriness or truth or falsity or acceptance for, attributions of absolute non-relativised value by representing such attribution as needed in order to fulfil a rational demand.    Grice presents this amplified version in two parts.     The first part is designed to exhibit the structure of the suggestion which is being made and will refer to, without specifying, a certain system of hypotheses, or story, to be called "Story S", which is to play a central role in the satisfaction of the aforementioned rational demand.     The second part will specify, in outline, Story S.    The genitor, in legitimately constructing Homo sapiens sapiens (an operation to which, as genitor, he is properly motivated by a concern to optimise alla Pareto the spread of biological efficiency and so of biological value), will have constructed a creature which  fulfills some conditions:    Homo sapiens sapiens will legitimately demand justification, ultimately in terms of absolute and not relativised value, for whatever attitude, purpose, or acceptance  (whether alethic or practical) Homo sapiens sapiens — now Lockeian Persons) freely adopts or maintains.    Homo sapiens sapiens will regard any system of hypotheses, or story, which fulfils the condition of satisfying the aforementioned demand ("Demand D") without being itself open to objection, as being a story which is worthy of acceptance unless this condition is met by more than one story.     That is, it will regard such a story as a story which is an admissible candidate for acceptance.)    Homo sapiens sapiens will hold that if there is a plurality of admissible candidates all of which involve a certain supposi-tion, then that supposition is worthy of acceptance.    Homo sapiens sapiens will allow that Story S is an admissible candidate which meets Demand D and that the supposition of the applicability to the world of the notion of absolute value which is embodied in Story S would also be embodied in any other story which would satisfy Demand D, with the consequence that this supposition is worthy of acceptance.    that the notions of absolute value and of finality,which appear within Story S, are not mechanistically substitutable, and so are authentic and non-Pickwickian concepts.    Grice presents Story S in the manner of one of those cosy and comforting question-and-answer sequences which telephone companies, public utilities, or insurance companies are liable to give us when they are hoping to unload on us some new gimmick.    How can we satisfy Demand D, and get non-relativised justification for our purpose, attitude, and so forth?    By setting up conditions for the successful application to that purpose, attitude (etc.) of a concept of absolute non-relativised value.    How do Oxonian philosophers do that?    By setting it up so that certain sorts of attitudes (etc.) have absolute value inasmuch as they are (or would be) valued by (seem valuable to) a certified value-fixer, whose valuations are (therefore) eligible for the benefits provided by Projection.     How do we find one of them?    We find a being whose essence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value.    How do we get such a being?    By Transubstantiation from the biological substantial type Homo sapiens sapiens, which produces for us the non-biological substantial type person.   We are now seen to be (qua persons) accredited value-fixers, at least in relation to ourselves, and (qua creatures which are both persons and specimens of Homo sapiens sapiens) subjects whose voluntary operations are supposed to conform to the values we fix for ourselves.    Can we be secured against the risk that the notions of absolute value and of finality, which appear in Story S, might turn out to be mechanistically substitutable (in which case the vitalistic-mechanistic overlap would not after all have been terminated, and the notions inquestion would after all be 'Pickwickian', not authentic)?    Yes, we can attain this security, provided we can show that being an accredited value-fixer (in relation to oneself) requires being free, in something like Kant's sense of positive freedom; and that if the dovetailed concepts of absolute value and finality were mechan-istically substitutable, this fact would import into the genesis of our self-originated attitudes (etc.) a 'foreign cause' (that is, a cause external to the legislator-cum-agent) which would constitute a barrier to the presence of freedom, and which would for that reason fatally undermine the prospects for success for Story S.    Grice is only too well aware that this, particularly in its terminal convulsions, contains much that is obscure, fragmentary, and ill defended (where indeed it is defended at all).     Grice is also conscious of the likelihood that, were he (Heaven forbid) after a breather to return to the fray, Grice should find himself inclined to produce quite different, though maybe equally problematic, reflections.     But Grice has some hope that his offering might provide an adequate starting-point for one of those interminable sequences of revisions of which serious theoretical thought seems, at least at Oxford, and on Saturday mornings, so largely and allegedly to consist.     H. P. Grice.  In the first section of this lecture, I formulate and criticise a theory of intention which is, in essentials, one which 1 advanced in an unpublished paper written a number of years ago, and which is a descendant of a leading idea in G. F. Stout's essay "Voluntary Action'.'  advanced in an unpublished paper written a number of years ago, and which is a descendant of a leading idea in G. F. Stout's essay "Voluntary Action'.'     In the remainder, I raise and try to deal with a sceptical puzzle about intention which could, on the face of it, have been met if the theory reviewed in the first section had proved tenable, but which, to my mind, becomes acute otherwise. In the course of this discussion, I reach a neo-Prichardian position which involves a concept bearing some considerable degree of affinity to Kenny's concept of 'voliting',? though I think that my route to it is quite substantially different from that followed by Kenny.    The theory to be considered advances a three-pronged analysis of statements of the type 'X intends to do A'. I will put up as plausible a case as I can for each clause in turn.  (I) It would seem odd to say 'X intends to go abroad next month, but won't in fact take any preliminary steps which are (or are regarded by him as being) essential for this purpose.  Of course, no preliminary steps may in fact be required at all; but if we think that, if any steps should turn out to be required, he would nevertheless not take them, then we should hesitate to say flatly that he intends to go. It is true that if the further conditions shortly to be mentioned were fulfilled we might also hesitate to say flatly that he doesn't intend to go. We should be likely to hedge by saying 'He doesn't really intend' or 'He  • In Studies in Philosophy and Psychology.  2 See Action, Emotion and Will, by Anthony Kenny, ch. xi.    doesn't seriously intend'. But I do not think we should say that he intends in the full sense of 'intend'. So let us say that one condition required for the truth of 'X intends to go abroad' is that X would in fact, at least for a time and up to a point, take steps which in his view are required to be taken to make it possible for him to go.  (2) The second condition is more tricky. If someone were to say, 'I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years' time', someone else might say, 'What if the directors offer you £1,000 a year more to stay on?' Now if in response to this he allows that the directors might make such an offer, and further-more, that if they were to do so it is not impossible that he would accept the offer and not retire, it would be linguistically extremely peculiar if he then went on to say, 'But I have definitely decided to retire'. We expect him to back down on his original statement. More than this, if it were clear to us that he had already envisaged the possibility of this offer being made and accepted, we should feel entitled to criticize him for having said in the first place, 'I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years' time'. The case would be similar if the reply to his original declaration were, 'But it might not be financially/ legally possible for you to retire then'. If he admits this he cannot go on saying simpliciter, 'I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years' (he must add something like  'if I can'); and if we think he has already envisaged the possibility that he may not be legally (or financially) able to retire, we feel entitled to criticize the formulation of his original declaration. I think it is also time that we should be unhappy about the propriety of ourselves saying (without any qualifica-tion), 'He has definitely made up his mind to retire',  , if we  thought that he envisaged the possibility that he might in fact not retire.  The case with regard to 'I intend' ('he intends') is perhaps less clear; but here too I am inclined to think that to say of someone that he intends to do A (without qualification) is, in standard examples, to imply or suggest that he does not think it doubtful whether he will in fact do A. The following imaginary conversation will perhaps support this contention:  I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday. You will enjoy that. I may not be there. I am afraid I don't understand. The police are going to ask me some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, and I may be in prison by Tuesday evening. Then you should have said to begin with, 'I intend to go to the concert if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like, 'I should probably be going', or, 'I hope to go', or, 'I aim to go' ', or, 'I intend to  go if I can'  It seems to me that Y's remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained. It is true that there are cases in which we would not complain that the speaker had omitted such a qualification as  'if I can'  , even though we were well aware that he had doubts  about the actual performance of that which he said he intended to do, but I am inclined to think that these cases can be accounted for consistently with the thesis I am suggesting. Sometimes we tolerate the omission of such a phrase as 'if I can' when the nature of the proposed action is such that it is obvious that the speaker must have doubts about the fact of performance, and so the warning 'if I can' is unnecessary. Suppose I say,  'I intend to keep ducks when I am a very old man'; my extreme old age is still some way off, and it can be assumed that I am perfectly aware that a lot may happen between now and then which would upset my plans. Again, if I say of someone that he intends to climb Mt. Everest, the task specified is of such notorious difficulty that no one is misled if the qualification 'if he can' is omitted. We may note, however, even in these cases, if the obstacles and uncertainties are pointed out, and are admitted by the speaker to be such as to render performance dubious, he cannot now refuse to qualify his specification of the intention by such riders as 'if I can' ('if he can'); if, after the magnitude of the task is pointed out, I say, 'Nevertheless, he intends to climb Mt. Everest', I imply, I think, that he expects to triumph over the difficulties; if I wished to avoid this suggestion I could use another verb, e.g. 'aims to' or  'hopes to'  Bearing in mind these considerations, we can I think allow that there is quite a good case for saying that one condition for the truth of 'X intends to do A' is that X should be free from doubt whether he will in fact do A (provided that 'intends' is being used strictly). But I do not think this formulation of the condition will be adequate as it stands; we must look at the force of the phrase, 'free from doubt'. A man could be said to be  free from doubt whether something will happen if he has simply not considered the question at all; or again, if he knows perfectly well that it won't happen it is not this sort of freedom from doubt that is needed for this theory; what is needed is the notion of  'having no doubt that', which seems to be indistinguishable from  "being sure that'  . So I think the theory, to avoid the possibility  of confusion or equivocation, should come into the open and employ the notion of 'being sure' (even if it later suffers for doing so). We may then propose, as a second condition for the truth of 'X intends to do A', that X should be sure that he will in fact do A.  (3) The argument for the third condition is as follows. For it to be the case that X intends to go abroad, it must be the case that his being sure that he will go is not dependent on his having what seems to him satisfactory evidence that he will go. Once we found that he thought he would go because he thought the evidence pointed that way, we should say that he was, at the moment at least, treating the question of his going not as a practical question (one calling for action or decision), but as a theoretical question (one to be settled by investigation), and that it is impossible (logically) to treat a question in both of these ways at once. X may of course (intending to go) marshal theoretical reasons which support the view that he will go (e.g. look how much I stand to lose by not going'), in order to convince someone else that he will go; but he cannot (con-sistently with intending to go) do this to convince himself. We can then offer, as a third condition for the truth of 'X intends to do A', that X's being sure that he will do A is not dependent on evidence.  The theory, then, offers three conditions for the truth of 'X intends to do A'. The conditions are supposed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient; the falsity of either the second or the third condition is sufficient for the falsity of 'X intends to do A'; but this is not true of the first condition; if this condition is false the truth or falsity of 'X intends to do A' may be undecidable. The conditions, stated as briefly as possible, are that  (I) X would take steps required for doing A,  X is sure that he will do A, and X's assurance of this is independent of evidence. I now turn to criticism. The crucial difficulties arise in con-  nection with the central idea of the theory, the suggestion that the focal element in an intention is a certain sort of belief.  To begin with, one may well feel pretty uncomfortable about the notion of beliefs which are (in the required sense) independent of evidence. Suppose I were to say, 'I have just decided that the Chairman has a corkscrew in his pocket', and, when asked what reason I have for supposing this to be so, I reply, cheerfully, 'None whatsoever'. I shall just not be taken seriously at all, and even if I systematically set about behaving as if he had a corkscrew (e.g. collect a lot of bottles which need un-corking), it could be pointed out that to decide to behave as if p were true is not the same as to believe that p. It might, however, be argued that completely unevidenced beliefs will not be beliefs that we adopt, but beliefs that come upon us, that we find ourselves with. Hunches might be cited as examples of this sort of belief. But this line runs into trouble in three ways. (I) It is far from clear that a hunch is a belief, and not something on the strength of which (together perhaps with the memory of the correctness of previous hunches) one may form a somewhat tentative belief. (2) If a hunch is a belief, and one which one finds oneself with rather than one which one adopts, it is importantly different from the alleged unevidenced belief involved in intending. For if there are such beliefs involved in intention, they are certainly not usually things we find ourselves with; we do not, normally at least, find ourselves with intentions; we form intentions. (3) Again, if a hunch is a belief, it is one which we should feel more comfortable about if it were supported by evidence. But the beliefs supposed to be involved in intention are, according to the theory, perfectly satisfactory as they are; we not merely are not relying on evidence, we have no need of it.  The general direction of this attack is, I hope, clear; it is that the less able we are to find parallels in the non-practical sphere for the so-called beliefs about our own future actions which the theory invites, the more special these so-called beliefs become, and the more unjustified is the application of the term 'belief' (or 'assurance').  However, the case is not yet hopeless, for I think a more promising parallel can be found. Consider the pair of statements,  'I remembered that I bit my nurse', and, 'I remembered biting my nurse'. If we ask how they differ, it would, I think, be quite a promising answer to say that whereas I may be entitled to make the first statement if my belief that I bit my nurse is wholly dependent on evidence or testimony, this does not entitle me  to make the second statement. For me to be in a position to make the second statement, it must be the case that, even if I have been provided, say, with testimony that I bit my nurse, my belief that I did so should be independent of that testimony, i.e. that I should be prepared to maintain my belief in the event of that testimony turning out to have been unreliable. If this is correct, then memory sometimes at least involves beliefs which are not held on the basis of evidence. These memory-beliefs could, moreover, be held to be parallel to beliefs allegedly involved in intention in a further respect; sometimes at least we are perfectly happy with them as they are; we would be no happier if we were provided with information which supported them.  Here, however, the parallel ends, and the lack of parallel begins to emerge. (I) Immediate memory-beliefs are things we find ourselves with; we do not adopt them or form them. (2) I can come to question an immediate memory belief of my own, and if I do, then I do rely on confirmatory evidence to settle my doubt, but if I begin to doubt whether I shall after all go abroad this year, I do not dispel this doubt by gathering confirmatory evidence. (3) If we ask why (assuming the theory to be correct) I hold a belief such that (say) I shall go abroad, the only possible answer is that I believe this because, for example, it is something that I should particularly like to be the case, or something that I think ought to be the case. This is not only common form, it is regarded by us as entirely reasonable. So, to put it crudely, the theory represents having an intention as being a case of licensed wishful thinking. (4) It could be most unnatural to speak of someone who intends to do A as thinking truly, or falsely, or rightly, or mistakenly, that he will do A; that is, we cannot employ here the ordinary terminology for appraising beliefs (cf. Aristotle on the difference between про-aípeois and Sóça). This point may be (and I think has been') put vividly by saying that if a man fails to fulfil an intention, we do not criticize his state of mind for failing to conform to the facts, we criticize the facts for failing to conform to his state of mind. I think the conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that a so-called belief which cannot be confirmed, which cannot be called true, false, right, or mistaken, and which it is reasonable to hold because one would like that which one believes to be the case, is not properly called a belief at all; and this conclusion is, I think, fatal to the theory under discussion.  * By Professor Anscombe.  A possible sceptical position may be stated as follows:  (I) A man who expresses an intention to do A (who says  'I intend to do A') is involved in a factual commitment; he is logically committed to subscribing, with this or that degree of firmness, to a factual statement to the effect that he will do A.  Furthermore, given that expressions of intention have legitimate application, the intender must be able to make such a factual statement with justification; he must be regarded as entitled to say (as being in a position to say) that he will do A.  Since 'I shall in fact do A' cannot be the expression of an incorrigible statement, if the intender is to be entitled to make this statement, there must be something which gives him this title; if someone is entitled, the question 'What gives him the title?' must have an answer. The standard source of entitlement to make such a factual statement is not available for this case, since the ordinary concept of intention is such that if one intends to do A, one is logically debarred from relying on evidence that one will in fact do A. No alternative source, however, of a different, non-evidential kind, for the entitlement to say 'I shall in fact do A' seems to be forthcoming. One must, therefore, reject the idea that expressions of intention have a legitimate use; the ordinary concept of intention is incoherent, since it involves (a) the idea that one who intends to do A is entitled to say that he will, in fact, do A, (b) the idea that there is nothing which gives him this title. On the theory which I have just been considering (the three-pronged analysis of intention) there is, at least on the face of it, a way of disposing of the sceptic's position. It might be possible to maintain that 'I intend to do A, but perhaps I shall not do A' is illegitimate for the same reason, whatever that is, which makes 'I am sure (certain) that p, but perhaps not p' illegiti-mate; for on the theory in question 'I am sure that I shall do A' is straightforwardly entailed by 'I intend to do A'. It might further be possible to maintain that the illegitimacy involved is analogous to that involved in Moore's 'paradox' ("P, but I do not believe that p'). But if the three-pronged analysis of intention be rejected, then we lose the basis for supposing 'I am sure that I shall do A' to be entailed by 'I intend to do A'.  It can be argued, I think, that this sceptical position is clearly untenable; but even if this be so, I do not regard the mere refutation of the sceptic as an adequate treatment of his puzzle.  There are two difficulties in the sceptic's position.  (I) He in effect complains 'If only the statement that one will in fact do A (made by someone who would ordinarily be described as intending to do A) conformed to the requirements satisfied by a respectable expression of belief, then the concept of intention would be open to no objection'. It is clear that the sceptic proposes to reject the concept of intention while retaining the concept of belief. But it is very dubious indeed whether this proposal is itself coherent. For, if the concept of intention be rejected, other concepts which involve it must also be rejected, for example such concepts as those of planning and of acting.  But is it not essential to the notion of belief that it should be possible, if occasion arises, to act on a belief? Will not the rejection of the notion of acting involve also the rejection of the notion of belief?  (2) In order that the sceptic should get going at all, it is essential for him to show that the ordinary concept of intention does involve a factual commitment as regards future action.  This contention seems to rest largely, if not entirely, on a point of analogy between a (so-called) intender's statement that he will do A and the general run of factual statements; namely that someone who announces an intention to do A is ordinarily held both to have given others a justification for planning on the assumption that he will do A and to have committed himself, on pain of being convicted of insincerity, to planning on that assumption himself; just as someone who makes a factual statement that p is held to have given others a justification for planning on the assumption that p and to have committed himself to planning on that assumption. But if the notion of intention, and with it the notion of planning, is to be rejected, can this analogy be maintained? It looks as if the sceptic needs to use the notion of planning in order to put himself in a position to reject it. Can one use one's own bootstraps in order to demonstrate that one has no bootstraps to pull oneself up by?  But to refute the sceptic is not enough. I suggest that the point of most sceptical arguments is not to attempt to persuade us that something very paradoxical is in fact true, but to con-to ace ting somethis hich i undering to be treasons  se false. What is primarily wanted, in reply to the sceptic, is an attack on the cogency of the reasons apparently supporting the sceptic's 'conclusion'  So far as the current topic is concerned, one might try to discharge this task in one or other of two ways; (a) by denying that the factual commitment allegedly involved in the ordinary notion of intention is really present, or (b) by maintaining that, contrary to appearance, one who intends to do A does have (and rely on) some evidential basis for the statement that he will in fact do A.  A. The possibility of denying the presence of the factual commitment  (i) Thesis  There is, in Brecht's Refugee Conversations, an anecdote which relates (no doubt fictively) that Denmark was at one time plagued by a succession of corrupt finance ministers, and that, to deal with this situation, a law was passed requiring periodic inspection of the books of the Finance Minister. A certain Finance Minister, when visited by the inspectors, said to them  'If you inspect my books, I shall not continue to be your finance minister'  '. They retired in confusion, and only eighteen months later was it discovered that the Finance Minister had spoken nothing other than the literal truth.  This anecdote, it seems, exploits a modal ambiguity in the future tense, between (a) the future indicated or factual, and  (b) the future intentional. This ambiguity extends beyond the first person form of the tense; there is a difference between  'There will, be light' (future factual) and 'There will, be light' (future intentional); God might have uttered the second sentence while engaged in the Creation. Sensitive English speakers (which most of us are not) may be able to mark this distinction by discriminating between 'shall' and 'will'. 'I shall, go to London' stands to 'I intend to go to London' analogously to the way in which 'Oh for rain tomorrow!' stands to 'I wish for rain tomorrow'. Just as no one else can say just what I say when I say 'Oh for rain tomorrow!' so no one else can say just what I say when I say 'I shall, go to London'. If someone else says 'Grice will go to London'  ', he will be expressing his, not my,  intention that I shall go. There is (so the thesis maintains) no unambiguous but less specific future mood, no 'future neutral'.  One who intends to do A cannot honestly use the future factual, only the future intentional; if he uses the future factual he will  be pretending that doing A is something with regard to which he has no intentions (maybe that it is something not within his control). So, if one has an intention to do A, one either says (dishonestly) 'I shall do A', in which case a request for an evidential basis is perfectly legitimate (and to maintain one's pretence in response to such a request one may have in supply, and perhaps even invent, an evidential basis for 'I shall, do A'); or one says 'I shall, do A', in which case a request for an evidential basis is syntactically no more appropriate than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!' The sceptic, then, is hamstrung. (ii) Reply to the thesis  The thesis is heroic, in view of the following objections.  (I) If one intends to do A, one can certainly discuss the possibility that one will be prevented, and so that one will not do A. Even if use of the future intentional were to be restricted to expressions of an intention to attempt to do A, rather than to do A, it is still time that an attempt to do A may be prevented by such contingencies as sudden death; so the possibility of the prevention of an attempt to do A is no less discussible than the possibility of being prevented from doing A. Furthermore, one can surely not merely discuss whether one will be prevented, but deny that one will be prevented. So even if one intends to do A, one can (honestly) deny that one will, not do A; in which case it must be possible to assert (honestly) that one will, do A.  (2) One who expresses an intention not only says something which, to this or that degree, justifies others in planning on the assumption that he will in fact do A, but also puts himself in a position in which he is expected himself to plan on this assumption. Such planning on his part will involve the use of  'I shall do A' in the antecedents of conditionals, where it presumably has the force of 'I shall do A'.  (3) The thesis offers no reason why it should be impossible to operate simultaneously with both moods of the future tense.  There is certainly no general principle of the mutual exclusiveness of different moods; I can certainly combine 'Oh that it may rain tomorrow!' either with 'It (probably) will rain to-morrow' or with 'it (probably) will not rain tomorrow' One might consider a modified form of the thesis; namely that an intender may use both moods, but can only reasonably use the future factual in so far as he has evidential backing.  This modification either runs into the difficulty that it licenses such illegitimate locutions as 'I shall, do A, but I cannot say (have no reason to think) that I shall, do A', or else involves the contention that one who intends always does have evidential backing (viz. his intention) for the relevant future factual, and this reduces to an example of the second main line against the sceptic ((b) above).  Before considering line 6) directly, I want to give a little attention to the possible impact on the sceptical puzzle of the introduction of a generic notion of 'acceptance'  Acceptance  It seems that a degree of analogy between intending and believing has to be admitted; likewise the presence of a factual commitment in the case of an expression of intention. We can now use the term 'acceptance' to express a generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief. He who intends to do A and he who believes that he will do A can both be said to accept (or to accept it as being the case) that he will do A. We could now attempt to renovate the three-pronged analysis discussed in section I, replacing references in that analysis to being sure that one will do A by references to accepting that one will do A; we might reasonably hope thereby to escape the objections raised in section I, since these objections seemingly centred on special features of the notions of certainty and belief which would not attach to the generic notion of acceptance. Hope that the renovated analysis will enable us to meet the sceptic will not immediately be realized, for the sceptic can still ask (a) why some cases of acceptance should be specially dispensed from the need for evidential backing, and (b) if certain cases are exempt from evidential justification but not from justification, what sort of justification is here required.  Some progress might be achieved by adopting a different analysis of intention in terms of acceptance. We might suggest that 'X intends to do A' is very roughly equivalent to the conjunction of  (I) X accepts that he will do A  and (2) X accepts that his doing A will result from (the effect of) his acceptance that he will do A.  The idea is that when a case of acceptance is also a case of belief, the accepter does not regard his acceptance as contributing towards the realization of the state of affairs the future  existence of which he accepts; whereas when a case of acceptance is not a case of belief but a case of intention, he does regard the acceptance as so contributing.  Such an analysis clearly enables us to deal with the sceptic with regard to his question (a), namely why some cases of acceptance (those which are cases of intention) should be specially exempt from the need for evidential backing. For if my going to London is to depend causally on my acceptance that I shall go, the possession of satisfactory evidence that I shall go will involve possession of the information that I accept that I shall go. Obviously, then, I cannot (though others can) come to accept that I shall go on the basis of satisfactory evidence; for to have such evidence I should have already to have accepted that 1 shall go. I cannot decide whether or not to accept that I shall go on the strength of evidence which includes as a datum that 1 do accept that I shall go. But we are still unable to deal with the sceptic as regards question (b), namely what sort of justification is available for those cases of acceptance which require non-evidential justification even though they involve a factual commitment. Though it is clear that, on this analysis, one must not expect the intender to rely on evidence for his statement of what he will in fact do, we have not provided any account of the nature of the non-evidential considerations which may be adduced to justify such a statement, nor (a fortiori) of the reasons why such considerations might legitimately be thought to succeed in justifying such a statement.  B. Second main line against the sceptic: an intender does have evidential backing  When faced with the suggestion that one who intends to do A really does have evidence that he will in fact do A, it would be dangerous for the sceptic to rely on an argument from usage to rebut the suggestion; to rely, for example, on the oddity of saying 'How do you know that you will go to London?' or  "What reason have you for thinking that you will go to London?' in response to someone who has expressed his intention of going to London by saying 'I shall go to London'. For it might be argued that in the unusual case in which an interrogation does not assume that it is up to X whether he goes to London or not, such questions are in order and are at least partially answered by 'I intend to go'; it is only when as is normally the case, one already assumes that, if a man says he will go to London, he  says so because this is his intention, that such questions are odd; and they are then odd because they ask a question the answer to which the asker already knows, or thinks he knows.  The sceptic's best resource seems to be the following argument.  If an intender has and relies on evidence that he will perform, this evidence either (a) is independent of his intention to per-form, or (b) includes the fact that he intends to perform. If (a), then it will be difficult or impossible to avoid the admission that it makes no difference, as regards performance taking place, whether the intention is present or not; performance is something that the performer cannot avoid, and, if so, something which he cannot regard as within the scope of a possible intention on his part. If (b), then, since the fact that one intends to do A cannot be a logically conclusive reason for supposing that one will do A, it must be logically possible for a situation to arise in which this piece of evidence favourable to the idea that one will do A is outweighed by counter-evidence. I ought to be able to say 'I intend to do A, though other evidence makes it virtually certain that I shall not in fact do A',  ', just as I can say 'It looks  to me as if there were a red object before me, but other evidence makes it virtually certain that there is in fact no such object before me'. But the former is something that I cannot legitimately say; and this fact blocks the suggestion that my intention to do A can properly be regarded as being (for me) evidence that I shall do A.  An approach to a solution via consideration of action  We may remind ourselves of a Prichardian problem about action. If, somewhat artificially, we treat such sentences as 'X raised his arm' as restricted, in clear application, to descriptions of actions, then we may say that 'X raised his arm' entails, but is not equivalent to, 'X's arm went up'. What more, then, is required for the truth of 'X raised his arm' beyond (I) 'X's arm went up'? Perhaps (21) 'X intended to raise his arm'. But the introduction of (21), as it stands, would involve circularity, since the analysandum ('raise his arm') reappears in it. So we might substitute (2) 'X intended that his arm should go up'. (I) and (2) together, however, are not sufficient; X might intend that his arm should go up, and it might go up; yet, if it went up because of, for example, an appropriately placed electrode, X would not (in the favoured sense of 'raise') have raised it.  So we seem to need (3) 'X's arm went up because X intended that it should go up'; and it would be natural to interpret (3)  as specifying that the arm's going up was a result or effect of X's intending that it should go up.  We now face a twofold difficulty.  It seems that my intending that so-and-so should occur involves my thinking of this occurrence as something which will result from something which I do; if so, we start by explaining doing A in terms of intending that so-and-so should occur, and then have to explain intending that so-and-so should occur; in part at least, in terms of doing something (doing B). This will lead to an infinite regress. There is obviously a distinction between cases in which an intention that A should occur may be expected to be effective and those in which it cannot, at least in any relatively direct way. An intention that my arm should go up would fall into the first group, an intention that my hair should stand on end into the second. How do we learn to separate the two sorts of case? The obvious answer seems to be 'By experience'. But I cannot find by experience that an intention that my hair should stand on end is ineffective; for I cannot have such an intention unless I think of my hair's standing on end as a matter within my direct control; and to think of this as being so is to suppose myself as being already provided with the answer which experience is supposed to give me.  Both these difficulties will be avoidable if we can replace, in the analysis 'intending that' by some concept-call it 'Z-ing that'-which satisfies the following condition: that it should be closely related to, indeed involved in, 'intending that', but that, unlike 'intending that', 'Z-ing that so-and-so should occur' should not entail that the occurrence is thought of as being within one's control. Prichard, for reasons not unlike those here mentioned, introduced such a concept, which he called 'willing'.  I would like to suggest that he deserves great credit (a) for seeing and taking seriously the initial problems about action,  for seeing the lines along which an answer must proceed, for looking for a concept which applies both in cases of one's own action and in cases which are not cases of one's own action (e.g. 'willing the footballer to run faster'), and (d) for seeing that the accurate specification of willing should take the form 'willing that..?, not 'willing to . .?. The deficiencies in his account do not lie in these regions, though I think that they are usually thought to do so; they lie rather in the fact that he did not give an adequate characterization of the notion ofwilling (he did not, indeed, seem very greatly interested in doing so; what little he does say is dubious or misleading, for example that willing is 'an activity' and that it is 'sui generis'). What we need is to find analogies between the state of the man who does something intentionally (e.g. scratches his head) and other states not conjoined with intentional action; just as previously we found analogies between intending and believing.  Let us first, however, stipulate that willing is to belong to the same general categorial family as intending and wanting (and, maybe, believing); it is not a process or activity, but rather, perhaps, a 'state', though the precise significance of any such classificatory term would emerge only within the context of a developed theory. We do not by this stipulation (we hope) commit ourselves with respect to any particular candidate for the further analysis of 'willing'; we do not, for example, exclude a physicalistic analysis.  Let us consider the following four examples:  (i) I scratch my head (intentionally) ;  (ii) I intend to scratch my head in one minute's time; (iii) I wish, wholeheartedly, when tied up, that I could  scratch my head;  (iv) I wish, wholeheartedly, being now tied up, that I had scratched my head two minutes ago, when I was not tied up.  There seem to me to be the following, possibly familiar, points of analogy between the four specified situations.  (I) In each case I think, or assume without question, that there is a good case for saying that it would be (would have been) a good thing if my hand were to scratch (had scratched) my head.  There is no rival occurrence the case for which is in serious competition with that for head-scratching. Not only do I recognize the superiority of the case for head-scratching, but I do not shrink from the idea of this taking (having taken) place. The considerations relevant to the merits of the case for head-scratching are apart from time-differences, the same in each example; e.g. that head-scratching will (would, would have) relieve (relieved) an itch.(5) If, when tied up, I say 'I wish I could scratch my head' and my gaoler immediately releases me, it will be very odd if I do not then scratch my head. I can refrain and say (a) 'the itch has gone' thereby implying that there is no longer a case for head-scratching, or (b) 'I've changed my mind'; but I cannot say 'I only said, when tied up, that I wished that I could scratch my head; but now that I am untied I am faced with a quite different question, namely whether or not to scratch my head'. If we accept the generic concept of 'willing that', as a concept which captures such analogies as those just mentioned, then perhaps 'X scratched his head' may be regarded as roughly analysable as follows:  (I) X's hand scratched his head;  X willed that his hand should scratch his head; The circumstance specified in (I) resulted, relatively directly (with no intervening overt link) from the circumstance specified in (2). Normally the first, and sometimes the second, of two further conditions will also be fulfilled:  X expected that it would be the case that (3) ; X willed that it would be the case that (3). But I do not see any reason to regard either (4) or (5) as a necessary condition for the truth of 'X scratched his head'.  What, then, are we to say about the analysis of 'X now intends to scratch his head in one minute's time'? Perhaps this can be regarded as roughly analysable as  (I) X wills now that his hand should scratch his head in one minute's time;  (2) X believes that his present will that his hand should scratch his head in one minute's time will result at the time in question in X's hand scratching X's head.  To deal with our sceptic, we must show with what justification X has the thought mentioned in clause (2) of this provisional analysis.  (I) X is in a position to say what his will now is. This is clearly not, for X, an evidential matter, though its status is by no means easy to determine.  (2) X is (or may be) in a position to say that, if one minutehence his will is still the same, then his head will be scratched; this will be for X an evidential matter, and rests on (a) his knowing from experience that head-scratching is a matter within his control, that is, is the sort of occurrence which will result from willing that it occur, provided that there are no inter-ference-factors, and (b) his having reason to suppose that, on this occasion, there will be no interference-factor.  The justifiability of X's factual commitment, if he expresses an intention by saying 'I shall scratch my head in one minute's time'  ', to its being the case that he will in fact scratch his head in one minute's time, reduces then, to the question of the justifiability of an assumption on his part, given that he now wills that his head be scratched in one minute, that he will still in one minute hence will that this be so. This question, which is fairly closely related to questions about the predictability of one's own decisions (which have been worked on by David Pears and others), is not one which I shall attempt to resolve in this lecture. H. P. Grice   In the first section of ‘Intention and uncertainty,’ Grice formulates and criticises a theory of intention which is, in essentials, one which he advances in an essay, and which is a descendant of a leading idea in Stout's essay "Voluntary Action' in Studies in philosophy and psychology.  In the remainder, Grice raises and tries to deal with a sceptical puzzle about intention which could, on the face of it, have been met if the theory reviewed in the first section had proved tenable, but which, to Grice’s mind, becomes acute otherwise.     In the course of this discussion, Grice reaches a Prichardian position which involves a concept bearing some considerable degree of affinity to Kenny's concept of 'voliting', in Action, Emotion, and Will, though Grice think that his Anglican route to it is quite substantially different from that followed by Kenny.    The Stoutian theory to be considered advances a three-pronged analysis of statements of the type 'X intends to do A'.     Grice puts up as plausible a case as he can for each clause in turn.    It would seem odd to say     'Prichard intends to go to Cambridge tomorrow, but won't in fact take any preliminary steps which are (or are regarded by Prichard as being) essential for this purpose.    Of course, no preliminary steps may in fact be required at all.    But, IF we think that, IF any preliminary steps should turn out to be required, Prichard would nevertheless not take them, we should hesitate to say flatly that Prichard intends to go to Cambridge tomorrow.     It is true that IF the further conditions shortly to be mentioned were fulfilled we might also hesitate to say flatly that it is not the case that Prichard intends to go to Cambridge.    We should be likely to hedge by saying     ‘It is not the case that Prichard intends to go to Cambridge tomorrow.    or     It is not the case that Prichard seriously intend'.     But Grice does not think we should say that he intends in the full *sense* of 'intend'.     So let us say that one condition required for the truth of     Prichard intends to go to Cambridge tomorrow     is that     Prichard would in fact, at least for a time and up to a point, take those preliminary steps which in Prichard’s view are required to be taken to make it possible for him to go.    A second condition is trickier.    If Locke were to say,     I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years' time',     someone else says:    'What if the directors offer you £1,000 a year more to stay on?'     Now, IF, in response to this,     Locke allows that the directors might make such an offer, and furthermore,     that, if the directors were to do so     it is not impossible that Locke would accept the offer and NOT retire,     it would be  extremely peculiar, conversationally, if Locke then goes on to say,     ‘But I HAVE definitely decided to retire in two years’s time.”     We expect Locke to back down on his original statement.     More than this, if it were clear to us that Locke had already envisaged the possibility of this offer being made and accepted, we should feel entitled to criticize Locke for having said in the first place, 'I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years' time'.     The case would be similar if the reply to his original declaration were,     'But it may not be legally possible for you to retire then'.     If he admits this, Locke cannot go on saying simpliciter,    ‘'I have definitely made up my mind to retire in two years'    Locke must add something like    ‘— if I can, needless to say — then do I say it.    and IF we think that Locke has already envisaged the possibility that he may not be legally  able to retire in two years’s time, we feel entitled to criticize, on conversational grounds  the formulation of his original declaration — never mind the stupidity of his ‘needless to say’ caveat - cfr. Pears, Ifs and cans. Nowell-Smith, Austin on ifs and cans, Hampshire, Thought and action, Hart and Hampshire, Intention and decision. Pears, Predicting.       Grice thinks it is also time that we should be unhappy about the propriety of ourselves saying (without any qualifica-tion),     “Locke has definitely made up his mind to retire in two years’s time  ,      if we  thought that Locke envisaged the possibility that he *might*, in fact, not retire.    The case with regard to 'I intend' ('Grice intends') is perhaps less clear.    But here too Grice is inclined to think that: to say of someone, say Prichard, that he intends to do A (without qualification) is, in this or thus standard example, to implicate, hint, insinuate, indicate, mean, signify, imply or suggest that the utterer does NOT think it doubtful whether Prichard will in fact do A.     The following imaginary conversation will perhaps support this contention    Prichard: I intend to go to that concert on Tuesday.    Price: You will enjoy that.    Prichard: I may not be there to enjoy.    Price: I am afraid I don't understand you.    Prichard’s wife (intervening):     The police are going to ask my husband  some awkward questions on Tuesday afternoon, Price, and my husband may well be in prison by Tuesday evening.    Price: Then your husband — (turning to Prichard) — you old fool — should have said to begin with, 'I intrnd to go to the concert — if I am not in prison', or, if you wished to be more reticent, something like,     I should probably be going to the concert', or,    'I hope to go to the concert or,     'I aim to go to the concert or,     'I intend to go — if I can, needless to say — so why I am saying it? shouldn’t I leave it to my implicature?    It seems to Grice that Price’s remarks are reasonable, perhaps even restrained — including the ‘you old fool’.     It is true that there are cases in which we would not complain that an utterer or conversationalist  had *omitted* — or better, failed to include - such a qualification as  'if I can'  by his abiding at some conversational maxim (don’t over do it) or other (be brief) — , even though we were well aware that he had doubts about the actual performance of that which he said he intended to do,  But Grice is inclined to think that these cases can be accounted for consistently with the thesis Grice is suggesting.   We tolerate sometimes the omission of such a phrase as 'if I can'   — when the nature of the proposed action is such that it is   obvious non-controversial common ground    that the utterer or conversationalist — although not Phyro — MUST surely  have doubts (don’t we all?) about the fact of performance, and so the warning 'if I can' is unnecessary.   Suppose Grice says  'I intend to keep ducks when I am a very old man'  Grice’s extreme old age is still some way off, and it can be assumed that Grice is perfectly aware that a lot may happen between now and then which would upset Grice’s plans.   Again, if I say to some member of The Merseyside Geographical Society of Marmaduke Bloggs   Marmaduke Bloggs intends to climb Mt. Everest on hands and knees.   — the task specified is of such notorious difficulty that no one is conversationally misled if the prolixic qualification 'if he can' is omitted.   We may note, however, even in these cases, if the obstacles and uncertainties ARE  pointed out, and are admitted by the utterer or conversationalist  to be such as to render performance dubious, the utterer or conversationalist cannot NOW refuse to qualify his specification of the intention by such a rider as ''if Marmarduke Bloggs can' or ‘if Grice can,’ or ‘if I can.’  If, after the magnitude of the task is pointed out, I say,   'Nevertheless, he intends to climb Mt. Everest',   Grice would be implicating, signifying, suggesting, hinting, implying  kndknuating, Grice thinks, that he expects Marmaduke Bloggs or himself to triumph over the difficulties;   If  Grice wished to avoid or cancel this suggestion or implicature  Grice could always rely on a related verb but below the scale — to use Urmson’s phrase — his scale of ‘know,’ ‘be certain,’ ‘find it probable,’ ‘find it possible, ‘believe — use another verb, e.g.   aims to'   or   'hopes to'  which yield no such implicature.  Bearing in mind these considerations, we can Grice thinks allow that there is quite a good case for saying that one condition for the truth of   X intends to do A'   is that X should be *free from doubt* whether he will in fact do A (provided that 'intends' is being used strictly — as they do at Cambridge with Stout — and not loosely — and disimplicature-loaded — as we do at Oxford with Prichard.  But Grice has Moore’s entailment as a ‘semantic’ or signification constraint in mind, and does not think this formulation of the condition will be adequate as it stands;   we must look at the force of the phrase, 'free from doubt'.   Cfr. Sugar-free  Alcohol-free  A man could be said to be free from doubt whether something will happen if it is simply not the case that he has considered the question at all;   or again,   if he knows perfectly well that it is not the case that something will happen  It is not this sort of freedom from doubt that is needed for this theory;  What  is needed is the notion of  'not having any doubt that',   which seems to be indistinguishable from "being sure that'  Or  Being certain that…  So Grice thinks the theory, to avoid the possibility of confusion or equivocation, should come into the open and employ the notion of '  ‘being sure'   even if it later suffers for doing so.  Hint to the wrongness of Hampshire and Hart.  We may then propose, as a second condition for the truth of    ‘X intends to do A',   Or  x means to do A   that X should be sure or certain, if not know, that he will in fact do A.  The argument for the third condition is as follows.   For it to be the case that   Prichard intends to go to Cambridge tomorrow,   it must be the case that   It is not the case that his being sure that he will go is dependent on his having what seems to him or what he believes to be satisfactory or adequate evidence that he will go.   Once we found that Prichard thinks that he will go because he thinks that the evidence points that way,   we should say that he was, at the moment at least, treating the question of his going NOT as a practical question (one calling for action or decision), but as a   theoretical question (one to be settled by investigation), and that it is impossible (logically) to treat a question in both of these ways at once.   X may of course, as he intends to go, marshal this or that theoretical reason which support the view that he will go   - e.g. look how much I stand to lose by not going'),   in order to convince someone else that he will go;   But he cannot, consistently with intending to go, do this to convince *himself.*   We can then offer, as a third condition for the truth of '  X intends to do A', that   X's being sure that he will do A is not dependent on evidence.  The theory, then, offers three conditions for the truth of '  X intends to do A'.   The conditions are supposed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient;   the falsity of either the second or the third condition is sufficient for the falsity of 'X intends to do A';   but this is not true of the first condition;   if this condition is false the truth or falsity of 'X intends to do A' may be undecidable.   The conditions, stated as briefly as possible, are that  X would take preliminary steps required for doing A,  X is sure of certain that he will do A,  it is not the case that X's assurance of his sureness is dependent of evidence.  Gricd now turns to criticism.   The crucial difficulties arise in connection with the central idea of the theory, the suggestion that the focal element in intending  is a certain sort of belief.  To begin with, one may well feel pretty UNcomfortable about the notion of a belief which  is not (in the required sense) dependent of evidence.   Suppose Grice were to say,  ‘'I have just decided that the Chairman has a corkscrew in his pocket',   and, when asked what reason I have for supposing this to be so, I reply, cheerfully,   None whatsoever'.   I shall just not be taken seriously at all, and even if I systematically set about behaving as if he had a corkscrew (e.g. collect a lot of bottles which need un-corking), it could be pointed out that to decide to behave as if p were true is not the same as to *believe* that  p.   It may, however, be argued that a completely unevidenced belief will not be a belief that we adopt, but a belief that comes upon us, as the belief in God, that we find ourselves with.   Hunches might be cited as examples of this sort of belief.   But this line runs into trouble in three ways.   It is far from clear that a hunch is a belief, and not something on the strength of which (together perhaps with the memory of the correctness of previous hunches) one may form a somewhat tentative belief.   If a hunch *is* a belief, and one which one finds oneself with rather than one which one adopts, it is importantly different from the alleged unevidenced belief involved in intending.   For, if there *is* sond sort of belief involved in intending, it is certainly not usually a thing with which we find ourselves.  We do not, normally at least, find ourselves with this or that intentions; we form an intention.  Again, if a hunch *is* a belief, it is one about which we should feel more comfortable if it were supported by evidence.   But the belief supposed to be involved in intending is, according to the theory, perfectly satisfactory as it is  we not merely are not relying on evidence, we have no need of it.  The general direction of this attack is, I hope, clear;   it is that the less able we are to find parallels in the  NON-practical sphere for the so-called beliefs about our own future actions which the theory invites, the more special these so-called beliefs become, and the more *unjustified* is the application of the term 'belief' (or 'assurance').  However, the case is not yet hopeless, for Grice thinks a more promising parallel can be found.   Consider the pair of statements,  'I remembered *that* that I bit my nurse', and,   'I remembered biting my nurse'.   If we ask how they differ, it would, Grice thinks, be quite a promising answer to say that whereas Grice may be entitled to make the first statement if Grice’s belief that he bit his nurse is wholly dependent on evidence or testimony, this does not entitle me to make the second statement.   For Grice to be in a position to make the second statement, it must be the case that, even if I have been provided, say, with testimony that I bit my nurse, my belief that I did so should be independent of that testimony, i.e. that I should be prepared to maintain my belief in the event of that testimony turning out to have been unreliable.   If this is correct, memory sometimes at least involves beliefs which are not held on the basis of evidence.   Such a memory-belief could, moreover, be held to be parallel to the belief allegedly involved in intending in a further respect;   sometimes at least we are perfectly happy with them as they are;   we would be no happier if we were provided with information which supported them.  Here, however, the parallel ends, and the lack of parallel begins to emerge.   An Immediate memory-belief is a thing with which we find ourselves;   we do not adopt them or form them.    Grice can come to question an immediate memory belief of his own, and if he does, he does rely on confirmatory evidence to settle his doubt,   but if Prichard begins to doubt whether hd will after all go to Cambridge tomorrow, it is not the case that Prichard dispels this doubt by gathering confirmatory evidence.    If we ask why (assuming the theory to be correct) Prichard holds a belief such that (say) he will go to Cambridge tomorrow, the only possible answer is that Prichard believes this because, for example, it is something that he should particularly like to be the case, or something that he thinks ought to be the case.   This is not only common form, it is regarded by us as entirely reasonable.   So, to put it crudely, the theory represents having an intention as being a case of licensed wishful thinking.   It could be most unnatural to speak of someone who intends to do A as thinking truly, or falsely, or rightly, or mistakenly, that he will do A;   that is, we cannot employ here the ordinary terminology for appraising a belief (cf. Aristotle on the difference between про-aípeois and Sóça).   This point may be (and Gricd thinks that it has been' by Anscombe put vividly by saying that   if a man fails to fulfil an intention, we do not criticize his state of mind for failing to conform to the facts,   we criticize the facts for failing to conform to his state of mind.   Grice thinks that the conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that a so-called belief which cannot be confirmed, which cannot be called true, false, right, or mistaken, and which it is reasonable to hold because one would like that which one believes to be the case, is not properly called a belief at all; and this conclusion is, Grice thinks, fatal to the theory under discussion.  A possible sceptical position may be stated as follows:  A man who expresses an intention to do A (who says 'I intend to do A') is involved in a factual commitment;   he is logically committed to subscribing, with this or that degree of firmness, to a factual statement to the effect that he will do A.  Furthermore, given that expressions of intention have legitimate application, the intender must be able to make such a factual statement with justification;   he must be regarded as entitled to say (as being in a position to say) that he will do A.  Since   'I shall in fact do A'   cannot be the expression of an incorrigible statement, if the intender is to be entitled to make this statement, there must be something which gives him this title;   if someone is entitled, the question 'What gives him the title?' must have an answer.  The standard source of entitlement to make such a factual statement is not available for this case, since the ordinary concept of intention is such that if one intends to do A, one is logically debarred from relying on evidence that one will in fact do A.   No alternative source, however, of a different, non-evidential kind, for the entitlement to say 'I shall in fact do A' seems to be forthcoming.  One must, therefore, reject the idea that expressions of intention have a legitimate use;   the ordinary concept of intention is incoherent, since it involves   the idea that one who intends to do A is entitled to say that he will, in fact, do A,   the idea that there is nothing which gives him this title.  On the theory which I have just been considering (the three-pronged analysis of intention) there is, at least on the face of it, a way of disposing of the sceptic's position.   It might be possible to maintain that '  I intend to do A, but perhaps I shall not do A'   is illegitimate for the same reason, whatever that is, which makes '  I am sure (certain) that p, but perhaps not p'   illegiti-mate;   for, on the theory in question '  I am sure that I shall do A'   is straightforwardly entailed by   'I intend to do A'.   It might further be possible to maintain that the illegitimacy involved is analogous to that involved in Moore's 'paradox' ("P, but I do not believe that p').   But if the three-pronged analysis of intention be rejected, we lose the basis for supposing 'I am sure that I shall do A' to be entailed by 'I intend to do A'.  It can be argued, Grice thinks, that this sceptical position is clearly untenable;   but even if this be so, Grice does not regard the mere refutation of the sceptic as an adequate treatment of his puzzle or philosophism.  There are two difficulties in the sceptic's position.  He in effect complains 'If only the statement that one will in fact do A (made by someone who would ordinarily be described as intending to do A) conformed to the requirements satisfied by a respectable expression of belief, the concept of intention would be open to no objection'.   It is clear that the sceptic proposes to reject the concept of intention while retaining the concept of belief.   But it is very dubious indeed whether this proposal is itself coherent.   For, if the concept of intention be rejected, other concepts which involve it must also be rejected, for example such concepts as those of planning and of acting.  But is it not essential to the notion of belief that it should be possible, if occasion arises, to act on a belief?   Will not the rejection of the notion of acting involve also the rejection of the notion of belief?  In order that the sceptic should get going at all, it is essential for him to show that the ordinary concept of intention does involve a factual commitment as regards future action.  This contention seems to rest largely, if not entirely, on a point of analogy between a (so-called) intender's statement that he will do A and the general run of factual statements;   namely that someone who announces an intention to do A is ordinarily held both to have given others a justification for planning on the assumption that he will do A and to have committed himself, on pain of being convicted of insincerity, to planning on that assumption himself;   just as someone who makes a factual statement that p is held to have given others a justification for planning on the assumption that p and to have committed himself to planning on that assumption.   But if the notion of intention, and with it the notion of planning, is to be rejected, can this analogy be maintained?   It looks as if the sceptic needs to use the notion of planning in order to put himself in a position to reject it.   Can one use one's own bootstraps in order to demonstrate that one has no bootstraps by wich to pull oneself up?  But to refute the sceptic is not enough.  Grice suggests that the point of most sceptical arguments is not to attempt to persuade us that something very paradoxical is in fact true, but to confront us with a quandary; to give us seemingly cogent reasons for accepting something which can independently be shown to be false.    What is primarily wanted, in reply to the sceptic, is an attack on the cogency of the reasons apparently supporting the sceptic's 'conclusion'  So far as the current topic is concerned, one might try to discharge this task in one or other of two ways;    by denying that the factual commitment allegedly involved in the ordinary notion of intention is really present, or    by maintaining that, contrary to appearance, one who intends to do A does have (and rely on) some evidential basis for the statement that he will in fact do A.  The possibility of denying the presence of the factual commitment  Thesis  There is, in Brecht's Refugee Conversations, an anecdote which relates (no doubt fictively) that Denmark was at one time plagued by a succession of corrupt finance ministers, and that, to deal with this situation, a law was passed requiring periodic inspection of the books of the Finance Minister.   A certain Finance Minister, when visited by the inspectors, said to them  'If you inspect my books, I shall not continue to be your finance minister'  They retired in confusion, and only eighteen months later was it discovered that the Finance Minister had spoken nothing other than the literal truth.  This anecdote, it seems, exploits a modal ambiguity in the future tense, between   (a) the future indicated or factual, and  (b) the future intentional.   This ambiguity extends beyond the first person form of the tense;   there is a difference between  'There will, be light' (future indicated) and   There will, be light' (future intentional);   God might have uttered the second sentence while engaged in the Creation.   Sensitive English speakers (which most of us are not) may be able to mark this distinction by discriminating between 'shall' and 'will'.   'I shall, go to London'   stands to '  I intend to go to London'   analogously to the way in which   'Oh for rain tomorrow!' stands to   'I wish for rain tomorrow'.   Just as no one else can say just what I say when I say   'Oh for rain tomorrow!'   so no one else can say just what I say when I say '  I shall, go to London'.   If someone else says   'Grice will go to London'  he will be expressing *his*, not Grice’s intention that Grice will go.   There is (so the thesis maintains) no unambiguous but less specific future mood, no 'future neutral'.  One who intends to do A cannot honestly use the future indicated, only the future intentional;   if he uses the future indicated he will be pretending that doing A is something with regard to which he has no intentions — maybe that it is something not within his control, or against his will.  So, if one has an intention to do A, one either says (dishonestly)   'I shall do A',   in which case a request for an evidential basis is perfectly legitimate (and to maintain one's pretence in response to such a request one may have in supply, and perhaps even invent, an evidential basis for 'I shall, do A');   or one says '  I shall, do A',   in which case a request for an evidential basis is syntactically no more appropriate than it would be in response to 'Oh for rain tomorrow!'   The sceptic, then, is hamstrung.   Reply to the thesis  The thesis is heroic, in view of the following objections.  If one intends to do A, one can certainly discuss the possibility that one will be prevented, and so that one will not do A.   Even if use of the future intentional were to be restricted to expressions of an intention to attempt to do A, rather than to do A, it is still time that an attempt to do A may be prevented by such contingencies as sudden death;   so the possibility of the prevention of an attempt to do A is no less discussible than the possibility of being prevented from doing A.   Furthermore, one can surely not merely discuss whether one will be prevented, but deny that one will be prevented.   So even if one intends to do A, one can (honestly) deny that one will, not do A;   in which case it must be possible to assert (honestly) that one will, do A.   One who expresses an intention not only says something which, to this or that degree, justifies others in planning on the assumption that he will in fact do A,   but also puts himself in a position in which he is expected himself to plan on this assumption.   Such planning on his part will involve the use of  'I shall do A' in the antecedents of conditionals, where it presumably has the force of 'I shall do A'.   The thesis offers no reason why it should be impossible to operate simultaneously with both modes of the future tense.  There is certainly no general principle of the mutual exclusiveness of different modes;   I can certainly combine '  Oh that it may rain tomorrow!'   either with '  It (probably) will rain to-morrow' or with   'it (probably) will NOT rain tomorrow'   One might consider a modified form of the thesis;   namely that an intender may use both modes,   but can only reasonably use the future indicated  in so far as he has evidential backing.  This modification either runs into the difficulty that it licenses such illegitimate locutions as '  I shall, do A, but I cannot say (have no reason to think) that I shall, do A',   or else involves the contention that one who intends always does have evidential backing (viz. his intention) for the relevant future factual, and this reduces to an example of the second main line against the sceptic ((b) above).  Before considering line 6) directly, Grice wants to give a little attention to the possible impact on the sceptical puzzle of the introduction of a generic notion of 'acceptance'  It seems that a degree of analogy between intending and believing has to be admitted;   likewise the presence of a factual commitment in the case of an expression of intention.   We can now use the term 'acceptance' to express a generic concept applying both to cases of intention and to cases of belief.   He who intends to do A and he who believes that he will do A can both be said to accept (or to accept it as being the case) that he will do A.   We could now attempt to renovate the three-pronged analysis discussed in section I, replacing references in that analysis to being sure that one will do A by references to accepting that one will do A;   we might reasonably hope thereby to escape the objections since these objections seemingly centred on special features of the notions of certainty and belief which would not attach to the generic notion of acceptance.   Hope that the renovated analysis will enable us to meet the sceptic will not immediately be realized, for the sceptic can still ask   why some cases of acceptance should be specially dispensed from the need for evidential backing, and   if certain cases are exempt from evidential justification but not from justification, what sort of justification is here required.  Some progress might be achieved by adopting a different analysis of intention in terms of acceptance.   We might suggest that '  X intends to do A'   is very roughly equivalent to the conjunction of  X accepts that he will do A  X accepts that his doing A will result from (the effect of) his acceptance that he will do A.  The idea is that when a case of acceptance is also a case of belief, the accepter does not regard his acceptance as contributing towards the realization of the state of affairs the future existence of which he accepts; whereas when a case of acceptance is not a case of belief but a case of intention, he DOES regard the acceptance as so contributing.  Such an analysis clearly enables us to deal with the sceptic with regard to his question (a), namely why some cases of acceptance (those which are cases of intention) should be specially exempt from the need for evidential backing.   For if my going to London is to depend causally on my acceptance that I shall go, the possession of satisfactory evidence that I shall go will involve possession of the *information* that I accept that I shall go.   Obviously, then, I cannot (though others can) come to accept that I shall go on the basis of satisfactory evidence;   for to have such evidence I should have already to have accepted that 1 shall go.   I cannot decide whether or not to accept that I shall go on the strength of evidence which includes as a datum that 1 do accept that I shall go.   But we are still unable to deal with the sceptic as regards question (b), namely what sort of justification is available for those cases of acceptance which require non-evidential justification even though they involve a factual commitment.   Though it is clear that, on this analysis, one must not expect the intender to rely on evidence for his statement of what he will in fact do, we have not provided any account of the nature of the non-evidential considerations which may be adduced to justify such a statement, nor (a fortiori) of the reasons why such considerations might legitimately be thought to succeed in justifying such a statement.  Second main line against the sceptic: an intender does have evidential backing  When faced with the suggestion that one who intends to do A really does have evidence that he will in fact do A, it would be dangerous for the sceptic to rely on an argument from usage to rebut the suggestion; to rely, for example, on the oddity of saying   'How do you know that you will go to London?'   or  What reason have you for thinking that you will go to London?'   in response to someone who has expressed his intention of going to London by saying 'I shall go to London'.   For it might be argued that, in the unusual case in which an interrogation does not assume that it is up to X whether he goes to London or not, such questions are in order and are at least partially answered by 'I intend to go';   it is only when, as is normally the case, one already assumes that, if a man says   he will go to London,   he says so because this is his intention, that such questions are odd;   and they are odd because they ask a question the answer to which the asker already knows, or thinks he knows.  The sceptic's best resource seems to be the following argument.  If an intender has and relies on evidence that he will perform, this evidence either (a)   is independent of his intention to perform, or (b)   includes the fact that he intends to perform.   If (a), it will be difficult or impossible to avoid the admission that it makes no difference, as regards performance taking place, whether the intention is present or not; performance is something that the performer cannot avoid, and, if so, something which he cannot regard as within the scope of a possible intention on his part.   If (b), since the fact that one intends to do A cannot be a logically conclusive reason for supposing that one will do A, it must be logically possible for a situation to arise in which this piece of evidence favourable to the idea that one will do A is outweighed by counter-evidence.   Grice ought to be able to say   'I intend to do A, though other evidence makes it virtually certain that I shall not in fact do A',  ', just as I can say   It looks to me as if there were a red object before me, but other evidence makes it virtually certain that there is in fact no such object before me'.   But the former is something that I cannot legitimately say; and   this fact blocks the suggestion that   my intention to do A   can properly be regarded as being (for me)   evidence   that I shall do A.  An approach to a solution via consideration of action  We may remind ourselves of a Prichardian problem about action.   If, somewhat artificially, we treat such sentences as '  X raised his arm'   as restricted, in clear application, to descriptions of actions, we may say that '  X raised his arm' entails, but is not equivalent to, 'X's arm went up'.   What more, then, is required for the truth of 'X raised his arm' beyond (I) 'X's arm went up'?   Perhaps (21) 'X intended to raise his arm'.   But the introduction of (21), as it stands, would involve circularity, since the analysandum ('raise his arm') reappears in it.   So we might substitute (2) 'X intended that his arm should go up'. (  I) and (2) together, however, are not sufficient;   X might intend that his arm should go up, and it might go up; yet, if it went up because of, for example, an appropriately placed electrode, X would not (in the favoured sense of 'raise') have raised it.  So we seem to need (3)   'X's arm went up because X intended that it should go up'; and it would be natural to interpret (3)  as specifying that the arm's going up was a result or effect of X's intending that it should go up.  We now face a twofold difficulty.  It seems that my intending that so-and-so should occur involves my thinking of this occurrence as something which will result from something which I do;   if so, we start by explaining doing A in terms of intending that so-and-so should occur, and then have to explain intending that so-and-so should occur; in part at least, in terms of doing something (doing B).   This will lead to an infinite regress.  There is obviously a distinction between cases in which an intention that A should occur may be expected to be effective and those in which it cannot, at least in any relatively direct way.   An intention that my arm should go up would fall into the first group, an intention that my hair should stand on end into the second.   How do we learn to separate the two sorts of case?  The obvious answer seems to be 'By experience'.   But I cannot find by experience that an intention that my hair should stand on end is ineffective;   for I cannot have such an intention unless I think of my hair's standing on end as a matter within my direct control;   and to think of this as being so is to suppose myself as being already provided with the answer which experience is supposed to give me.  Both these difficulties will be avoidable if we can replace, in the analysis 'intending that' by some concept-call it 'Z-ing that'-which satisfies the following condition:   that it should be closely related to, indeed involved in, 'intending that', but that, unlike 'intending that', 'Z-ing that so-and-so should occur'   should not entail   that the occurrence is thought of as being within one's control.   Prichard, for reasons not unlike those here mentioned, introduced such a concept, which he called 'willing'.  Grice would like to suggest that Prichard deserves great credit (a) for seeing and taking seriously the initial problems about action,  for seeing the lines along which an answer must proceed,  for looking for a concept which applies both in cases of one's own action and in cases which are not cases of one's own action (e.g. 'willing the footballer to run faster'), and   for seeing that the accurate specification of willing should take the form 'willing that..?, not 'willing to . .?.   The deficiencies in his account do not lie in these regions, though I think that they are usually thought to do so;   they lie rather in the fact that he did not give an adequate characterization of the notion ofwilling (he did not, indeed, seem very greatly interested in doing so; what little he does say is dubious or misleading, for example that willing is 'an activity' and that it is 'sui generis').  What we need is to find analogies between the state of the man who does something intentionally (e.g. scratches his head) and other states not conjoined with intentional action; just as previously we found analogies between intending and believing.  Let us first, however, stipulate that willing is to belong to the same general categorial family as intending and wanting (and, maybe, believing);   it is not a process or activity, but rather, perhaps, a 'state', though the precise significance of any such classificatory term would emerge only within the context of a developed theory.   We do not by this stipulation (we hope) commit ourselves with respect to any particular candidate for the further analysis of 'willing'; we do not, for example, exclude a physicalistic analysis.  Let us consider the following four examples:  (i) I scratch my head (intentionally) ;  (ii) I intend to scratch my head in one minute's time; (iii)   I wish, wholeheartedly, when tied up, that I could scratch my head;   I wish, wholeheartedly, being now tied up, that I had scratched my head two minutes ago, when I was not tied up.  There seem to me to be the following, possibly familiar, points of analogy between the four specified situations.  In each case I think, or assume without question, that there is a good case for saying that it would be (would have been) a good thing if my hand were to scratch (had scratched) my head.  There is no rival occurrence the case for which is in serious competition with that for head-scratching.  Not only do I recognize the superiority of the case for head-scratching, but I do not shrink from the idea of this taking (having taken) place.  The considerations relevant to the merits of the case for head-scratching are apart from time-differences, the same in each example; e.g. that head-scratching will (would, would have) relieve (relieved) an itch.   If, when tied up, I say '  I wish I could scratch my head'   and my gaoler immediately releases me, it will be very odd if I do not then scratch my head.   I can refrain and say (a)   'the itch has gone' thereby implying that there is no longer a case for head-scratching, or (b) '  I've changed my mind';   but I cannot say 'I only said, when tied up, that I wished that I could scratch my head; but now that I am untied I am faced with a quite different question, namely whether or not to scratch my head'.  If we accept the generic concept of 'willing that', as a concept which captures such analogies as those just mentioned, then perhaps 'X scratched his head' may be regarded as roughly analysable as follows:  X's hand scratched his head;  X willed that his hand should scratch his head;  The circumstance specified in (I) resulted, relatively directly (with no intervening overt link) from the circumstance specified in (2).  Normally the first, and sometimes the second, of two further conditions will also be fulfilled:  X expected that it would be the case that (3) ;  X willed that it would be the case that (3).  But Grice does not see any reason to regard either (4) or (5) as a necessary condition for the truth of 'X scratched his head'.  What, then, are we to say about the analysis of 'X now intends to scratch his head in one minute's time'? Perhaps this can be regarded as roughly analysable as  X wills now that his hand should scratch his head in one minute's time  X believes that his present will that his hand should scratch his head in one minute's time will result at the time in question in X's hand scratching X's head.  To deal with our sceptic, we must show with what justification X has the thought mentioned in clause (2) of this provisional analysis.  (I) X is in a position to say what his will now is. This is clearly not, for X, an evidential matter, though its status is by no means easy to determine.   X is (or may be) in a position to say that, if one minutehence his will is still the same, then his head will be scratched; this will be for X an evidential matter, and rests on (a) his knowing from experience that head-scratching is a matter within his control, that is, is the sort of occurrence which will result from willing that it occur, provided that there are no inter-ference-factors, and (b) his having reason to suppose that, on this occasion, there will be no interference-factor.  The justifiability of X's factual commitment, if he expresses an intention by saying 'I shall scratch my head in one minute's time'', to its being the case that he will in fact scratch his head in one minute's time, reduces then, to the question of the justifiability of an assumption on his part, given that he now wills that his head be scratched in one minute, that he will still in one minute hence will that this be so.   This question, which is fairly closely related to questions about the predictability of one's own decisions (which have been worked on by Pears and others), is not one which I shall attempt to resolve in this lecture.   H. P. Grice  In what follows, I shall be presenting some of my ideas about how I want to approach philosophical psychology.  My hope is, in effect, to sketch a whole system; this is quite an undertaking, and I hope that you will bear with me if in discharging it I occupy a little more of your time than is becoming in holders of my august office. While I am sure that you will be able to detect some affinities between my ideas and ideas to be found in recent philosophy, I propose to leave such comparisons to you. Though at certain points I have had my eye on recent discussions, the main influences on this part of my work have lain in the past, particularly in Aristotle, Hume, and Kant. I have the feeling that between them these philosophers have written a great deal of the story, though perhaps not always in the most legible of hands.I shall begin by formulating, in outline, a sequence of four particular problems which I think an adequate philosophical psychology must be able to lay to rest.  The first problem (Problem A) concerns the real or apparent circularity with which one is liable to be faced if one attempts to provide an analysis of central psychological concepts by means of explicit definitions. Suppose that, like some philosophers of the not so distant past, we are attracted by the idea of giving dispositional behaviouristic analyses of such concepts, and that we make a start on the concept of belief. As a first shot, we try the following, By: x believes that p just in case x is disposed to act as if p were true. In response to obvious queries about the meaning of the phrase, 'act as if p were true', we substitute, for Bi, Bz: x believes that p just in case x is disposed, whenever x wants (desires) some end E, to act in ways which will realize E given that p is true rather than in ways which will realize E given that p is false. The precise form which such a definition as B, might take is immaterial to my present purpose, provided that it has two features observable in Bz; first, that a further psychological concept, that of wanting, has been introduced in the definiens; and second, that to meet another obvious response, the concept of belief itself has to be reintroduced in the definiens. For the disposition associated with a belief that p surely should be specified, not as a disposition to act in ways which will in fact realize E given that p is true, but rather as a disposition to act in ways which x believes will, given that p is true, realize E. One who believes that p may often fail to act in ways that would realize E given that p were true, because he is quite unaware of the fact that such actions would realize E if p were true; and he may quite often act in ways which would realize E only if p were false, because he mistakenly believes that such ways would realize E if p were true.If we turn to the concept of wanting, which B2 introduced into the definiens for belief, we seem to encounter a parallel situation. Suppose we start with W,: x wants E just in case x is disposed to act in ways which will realize E rather than in ways which will realize the negation of E. Precisely the same kind of objection as that just raised in the case of belief seems to compel the introduction of the concept of belief into the definiens of W, giving us W2: x wants E just in case x is disposed to act in ways which x believes will realize E rather than in ways which x believes will realize the negation of E. We now meet the further objection that one who wants E can be counted on to act in such ways as these only provided that there is no E' which he wants more than E; if there is such an E, then in any situation in which & conflicts with & he may be expected to act in ways he thinks will realize the negation of E. But the incorporation of any version of this proviso into the definiens for wanting will reintroduce the concept of wanting itself.  The situation, then, seems to be that if, along the envisaged behaviouristic lines,  we attempt to provide  explicit definitions for such a pair of concepts as those of belief and wanting, whichever member of the pair we start with we are driven into the very small circle of introducing into the definiens the very concept which is being defined, and also into the slightly larger circle of introducing into the definiens the other member of the pair. The idea suggested to me by this difficulty is that we might be well advised, as a first move, to abandon the idea of looking for explicit definitions of central psychological concepts, and look instead for implicit definitions, to be provided by some form of axiomatic treatment; leaving open the possibility that, as a second move, this kind of treatment might be made the foundation for a different sort of explicit definition. Such a procedure might well preserve an attractive feature of behaviouristic analyses, that of attempting to explain psychological concepts by relatingthem to appropriate forms of behaviour, while at the same time freeing us from the logical embarrassments into which such analyses seem to lead us.  We are now, however, faced with a further question: if we are to think of certain psychological concepts as being implicitly defined by some set of laws (or quasi-laws) in which they figure, are we to attribute to such laws a contingent or a non-contingent status! A look at some strong candidates for the position of being laws of the kind which we are seeking seems merely to reinforce the question. Consider the principle 'He who wills the end wills the means,' some form of which seems to me to be the idea behind both of the behaviouristic definitions just discussed; and interpret it as saying that anyone who wills some end, and also believes that some action on his part is an indispensable means to that end, wills the action in question. One might be inclined to say that if anyone believed (really believed) that a certain line of action was indispensable to the attainment of a certain end, and yet refused to adopt that line of action, then that would count decisively against the conceptual legitimacy of saying that it was really his will to attain that end. To proceed in this way at least appears to involve treating the principle as a necessary truth. On the other hand, one might also be inclined to regard the principle as offering a general account of a certain aspect of our psychological processes, as specifying a condition under which, when our will is fixed on a certain object, it will be the case that it is also fixed on a certain other object; to take this view of the principle seems like regarding it as a psychological law and so as contingent. My second problem (Problem B) is, then, this: how (without a blanket rejection of the analytic/ synthetic distinction) are we to account for and, if possible, resolve the ambivalence concerning their status with which we seem to look upon certain principles involving psychological concepts?  To set this problem aside for a moment, the approachwhich I am interested in exploring is that of thinking of certain central psychological concepts as theoretical concepts; they are psychological concepts just because they are the primitive concepts which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory without also belonging to any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory); and a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, explanations of behaviour which differ from any explanations of behaviour which may be provided by (or may some day be provided by) any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory). To explicate such psychological concepts is to characterize their role in the theory to which they primarily belong, to specify (with this or that degree of detail) the laws or quasi-laws in which they figure, and the manner in which such laws are linked to behaviour. Now to say this much is not to say anything very new; I am sure you have heard this sort of thing before. It is also not to say very much; all that has so far been given is a sketch of a programme for the philosophical treatment of psychological concepts, not even the beginnings of a philosophical treatment itself.  What is needed is rather more attention to detail than is usually offered by advocates of this approach; we need to pursue such questions as what the special features of a psychological theory are, why such a theory should be needed, what sort of laws or generalities it should contain, and precisely how such laws may be used to explicate familiar psychological terms. I shall be addressing myself to some of these questions in the remainder of this address to you.  But before any more is said, a further problem looms. I can almost hear a murmur to the effect that such an  approach to philosophical psychology is doomed from the start. Do we not have privileged access to our own beliefs and desires? And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our beliefs and desires are incorrigible? How, then, are such considerations as theseto be rendered consistent with an approach which seems to imply that the justifiability of attributing beliefs and desires to people (and maybe animals), including ourselves, rests on the utility of the theory to which the concepts of belief and desire belong, in providing desiderated explanations of behaviour? This is my third problem (Problem C).  My fourth problem (D: the Selection Problem) is connected with a different and less radical objection to the approach which I have just begun to sketch. Surely, it may be said, it cannot be right to suppose that a conjunction of all the laws of a psychological theory in which a psychological concept figures is what should be used to explicate that concept. Even if we are in a position to use some of these laws (which is not certain), we are not, and indeed never shall be, in a position to use all of them.  Moreover, some particular laws are not going to be suitable. For all we know, some modification of one or other of the following laws' might be a psychological law, possibly an underived law:  Optimism Law: the more one wants @ the more likely one is to believe p. Optimism/Pessimism Law: given condition C, the more one wants d, the more likely one is to believe d; given condition C2, the more one wants , the less likely one is to believe .  These do not seem the right kind of laws to be used to explicate wanting and believing. We need some selective principle: what is it?  1. some General Aspects of the Relation betwee sychological Theory and Psychological Concepi  irst, a preliminary observation: it we are seeking t  xplicate psychological concepts by relating them topsychological theory, the theory which we invoke should be one which can be regarded as underlying our ordinary speech and thought about psychological matters, and as such will have to be a part of folk-science. There is no need to suppose that its structure would be of a sort which is appropriate for a professional theory, nor even to suppose that it would be a correct or acceptable theory; though I would hope that there would be a way of showing that at least some central parts of it would be interpretable within an acceptable professional theory in such a way as to come out true in that theory, and that indeed this demand might constitute a constraint on the construction of a professional theory. This is perhaps a latter-day version of a defence of common sense in this area.3  Let us unrealistically suppose, for the purposes of schematic discussion, that we have a psychological theory which, when set out in formal dress, contains a body of underived laws, the formulation of which incorporates two primitive predicate-constants, J and V; these we want to correspond, respectively, to two psychological terms  "judging" and "willing", which in their turn will serve as a regimented base for the explication of such familiar notions as believing and wanting. Let us think of J and V as correlated with, or ranging over, "instantiables" leaving open the question whether these instantiables are sets or properties, or both, or neither. Let us abbreviate the conjunction of these laws by "L", and let us ignore for the moment the obvious fact that any adequate theory along these lines would need to distinguish specific sub-instantiables under J and V, corresponding to the diversity of specific contents which judging and willing may take as modifications (as "intentional objects").  How are we to envisage the terms "judge" and "will" as being introduced? Two closely related alternative ways suggest themselves. First, what I shall call the way ofRamsified naming: 'There is just one J and just one V such that L, and let J be called "judging" and V be called  "willing"? On this alternative, the uniqueness claim is essential, since "judging" and "willing" are being assigned as names for particular instantiables. The second altern-ative, which I may call the way of Ramsified definition, can dispense with the uniqueness claim. It will run: '(a) x judges just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates J; (b) x wills just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates V.  We now have available a possible explanation of the ambivalence we may feel with regard to the status of certain psychological principles, which was the subject of Problem B. The difference between the two alternative procedures is relatively subtle, and if we do not distinguish them we may find ourselves under the pull of both. But the first alternative will render certain psychological principles contingent, while the second will render the same principles non-contingent. Let me illustrate by using an even simpler and even less realistic example. Suppose that a psychological law tells us that anyone in state P hollers, and that we seek to use this law to introduce the term "pain". On the first alternative, we have: there is just one P, such that anyone in state P hollers, and let us call P "pain". Since on this alternative we are naming the state P "pain", if the utilized law is contingent, so will be the principle 'anyone who is in pain hollers.' If we use the second alternative, we shall introduce "pain" as follows: * is in pain just in case there is a P such that anyone in state P hollers and x is in state P. On this alternative it will be non-contingently true that anyone who is in pain hollers. (For to be in pain is to be in some state which involves hollering.) While this suggestion may account for the ambivalence noted, it does not of course resolve it; to resolve it, one would have to find a reason for preferring one of the alternatives to the other.  In a somewhat devious pursuit of such a reason, let usenquire further about the character of the postulated psychological instantiables—are they, or could they be, identifiable with physical (physiological) instantiables?  One possible position of a sort which has been found attractive by some slightly impetuous physicalists would be to adopt the first alternative (that of Ramsified naming) and to combine it with the thesis that the J-instantiable is to be identified with one physiological property and the V-instantiable with another such property. This position at least appears to have the feature, to which some might strongly object, of propounding a seemingly philosophical thesis which is at the mercy of possible developments in physiology; and, one might add, the prospects that such developments would be favourable to the thesis do not seem to be all that bright. The adaptiveness of organisms may well be such as to make it very much in the cards that different creatures of the same species may, under different environmental pressures, develop different sub-systems (even different sub-systems at different times) as the physiological underlay of the same set of psychological instantiables, and that a given physiological property may be the correlate in one sub-system of a particular psychological instantiable, while in another it is correlated with a different psychological instantiable, or with none at all.  Such a possibility would mean that a physiological property which was, for a particular creature at a particular time, correlated with a particular psychological instantiable would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that instantiable; it would at best be sufficient (and perhaps also necessary) for the instantiable within the particular kind of sub-system prevailing in the creature at the time. The unqualified identification of the property and the instantiable would now be excluded.  Faced with such a difficulty, a physicalist might resort to various manoeuvres. He might seek to identify a particular psychological instantiable with a disjunctive property, each disjoined constituent of which is a property consistingin having a certain physiological property in a certain kind of sub-system; or he might relativize the notion of identity, for the purpose of psycho-physical identification, to types of sub-systems; or he might abandon the pursuit of identification at the level of instantiables, and restrict himself to claiming identities between individual psychological events or states of affairs (e.g. Jones's believing at t that p) and physiological events or states of affairs (e.g Jones's brain being in such and such a state at t). But none of these shifts has the intuitive appeal of their simplistic forebear. Moreover, each will be open to variants of a familiar kind of objection. For example, Jones's judging at noon that they were out to get him might well be a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence; but (to use Berkeley's phrase) it 'sounds harsh' to say that Jones's brain's being in such and such a state at noon is a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence. For my part, I would hope that a much-needed general theory of categories would protect me against any thesis which would require me either to license such locutions as the last or to resort to a never-ending stream of cries of 'Opaque context!' in order to block them. If the prime purpose of the notion of identity is, as I believe it to be, to license predicate-transfers, one begins to look a little silly if one first champions a particular kind of identifica-tion, and then constantly jibs at the predicate-transfers which it seems to allow.  Such considerations as these can, I think, be deployed against the way of Ramsified naming even when it is unaccompanied by a thesis about psycho-physical identities.  However unlikely it may be that the future course of physiological research will favour any simple correlations between particular psychological instantiables and particular physiological properties, I do not see that I have any firm guarantee that it will not, that it will never be established that some particular kind of brain state is associated with, say, judging that snow is white. If so, thenf I adopt the first alternative with its uniqueness claim, I  ave no firm guarantee against having to identity m brain's being in some particular state with my judging that snow is white, and so being landed with the embarrassments I have just commented upon. Since I am inclined to think that I do in fact have such a guarantee (although at the moment I cannot lay my hands on it), I am inclined to prefer the second alternative to the first.  As a pendant to the discussion just concluded, let me express two prejudices. First, any psycho-physical identifications which are accepted will have to be accepted on the basis of some known or assumed psycho-physical correlations; and it seems to me that in this area all that philosophical psychology really requires is the supposition that there are such correlations. Whether they do or do not provide a legitimate foundation for identifications seems to me to be more a question in the theory of identity than in the philosophy of mind. Second, I am not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the advocacy of psycho-physical identifications; I have in mind a concern to exclude such 'queer' or "mysterious' entities as souls, purely mental events, purely mental properties, and so forth. My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.  Provided that I can see them at work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects.In this section I shall briefly discuss two formal features which I think it might be desirable to attribute to some at least of the laws or quasi-laws of the theory to be used to explicate psychological concepts.  1. Aristotle distinguished between things which are so of necessity and things which are so for the most part, and located in the second category things which are done.  More or less conformably with this position, I shall suggest that some or all of the laws which determine psychological concepts are ceteris paribus laws, which resemble probability generalizations in that they are defeasible, but differ from them in that ceteris paribus laws do not assign weights. I envisage a system which without inconsistency may contain a sequence consisting of a head-law of the form A's are Z, and modifying laws of the form A's which are B are Z' (where Z' is incompatible with Z), and of the form A's which are B and C are Z, and so on. Analogous sequences can be constructed for functional laws; if A, B, and Z are determinables we may have, in the same system:  things which are A to degree a are Z to degree f' (a) things which are A to degree a and B to degree B are Z to a degree which is the value of f (B, f' (a)) If we like, we can prefix "ceteris paribus" to each such generality, to ensure that "A's are Z" is not taken as synonymous with "All A's are Z." For any such system a restriction on Modus Ponens is required, since we must not be allowed to infer from A's are Z and x is both A and B to x is Z if A's which are B are Z' (where Z' is incompatible with Z) is a law. This restriction will be analogous to the Principle of Total Evidence required for probabilistic systems; a first approximation might run as follows: in applying a law of the system to an individualcase for the purpose of detachment, one must select the law with the most specific antecedent which is satisfied by the individual case. Two results of treating psychological laws as ceteris paribus laws which will be attractive to me are first that it can no longer be claimed that we do not know any psychological laws because we do not know all the restrictive conditions, and second, that a psychological theory may be included in a larger theory which modifies it; modification does not require emendation.  If a modifying sequence terminates, then its constituent laws can be converted into universal laws; otherwise not.  If we hold a strong version of Determinism (roughly, that there is an acceptable theory in which every phenomenon is explained), we might expect the Last Trump to herald a Presidential Address in which the Final Theory is presented, entirely free from ceteris paribus laws; but if we accept only a weaker version, with reversed quantifiers (for every phenomenon there is an acceptable theory in which it is explained), the programme for Judgement Day will lose one leading attraction: Other items on the agenda, however, may prove sufficiently exciting to compensate for this loss.  2. I suspect that even the latitude given to our prospective psychological folk-theory by allowing it to contain or even consist of ceteris paribus laws will not make it folksy enough. There is (or was) in Empirical Psychology a generality called "The Yerkes-Dodson Law"; based on experiments designed to test degrees of learning competence in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying periods of initial constraint, it states (in effect) that, with other factors constant, degrees of learning competence are correlated with degrees of emotional stress by a function whose values form a bell-curve. I have some reluctance towards calling this statement the expression of a law, on the grounds that, since it does not (and could not, given that quantitative expression of degrees of competence and of stress is not available) specify the function or functions in question, it states that there is a law of a certain sortrather than actually state a law. But whether or not the Yerkes-Dodson Law is properly so-called, it is certainly law-allusive'; and the feature of being law-allusive is one which I would expect to find in the psychological 'laws' to be used to explicate psychological concepts.  IV. Semi-realistic Procedure for Introducing some Psychological Concepts  I turn now to the task of outlining, in a constructive way, the kind of method by which, in accordance with my programme, particular psychological concepts, and linguistic expressions for them, might be introduced; I shall take into account the need to clarify the routes by which psychological sub-instantiables come to be expressed by the combination of a general psychological verb and a complement which specifies content. My account will be only semi-realistic, since I shall consider the psychological explanation of only a very rudimentary sample of  behaviour, and even with respect to that sample a proper explanation would involve apparatus which I omit-for example, apparatus to deal with conceptual representation and with the fact that motivations towards a particular sort of behaviour may be frustrated. But since I am attempting only to illustrate a general method, not to make substantial proposals, these over-simplifications should not matter. I construct my account as if I espoused the first alternative discussed in Section II (the way of Ramsified naming) rather than the second, since that considerably simplifies exposition: a transition to the second alternative can, of course, be quite easily effected.  Let us suppose that a squarrel (a creature something like a squirrel) has some nuts in front of it, and proceeds to gobble them; and that we are interested in the further explanation of this occurrence. Let us call the squarrel  "Toby". Our ethological observations of Toby, and ofother squarrels, tell us that Toby and other squarrels often gobble nuts in front of them, and also other things besides nuts, and indeed that they are particularly liable to do some gobbling after a relatively prolonged period in which they have done no gobbling at all. On the basis of these observations, and perhaps a range of other observations as well, we decide that certain behaviour of squarrels, including Toby's gobbling nuts in front of him, are suitable subjects for psychological explanation; so we undertake to introduce some theoretical apparatus which can be used to erect an explanatory bridge between Toby's having nuts in front of him, and his gobbling them.  We make the following postulations (if we have not  already made them long ago):  That the appropriate explanatory laws will refer to three instantiables P, J, and V which (we stipulate) are to be labelled respectively "prehend", "join", and "will" That for any type of creature T there is a class N of kinds of thing, which is a class of what (we stipulate) shall be called "necessities for T", and that N (in N) is a necessity for T just in case N is vital for T, that is, just in case any member of T which suffers a sufficiently prolonged non-intake of N will lose the capacity for all of those operations (including the intake of N), the capacity for which is constitutive of membership of T [in a fuller account this condition would require further explication).  That if N is a necessity for T, then ceteris paribus a moderately prolonged non-intake of N on the part of a member (x) of T will cause x to instantiate a particular sub-instantiable V; of "will", x's instantiation of which will (ceteris paribus) be quenched by a moderately prolonged intake of N; and (we stipulate) V; shall be called "will for N" (or, if you like, "willing N"). That for any member x (e.g. Toby) of any creature-type T (e.g. squarrels) there is a class f of object-types (which, we stipulate, is a class of what shall be called"object-types familiar to x"); a class R of relations (a class of what shall be called "relations familiar to x"), and a class  of action-types (a class of what shall be called "action-types in the repertoire of x"), which satisfy the following conditions:  that there are two ways (if you like, functions) w, and w, such that ceteris paribus if an instance of an object-type F (familiar to x) is related to x by a relation R (familiar to x), then this causes x to instantiate a sub-instantiable of prehending which corresponds in ways w, and we to F and R respectively; which sub-instantiable (we stipulate) shall be called "prehending an F as R" le.g. "prehending nuts as in front"]. that ceteris paribus if, for some N [e.g. 'squarrel-food'] which is a necessity for x's type, for some A which is in x's repertoire, and for some F and R familiar to x, x has sufficiently frequently, when instantiating will for N, performed A upon instances of F which have been related by R to x, and as a result has ceased to instantiate will for N: then x instantiates a corresponding [corresponding to N, A, F, R] sub-instantiable of joining; which sub-instantiable shall be called "joining N with A and F and R". We can now formulate an "overall" law (a "PJV Law"), in which we no longer need to restrict N, A, F, and R to members of classes connected in certain ways with a particular creature or type of creature, as follows:  5. Ceteris parious, a creature x which wills N, prehends an F as R, and joins N and A and F and R, performs A.  Finally, we can introduce "judging" by derivation from  "joining"; we stipulate that if x joins N with A and F and R, then we shall speak of x as judging A, upon-F-in-R, for N le.g. judging gobbling, upon nuts (in) in front, for squarrel-food).  AdWe now have the desired explanatory bridge.  (i) Toby has nuts in front of him; (ii) Toby is short on squarrel-food (observed or  assumed); so  (iii) Toby wills squarrel-food [by postulate 3, connect-  ing will with intake of N;  (iv) Toby prehends nuts as in front [from (i) by postulate 4(a), if it is assumed that nuts and in front are familiar to Toby);  (v) Toby joins squarrel-food with gobbling and nuts and in front (Toby judges gobbling, on nuts in front, for squarrel-food) [by postulate 4(b), with the aid of prior observation]; so, by the PJV Law, from (iii), (iv), and (v),  (vi) Toby gobbles; and, since nuts are in front of him,  gobbles the nuts in front of him.  I shall end this section by some general remarks about the procedure just sketched.  The strategy is relatively simple; we invoke certain ceteris paribus laws in order to introduce particular psychological sub-instantiables and their specification by reference to content: thus "willing N" is introduced as the specific form of willing which is dependent on the intake and deprivation of a necessity N, "prehending F as R" as the variety of prehension which normally results from an F being R to one, and similarly for "joining". Then we use a further "overall" ceteris paribus law to eliminate reference to the psychological instantiables and to reach the behaviour which is to be explained. A more developed account would (no doubt) bring in intermediate laws, relating simply to psychological instantiables and not also to features of the common world. The generalities used have at various points the 'law-allusiveness' mentioned in Section III. Every reference to, for example, 'a sufficiently prolonged deprivation', 'a sufficiently frequent performance', or to 'correspondencein certain ways' in effect implies a demand on some more developed theory actually to produce laws which are here only asserted to be producible. 3. The psychological concepts introduced have been defined only for a very narrow range of complements.  Thus, judging has so far been defined only for complements which correspond in a certain way with those involved in the expression of hypothetical judgements (judging is, one might say, so far only a species of "if-judging"; and  "will" has been defined, so far, only for complements specifying necessities. Attention would have to be given to the provision of procedures for extending the range of these concepts.  4. If the procedure is, in its general character, correct (and I have not even attempted to show that it is), the possibility of impact on some familiar philosophical issues is already discernible. To consider only "prehension", which is intended as a prototype for perception:  "Prehending F as R" lacks the existential implication that there is an F which is R to the prehender; this condition could be added, but it would be added. This might well please friends of sense-data. The fact that reference to physical situations has to be made in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions might well be very unwelcome to certain phenomenalists. The fact that in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions a demand is imposed on a further theory to define functions mapping such pre-hensions on to physical situations might well prove fatal to a sceptic about the material world. How can such a sceptic, who is unsceptical about descriptions of sense-experience, combine the demand implicit in such descriptions with a refusal to assent to the existence of the physical situations which, it seems, the further theory would require in order to be in a position to meet the demand?I have so far been occupying myself with questions about the structure of the kind of psychological theory which would fulfil the function of bestowing the breath of life on psychological concepts. I shall move now to asking by what methods one might hope to arrive at an acceptable theory of this sort. One procedure, which I do not in the least despise, would be to take as a body of data our linguistic intuitions concerning what we would or would not be prepared to say when using psychological terms; then, as a first stage, to look for principles (perhaps involving artificially constructed concepts) which would seem to generalize the features of this or that section of our discourse, making adjustments when provisionally accepted principles lead to counter-intuitive or paradoxical results; and, as a second stage, to attempt to systematize the principles which have emerged piecemeal in the first stage, paying attention to the adequacy of a theory so constructed to account for the data conformably with general criteria for the assessment of theories. This would be to operate in two stages approximately corresponding to what the Greeks called the "analytic" (or "dialectical" and the "synthetic" procedures.  I am, for various reasons, not happy to confine myself to these methods. In applying them, many alternative theoretical options may be available, which will often be difficult to hit upon. I would like, if it is possible, to find a procedure which would tell me sooner and louder if I am on the right track, a procedure, indeed, which might in the end tell me that a particular theory is the right one, by some test beyond that of the ease and elegance with which it accommodates the data. I suspect that a dividend of this sort was what Kant expected transcendental arguments to yield, and I would like a basis for the construction of some analogue of transcendental arguments. I am also    influenced by a different consideration. I am much impressed by the fact that arrays of psychological concepts, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with human beings (so far) at the peak. So I would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity, and would not leave me just pursuing a number of separate psychological theories for different types of creatures.  The method which I should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course), according to certain principles of construction, a type of creature, or rather a sequence of types of creature, to serve as a model (or models) for actual creatures. My creatures I call pirots (which, Russell and Carnap have told us, are things which karulize elatically).  The general idea is to develop sequentially the psychological theory for different brands of pirot, and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concepts we apply to suitably related actual creatures, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction (which of course is unlikely ever to be more than partial).  The principles of pirot-construction may be thought of as embodied in what I shall call a genitorial programme, the main aspects of which I shall now formulate.  1. We place ourselves in the position of a genitor, who is engaged in designing living things (or rather, as I shall say, operants). An operant may, for present purposes, be taken to be a thing for which there is a certain set of operations requiring expenditure of energy stored in the operant, a sufficient frequency of each operation in the set being necessary to maintain the operant in a condition to pertorm any in the set le. to avoid becoming an ex-operant). Specific differences within such sets will determine different types of operant. The genitor will at least have to design them with a view to their survival (continued operancy); for, on certain marginal assumptions which it will be reasonable for us to make but tediousfor me to enumerate, if an operant (x) is not survival-oriented, there is no basis for supposing it to exist at all; since (by the assumption) x has to be produced in some way or other by other operants of the type, x will not exist unless pro-genitors are around to produce it; and if they are to have the staying power (and other endowments) required for x's production, x, being of the same type, must be given the same attributes. So in providing for the individual x, some provision for the continuation of the type is implicit. In order to achieve economy in assump-tions, we shall suppose the genitor to be concerned only to optimize survival chances.  Since the genitor is only a fiction, he is to be supposed only to design, not to create. In order that his designs should be useful to philosophical psychology, he must be supposed to pass his designs on to the engineer (who, being also a fiction, also does not have the power to create): the function of the engineer is to ensure that the designs of the genitor can be realized in an organism which behaves according to pre-psychological laws (e.g. those of physics and physiology). Since the genitor does not know about engineering, and since he does not want to produce futile designs, he had better keep a close eye on the actual world in order to stay within the bounds of the possible. The mode of construction is to be thought of as being relative to some very generally framed "living-condition" concerning the relation of a pirot to its environment; the operations the capacity for which determines the type of the pirot are to be those which, given the posited condition, constitute the minimum which the pirot would require in order to optimize the chances of his remaining in a condition to perform just those operations. Some pirots (plant-like) will not require psychological apparatus in order that their operations should be explicably performed; others will. Within the latter class, an ascending order of psychological types would, I hope, be generated by increasing the degree of demandingness in the determiningcondition. I cannot specify, at present, the kind of generality which is to attach to such conditions; but I have in mind such a sequence as operants which do not need to move at all to absorb sources of energy, operants which only have to make posture changes, operants which, because the sources are not constantly abundant, have to locate those sources, and (probably a good deal later in the sequence) operants who are maximally equipped to cope with an indefinite variety of physiologically tolerable environments (i.e., perhaps, rational pirots). Further types (or sub-types) might be generated by varying the degree of effectiveness demanded with respect to a given living-condition. Aristotle regarded types of soul (as I would suppose, of living thing) as forming a "developing series". I interpret that idea as being the supposition that the psychological theory for a given type is an extension of, and includes, the psychological theory of its predecessor-type. The realization of this idea is at least made possible by the assumption that psychological laws may be of a ceteris paribus form, and so can be modified without emendation. If this aspect of the programme can be made good, we may hope to safeguard the unity of psychological concepts in their application to animals and to human beings. Though (as Wittgenstein noted) certain animals can only expect such items as food, while men can expect a drought next summer, we can (if we wish) regard the concept of expectation as being determined not by the laws relating to it which are found in a single psychological theory, but by the sequences of sets of laws relating to it which are found in an ascending succession of psychological theories. Since the genitor is only to install psychological apparatus in so far as it is required for the generation of operations which would promote survival in a posited living-condition, no psychological concept can be instantiated by a pirot without the supposition of behaviour whichmanifests it. An explanatory concept has no hold if there is nothing for it to explain. This is why 'inner states must have outward manifestations'. 6. Finally, we may observe that we now have to hand a possible solution of the Selection Problem (D). Only those laws which can be given a genitorial justification (which fall within 'Pure Psychology') will be counted as helping to determine a psychological concept. It is just because one is dubious about providing such a justification for the  envisaged "Optimism" laws that one is reluctant to regard either of them as contributing to the definition of believing and wanting.  Kant thought that, in relation to the philosophy of nature, ideas of pure reason could legitimately be given only a regulative employment; somewhat similarly, as far as philosophical psychology is concerned, I think of the genitorial programme (at least in the form just characterized) as being primarily a heuristic device. I would, however, hope to be able to retain a less vivid reformulation of it, in which references to the genitor's purposes would be replaced by references to final causes, or (more positivistic-ally) to survival-utility; this reformulation I would hope to be able to use to cope with such matters as the Selection problem. But (also much as Kant thought with respect to ideas of pure reason) when it comes to ethics the genitorial programme, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is not purely heuristic. The thought that if one were genitor, one would install a certain feature which characteristically leads to certain forms of behaviour might conceivably be a proper step in the evaluation of that feature and of the associated behaviour.  Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of pirots which, nearly following Locke (Essay, i. 27. 8), I might call 'very    intelligent rational pirots. These pirots will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task; and if we have done our work aright, their answer will be the same as ours. In virtue of the rational capacities and dispositions which we have given them, and which they would give themselves, each of them will have both the capacity and the desire to raise the further question 'Why go on surviving?; and (I hope) will be able to justify his continued existence by endorsing (in virtue of the aforementioned rational capacities and dispositions) a set of criteria for evaluating and ordering ends, and by applying these criteria both to ends which he may already have, as indirect aids to survival, and to ends which are yet to be selected; such ends, I may say, will not necessarily be restricted to concerns for himself. The justification of the pursuit of some system of ends would, in its turn, provide a justification for his continued existence.  We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these pirots would be in a position to compile; this manual, though perhaps short, might serve as a basis for more specialized manuals to be composed when the pirots have been diversified by the harsh realities of actual existence. The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.  The pirots have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorially justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be formulated in terms of the concepts of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of living-conditions which have been used to set up that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality. There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addresses, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very6:49  67  scribd.com  intelligent rational pirot, and will thus have generality of form. And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable pirots, no pirot would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he was not likely to be subject; nor indeed could he do so, even if he would. So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application.  Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).  VI. Type-Progression in Pirotology: Content-Internalization  My purpose in this section is to give a little thought to the question 'What are the general principles exemplified, in creature-construction, in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type? What kinds of steps are being made?' The kinds of step with which I shall deal here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specitication of the content of the psychological state of certain pirots, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to lower pirots; such expressions include connectives, quantifiers, temporal modifiers, mood-indicators, modal operators, and (importantly) names of psychological states like "judge" and "will"; expressions the availability of which leads to the structural enrichment of specifications of content. In general, these steps will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables (or, if you will, the expressions forI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind. Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea. I am not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.  The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization.  1. References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology. Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging (A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction. To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge (A), or that he either judges [A] or judges (B), is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging (Al, or trom judging  [A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofwhich occur legitimately outside the scope of psychological verbs) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such instantiables: steps by which (one might say) such items or ideas come to be internalized  I am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind. Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea. I am not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.  The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization.  1. References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology. Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging [A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction. To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge [A], or that he either judges [A] or judges (B], is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging [A], or from judging  [A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofjudgings which are distinct, viz. of "future-judging [A]"  (expecting [A]) and of "or-judging [A, B]"  '. Since these are  new y-states, they will be open to the standard range of linguistic settings for references to y-states; a creature may now (or at some time in the future) future-judge [A]  (or past-judge [A]). There will be both a semantic difference and a semantic connection (not necessarily the same for every case) between the terminology generated by this kind of transition and the original from which it is generated; while "x or-judges [A, B]" will not require the truth of "x judges (A] or x judges (B]", there will be a connection of meaning between the two forms of expres-sion; if a creature x or-judges its potential prey as being [in the tree, in the bush], we may expect x to wait in between the tree and the bush, constantly surveying both; or-judging [A, B] will, in short, be typically manifested in behaviour which is appropriate equally to the truth of A and to the truth of B, and which is preparatory for behaviour specially appropriate to the truth of one of the pair, to be evinced when it becomes true either that x judges [A] or that x judges [B].  This kind of transition, in which an "extrinsic" modifier attachable to y-expressions is transformed into (or replaced by) an "intrinsic" modifier (one which is specific-atory of a special (-state), I shall call first-stage internal-ization.  2. It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that transitions from a lower type to a higher type of pirot will often involve the addition of diversifications of a y-state to be found undiversified in the lower type of pirot; we might proceed, for example, from pirots with a capacity for simple judging to pirots with a capacity for present-judging (the counterpart of the simple judging of their predecessors), and also for future-judging (primitive expecting) and for past-judging (primitive remembering).  It may be possible always to represent developmental steps in this way; but I am not yet sure of this. It may be thatsometimes we should attribute to the less-developed pirot two distinct states, say judging and willing; and only to a more developed pirot do we assign a more generic state, say accepting, of which, once it is introduced, we may represent judging and willing as specific forms (judicatively accepting and volitively accepting). But by whatever route we think of ourselves as arriving at it, the representation within a particular level of theory of two or more y-states as diversifications of a single generic y-state is legitimate, in my view, only if the theory includes laws relating to the generic -state which, so far from being trivially derivable from laws relating to the specific -states, can be used to derive in the theory, as special cases, some but not all generalities which hold for the specific y-states. We  might, for example, justity the attribution to a pirot of the generic y-state of accepting, with judging and willing as diversifications, by pointing to the presence of such a law as the following: ceteris paribus, if x or-accepts (in mode m of acceptance) [A, B], and x negatively accepts, in mode m, [A], then x positively accepts, in mode m, [B]. From this law we could derive that, ceteris paribus, (a) if x or-judges [A, B] and negatively judges [A], then x positively judges [B]; and (b) if x or-wills [A, B] and negatively wills [A], then x positively wills (BJ. ( (a) and (b) are, of course, psychological counterparts of mood-variant versions of modus tollendo ponens.)  3. A further kind of transition is one which I shall label second-stage internalization. It involves the replacement of an "intrinsic" modifier, which signifies a differentiating feature of a specific y-state, by a corresponding operator within the content-specifications for a less specific v-state. If, for example, we have reached by first-stage internalization the -state of future-judging [A], we may proceed by second-stage internalization to the y-state of judging [in the future, A]: similarly, we may proceed from judging (judicatively accepting) [A] to accepting [it is the case that Al, from willing (volitively accepting) [A] toaccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B). So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:  "x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory. To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]". An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator. The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old; indeed, I suspect that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.  Two observations remain to be made. First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ. This capacity may well require otheraccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B). So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:  "x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory. To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]". An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator. The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old; indeed, I suspect that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.  Two observations remain to be made. First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ. This capacity may well require other  M-states generated by internalization should conform to the restrictions propounded in Section VII; that is to say, they should not be assigned to a pirot without (a) the assignment to the pirot of behaviour the presence of which they will be required to explain, and (b) a genitorial justification for the presence of that behaviour in the pirot. If both generic and specific y-states are to be recognized by a theory, each such state should figure non-trivially in laws of that theory. Second-stage internalization should be invoked only when first-stage internalization is inadequate for explanatory purposes. Where possible, full internalization should be reached by a standard two-stage progression. VII. Higher-Order Psychological States  In this section I shall focus on just one of the modes of content-internalization, that in which psychological concepts (or other counterparts in psychological theory) are themselves internalized. I shall give three illustrations of the philosophical potentialities of this mode of internal-ization, including a suggestion for the solution of my third initial problem (Problem C), that of the accommodation, within my approach, of the phenomena of privileged access and incorrigibility.  1. As I have already remarked, it may be possible in a sufficiently enriched theory to define concepts which have to be treated as primitive in the theory's more impoverished predecessors. Given a type of pirot whose behaviour is sufficiently complex as to require a psychological theory in which psychological concepts, along with such other items as logical connectives and quantifiers, are internalized, it will I think be possible to define a variety of judging, which I shall call "judging*", in terms of willing. I doubt if one  would wish judging* to replace the previously distinguished notion of judging; I suspect one would wish them to coexist; one would want one's relatively advanced pirots to be capable not only of the highly rational state of judging but also of the kind of judging exemplified by lower types, if only in order to attribute to such advanced pirots implicit or unconscious judgings. There may well be more than one option for the definition of judging*; since my purpose is to illustrate a method rather than to make a substantial proposal, I shall select a relatively simple way, which may not be the best.  The central ideal is that whereas the proper specification of a (particularized) disposition, say a man's disposition to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town, would be as a disposition to entertain his brother if he believes that his brother has come to town (ct. the circularities noted in Section I), no such emendation is required if we speak of a man's will to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town. We may expect the man to be disappointed if he discovers that his brother has actually come to town without his having had the chance to entertain him, whether or not he was at the time aware that his brother was in town. Of course, to put his will into effect on a particular occasion, he will have to judge that his brother is in town, but no reference to such a judgement would be appropriate in the specification of the content of his will.  Here, then, is the definition which I suggest. x judges* that p just in case x wills as follows: given any situation in which (i) x wills some end E, (ii) there are two non-empty classes (K, and K2) of action-types such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K, will realize E just in case p is true, and the performance by x of a member of K, will realize E just in case p is false, (iji) there is no third non-empty class (K3) of action-types, such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K3 will realize E whether p is true or p is false: then in such a situation x is to will that he perform some action-type  belonging to K,. Put more informally (and less accurately), x judges that p just in case x wills that, if he has to choose between a kind of action which will realize some end of his just in case p is true and a kind of action which will realize that end just in case p is false, he should will to adopt some action of the first kind.  We might be able to use the idea of higher-order states to account for a kind of indeterminacy which is frequently apparent in our desires. Consider a disgruntled employee who wants more money; and suppose that we embrace the idea (which may very well be misguided) of representing his desire in terms of the notion of wanting that p (with the aid of quantifiers). To represent him as wanting that he should have some increment or other, or that he should have some increment or other within certain limits, may not do justice to the facts; it might be to attribute to him too generic a desire, since he may not be thinking that any increment, or any increment within certain limits, would do. If, however, we shift from thinking in terms of internal quantification to thinking in terms of external quantification, then we run the risk of attributing to him too specific a desire; there may not be any specific increment which is the one he wants; he may just not have yet made up his mind. It is as if we should like to plant our (existential) quantifier in an intermediate position, in the middle of the word 'want'; and that, in a way, is just what we can do. We can suppose him (initially) to be wanting that there be some increment (some increment within certain limits) such that he wants that increment; and then, when under the influence of that want he has engaged in further reflection, or succeeded in eliciting an offer from his employer, he later reaches a position to which external quantification is appropriate; that is, there now is some particular increment such that he wants that increment. I shall now try to bring the idea of higher-order states to bear on Problem C (how to accommodate privilegedaccess and, maybe, incorrigibility). I shall set out in stages a possible solution along these lines, which will also illustrate the application of aspects of the genitorial programme. Stage 0. We start with pirots equipped to satisfy unnested judgings and willings (i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing).  Stage 1. It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have judgings and willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other pirots; for example, if pirots are sufficiently developed to be able to will their own behaviour in advance (form intentions for future action), it could be advantageous to one pirot to anticipate the behaviour of another by judging that the second pirot wills to do A (in the future). So we construct a higher type of pirot with this capacity, without however the capacity for reflexive states.  Stage 2. It would be advantageous to construct a yet higher type of pirot, with judgings and willings which relate to its own judgings or willings. Such pirots could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings; they will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that ceteris paribus if they will that p and judge that not-p, then if they can, they make it the case that p. To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judgings and willings; we equip them so that ceteris paribus if they will that they do not will that p and judge that they do will that p, then (if they can) they make it the case that they do not will that p (and we somehow ensure that sometimes they can do this).  [It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in hand with the installation of the capacity for evaluation; but I need not concern myself with this now.]  Stage 3. We shall not want these pirots to depend, inreaching their second-order judgements about them-selves, on the observation of manifestational be-haviour; indeed, if self-control which involves suppressing the willing that p is what the genitor is aiming at,  behaviour which manifests a pirot's  judging that it wills that p may be part of what he hopes to prevent. So the genitor makes these pirots subject to the law that ceteris paribus if a pirot judges (wills) that p, then it judges that it judges (wills) that  p. To build in this feature is to build in privileged access to judgings and willings.  To minimize the waste of effort which would be involved in trying to suppress a willing which a pirot mistakenly judges itself to have, the genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that ceteris paribus if a pirot judges that it judges (wills) that P, then it judges (wills) that p. Both of these laws however are only ceteris paribus laws; and there will be room for counter-examples; in self-deception, for example, either law may not hold (we may get a judgement that one wills that p without the willing that p, and we may get willing that p without judging that one wills that p-indeed, with judging that one does not will that p).  Stage 4. Let me abbreviate "x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges? that p", and "x judges that x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges" that p". Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will be no way of finding non-linguistic manifestational behaviour which distinguishes  judging? that p from judging that p. There will now be two options: we may suppose that "judge? that p" is an inadmissible locution, which one has no basis for applying; or we may suppose that "x judges that p" and "x judges? that p" are manifestationally equivalent, just because there can be no distinguishing behavioural manifestation.The second option is preferable, if (a) we want to allow for the construction of a (possibly later) type, a talking pirot, which can express that it judges? that p; and (b) to maintain as a general (though probably derivative) law that ceteris paribus if x expresses that & then x judges that ф. The substitution of "x judges? that p" for " p" will force the admissibility of "x judges" that p". So we shall have to adopt as a law that x judges" that piff x judges? that p. Exactly parallel reasoning will force the adoption of the law that x judges that p if x judges? that p.  If we now define "x believes that p" as "x judges? that p", we get the result that a believes that p iff x believes that x believes that p. We get the result, that is to say, that beliefs are (in this sense) incorrigible, whereas first-order judgings are only matters for privileged access.  VIII. Are Psychological Concepts Eliminable?  I have tried to shed a little light on the question 'How are psychological concepts related to psychological theory and to psychological explanation?"; I have not, so far, said anything about a question which has considerably vexed some of my friends as well as myself. Someone (let us call him the eliminator) might say: 'You explicitly subscribe to the idea of thinking of psychological concepts as explicable in terms of their roles in psychological laws, that is to say, in terms of their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour. Y ou also subscribe to the idea that, where there is a psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, there is also a physiological explanation; with respect to pirots, it is supposedly the business of the engineer to make psychological states effective by ensuring that this condition holds. You must, however, admit that the explanations of behaviour, drawn from pirot-physiology, which are accessible to the engineer are, from a theoretical point of view, greatly superior to those accessible to the genitor; theformer are, for example, drawn from a more comprehensive theory, and from one which yields, or when fully developed will yield, even in the area of behaviour, more numerous and more precise predictions. So since attributions of psychological states owe any claim to truth they may have to their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour, and since these potentialities are inferior to the potentialities of physiological states, Occam's Razor will dictate that attributions of psychological states, to actual creatures no less than to pirots, should be rejected en bloc as lacking truth (even though, from ignorance or to avoid excessive labour, we might in fact continue to utter them). We have indeed come face to face with the last gasp of Primitive Animism, namely the attempted perpetuation of the myth that animals are animate.'  The eliminator should receive fuller attention than I can give him on this occasion, but I will provide an interim response to him, in the course of which I shall hope to redeem the promise, made in Section Il, to pursue a little further the idea that the common-sense theory which underlines our psychological concepts can be shown to be at least in some respects true.  First, the eliminator's position should, in my view, be seen as a particular case of canonical scepticism, and should, therefore, be met in accordance with general principles for the treatment of sceptical problems. It is necessary, but it is also insufficient, to produce a cogent argument for the falsity of his conclusion; if we confine ourselves to this kind of argumentation we shall find ourselves confronted by the post-eliminator, who says to us 'Certainly the steps in your refutation of the eliminator are validly made; but so are the steps in his argument.  A correct view of the matter is that from a set of principles in which psychological concepts occur crucially, and through which those concepts are delineated, it follows both that the eliminator is right and that he is wrong; so much the worse, then, for the set of principles and for the concepts;they should be rejected as incoherent. A satisfactory rebuttal of the eliminator's position must, therefore, undermine his argument as well as overturn his conclu-sion.  In pursuit of the first of these objectives, let me remark that, to my mind , to explain a phenomenon (or sequence  of phenomena) P is typically to explain P qua exemplifying some particular feature or characteristic; and so one fact or system may explain P qua exemplifying characteristic C, while another fact or system explains P qua exemplifying C2. In application to the present case, it is quite possible that one system, the physiology of the future, should explain the things we do considered as sequences of physical movements, while another system, psychological theory, explains the things we do considered as instances of sorts of behaviour. We may, at this point, distinguish two possible principles concerning the acceptability of systems of explanation:  1. If system S, is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of a class of phenomena P will respect to a class of characteristics C, than is system S, for the explanation of & with respect to C, then (other things being equal) S, is to be accepted and S, is to be rejected.  I have no quarrel with this principle.  2. If system S, is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of P with respect to C, than is system S2 for the explanation of P with respect to Cz la different class of characteristics], then (other things being equal) S, is to be accepted and S, is to be rejected.  The latter principle seems to me to lack plausibility; in general, if we want to be able to explain P qua C2 (e.g. as behaviour), our interest in such explanation should not be abandoned merely because the kind of explanation available with respect to some other class of characteristics is theoretically superior to the kind available with respect to C2. The eliminator, however, will argue that, in the presentcase, what we have is really a special case of the application of Principle 1; for since any Ca (in Cz) which is exemplified on a given occasion has to be "realized" on that occasion in some , (some sequence of physical movements), for which there is a physiological explanation, the physiological explanation of the presence of C, on that occasion is ipso facto an explanation of the presence of C2 (the behavioural feature) on that occasion, and so should be regarded as displacing any psychological explanation of the presence of Ca.  To maintain this position, the eliminator must be prepared to hold that if a behavioural feature is, on an occasion, "realized" in a given type of physical movement-sequence, then that type of movement-sequence is, in itself, a sufficient condition for the presence of the behavioural feature; only so can he claim that the full power and prestige of physiological explanation is transmitted from movements to behaviour, thereby ousting psychological explanation. But it is very dubious whether particular movement-sequences are, in general, sufficient conditions for behavioural features, especially with respect to those behavioural features the discrimination of which is most important for the conduct of life. Whether a man with a club is merely advancing towards me or advancing upon me may well depend on a condition distinct from the character of his movements, indeed (it would be natural to suppose) upon a psychological condition. It might of course be claimed that any such psychological condition would, in principle, be re-expressible in psychological terms, but this claim cannot be made by one who seeks not the reduction of psychological concepts but their rejection: if psychological states are not to be reduced to physiological states, the proceeds of such reduction cannot be used to bridge gaps between movements and behaviour.  The truth seems to be that the language of behavioural description is part and parcel of the system to which psychological explanation belongs, and cannot be prisedoff therefrom. Nor can the eliminator choose to be hanged for a sheep rather than for a mere lamb, by opting to jettison behavioural description along with psychological concepts; he himself will need behavioural terms like  "describe" and "report" in order to formulate his non-recommendations (or predictions); and, perhaps more importantly, if there is (or is to be) strictly speaking no such thing as the discrimination of behaviour, then there are (or are to be) no such things as ways of staying alive, either to describe or to adopt.  Furthermore, even if the eliminator were to succeed in bringing psychological concepts beneath the baleful glare of Principle 1, he would only have established that other things being equal psychological concepts and psychological explanation are to be rejected. But other things are manifestly not equal, in ways which he has not taken into account. It is one thing to suggest, as I have suggested, that a proper philosophical understanding of ascriptions of psychological concepts is a matter of understanding the roles of such concepts in a psychological theory which explains behaviour; it is quite another thing to suppose that creatures to whom such a theory applies will (or should) be interested in the ascription of psychological states only because of their interest in having a satisfactory system for the explanation of behaviour. The psychological theory which I envisage would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests (for example) on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature. Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would (or should) regardas justified.? Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, I think, can matters of evaluation, and so of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all. If I conjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all.  We must be ever watchful against the devil of scientism, who would lead us into myopic over-concentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the devil who is even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas required to make intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that, since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay.  * Let me illustrate with a little fable. The very eminent and very dedicated neurophysiologist speaks to his wife. "My (for at least a little while longer) dear," he says, "I have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your actions and behaviour. I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile and nearly every desire that has moved you to act. My researches, however, have made such progress that I shall no longer need to understand you in this way. Instead I shall be in a position, with the aid of instruments which I shall attach to you, to assign to each bodily movement which you make in acting a specific antecedent condition in your cortex. No longer shall I need to concern myself with your so-called thoughts and feelings. In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight. I trust that you will not resist if I bring along some apparatus to help me to determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system." I have a feeling that the lady might refuse the proffered invitation.  § I am indebted to George Myro for the tenor of this remark, as well as for valuable help with the substance of this section. H. P. Grice  In his ‘Method,’ Grice presents some of his ideas about how he wants to approach philosophical psychology.  Grice’s hope is, in effect, to sketch a whole system.    This is quite an undertaking, and Grice hope that you will bear with him if in discharging it he occupies a little more of your time than is becoming in holders of his august office.     While Grice is sure that you will be able to detect some affinities between my ideas and ideas to be found in recent philosophy, Grice proposes to leave such comparisons to you.     Though at certain points Grice has had his eye on recent discussions, the main influences on this part of his work have lain in the past, particularly in Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.     Grice has the feeling that between them these philosophers have written a great deal of the story, though perhaps not always in the most legible of hands.    Grice begins by formulating, in outline, a sequence of four particular problems which Grice thinks an adequate philosophical psychology must be able to lay to rest.    One concerns the real or apparent circularity with which one is liable to be faced if one attempts to provide an analysis of central psychological concepts by means of an explicit definition.     Suppose that, like some philosophers of the not so distant past, we are attracted by the idea of giving dispositional behaviouristic analyses of such concepts, and that we make a start on the concept of belief.     As a first shot, we try the following,     x believes that p     just in case x is disposed to act as if p were true.     In response to obvious queries about the meaning of the phrase, 'act as if p were true', we substitute, for Bi, Bz:     x believes that p just in case x is disposed, whenever x wants (desires) some end E, to act in ways which will realize E given that p is true rather than in ways which will realize E given that p is false.     The precise form which such a definition might take is immaterial to Grice’s present purpose, provided that it has two features observable in Bz;     first, that a further psychological concept, that of wanting, has been introduced in the definiens; and     second, that to meet another obvious response, the concept of belief itself has to be reintroduced in the definiens.     For the disposition associated with a belief that p surely should be specified, not as a disposition to act in ways which will in fact realize E given that p is true, but rather as a disposition to act in ways which x believes will, given that p is true, realize E.     One who believes that p may often fail to act in ways that would realize E given that p were true, because he is quite unaware of the fact that such actions would realize E if p were true;     and he may quite often act in ways which would realize E only if p were false, because he mistakenly believes that such ways would realize E if p were true.    If we turn to the concept of wanting, which B2 introduced into the definiens for belief, we seem to encounter a parallel situation.     Suppose we start with W,:     x wants E just in case x is disposed to act in ways which will realize E rather than in ways which will realize the negation of E.     Precisely the same kind of objection as that just raised in the case of belief seems to compel the introduction of the concept of belief into the definiens of W, giving us W2:     x wants E just in case x is disposed to act in ways which x believes will realize E rather than in ways which x believes will realize the negation of E.   We now meet the further objection that one who wants E can be counted on to act in such ways as these only provided that there is no E' which he wants more than E;     if there is such an E,  in any situation in which & conflicts with & he may be expected to act in ways he thinks will realize the negation of E.     But the incorporation of any version of this proviso into the definiens for wanting will reintroduce the concept of wanting itself.    The situation, then, seems to be that if, along the envisaged behaviouristic lines, we attempt to provide explicit definitions for such a pair of concepts as those of belief and wanting, whichever member of the pair we start with we are driven into the very small circle of introducing into the definiens the very concept which is being defined, and also into the slightly larger circle of introducing into the definiens the other member of the pair.     The idea suggested to Grice by this difficulty is that we might be well advised, as a first move, to abandon the idea of looking for explicit definitions of central psychological concepts, and look instead for implicit definitions, to be provided by some form of axiomatic treatment; leaving open the possibility that, as a second move, this kind of treatment might be made the foundation for a different sort of explicit definition.     Such a procedure might well preserve an attractive feature of behaviouristic analyses, that of attempting to explain psychological concepts by relatingthem to appropriate forms of behaviour, while at the same time freeing us from the logical embarrassments into which such analyses seem to lead us.    We are now, however, faced with a further question: if we are to think of certain psychological concepts as being implicitly defined by some set of laws (or quasi-laws) in which they figure, are we to attribute to such laws a contingent or a non-contingent status!     A look at some strong candidates for the position of being laws of the kind which we are seeking seems merely to reinforce the question.     Consider the principle 'He who wills the end wills the means,' some form of which seems to me to be the idea behind both of the behaviouristic definitions just discussed; and interpret it as saying that anyone who wills some end, and also believes that some action on his part is an indispensable means to that end, wills the action in question.     One might be inclined to say that if anyone believed (really believed) that a certain line of action was indispensable to the attainment of a certain end, and yet refused to adopt that line of action, then that would count decisively against the conceptual legitimacy of saying that it was really his will to attain that end.     To proceed in this way at least appears to involve treating the principle as a necessary truth. On the other hand, one might also be inclined to regard the principle as offering a general account of a certain aspect of our psychological processes, as specifying a condition under which, when our will is fixed on a certain object, it will be the case that it is also fixed on a certain other object; to take this view of the principle seems like regarding it as a psychological law and so as contingent.     Grice’s second problem  is, then, this: how (without a blanket rejection of the analytic/ synthetic distinction) are we to account for and, if possible, resolve the ambivalence concerning their status with which we seem to look upon certain principles involving psychological concepts?    To set this problem aside for a moment, the approach which Grice is interested in exploring is that of thinking of certain central psychological concepts as theoretical concepts; they are psychological concepts just because they are the primitive concepts which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory without also belonging to any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory); and a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, explanations of behaviour which differ from any explanations of behaviour which may be provided by (or may some day be provided by) any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory).     To explicate such psychological concepts is to characterize their role in the theory to which they primarily belong, to specify (with this or that degree of detail) the laws or quasi-laws in which they figure, and the manner in which such laws are linked to behaviour.     Now to say this much is not to say anything very new;     Grice is sure you have heard this sort of thing before.     It is also not to say very much; all that has so far been given is a sketch of a programme for the philosophical treatment of psychological concepts, not even the beginnings of a philosophical treatment itself.    What is needed is rather more attention to detail than is usually offered by advocates of this approach; we need to pursue such questions as what the special features of a psychological theory are, why such a theory should be needed, what sort of laws or generalities it should contain, and precisely how such laws may be used to explicate familiar psychological terms. I shall be addressing myself to some of these questions in the remainder of this address to you.    But before any more is said, a further problem looms.     Grice can almost hear a murmur to the effect that such an approach to philosophical psychology is doomed from the start.     Do we not have privileged access to our own beliefs and desires?     And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our beliefs and desires are incorrigible?     How, then, are such considerations as theseto be rendered consistent with an approach which seems to imply that the justifiability of attributing beliefs and desires to people (and maybe animals), including ourselves, rests on the utility of the theory to which the concepts of belief and desire belong, in providing desiderated explanations of behaviour? This is Grice’s third problem (    Grice’s fourth problem, the Selection Problem, is connected with a different and less radical objection to the approach which I have just begun to sketch.   Surely, it may be said, it cannot be right to suppose that a conjunction of all the laws of a psychological theory in which a psychological concept figures is what should be used to explicate that concept.     Even if we are in a position to use some of these laws (which is not certain), we are not, and indeed never shall be, in a position to use all of them.  Moreover, some particular laws are not going to be suitable. For all we know, some modification of one or other of the following laws' might be a psychological law, possibly an underived law:    Optimism Law: the more one wants @ the more likely one is to believe pOptimism/Pessimism Law: given condition C, the more one wants d, the more likely one is to believe  d; given condition C2, the more one wants , the less likely one is tobelieve .  These do not seem the right kind of laws to be used to explicate wanting and believing. We need some selective principle: what is it?    some General Aspects of the Relation betwee sychological Theory and Psychological Concepi  irst, a preliminary observation: it we are seeking t  xplicate psychological concepts by relating them topsychological theory, the theory which we invoke should be one which can be regarded as underlying our ordinary speech and thought about psychological matters, and as such will have to be a part of folk-science.     There is no need to suppose that its structure would be of a sort which is appropriate for a professional theory, nor even to suppose that it would be a correct or acceptable theory; though I would hope that there would be a way of showing that at least some central parts of it would be interpretable within an acceptable professional theory in such a way as to come out true in that theory, and that indeed this demand might constitute a constraint on the construction of a professional theory.     This is perhaps a latter-day version of a defence of common sense in this area.3    Let us unrealistically suppose, for the purposes of schematic discussion, that we have a psychological theory which, when set out in formal dress, contains a body of underived laws, the formulation of which incorporates two primitive predicate-constants, J and V; these we want to correspond, respectively, to two psychological terms    "judging" and "willing", which in their turn will serve as a regimented base for the explication of such familiar notions as believing and wanting. Let us think of J and V as correlated with, or ranging over, "instantiables" leaving open the question whether these instantiables are sets or properties, or both, or neither. Let us abbreviate the conjunction of these laws by "L", and let us ignore for the moment the obvious fact that any adequate theory along these lines would need to distinguish specific sub-instantiables under J and V, corresponding to the diversity of specific contents which judging and willing may take as modifications (as "intentional objects").    How are we to envisage the terms "judge" and "will" as being introduced?   Two closely related alternative ways suggest themselves.     First, what I shall call the way ofRamsified naming: 'There is just one J and just one V such that L, and let J be called "judging" and V be called  "willing"? On this alternative, the uniqueness claim is essential, since "judging" and "willing" are being assigned as names for particular instantiables.     The second altern-ative, which I may call the way of Ramsified definition, can dispense with the uniqueness claim. It will run: '(a) x judges just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates J; (b) x wills just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates V.  We now have available a possible explanation of the ambivalence we may feel with regard to the status of certain psychological principles, which was the subject of Problem B. The difference between the two alternative procedures is relatively subtle, and if we do not distinguish them we may find ourselves under the pull of both.     But the first alternative will render certain psychological principles contingent, while the second will render the same principles non-contingent. Let me illustrate by using an even simpler and even less realistic example. Suppose that a psychological law tells us that anyone in state P hollers, and that we seek to use this law to introduce the term "pain". On the first alternative, we have: there is just one P, such that anyone in state P hollers, and let us call P "pain".     Since on this alternative we are naming the state P "pain", if the utilized law is contingent, so will be the principle 'anyone who is in pain hollers.' If we use the second alternative, we shall introduce "pain" as follows: * is in pain just in case there is a P such that anyone in state P hollers and x is in state P. On this alternative it will be non-contingently true that anyone who is in pain hollers. (For to be in pain is to be in some state which involves hollering.) While this suggestion may account for the ambivalence noted, it does not of course resolve it; to resolve it, one would have to find a reason for preferring one of the alternatives to the other.    In a somewhat devious pursuit of such a reason, let usenquire further about the character of the postulated psychological instantiables—are they, or could they be, identifiable with physical (physiological) instantiables?    One possible position of a sort which has been found attractive by some slightly impetuous physicalists would be to adopt the first alternative (that of Ramsified naming) and to combine it with the thesis that the J-instantiable is to be identified with one physiological property and the V-instantiable with another such property.     This position at least appears to have the feature, to which some might strongly object, of propounding a seemingly philosophical thesis which is at the mercy of possible developments in physiology; and, one might add, the prospects that such developments would be favourable to the thesis do not seem to be all that bright.     The adaptiveness of organisms may well be such as to make it very much in the cards that different creatures of the same species may, under different environmental pressures, develop different sub-systems (even different sub-systems at different times) as the physiological underlay of the same set of psychological instantiables, and that a given physiological property may be the correlate in one sub-system of a particular psychological instantiable, while in another it is correlated with a different psychological instantiable, or with none at all.    Such a possibility would mean that a physiological property which was, for a particular creature at a particular time, correlated with a particular psychological instantiable would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that instantiable; it would at best be sufficient (and perhaps also necessary) for the instantiable within the particular kind of sub-system prevailing in the creature at the time.     The unqualified identification of the property and the instantiable would now be excluded.    Faced with such a difficulty, a physicalist might resort to various manoeuvres.   He might seek to identify a particular psychological instantiable with a disjunctive property, each disjoined constituent of which is a property consistingin having a certain physiological property in a certain kind of sub-system; or he might relativize the notion of identity, for the purpose of psycho-physical identification, to types of sub-systems; or he might abandon the pursuit of identification at the level of instantiables, and restrict himself to claiming identities between individual psychological events or states of affairs (e.g. Jones's believing at t that p) and physiological events or states of affairs (e.g Jones's brain being in such and such a state at t).     But none of these shifts has the intuitive appeal of their simplistic forebear. Moreover, each will be open to variants of a familiar kind of objection.     For example, Jones's judging at noon that they were out to get him might well be a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence; but (to use Berkeley's phrase) it 'sounds harsh' to say that Jones's brain's being in such and such a state at noon is a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.     For Grice’s part, Grice would hope that a much-needed general theory of categories would protect me against any thesis which would require me either to license such locutions as the last or to resort to a never-ending stream of cries of 'Opaque context!' in order to block them.     If the prime purpose of the notion of identity is, as I believe it to be, to license predicate-transfers, one begins to look a little silly if one first champions a particular kind of identifica-tion, and then constantly jibs at the predicate-transfers which it seems to allow.    Such considerations as these can, I think, be deployed against the way of Ramsified naming even when it is unaccompanied by a thesis about psycho-physical identities.    However unlikely it may be that the future course of physiological research will favour any simple correlations between particular psychological instantiables and particular physiological properties, I do not see that I have any firm guarantee that it will not, that it will never be established that some particular kind of brain state is associated with, say, judging that snow is white.     If so, thenf I adopt the first alternative with its uniqueness claim, I  ave no firm guarantee against having to identity m brain's being in some particular state with my judging that snow is white, and so being landed with the embarrassments I have just commented upon. Since I am inclined to think that I do in fact have such a guarantee (although at the moment I cannot lay my hands on it), I am inclined to prefer the second alternative to the first.    As a pendant to the discussion just concluded, let me express two prejudices. First, any psycho-physical identifications which are accepted will have to be accepted on the basis of some known or assumed psycho-physical correlations; and it seems to me that in this area all that philosophical psychology really requires is the supposition that there are such correlations. Whether they do or do not provide a legitimate foundation for identifications seems to me to be more a question in the theory of identity than in the philosophy of mind.     Second, Grice is not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the advocacy of psycho-physical identifications; I have in mind a concern to exclude such 'queer' or "mysterious' entities as souls, purely mental events, purely mental properties, and so forth.     My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework.    Provided that I can see them at work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all.     To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima.     To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects.In this section I shall briefly discuss two formal features which I think it might be desirable to attribute to some at least of the laws or quasi-laws of the theory to be used to explicate psychological concepts.     Aristotle distinguished between things which are so of necessity and things which are so for the most part, and located in the second category things which are done.    More or less conformably with this position, I shall suggest that some or all of the laws which determine psychological concepts are ceteris paribus laws, which resemble probability generalizations in that they are defeasible, but differ from them in that ceteris paribus laws do not assign weights.     Grice envisages a system which without inconsistency may contain a sequence consisting of a head-law of the form A's are Z, and modifying laws of the form A's which are B are Z' (where Z' is incompatible with Z), and of the form A's which are B and C are Z, and so on. Analogous sequences can be constructed for functional laws; if A, B, and Z are determinables we may have, in the same system:    things which are A to degree a are Z to degree f' (a)  things which are A to degree a and B to degree B are Z to a degree which is the value of f (B, f' (a))    If we like, we can prefix "ceteris paribus" to each such generality, to ensure that "A's are Z" is not taken as synonymous with "All A's are Z." For any such system a restriction on Modus Ponens is required, since we must not be allowed to infer from A's are Z and x is both A and B to x is Z if A's which are B are Z' (where Z' is incompatible with Z) is a law.     This restriction will be analogous to the Principle of Total Evidence required for probabilistic systems; a first approximation might run as follows: in applying a law of the system to an individualcase for the purpose of detachment, one must select the law with the most specific antecedent which is satisfied by the individual case.     Two results of treating psychological laws as ceteris paribus laws which will be attractive to me are first that it can no longer be claimed that we do not know any psychological laws because we do not know all the restrictive conditions, and second, that a psychological theory may be included in a larger theory which modifies it; modification does not require emendation.  If a modifying sequence terminates, then its constituent laws can be converted into universal laws; otherwise not.    If we hold a strong version of Determinism (roughly, that there is an acceptable theory in which every phenomenon is explained), we might expect the Last Trump to herald a Presidential Address in which the Final Theory is presented, entirely free from ceteris paribus laws; but if we accept only a weaker version, with reversed quantifiers (for every phenomenon there is an acceptable theory in which it is explained), the programme for Judgement Day will lose one leading attraction: Other items on the agenda, however, may prove sufficiently exciting to compensate for this loss.    I suspect that even the latitude given to our prospective psychological folk-theory by allowing it to contain or even consist of ceteris paribus laws will not make it folksy enough.     There is (or was) in Empirical Psychology a generality called "The Yerkes-Dodson Law"; based on experiments designed to test degrees of learning competence in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying periods of initial constraint, it states (in effect) that, with other factors constant, degrees of learning competence are correlated with degrees of emotional stress by a function whose values form a bell-curve.     I have some reluctance towards calling this statement the expression of a law, on the grounds that, since it does not (and could not, given that quantitative expression of degrees of competence and of stress is not available) specify the function or functions in question, it states that there is a law of a certain sortrather than actually state a law.     But whether or not the Yerkes-Dodson Law is properly so-called, it is certainly law-allusive'; and the feature of being law-allusive is one which I would expect to find in the psychological 'laws' to be used to explicate psychological concepts.     Semi-realistic Procedure for Introducing some Psychological Concepts    Grice turns now to the task of outlining, in a constructive way, the kind of method by which, in accordance with my programme, particular psychological concepts, and linguistic expressions for them, might be introduced; I shall take into account the need to clarify the routes by which psychological sub-instantiables come to be expressed by the combination of a general psychological verb and a complement which specifies content. My account will be only semi-realistic, since I shall consider the psychological explanation of only a very rudimentary sample of  behaviour, and even with respect to that sample a proper explanation would involve apparatus which I omit-for example, apparatus to deal with conceptual representation and with the fact that motivations towards a particular sort of behaviour may be frustrated.     But since I am attempting only to illustrate a general method, not to make substantial proposals, these over-simplifications should not matter. I construct my account as if I espoused the first alternative discussed in Section II (the way of Ramsified naming) rather than the second, since that considerably simplifies exposition: a transition to the second alternative can, of course, be quite easily effected.    Let us suppose that a squarrel (a creature something like a squirrel) has some nuts in front of it, and proceeds to gobble them; and that we are interested in the further explanation of this occurrence. Let us call the squarrel  "Toby".     Our ethological observations of Toby, and ofother squarrels, tell us that Toby and other squarrels often gobble nuts in front of them, and also other things besides nuts, and indeed that they are particularly liable to do some gobbling after a relatively prolonged period in which they have done no gobbling at all.   On the basis of these observations, and perhaps a range of other observations as well, we decide that certain behaviour of squarrels, including Toby's gobbling nuts in front of him, are suitable subjects for psychological explanation; so we undertake to introduce some theoretical apparatus which can be used to erect an explanatory bridge between Toby's having nuts in front of him, and his gobbling them.    We make the following postulations (if we have not  already made them long ago):    That the appropriate explanatory laws will refer to three instantiables P, J, and V which (we stipulate) are to be labelled respectively "prehend", "join", and "will"    That for any type of creature T there is a class N of kinds of thing, which is a class of what (we stipulate) shall be called "necessities for T", and that N (in N) is a necessity for T just in case N is vital for T, that is, just in case any member of T which suffers a sufficiently  prolonged non-intake of N will lose the capacity for all of those operations (including the intake of N), the capacity for which is constitutive of membership of T [in a fuller account this condition would require further explication).    That if N is a necessity for T, then ceteris paribus a moderately prolonged non-intake of N on the part of a member (x) of T will cause x to instantiate a particular sub-instantiable V; of "will", x's instantiation of which will (ceteris paribus) be quenched by a moderately prolonged intake of N; and (we stipulate) V; shall be called "will for N" (or, if you like, "willing N").    That for any member x (e.g. Toby) of any creature-type T (e.g. squarrels) there is a class f of object-types (which, we stipulate, is a class of what shall be called"object-types familiar to x"); a class R of relations (a class of what shall be called "relations familiar to x"), and a class  of action-types (a class of what shall be called "action-types in the repertoire of x"), which satisfy the following conditions:    that there are two ways (if you like, functions) w, and w, such that ceteris paribus if an instance of an object-type F (familiar to x) is related to x by a relation R (familiar to x), then this causes x to instantiate a sub-instantiable of prehending which corresponds in ways w, and we to F and R respectively; which sub-instantiable (we stipulate) shall be called "prehending an F as R" le.g.    "prehending nuts as in front"].    that ceteris paribus if, for some N [e.g. 'squarrel-food'] which is a necessity for x's type, for some A which is in x's repertoire, and for some F and R familiar to x, x has sufficiently frequently, when instantiating will for N, performed A upon instances of F which have been related by R to x, and as a result has ceased to instantiate will for N: then x instantiates a corresponding [corresponding to N, A, F, R] sub-instantiable of joining; which sub-instantiable shall be called "joining N with A and F and R".    We can now formulate an "overall" law (a "PJV Law"), in which we no longer need to restrict N, A, F, and R to members of classes connected in certain ways with a particular creature or type of creature, as follows:    Ceteris parious, a creature x which wills N, prehends an F as R, and joins N and A and F and R, performs A.    Finally, we can introduce "judging" by derivation from    joining"; we stipulate that if x joins N with A and F and R, then we shall speak of x as judging A, upon-F-in-R, for N le.g. judging gobbling, upon nuts (in) in front, for squarrel-food).    AdWe now have the desired explanatory bridge.    Toby has nuts in front of him; (ii) Toby is short on squarrel-food (observed or  assumed); so  (iii) Toby wills squarrel-food [by postulate 3, connect-ing will with intake of N;(iv) Toby prehends nuts as in front [from (i) by postulate 4(a), if it is assumed that nuts and in front are familiar to Toby);v) Toby joins squarrel-food with gobbling and nuts and in front (Toby judges gobbling, on nuts in front, for squarrel-food) [by postulate 4(b), with the aid of prior observation]; so, by the PJV Law, from (iii), (iv), and (v),  (vi) Toby gobbles; and, since nuts are in front of him  gobbles the nuts in front of him.  I shall end this section by some general remarks about the procedure just sketched.    The strategy is relatively simple; we invoke certain ceteris paribus laws in order to introduce particular psychological sub-instantiables and their specification by reference to content: thus "willing N" is introduced as the specific form of willing which is dependent on the intake and deprivation of a necessity N, "prehending F as R" as the variety of prehension which normally results from an F being R to one, and similarly for "joining". Then we use a further "overall" ceteris paribus law to eliminate reference to the psychological instantiables and to reach the behaviour which is to be explained. A more developed account would (no doubt) bring in intermediate laws, relating simply to psychological instantiables and not also to features of the common world.    The generalities used have at various points the 'law-allusiveness' mentioned in Section III. Every reference to, for example, 'a sufficiently prolonged deprivation', 'a sufficiently frequent performance', or to 'correspondencein certain ways' in effect implies a demand on some more developed theory actually to produce laws which are here only asserted to be producible.    The psychological concepts introduced have been defined only for a very narrow range of complements.    Thus, judging has so far been defined only for complements which correspond in a certain way with those involved in the expression of hypothetical judgements (judging is, one might say, so far only a species of "if-judging"; and    "will" has been defined, so far, only for complements specifying necessities. Attention would have to be given to the provision of procedures for extending the range of these concepts.    4. If the procedure is, in its general character, correct (and I have not even attempted to show that it is), the possibility of impact on some familiar philosophical issues is already discernible. To consider only "prehension", which is intended as a prototype for perception:    "Prehending F as R" lacks the existential implication that there is an F which is R to the prehender; this condition could be added, but it would be added. This might well please friends of sense-data.    The fact that reference to physical situations has to be made in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions might well be very unwelcome to certain phenomenalists.    The fact that in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions a demand is imposed on a further theory to define functions mapping such pre-hensions on to physical situations might well prove fatal to a sceptic about the material world. How can such a sceptic, who is unsceptical about descriptions of sense-experience, combine the demand implicit in such descriptions with a refusal to assent to the existence of the physical situations which, it seems, the further theory would require in order to be in a position to meet the demand?I have so far been occupying myself with questions about the structure of the kind of psychological theory which would fulfil the function of bestowing the breath of life on psychological concepts. I shall move now to asking by what methods one might hope to arrive at an acceptable theory of this sort.    One procedure, which I do not in the least despise, would be to take as a body of data our linguistic intuitions concerning what we would or would not be prepared to say when using psychological terms; then, as a first stage, to look for principles (perhaps involving artificially constructed concepts) which would seem to generalize the features of this or that section of our discourse, making adjustments when provisionally accepted principles lead to counter-intuitive or paradoxical results; and, as a second stage, to attempt to systematize the principles which have emerged piecemeal in the first stage, paying attention to the adequacy of a theory so constructed to account for the data conformably with general criteria for the assessment of theories. This would be to operate in two stages approximately corresponding to what the Greeks called the "analytic" (or "dialectical" and the "synthetic" procedures.    I am, for various reasons, not happy to confine myself to these methods. In applying them, many alternative theoretical options may be available, which will often be difficult to hit upon. I would like, if it is possible, to find a procedure which would tell me sooner and louder if I am on the right track, a procedure, indeed, which might in the end tell me that a particular theory is the right one, by some test beyond that of the ease and elegance with which it accommodates the data. I suspect that a dividend of this sort was what Kant expected transcendental arguments to yield, and I would like a basis for the construction of some analogue of transcendental arguments. I am alsoinfluenced by a different consideration. I am much impressed by the fact that arrays of psychological concepts, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with human beings (so far) at the peak. So I would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity, and would not leave me just pursuing a number of separate psychological theories for different types of creatures.    The method which I should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course), according to certain principles of construction, a type of creature, or rather a sequence of types of creature, to serve as a model (or models) for actual creatures. My creatures I call pirots (which, Russell and Carnap have told us, are things which karulize elatically).    The general idea is to develop sequentially the psychological theory for different brands of pirot, and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concepts we apply to suitably related actual creatures, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction (which of course is unlikely ever to be more than partial).    The principles of pirot-construction may be thought of as embodied in what I shall call a genitorial programme, the main aspects of which I shall now formulate.    We place ourselves in the position of a genitor, who is engaged in designing living things (or rather, as I shall say, operants). An operant may, for present purposes, be taken to be a thing for which there is a certain set of operations requiring expenditure of energy stored in the operant, a sufficient frequency of each operation in the set being necessary to maintain the operant in a condition to pertorm any in the set le. to avoid becoming an ex-operant). Specific differences within such sets will determine different types of operant. The genitor will at least have to design them with a view to their survival (continued operancy); for, on certain marginal assumptions which it will be reasonable for us to make but tediousfor me to enumerate, if an operant (x) is not survival-oriented, there is no basis for supposing it to exist at all; since (by the assumption) x has to be produced in some way or other by other operants of the type, x will not exist unless pro-genitors are around to produce it; and if they are to have the staying power (and other endowments) required for x's production, x, being of the same type, must be given the same attributes.     So in providing for the individual x, some provision for the continuation of the type is implicit. In order to achieve economy in assumptions, we shall suppose the genitor to be concerned only to optimize survival chances.      Since the genitor is only a fiction, he is to be supposed only to design, not to create. In order that his designs should be useful to philosophical psychology, he must be supposed to pass his designs on to the engineer (who, being also a fiction, also does not have the power to create): the function of the engineer is to ensure that the designs of the genitor can be realized in an organism which behaves according to pre-psychological laws (e.g. those of physics and physiology).     Since the genitor does not know about engineering, and since he does not want to produce futile designs, he had better keep a close eye on the actual world in order to stay within the bounds of the possible.    The mode of construction is to be thought of as being relative to some very generally framed "living-condition" concerning the relation of a pirot to its environment; the operations the capacity for which determines the type of the pirot are to be those which, given the posited condition, constitute the minimum which the pirot would require in order to optimize the chances of his remaining in a condition to perform just those operations.     Some pirots (plant-like) will not require psychological apparatus in order that their operations should be explicably performed; others will. Within the latter class, an ascending order of psychological types would, I hope, be generated by increasing the degree of demandingness in the determiningcondition. I cannot specify, at present, the kind of generality which is to attach to such conditions; but I have in mind such a sequence as operants which do not need to move at all to absorb sources of energy, operants which only have to make posture changes, operants which, because the sources are not constantly abundant, have to locate those sources, and (probably a good deal later in the sequence) operants who are maximally equipped to cope with an indefinite variety of physiologically tolerable environments (i.e., perhaps, rational pirots).     Further types (or sub-types) might be generated by varying the degree of effectiveness demanded with respect to a given living-condition.    Aristotle regarded types of soul (as I would suppose, of living thing) as forming a "developing series". I interpret that idea as being the supposition that the psychological theory for a given type is an extension of, and includes, the psychological theory of its predecessor-type.     The realization of this idea is at least made possible by the assumption that psychological laws may be of a ceteris paribus form, and so can be modified without emendation. If this aspect of the programme can be made good, we may hope to safeguard the unity of psychological concepts in their application to animals and to human beings.     Though (as Wittgenstein noted) certain animals can only expect such items as food, while men can expect a drought next summer, we can (if we wish) regard the concept of expectation as being determined not by the laws relating to it which are found in a single psychological theory, but by the sequences of sets of laws relating to it which are found in an ascending succession of psychological theories.    Since the genitor is only to install psychological apparatus in so far as it is required for the generation of operations which would promote survival in a posited living-condition, no psychological concept can be instantiated by a pirot without the supposition of behaviour which manifests it.     An explanatory concept has no hold if there is nothing for it to explain.     This is why 'inner states must have outward manifestations'.     Finally, we may observe that we now have to hand a possible solution of the Selection Problem (D).     Only those laws which can be given a genitorial justification (which fall within 'Pure Psychology') will be counted as helping to determine a psychological concept. It is just because one is dubious about providing such a justification for theenvisaged "Optimism" laws that one is reluctant to regard either of them as contributing to the definition of believing and wanting.    Kant thought that, in relation to the philosophy of nature, ideas of pure reason could legitimately be given only a regulative employment; somewhat similarly, as far as philosophical psychology is concerned, I think of the genitorial programme (at least in the form just characterized) as being primarily a heuristic device.     Grice would, however, hope to be able to retain a less vivid reformulation of it, in which references to the genitor's purposes would be replaced by references to final causes, or (more positivistic-ally) to survival-utility; this reformulation I would hope to be able to use to cope with such matters as the Selection problem.     But (also much as Kant thought with respect to ideas of pure reason) when it comes to ethics the genitorial programme, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is not purely heuristic.     The thought that if one were genitor, one would install a certain feature which characteristically leads to certain forms of behaviour might conceivably be a proper step in the evaluation of that feature and of the associated behaviour.    Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of pirots which, nearly following Locke (Essay, i. 27. 8), I might call 'veryintelligent rational pirots.     These pirots will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task; and if we have done our work aright, their answer will be the same as ours. In virtue of the rational capacities and dispositions which we have given them, and which they would give themselves, each of them will have both the capacity and the desire to raise the further question 'Why go on surviving?; and (I hope) will be able to justify his continued existence by endorsing (in virtue of the aforementioned rational capacities and dispositions) a set of criteria for evaluating and ordering ends, and by applying these criteria both to ends which he may already have, as indirect aids to survival, and to ends which are yet to be selected; such ends, I may say, will not necessarily be restricted to concerns for himself.     The justification of the pursuit of some system of ends would, in its turn, provide a justification for his continued existence.    We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these pirots would be in a position to compile; this manual, though perhaps short, might serve as a basis for more specialized manuals to be composed when the pirots have been diversified by the harsh realities of actual existence.     The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.    The pirots have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorially justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be formulated in terms of the concepts of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of living-conditions which have been used to set up that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality.     There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addresses, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very6:intelligent rational pirot, and will thus have generality of form.     And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable pirots, no pirot would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he was not likely to be subject; nor indeed could he do so, even if he would.     So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application.    Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).    Type-Progression in Pirotology:     Content-Internalization    Grice’s purpose in this section is to give a little thought to the question 'What are the general principles exemplified, in creature-construction, in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type? What kinds of steps are being made?'     The kinds of step with which I shall deal here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specitication of the content of the psychological state of certain pirots, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to lower pirots; such expressions include connectives, quantifiers, temporal modifiers, mood-indicators, modal operators, and (importantly) names of psychological states like "judge" and "will"; expressions the availability of which leads to the structural enrichment of specifications of content.     In general, these steps will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables (or, if you will, the expressions forI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea.     Grice is not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization.    References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology.     Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging (A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge (A), or that he either judges [A] or judges (B), is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging (Al, or trom judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofwhich occur legitimately outside the scope of psychological verbs) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such instantiables: steps by which (one might say) such items or ideas come to be internalizedI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea. I am not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization. References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology. Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging [A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge [A], or that he either judges [A] or judges (B], is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging [A], or from judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofjudgings which are distinct, viz. of "future-judging [A]"(expecting [A]) and of "or-judging [A, B]" Since these arenew y-states, they will be open to the standard range of linguistic settings for references to y-states; a creature may now (or at some time in the future) future-judge [A](or past-judge [A]).     There will be both a semantic difference and a semantic connection (not necessarily the same for every case) between the terminology generated by this kind of transition and the original from which it is generated; while "x or-judges [A, B]" will not require the truth of "x judges (A] or x judges (B]", there will be a connection of meaning between the two forms of expres-sion; if a creature x or-judges its potential prey as being [in the tree, in the bush], we may expect x to wait in between the tree and the bush, constantly surveying both; or-judging [A, B] will, in short, be typically manifested in behaviour which is appropriate equally to the truth of A and to the truth of B, and which is preparatory for behaviour specially appropriate to the truth of one of the pair, to be evinced when it becomes true either that x judges [A] or that x judges [B].    This kind of transition, in which an "extrinsic" modifier attachable to y-expressions is transformed into (or replaced by) an "intrinsic" modifier (one which is specific-atory of a special (-state), I shall call first-stage internal-ization.    It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that transitions from a lower type to a higher type of pirot will often involve the addition of diversifications of a y-state to be found undiversified in the lower type of pirot; we might proceed, for example, from pirots with a capacity for simple judging to pirots with a capacity for present-judging (the counterpart of the simple judging of their predecessors), and also for future-judging (primitive expecting) and for past-judging (primitive remembering).    It may be possible always to represent developmental steps in this way; but I am not yet sure of this. It may be thatsometimes we should attribute to the less-developed pirot two distinct states, say judging and willing; and only to a more developed pirot do we assign a more generic state, say accepting, of which, once it is introduced, we may represent judging and willing as specific forms (judicatively accepting and volitively accepting).     But by whatever route we think of ourselves as arriving at it, the representation within a particular level of theory of two or more y-states as diversifications of a single generic y-state is legitimate, in my view, only if the theory includes laws relating to the generic -state which, so far from being trivially derivable from laws relating to the specific -states, can be used to derive in the theory, as special cases, some but not all generalities which hold for the specific y-states. Wemight, for example, justity the attribution to a pirot of the generic y-state of accepting, with judging and willing as diversifications, by pointing to the presence of such a law as the following: ceteris paribus, if x or-accepts (in mode m of acceptance) [A, B], and x negatively accepts, in mode m, [A], then x positively accepts, in mode m, [B].     From this law we could derive that, ceteris paribus, (a) if x or-judges [A, B] and negatively judges [A], then x positively judges [B]; and (b) if x or-wills [A, B] and negatively wills [A], then x positively wills (BJ. ( (a) and (b) are, of course, psychological counterparts of mood-variant versions of modus tollendo ponens.)    A further kind of transition is one which I shall label second-stage internalization. It involves the replacement of an "intrinsic" modifier, which signifies a differentiating feature of a specific y-state, by a corresponding operator within the content-specifications for a less specific v-state.     If, for example, we have reached by first-stage internalization the -state of future-judging [A], we may proceed by second-stage internalization to the y-state of judging [in the future, A]: similarly, we may proceed from judging (judicatively accepting) [A] to accepting [it is the case that Al, from willing (volitively accepting) [A] toaccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B).     So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old;     indeed, Grice suspects that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made. First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ.     This capacity may well require otheraccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B). So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    "x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old; indeed, I suspect that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made.     First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ. This capacity may well require other    M-states generated by internalization should conform to the restrictions propounded in Section VII; that is to say, they should not be assigned to a pirot without     the assignment to the pirot of behaviour the presence of which they will be required to explain, and     a genitorial justification for the presence of that behaviour in the pirotIf both generic and specific y-states are to be recognized by a theory, each such state should figure non-trivially in laws of that theory.    Second-stage internalization should be invoked only when first-stage internalization is inadequate for explanatory purposes.    Where possible, full internalization should be reached by a standard two-stage progression.    VII. Higher-Order Psychological States    In this section Grice focuses on just one of the modes of content-internalization, that in which psychological concepts (or other counterparts in psychological theory) are themselves internalized.     I shall give three illustrations of the philosophical potentialities of this mode of internal-ization, including a suggestion for the solution of my third initial problem (Problem C), that of the accommodation, within my approach, of the phenomena of privileged access and incorrigibility.    As I have already remarked, it may be possible in a sufficiently enriched theory to define concepts which have to be treated as primitive in the theory's more impoverished predecessors.     Given a type of pirot whose behaviour is sufficiently complex as to require a psychological theory in which psychological concepts, along with such other items as logical connectives and quantifiers, are internalized, it will I think be possible to define a variety of judging, which I shall call "judging*", in terms of willing.     I doubt if one would wish judging* to replace the previously distinguished notion of judging; I suspect one would wish them to coexist; one would want one's relatively advanced pirots to be capable not only of the highly rational state of judging but also of the kind of judging exemplified by lower types, if only in order to attribute to such advanced pirots implicit or unconscious judgings.     There may well be more than one option for the definition of judging*; since my purpose is to illustrate a method rather than to make a substantial proposal, I shall select a relatively simple way, which may not be the best.    The central ideal is that whereas the proper specification of a (particularized) disposition, say a man's disposition to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town, would be as a disposition to entertain his brother if he believes that his brother has come to town (ct. the circularities noted in Section I), no such emendation is required if we speak of a man's will to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town.     We may expect the man to be disappointed if he discovers that his brother has actually come to town without his having had the chance to entertain him, whether or not he was at the time aware that his brother was in town.     Of course, to put his will into effect on a particular occasion, he will have to judge that his brother is in town, but no reference to such a judgement would be appropriate in the specification of the content of his will.    Here, then, is the definition which I suggest. x judges* that p just in case x wills as follows: given any situation in which (i) x wills some end E, (ii) there are two non-empty classes (K, and K2) of action-types such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K, will realize E just in case p is true, and the performance by x of a member of K, will realize E just in case p is false, (iji) there is no third non-empty class (K3) of action-types, such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K3 will realize E whether p is true or p is false: then in such a situation x is to will that he perform some action-typebelonging to K,.     Put more informally (and less accurately), x judges that p just in case x wills that, if he has to choose between a kind of action which will realize some end of his just in case p is true and a kind of action which will realize that end just in case p is false, he should will to adopt some action of the first kind.    We might be able to use the idea of higher-order states to account for a kind of indeterminacy which is frequently apparent in our desires.     Consider a disgruntled employee who wants more money; and suppose that we embrace the idea (which may very well be misguided) of representing his desire in terms of the notion of wanting that p (with the aid of quantifiers).     To represent him as wanting that he should have some increment or other, or that he should have some increment or other within certain limits, may not do justice to the facts; it might be to attribute to him too generic a desire, since he may not be thinking that any increment, or any increment within certain limits, would do.     If, however, we shift from thinking in terms of internal quantification to thinking in terms of external quantification, then we run the risk of attributing to him too specific a desire; there may not be any specific increment which is the one he wants; he may just not have yet made up his mind. It is as if we should like to plant our (existential) quantifier in an intermediate position, in the middle of the word 'want'; and that, in a way, is just what we can do.     We can suppose him (initially) to be wanting that there be some increment (some increment within certain limits) such that he wants that increment; and then, when under the influence of that want he has engaged in further reflection, or succeeded in eliciting an offer from his employer, he later reaches a position to which external quantification is appropriate; that is, there now is some particular increment such that he wants that increment.    Grice shall now try to bring the idea of higher-order states to bear on Problem C (how to accommodate privilegedaccess and, maybe, incorrigibility).     Grice sets out in stages a possible solution along these lines, which will also illustrate the application of aspects of the genitorial programme    Stage 0. We start with pirots equipped to satisfy unnested judgings and willings (i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing).    Stage 1. It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have judgings and willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other pirots; for example, if pirots are sufficiently developed to be able to will their own behaviour in advance (form intentions for future action), it could be advantageous to one pirot to anticipate the behaviour of another by judging that the second pirot wills to do A (in the future).     So we construct a higher type of pirot with this capacity, without however the capacity for reflexive states.    It would be advantageous to construct a yet higher type of pirot, with judgings and willings which relate to its own judgings or willings.     Such pirots could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings; they will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that ceteris paribus if they will that p and judge that not-p, then if they can, they make it the case that p.     To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judgings and willings; we equip them so that ceteris paribus if they will that they do not will that p and judge that they do will that p, then (if they can) they make it the case that they do not will that p (and we somehow ensure that sometimes they can do this).    It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in hand with the installation of the capacity for evaluation; but I need not concern myself with this now.]    We shall not want these pirots to depend, inreaching their second-order judgements about them-selves, on the observation of manifestational be-haviour; indeed, if self-control which involves suppressing the willing that p is what the genitor is aiming at,behaviour which manifests a pirot'sjudging that it wills that p may be part of what he hopes to prevent. So the genitor makes these pirots subject to the law that ceteris paribus if a pirot judges (wills) that p, then it judges that it judges (wills) thatp.     To build in this feature is to build in privileged access to judgings and willings.    To minimize the waste of effort which would be involved in trying to suppress a willing which a pirot mistakenly judges itself to have, the genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that ceteris paribus     if a pirot judges that it judges (wills) that P, it judges (wills) that p.     Both of these laws however are only ceteris paribus laws.    And there will be room for counter-examples.    In self-deception, for example, either law may not hold.    We may get a judgement that one wills that p without the willing that p.    And we may get willing that p without judging that one wills that p, indeed, with judging that one does not will that p.    Grice abbreviates "x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges? that p", and "x judges that x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges" that p".     Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will be no way of finding non-linguistic manifestational behaviour which distinguishes judging? that p from judging that p.     There will now be two options.    We may suppose that "judge? that p" is an inadmissible locution, which one has no basis for applying.    Or we may suppose that "x judges that p" and "x judges? that p" are manifestationally equivalent, just because there can be no distinguishing behavioural manifestation.    The second option is preferable, if we want to allow for the construction of a possibly later type, a *talking* pirot, which can EXPRESS that it judges? that p; and to maintain as a general, though probably derivative, law that ceteris paribus     if x EXPRESSES that &, x judges that ф.     The substitution of "x judges? that p" for " p" will force the admissibility of "x judges" that p".     So we shall have to adopt as a law that x judges" that piff x judges? that p.   Exactly parallel reasoning will force the adoption of the law that x judges that p if x judges? that p.    If we now define "x believes that p" as "x judges? that p", we get the result that     a believes that p iff x believes that x believes that p.     We get the result, that is to say, that     — a belief is (in this sense) incorrigible, whereas a first-order judging is only a matter for privileged access.    Is this or that Psychological Concept Eliminable?    Grice has tried to shed a little light on the question 'How is a psychological concept related to psychological theory and to psychological explanation?"    Grice has not, so far, said anything about a question which has considerably vexed some of Grice’s friends as well as himself.    Someone —let us call him the eliminator — might say:     ‘You explicitly subscribe to the idea of thinking of apsychological concept as explicable in terms of its role in a psychological law, that is to say, in terms of their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour.     You also subscribe to the idea that, where there is a psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, there is also a physiological explanation   With respect to pirots, it is supposedly the business of the engineer to make a psychological state effective by ensuring that this condition holds.     You must, however, admit that the explanation of behaviour, drawn from pirot-physiology, which is accessible to the engineer is  from a theoretical point of view, greatly superior to that accessible to the genitor;     The former are, for example, drawn from a more comprehensive theory, and from one which yields  or when fully developed will yield — even in the area of behaviour, a more precise prediction.    So since the attribution of a psychological state owes any claim to truth it may have to its potentialities for the explanation of behaviour, and since these potentialities are inferior to the potentialities of this of that physiological state, Occam's Razor will dictate that attributions of psychological states, to actual creatures no less than to pirots, should be rejected en bloc as lacking truth —even though, from ignorance or to avoid excessive labour, we might in fact continue to utter them.    We have indeed come face to face with the last gasp of Primitive Animism, namely the attempted perpetuation of the myth that animals are animate.'    The eliminator should receive fuller attention than Grice can give him on this occasion, but I will provide an interim response to him, in the course of which Grice shall hope to redeem the promise made, to pursue a little further the idea that the common-sense theory which underlines this or that psychological concept can be shown to be at least in some respects true.    First, the eliminator's position should, in Grice’s view, be seen as a particular case of canonical scepticism, and should, therefore, be met in accordance with general principles for the treatment of sceptical problems.     It is necessary, but it is also insufficient, to produce a cogent argument for the falsity of his conclusion;     if we confine ourselves to this kind of argumentation we shall find ourselves confronted by the post-eliminator, who says to us     “Certainly the steps in your refutation of the eliminator are validly made.”    “But so are the steps in his argument.”    A correct view of the matter is that from a set of principles in which a psychological concept occurs crucially, and through which that psychological concept is delineated, it follows both that the eliminator is right and that he is wrong.    So much the worse, then, for the set of principles and for the concepts;    they should be rejected as incoherent.     A satisfactory rebuttal of the eliminator's position must, therefore, undermine his argument as well as overturn his conclusion.    In pursuit of the first of these objectives, Grice remarks that, to his mind, to explain a phenomenon, or a sequence of phenomena, P is, typically, to explain P qua exemplifying some particular feature or characteristic     And so, one fact — or system — may explain P qua exemplifying characteristic C, while another fact — or system — explains P qua exemplifying a different charscteristic C2.     In application to the present case, it is quite possible that one system, the physiology of the future, should explain the things we do considered as sequences of physical movements, while another system, psychological theory, explains the things we do considered as instances of sorts of behaviour.    We may, at this point, distinguish two possible principles concerning the acceptability of a system of explanation:    If a system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of a class of phenomena P will respect to a class of characteristics C, than is system S2 for the explanation of & with respect to C, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    Gricd has no quarrel with this principle.    If system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of P with respect to C1 than is system S2 for the explanation of P with respect to C2, la different class of characteristics, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    The latter principle seems to me to lack plausibility.    In general, if we want to be able to explain P qua C2, e.g. as behaviour, our interest in such explanation should not be abandoned merely because the kind of explanation available with respect to some other class of characteristics is theoretically superior to the kind available with respect to C2.     The eliminator, however, will argue that, in the present case, what we have is really a special case of the application of Principle 1;     for     since any Ca in Cz which is exemplified on a given occasion has to be realised on that occasion in some , (some sequence of physical movements), for which there is a physiological explanation, the physiological explanation of the presence of C, on that occasion is ipso facto an explanation of the presence of C2, the behavioural feature, on that occasion, and so should be regarded as displacing any psychological explanation of the presence of Ca.    To maintain this position, the eliminator must be prepared to hold that if a behavioural feature is, on an occasion, realised in a given type of physical movement sequence,  that type of a movement sequence is, in itself, a sufficient condition for the presence of the behavioural feature.    Only so can the eliminator claim that the full power and prestige of physiological explanation is transmitted from a movement to behaviour, thereby ousting psychological explanation.     But it is very dubious whether a particular a movement sequence is, in general, a sufficient condition for a behavioural feature, especially with respect to such a behavioural feature the discrimination of which is most important for the conduct of life.     Whether a man with a club is merely advancing *towards* Grice or advancing *upon* Grice may well depend on a condition distinct from the character of his movements, indeed, it would be natural to suppose, upon a psychological condition.     It might of course be claimed that any such psychological condition would, in principle, be re-expressible in psychological terms, but this claim cannot be made by one who seeks not the reduction of psychological concepts but their rejection.    If a psychological state is not to be reduced to a physiological state, the proceeds of such reduction cannot be used to bridge gaps between a movement and behaviour.    The truth seems to be that the language of behavioural description is part and parcel of the system to which psychological explanation belongs, and cannot be prised off therefrom.     Nor can the eliminator choose to be hanged for a sheep rather than for a mere lamb, by opting to jettison behavioural description along with psychological concepts.    The eliminator himself will need behavioural terms like"describe" and "report" in order to formulate his non-recommendations or predictions.    And, perhaps more importantly, if there is, or is to be, strictly speaking no such thing as the discrimination of behaviour, there are, or are to be, no such things as ways of staying alive, either to describe or to adopt.    Furthermore, even if the eliminator were to succeed in bringing psychological concepts beneath the baleful glare of Principle 1, he would only have established that other things being equal psychological concepts and psychological explanation are to be rejected.     But other things are manifestly not equal, in ways which he has not taken into account.     It is one thing to suggest, as Grice suggests, that a proper philosophical understanding of ascriptions of psychological concepts is a matter of understanding the roles of such concepts in a psychological theory which explains behaviour.    It is quite *another* thing to suppose that creatures to whom such a theory applies will (or should) be interested in the ascription of psychological states only because of their interest in having a satisfactory system for the explanation of behaviour.     The psychological theory which Grice envisages would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests, for example, on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature.     Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would (or should) regardas justified.    Grice illustrates with a little fable.     The very eminent and very dedicated neurophysiologist speaks to his wife.   "My (for at least a little while longer) dear," he says,     "I have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your actions and behaviour.”    “I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile, and nearly every desire that has moved you to act.”    “My researches, however, have made such progress that I shall no longer need to understand you in this way.”    “Instead I shall be in a position, with the aid of instruments which I shall attach to you, to assign to each bodily movement which you make in acting a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.”    “No longer shall I need to concern myself with your so-called thoughts and feelings.”    “In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight”      “I trust that you will not resist if I bring along some apparatus to help me to determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.”    Grice has a feeling that Mrs. Churchland might refuse the proffered invitation.   Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, Grice thinks, can matters of evaluation, and so of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all.     If Grice conjectures aright, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment — whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all.    We must be ever watchful against the devil of scientism, who would lead us into myopic over-concentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the devil who is even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas required to make intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that, since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay. H. P. Grice   In his ‘Method in philosophical philosophy: from the banal to the bizarre,’ Grice presents some of his ideas about how he wants to approach philosophical psychology.  Grice’s hope is, in effect, to sketch a whole system.    This is quite an undertaking, and Grice hopes that you will bear with him if in discharging it he occupies a little more of your time than is becoming in holders of his august office.     While Grice is sure that you will be able to detect some affinities between his ideas and ideas to be found in philosophy, Grice proposes to leave such comparisons to you.     Though at certain points Grice has had his eye on  discussions, the main influences on this part of his work have lain in the past, particularly in Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.     Grice has the feeling that, among them, these philosophers have written a great deal of the story, though perhaps not always in the most legible of hands.    Grice begins by formulating, in outline, a sequence of particular problems which Grice thinks an adequate philosophical psychology must be able to lay to rest.    One concerns the real or apparent circularity with which one is liable to be faced if one attempts to provide an analysis of a central psychological concept by means of an explicit definition.    Suppose that, like some philosophers, we are attracted by the idea of giving a dispositional behaviouristic analysis of such a concept, and that we make a start on the concept of belief.     As a first shot, we try the following:    x believes that p     just in case     x is disposed to act as if p is true.    In response to obvious queries about the meaning of the phrase, 'act as if p is true', we substitute:    x is disposed, whenever x wants (desires) some end E, to act in ways which will realise E given that p is true, rather than in ways which will realise E given that p is false.     The precise form which such a definition might take is immaterial to Grice’s present purpose, provided that it has two features observable.    First,    that a further psychological concept, that of wanting, has been introduced in the definiens; and     second,    that to meet another obvious response, the concept of belief itself has to be reintroduced in the definiens.    For the disposition associated with a belief that p surely should be specified, not as a disposition to act in ways which will in realise E given that p is true, but rather as a disposition to act in ways which x *believes* will — given that p is true — realise E.     One who believes that p may often fail to act in ways that would realise E given that p is true, because he is quite unaware of the fact that such actions would realise E if p is true    Or he may quite often act in ways which would realise E only if p is false — because he mistakenly believes that such ways would realiss E if p is true.    If we turn to the concept of wanting, which the definition introduced into the definiens for belief, we seem to encounter a parallel situation.     Suppose we start with:    x wants E     just in case     x is disposed to act in ways which will realise E, rather than in ways which will realise the negation of E.     The same kind of objection, as that just raised in the case of belief, seems to compel the introduction of the concept of belief into the definiens of W, giving us:    x is disposed to act in ways which x *believes* will realise E rather than in ways which x believes will realise the negation of E.     We now meet the further objection that one who wants E can be counted on to act in such ways as these — only provided that there is no E2 which he wants more than E1.    If there is such an E2, in any situation in which & conflicts with & he may be expected to act in ways he thinks will realise the negation of E.     But the incorporation of any version of this proviso into the definiens for wanting will reintroduce the concept of wanting itself.    The situation, then, seems to be that if, along the envisaged behaviouristic lines, we attempt to provide an explicit definition for such a pair of concepts as those of belief and wanting, whichever member of the pair we start with we are driven into the very small circle of introducing into the definiens the very concept which is being defined, and also into the slightly larger circle of introducing into the definiens the other member of the pair.     The idea, suggested to Grice by this difficulty, is that we might be well advised, as a first move, to abandon the idea of looking for an explicit definition of a central psychological concept, and look instead for an implicit definition, to be provided by some form of axiomatic treatment — leaving open the possibility that, as a second move, this kind of treatment might be made the foundation for a different sort of explicit definition.     Such a procedure might well preserve an attractive feature of behaviouristic analyses, that of attempting to explain psychological concepts by relating them to appropriate forms of behaviour, while at the same time freeing us from the logical embarrassments into which such analyses seem to lead us.    We are now, however, faced with a further question.    If we are to think of a certain psychological concept as being implicitly defined by some set of laws, or quasi-laws, in which they figure, are we to attribute to such laws a contingent or a non-contingent status?    A look at some strong candidates for the position of being laws of the kind which we are seeking seems merely to reinforce the question.     Consider the principle:    ‘He who wills the end wills the means.’    — some form of which seems to me to be the idea behind both of the behaviouristic definitions just discussed.    Interpret it as saying that anyone who wills some end, and also believes that some action on his part is an indispensable means to that end, wills the action in question.     One might be inclined to say that if anyone believes that a certain line of action is indispensable to the attainment of a certain end, and yet refuses to adopt that line of action, that would count decisively against the conceptual legitimacy of saying that it is his will to attain that end.     Think Machiavelli!    To proceed in this way at least appears to involve treating the principle as a necessary truth.    On the other hand, one might also be inclined to regard the principle as offering a general account of a certain aspect of our psychological processes, as specifying a condition under which, when our will is fixed on a certain object, it will be the case that it is also fixed on a certain other object.    To take this view of the principle seems like regarding it as a psychological *law* — and, so. as contingent.     Grice’s second problem  is, then, this:     How — without a blanket rejection of Leibniz’s analytic/ synthetic distinction — are we to account for and, if possible, resolve the ambivalence concerning their status with which we seem to look upon this or that principle involving this or that psychological concept?    Cf. Conversation as rational cooperation.    To set this problem aside for a moment, the approach which Grice is interested in exploring is that of thinking of a central psychological concept as a theoretical concept.    It is a psycho-logical concepts (Italian, psychic) just because it is the primitive concept which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory, without also belonging to any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    And a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, an explanation of behaviour whichs differ from any explanation of behaviour which may be provided by, or may some day be provided by, any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    To explicate such a psychological concept is to characterize its role in the theory to which it primarily belongs, to specify, with this or that degree of detail, the laws — or quasi-laws — in which it figures, and the manner in which such a law or quasi-law, is linked to behaviour.     Now to say this much is not to say anything very new;     Grice is sure you have heard this sort of thing before.     It is also not to say very much.    Allthat has so far been given is a sketch of a programme for the philosophical treatment of a psychological concept, not even the beginnings of a philosophical treatment itself.    What is needed is rather more attention to detail than is usually offered by advocates of this approach.    We need to pursue such questions as what the special features of a psychological theory are, why such a theory should be needed, what sort of laws or generalities it should contain, and precisely how such a law may be used to explicate a familiar psychological term.     Grice shall be addressing hinself to some of these questions in the remainder of this address to you.    But, before any more is said, a further problem looms.     Grice can almost hear a murmur to the effect that such an approach to philosophical psychology is doomed from the start.     Do we *not* have privileged access to our own belief and desire?     And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our belief and our desire are incorrigible?     How, then, are such considerations as these to be rendered consistent with an approach which seems to imply that the justifiability of attributing a belief and a desire to people — and maybe animals —, including ourselves, rests on the utility of the theory to which the concepts of belief and desire belong, in providing desiderated explanations of behaviour?     This is Grice’s third problem.    Grice’s fourth problem, the Selection Problem, is connected with a different and less radical objection to the approach which Grice has just begun to sketch.     Surely, it may be said, it cannot be right to suppose that a conjunction of all the laws of a psychological theory in which a psychological concept figures is what should be used to explicate that concept.     Even if we are in a position to use any such law — which is not certain — we are not, and indeed never shall be, in a position to use all of them.    Moreover, this or that law may not be suitable.     For all we know, some modification of one or other of the following laws' might be a psychological law, possibly an underived law:    Optimism Law:     The more one wants p the more likely one is to believe p.     Optimism/Pessimism Law:     Given condition C1, the more one wants d the more likely one is to believe  d.    Given condition C2, the more one wants d, the less likely one is to believe d.    These do not seem the right kind of law to be used to explicate wanting or believing.    We need some selective principle.    What is this selective problem?    First, a preliminary observation.    If we are seeking to explicate a psychological concept by relating it to psychological theory, the theory which we invoke should be one which can be regarded as underlying our ordinary speech and thought about this or that psychological matter, and as such will have to be a part of folk-science.    There is no need to suppose that its structure would be of a sort which is appropriate for a professional theory, nor even to suppose that it would be a correct or acceptable theory; though Grice would hope that there would be a way of showing that, at least, some central parts of it would be interpretable within an acceptable professional theory — in such a way as to come out true in that theory, and that, indeed, this demand might constitute a constraint on the construction of a professional theory.     This is perhaps a latter-day version of a defence of common sense in this area.    Let us unrealistically suppose, for the purposes of schematic discussion, that we have a psychological theory which, when set out in formal dress, contains a body of underived laws, the formulation of which incorporates two primitive predicate *constants*: J and V.    These two *constants* we want to correspond, respectively, to two psychological terms    "judging" — from Latin iudicatio — and "willing — from Latin vuolere.     — which in their turn will serve as a regimented base for the explication of such familiar notions as believing and wanting.     Let us think of I and V as correlated with, or ranging over, "instantiables" leaving open the question whether these instantiables are sets or properties, or both, or neither.     Let us abbreviate the conjunction of these laws by "L", and let us ignore for the moment the obvious fact that any adequate theory along these lines would need to distinguish specific sub-instantiables under J and V, corresponding to the diversity of specific contents which judging and willing may take as modifications as "intentional objects.”    How are we to envisage the terms "judge" and "will" as being introduced?     Two closely related alternative ways suggest themselves.     First, what Grice shall call the way of Ramseified naming:     “There is just one J, and just one V     — such that L,     and     Let I be called "judging" and V be called “willing.”    On this alternative, the uniqueness claim is essential, since "judging" and "willing" are being assigned as names for this or that particular instantiable.    An alternative, which Grice may call the way of Ramsified *definition*, can dispense with the uniqueness claim.     It will run:     x judges just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates J.    x wills just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates V.    We now have available a possible explanation of the ambivalence we may feel with regard to the Leibnizian status of a psychological principle, which was the subject of a problem.    The difference between the two alternative procedures is relatively subtle, and if we do not distinguish them we may find ourselves under the pull of both.     The first alternative renders a psychological principle contingent.    The second renders the same principle non-contingent.    Let me illustrate by using an even simpler and even less realistic example.   Suppose that a psychological law tells us that     anyone, in state P, hollers.    And that we seek to use this law to introduce the term "pain" — Latin: paena.    On the first alternative, we have:     There is just one P, such that anyone, in state P, hollers.    Let us call P "pain".     Since on this alternative we are naming the state P "pain", if the utilised law is contingent, so will be the principle     Anyone who is in pain hollers.    If we use the alternative, we shall introduce "pain" as follows:     x is in pain just in case     there is a P such that:    anyone in state P hollers and     x is in state P.     On this alternative, it will be non-contingently true that anyone who is in pain hollers.     For to be in pain *is* to be in some state which involves hollering.    While this suggestion may account for the ambivalence noted, it does not of course resolve it.    To resolve it, one would have to find a reason for preferring one of the alternatives to the other.    In a somewhat devious pursuit of such a reason, let us enquire further about the character of the postulated psychological instantiable.    Is it, or can it be, identifiable with a physical instantiable?    One possible position of a sort which has been found attractive by some slightly impetuous physicalists would be to adopt the first alternative — that of Ramsified naming — and to combine it with the thesis that     the J-instantiable     is to be identified with one physiological property and     the V-instantiable     with another such property.     This position at least appears to have the feature, to which some might strongly object, of propounding a seemingly philosophical thesis which is at the mercy of a possible development in physiology.    One might add that the prospect that such a development would be favourable to the thesis does not seem to be all that bright.     The adaptiveness of an organism may well be such as to make it very much in the cards that two soecimens of the same species may, under different environmental pressures, develop different sub-systems, even different sub-systems at different times, as the physiological underlay of the same set of a psychological instantiable, and that a given physiological property may be the correlate in one sub-system of a particular psychological instantiable, while in another it is correlated with a different psychological instantiable — or with none at all.    Such a possibility would mean that a physiological property which was, for a soecimen at a particular time, correlated with a particular psychological instantiable would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that instantiable.    It would at best be sufficient, and perhaps also necessary, for the instantiable within the particular kind of sub-system prevailing in the specimen at the time.     An unqualified identification of the physical property and the psychological instantiable would now be excluded.    Faced with such a difficulty, a physicalist might resort to various manoeuvres.     He might seek to identify a particular psychological instantiable with a disjunctive property, each disjoined constituent of which is a property consistingin having a certain physiological property in a certain kind of sub-system.    Or he might relativize the notion of identity, for the purpose of psycho-physical identification, to types of sub-systems.    Or he might abandon the pursuit of identification at the level of instantiables, and restrict himself to claiming an identities between individual psychological events or states of affairs     e.g.     Smith’s believing at t that p    and physiological events or states of affairs — e.g     Smith’s brain being in such and such a state at t.    But none of these shifts has the intuitive appeal of their simplistic forebear.   Moreover, each will be open to variants of a familiar kind of objection.     For example, Smith’s judging at noon that they were out to get him might well be a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    But, to use Berkeley's phrase, it 'sounds rather harsh' to say that it is Smith’s  brain being in such and such a state at noon which is ultimately a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    For Grice’s part, Grice would hope that a much-needed general theory of categories would protect him against any thesis which would require him either to license such a locution as the last — or to resort to a never-ending stream of cries of 'Opaque context!' in order to block such a locution.    If the prime purpose of the notion of identity is, as Grice believes it to be, to license a predicate transfer, one begins to look a little silly if one first champions a particular kind of identification, and then constantly jibs at the predicate transfer which it seems to allow.    Such considerations as these can, Grice thinks, be deployed against the way of Ramsified naming even — when it is *unaccompanied* by a thesis about a psycho-physical identity.    However unlikely it may be that the future course of physiological research will favour any simple correlations between a psychological instantiabl and a physiological property, Grice does not see that he has any firm guarantee that it will not, that it will never be established that some particular kind of Smith’s brain state is associated with, say, Smith’s judging that snow is white.     If so, if Grice adopts the first alternative with its uniqueness claim, Grice has no firm guarantee against having to identity Grice’s brain's being in some particular state with Grice’s judging that snow is white, and so being landed with the embarrassments Grice has just commented upon.     Since Grice is inclined to think that he does in fact have such a guarantee although at the moment he cannot lay his hands on it, Grice is inclined to prefer the second alternative to the first.    As a pendant to the discussion just concluded, Grice expresses two prejudices.     Any psycho-physical identification which is accepted will have to be accepted on the basis of some known, or assumed, psycho-physical co-relation.    it seems to Grice that in this area all that philosophical psychology really requires is the supposition that there *is* such a co-relation.    Whether the co-relation does or do not provide a legitimate foundation for identifications seems to Grice to be more a question in the theory of identity than in the philosophy of mind.     Or philosophical psychology — since Ryle taught Grice to avoid ‘mental.’    Second, Grice is not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the advocacy of a psycho-physical identification.    Grice has in mind a concern to exclude such a ‘queer' or "mysterious' entity, as a ‘soul,’ a a purely psychic event — such as ‘Someone is hearing a noise’ — a purely psychic property, and so forth.     Grice’s taste is for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as, when they come in, they help with the house-work.    Provided that Grice can see an entity  at work, and provided that it is not detected in illicit logical behaviour — within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy —, Grice does not find such an entity as a psychic entity queer or mysterious at all.     To fangle an ontological marxism, it works; therefore, it exists —    even though such an entity, perhaps an entity which comes on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of an ens realissimum.    To exclude a honest working entity seems to Grice like metaphysical or ontological snobbery — a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best things.    Grice discusses two formal features which Grice thinks it might be desirable to attribute to some at least of this or that law or quasi-law of the theory to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Aristotle distinguishes between things which are so of necessity and things which are so for the most part, and located in the second category things which are done.    More or less conformably with this position, Grice suggests that a law which determines a psychological concept is a ceteris paribus law — which resembles a probability generalisation in that it is defeasible, but differs from it in that a ceteris paribus law does not assign a weight.    Grice envisages a system which, without inconsistency, may contain a sequence consisting of a law of the form     A's are Z,     and a modifying law of the form     A's which are B are Z'     where Z' is incompatible with Z — and of the form     A's which are B and C are Z,     and so on.     Analogous sequences can be constructed for a functional law;     if A, B, and Z are determinables we may have, in the same system:    a thing which is A to degree a are Z to degree f'     a thing which is A to degree a and B to degree B are Z to a degree which is the value of f (B, f' (a))    If we like, we can prefix "ceteris paribus" to each such generality, to ensure that     "A's are Z"     is NOT taken as synonymous with     Every A is Z.    For any such system a restriction on Modus Ponens is required, since we must not be allowed to infer from     A's are Z     and     x is both A and     B to     x is Z     if A's which are B are Z' - where Z' is incompatible with Z —     is a law.     This restriction will be analogous to the Principle of Total Evidence required for a probabilistic system;    A first approximation might run as follows:     in applying a law of the system to an individual case for the purpose of detachment, one must select the law with the most specific antecedent which is satisfied by the individual case.     Results of treating a psychological law as ceteris paribus laws which will be attractive to Grice are     first     that     It can no longer be claimed that we do not *know* any psychological law because we do not know all the restrictive conditions, and     second,     that     a psychological theory may be included in a larger theory which modifies it.    Modification does not require emendation.    If a modifying sequence terminates, its constituent law can be converted into a universal law.    Otherwise, not.    If we hold a strong version of Determinism — roughly, that there is an acceptable theory in which every phenomenon is explained — we might expect the Last Trump to herald a Presidential Address in which the Final Theory is presented, entirely free from ceteris paribus laws.    But if we accept only a weaker version, with reversed quantifiers — for every phenomenon there is an acceptable theory in which it is explained — the programme for Judgement Day will lose one leading attraction.    Other items on the agenda, however, may prove sufficiently exciting to compensate for this loss.    Grice suspects that even the latitude given to our prospective psychological folk-theory by allowing it to contain or even consist of ceteris paribus laws will not make it folksy enough.     There is, or was, in empirical psychology, a generality called "The Yerkes-Dodson Law"; based on experiments designed to test degrees of learning competence in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying periods of initial constraint, it states, in effect, that, with other factors constant, degrees of learning competence are co-related with degrees of emotional stress by a function whose values form a bell-curve.     I have some reluctance towards calling this statement the expression of a law, on the grounds that, since it does not - and could not, given that quantitative expression of degrees of competence and of stress is not available — specify the function or functions in question, it states that there is a law of a certain sort rather than actually state a law.     But whether or not the Yerkes-Dodson Law is properly so-called, it is certainly law-allusive, and the feature of being law-allusive is one which Grice would expect to find in a psychological law to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Grice turns now to the task of outlining, in a constructive way, the kind of method by which, in accordance with his programme, a particular psychological concept, and a linguistic expression for it, might be introduced.    Grice takes into account the need to clarify the routes by which a psychological sub-instantiable comes to be expressed by the combination of a general psychological VERB and a complement which specifies content.     Grice’s account will be only semi-realistic, since he considers the psychological explanation of only a very rudimentary sample of behaviour, and even with respect to that sample a proper explanation would involve apparatus which Grice omits - for example, apparatus to deal with conceptual representation and with the fact that a motivation towards a particular sort of behaviour may be frustrated.     But since Grice is attempting only to illustrate a general method, not to make a substantial proposal, these over-simplifications should not matter.     Grice constructs his account as if I espoused the first alternative: the way of Ramsified naming, rather than the second, since that considerably simplifies exposition.    A transition to the second alternative can, of course, be quite easily effected.    Let us suppose that a squarrel — a specimen something like a squirrel — has some nuts in front of it, and proceeds to gobble the nuts; and that we are interested in the *explanation* of this occurrence.     Let us call the squarrel "Toby".     Our ethological observations of Toby, and of other squarrels, tell us that Toby — and other squarrels — often gobble nuts in front of them, and also other things besides nuts, and, indeed, that they are particularly liable to do some gobbling after a relatively prolonged period in which they have done no gobbling at all.     On the basis of these observations, and perhaps a range of other observations as well, we decide that a certain behaviour of squarrels — including Toby's gobbling nuts in front of him — is a suitable subject for psychological explanation; so we undertake to introduce some theoretical apparatus which can be used to erect an explanatory bridge between Toby's having nuts in front of him, and his gobbling them.    We make the following postulations (if we have not already made them long ago):    That the appropriate explanatory law will refer to three instantiables     P,     J, and     V which (we stipulate) are to be labelled respectively     “prehend", "join", and "will"    That for any type of creature T     there is a class N of kinds of thing,     which is a class of what (we stipulate) shall be called a  "necessity” for T", and that     N (in N) is a necessity for T just in case N is *vital* for T    that is, just in case any member of T which suffers a sufficiently  prolonged non-intake of N will lose the capacity for all of those operations — including the intake of N —, the capacity for which is constitutive of membership of T     [in a fuller account this condition would require further explication).    That     if N is a necessity for T, ceteris paribus a moderately prolonged non-intake of N on the part of a member (x) of T will cause x to instantiate a particular sub-instantiable V; of "will", x's instantiation of which will (ceteris paribus) be quenched by a moderately prolonged intake of N; and     We stipulate    V; shall be called "will for N" (or, if you like, "willing N").    That     for any member x (e.g. Toby) of any creature-type T (e.g. squarrels) there is a class f of thing-types (which, we stipulate, is a class of what shall be called"thing-types familiar to x");     a class R of relations (a class of what shall be called "relations familiar to x"), and     a class  of action-types — a class of what shall be called "action-types in the repertoire of x"),     which satisfy the following conditions:    that     there are two ways (if you like, functions) w, and w, such that, ceteris paribus, if an instance of a thing-type F (familiar to x) is related to x by a relation R (familiar to x), this causes x to instantiate a sub-instantiable of prehending which corresponds in ways w, and we to F and R respectively;     which sub-instantiable (we stipulate) shall be called "prehending an F as R" le.g.    "prehending nuts as in front"    that     ceteris paribus if, for some N [e.g. 'squarrel-food'] which is a necessity for x's type, for some A which is in x's repertoire, and for some F and R familiar to x, x has sufficiently frequently, when instantiating will for N, performed A upon instances of F which have been related by R to x, and as a result has ceased to instantiate will for N:     x instantiates a corresponding [corresponding to N, A, F, R] sub-instantiable of joining; which sub-instantiable shall be called "joining N with A and F and R".    We can now formulate a law in which we no longer need to restrict N, A, F, and R to members of classes connected in certain ways with a particular creature or type of creature, as follows:    Ceteris parious,     a creature x which wills N,     prehends an F as R, and     joins N and A and F and R,     performs A.    Finally,     we can introduce "judging" by derivation from    joining";     we stipulate that     if x joins N with A and F and R, we shall speak of x as judging A, upon-F-in-R, for N le.g. judging gobbling, upon nuts (in) in front, for squarrel-food).    AdWe now have the desired explanatory bridge.    Toby has nuts in front of him    Toby is short on squarrel-food (observed or  assumed); so    (iii) Toby wills squarrel-food [by postulate 3, connect-ing will with intake of N;(iv)   Toby prehends nuts as in front [from (i) by postulate 4(a), if it is assumed that nuts and in front are familiar to Toby);v)     Toby joins squarrel-food with gobbling and nuts and in front (Toby judges gobbling, on nuts in front, for squarrel-food) [by postulate 4(b), with the aid of prior observation]; so, by the PJV Law, from (iii), (iv), and (v),    Toby gobbles;     and, since nuts are in front of him gobbles the nuts in front of him.    Grice ends the section by some general remarks about the procedure just sketched.    The strategy is relatively simple.    We invoke a certain caeteris-paribus law     in order to     introduce a psychological sub-instantiable    and their specification by reference to content:     thus     “willing N"     is introduced as the specific form of     Prichard’s willing     which is dependent on the intake and deprivation of a necessity N,     — "prehending F as R" as the variety of prehension which normally results from an F being R to one, and similarly for "joining".     Then we use a caeteris-paribus law     to eliminate reference to the psychological instantiable     and to reach the behaviour which is to be explained.     A more developed account would, no doubt, bring in an intermediate laws, relating simply to a psychological instantiable and not also to features of the common world.    The generalities used have at various points law-allusiveness.    Every reference to, for example, 'a sufficiently prolonged deprivation', 'a sufficiently frequent performance', or to 'correspondence in certain ways' in effect implies a demand on some more developed theory actually to produce a law which is here only asserted to be producible.    The psychological concept introduced have been defined only for a very narrow range of complements.    Thus,     judging     has so far been defined only for complements which correspond in a certain way with those involved in the expression of hypothetical judgements.    Judging is, one might say, so far only a species of "if-judging"; and    "will"     has been defined, so far, only for complements specifying necessities.     Attention would have to be given to the provision of procedures for extending the range of these concepts.    If the procedure is, in its general character, correct (and Grice has not even attempted to show that it is), the possibility of impact on some familiar philosophical issues is already discernible.     To consider only "prehension", which is intended as a prototype for perception:    potch and cotch    "Prehending F as R" lacks the existential implication that there *is* an F which is R to the prehender.    This condition could be added, but it would be added.     This might well please friends of the concept of a sense-datum, such as Paul.    The fact that reference to a physical situations has to be made in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions might well be very *unwelcome* to a phenomenalist.    The fact that, in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions, a demand is imposed on a further theory to define functions mapping such prehensions on to physical situations might well prove fatal to a sceptic about reality or the material world.     How can such a sceptic, who is unsceptical about descriptions of sense-experience, combine the demand implicit in such a description with a refusal to assent to the existence of the physical situation which, it seems, the further theory would require in order to be in a position to meet the demand?    Grice has so far been occupying himself with questions about the structure of the kind of psychological theory which would fulfil the function of bestowing the breath of life on a psychological concept.    Grice moves now to asking by what methods one might hope to arrive at an acceptable theory of this sort.    One procedure, which Grice des not in the least despise, would be to take as a body of data our linguistic intuitions concerning what we would or would not be prepared to say when using a psychological term.    As a first stage, to look for a principle — (perhaps involving an artificially constructed concept — which would seem to generalise a feature of this or that section of our discourse, making adjustments when a provisionally accepted principle leads to a counter-intuitive or a paradoxical result;     and, as a second stage, to attempt     to systematise the principle which has emerged piecemeal in the first stage, paying attention to the adequacy of a theory so constructed to account for the data conformably with a general criterion for the assessment of a theory.    This would be to operate in two stages approximately corresponding to what the Greeks and Leibniz called an "analytic" (or "dialectical") procedure, and a “synthetic" procedure.    Grice is, for various reasons, not happy to confine myself to the dialectical method and the synthetic method.    In applying them, many alternative theoretical options may be available, upon which will often be difficult to hit.     Grice would like, if it is possible, to find a procedure which would tell him sooner and louder if he is on the right track — a procedure, indeed, which might in the end tell Grice that a particular theory is the right one, by some test beyond that of the ease and elegance with which it accommodates the data, and saves the phenomena.      Grice suspects that a dividend of this sort is what Kant expects a transcendental argument to yield     Grice would like a basis for the construction of some analogue of a transcendental argument.     Grice is also influenced by a different consideration.     Grice is much impressed by the fact that arrays of this or that psychological concept, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with Homo sapiens sapiens — so far — at the peak.     So Grice would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity — or logically developing series — and would not leave Grice just pursuing a a separate psychological theory for each species.     The method which Grice should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course), according to a certain principle of construction, a sequence of species, to serve as a model for a given species..     Grice’s species he calls a pirot — which, Russell and Carnap tell us, karulizes elatically.    The general idea is to develop, sequentially, the psychological theory for different sup-species of a pirot, and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concept we apply to this or that suitably related species, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction — which of course is unlikely ever to be more than partial.    The principle of pirot-construction may be thought of as embodied in what I shall call a the programme of a Genitor — the main aspects of which Grice shall now formulates.    We place ourselves in the position of The Genitor, who is engaged in designing this or that living thing — or rather, as Grice shall say, an operant.     An operant may, for present purposes, be taken to be a thing for which there is a certain set of operations requiring expenditure of energy stored in the operant, a sufficient frequency of each operation in the set being necessary to maintain the operant in a condition to pertorm any in the set le. to avoid becoming an ex-operant).     Specific differences within such sets will determine different types of operant.   The genitor will at least have to design them with a view to their survival (continued operancy);     For, on certain marginal assumptions which it will be reasonable for us to make but tedious for me to enumerate, if an operant (x) is not survival-oriented, there is no basis for supposing it to exist at all; since (by the assumption) x has to be produced in some way or other by other operants of the type, x will not exist unless pro-genitors are around to produce it; and if they are to have the staying power (and other endowments) required for x's production, x, being of the same type, must be given the same attributes.     So in providing for the individual x, some provision for the continuation of the type is implicit. In order to achieve economy in assumptions, we shall suppose the genitor to be concerned only to optimize survival chances.    Since the Genitor is only a fiction, he is to be supposed only to design, not to create.     In order that his designs should be useful to philosophical psychology, he must be supposed to pass his designs on to the engineer (who, being also a fiction, also does not have the power to create):     The function of the engineer is to ensure that the designs of the genitor can be realized in an organism which behaves according to pre-psychological laws — e.g. those of physics.     Since the genitor does not know about engineering, and since he does not want to produce futile designs, he had better keep a close eye on the actual world in order to stay within the bounds of the possible.    The mode of construction is to be thought of as being relative to some very generally framed "living-condition" concerning the relation of a pirot to its environment;     the operations the capacity for which determines the type of the pirot are to be those which, given the posited condition, constitute the minimum which the pirot would require in order to optimize the chances of his remaining in a condition to perform just those operations.     Some pirots (plant-like) will not require psychological apparatus in order that their operations should be explicably performed; others will.     Within the latter class, an ascending order of psychological types would, I hope, be generated by increasing the degree of demandingness in the determiningcondition.     I cannot specify, at present, the kind of generality which is to attach to such conditions; but I have in mind such a sequence as operants which do not need to move at all to absorb sources of energy, operants which only have to make posture changes, operants which, because the sources are not constantly abundant, have to locate those sources, and (probably a good deal later in the sequence) operants who are maximally equipped to cope with an indefinite variety of physiologically tolerable environments — i.e., perhaps, a     rational pirot.      Further types (or sub-types) might be generated by varying the degree of effectiveness demanded with respect to a given living-condition.    Aristotle regarded types of soul — as I would suppose, of living thing — as forming a "logically developing series".    Grice interprets that idea as being the supposition that the psychological theory for a given type is an extension of, and includes, the psychological theory of its predecessor-type.     The realization of this idea is at least made possible by the assumption that psychological laws may be of a ceteris paribus form, and so can be modified without emendation.     If this aspect of the programme can be made good, we may hope to safeguard the unity of psychological concepts in their application to animals and to human beings.     Though, as Witters notes, certain animals can only expect such items as food, while men can expect a drought next summer, we can (if we wish) regard the concept of expectation as being determined not by the laws relating to it which are found in a single psychological theory, but by the sequences of sets of laws relating to it which are found in an ascending succession of psychological theories.    Since the Genitor is only to install psychological apparatus in so far as it is required for the generation of operations which would promote survival in a posited living-condition, no psychological concept can be instantiated by a pirot without the supposition of behaviour which manifests it.     An explanatory concept has no hold if there is nothing for it to explain.     This is why 'inner states must have outward manifestations'.     Finally, we may observe that we now have to hand a possible solution of the Selection Problem.    Only those laws which can be given a genitorial justification — which fall within 'Pure Psychology' — will be counted as helping to determine a psychological concept.     It is just because one is dubious about providing such a justification for theenvisaged "Optimism" laws that one is reluctant to regard either of them as contributing to the definition of believing and wanting.    Kant thinks that, in relation to the philosophy of nature, an idea of pure reason could legitimately be given only a regulative employment.    Somewhat  similarly, as far as philosophical psychology is concerned, Grice thinks of the genitorial programme (at least in the form just characterised) as being primarily a heuristic device.     Grice would, however, hope to be able to retain a less vivid reformulation of it, in which references to the genitor's purposes would be replaced by references to final causes, or (more positivistically) to survival-utility.    This reformulation I would hope to be able to use to cope with such matters as the Selection problem.     But (also much as Kant thinks with respect to an idea of pure reason) when it comes to ethics the genitorial programme, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is not purely heuristic.     The thought that if one were genitor, one would install a certain feature which characteristically leads to certain forms of behaviour might conceivably be a proper step in the evaluation of that feature and of the associated behaviour.    Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of pirots which, nearly following Locke (Essay, i. 27. 8), I might call 'veryintelligent rational pirots.     These pirots will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task; and if we have done our work aright, their answer will be the same as ours. In virtue of the rational capacities and dispositions which we have given them, and which they would give themselves, each of them will have both the capacity and the desire to raise the further question 'Why go on surviving?; and (I hope) will be able to justify his continued existence by endorsing (in virtue of the aforementioned rational capacities and dispositions) a set of criteria for evaluating and ordering ends, and by applying these criteria both to ends which he may already have, as indirect aids to survival, and to ends which are yet to be selected; such ends, I may say, will not necessarily be restricted to concerns for himself.     The justification of the pursuit of some system of ends would, in its turn, provide a justification for his continued existence.    We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these pirots would be in a position to compile; this manual, though perhaps short, might serve as a basis for more specialized manuals to be composed when the pirots have been diversified by the harsh realities of actual existence.     The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.    The pirots have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorially justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be formulated in terms of the concepts of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of living-conditions which have been used to set up that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality.     There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addresses, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very6:intelligent rational pirot, and will thus have generality of form.     And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable pirots, no pirot would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he was not likely to be subject; nor indeed could he do so, even if he would.     So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application.    Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL; and the very intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course).    Type-Progression in Pirotology:     Content-Internalization    Grice’s purpose in this section is to give a little thought to the question 'What are the general principles exemplified, in creature-construction, in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type? What kinds of steps are being made?'     The kinds of step with which I shall deal here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specitication of the content of the psychological state of certain pirots, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to lower pirots; such expressions include connectives, quantifiers, temporal modifiers, mood-indicators, modal operators, and (importantly) names of psychological states like "judge" and "will"; expressions the availability of which leads to the structural enrichment of specifications of content.     In general, these steps will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables (or, if you will, the expressions forI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea.     Grice is not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization.    References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology.     Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging (A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge (A), or that he either judges [A] or judges (B), is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging (Al, or trom judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofwhich occur legitimately outside the scope of psychological verbs) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such instantiables: steps by which (one might say) such items or ideas come to be internalizedI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea. I am not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization. References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology. Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging [A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge [A], or that he either judges [A] or judges (B], is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging [A], or from judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofjudgings which are distinct, viz. of "future-judging [A]"(expecting [A]) and of "or-judging [A, B]" Since these arenew y-states, they will be open to the standard range of linguistic settings for references to y-states; a creature may now (or at some time in the future) future-judge [A](or past-judge [A]).     There will be both a semantic difference and a semantic connection (not necessarily the same for every case) between the terminology generated by this kind of transition and the original from which it is generated; while "x or-judges [A, B]" will not require the truth of "x judges (A] or x judges (B]", there will be a connection of meaning between the two forms of expres-sion; if a creature x or-judges its potential prey as being [in the tree, in the bush], we may expect x to wait in between the tree and the bush, constantly surveying both; or-judging [A, B] will, in short, be typically manifested in behaviour which is appropriate equally to the truth of A and to the truth of B, and which is preparatory for behaviour specially appropriate to the truth of one of the pair, to be evinced when it becomes true either that x judges [A] or that x judges [B].    This kind of transition, in which an "extrinsic" modifier attachable to y-expressions is transformed into (or replaced by) an "intrinsic" modifier (one which is specific-atory of a special (-state), I shall call first-stage internal-ization.    It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that transitions from a lower type to a higher type of pirot will often involve the addition of diversifications of a y-state to be found undiversified in the lower type of pirot; we might proceed, for example, from pirots with a capacity for simple judging to pirots with a capacity for present-judging (the counterpart of the simple judging of their predecessors), and also for future-judging (primitive expecting) and for past-judging (primitive remembering).    It may be possible always to represent developmental steps in this way; but I am not yet sure of this. It may be thatsometimes we should attribute to the less-developed pirot two distinct states, say judging and willing; and only to a more developed pirot do we assign a more generic state, say accepting, of which, once it is introduced, we may represent judging and willing as specific forms (judicatively accepting and volitively accepting).     But by whatever route we think of ourselves as arriving at it, the representation within a particular level of theory of two or more y-states as diversifications of a single generic y-state is legitimate, in my view, only if the theory includes laws relating to the generic -state which, so far from being trivially derivable from laws relating to the specific -states, can be used to derive in the theory, as special cases, some but not all generalities which hold for the specific y-states. Wemight, for example, justity the attribution to a pirot of the generic y-state of accepting, with judging and willing as diversifications, by pointing to the presence of such a law as the following: ceteris paribus, if x or-accepts (in mode m of acceptance) [A, B], and x negatively accepts, in mode m, [A], then x positively accepts, in mode m, [B].     From this law we could derive that, ceteris paribus, (a) if x or-judges [A, B] and negatively judges [A], then x positively judges [B]; and (b) if x or-wills [A, B] and negatively wills [A], then x positively wills (BJ. ( (a) and (b) are, of course, psychological counterparts of mood-variant versions of modus tollendo ponens.)    A further kind of transition is one which I shall label second-stage internalization. It involves the replacement of an "intrinsic" modifier, which signifies a differentiating feature of a specific y-state, by a corresponding operator within the content-specifications for a less specific v-state.     If, for example, we have reached by first-stage internalization the -state of future-judging [A], we may proceed by second-stage internalization to the y-state of judging [in the future, A]: similarly, we may proceed from judging (judicatively accepting) [A] to accepting [it is the case that Al, from willing (volitively accepting) [A] toaccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B).     So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old;     indeed, Grice suspects that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made. First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ.     This capacity may well require otheraccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B). So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    "x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old; indeed, I suspect that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made.     First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ. This capacity may well require other    M-states generated by internalization should conform to the restrictions propounded in Section VII; that is to say, they should not be assigned to a pirot without     the assignment to the pirot of behaviour the presence of which they will be required to explain, and     a genitorial justification for the presence of that behaviour in the pirotIf both generic and specific y-states are to be recognized by a theory, each such state should figure non-trivially in laws of that theory.    Second-stage internalization should be invoked only when first-stage internalization is inadequate for explanatory purposes.    Where possible, full internalization should be reached by a standard two-stage progression.    VII. Higher-Order Psychological States    In this section Grice focuses on just one of the modes of content-internalization, that in which psychological concepts (or other counterparts in psychological theory) are themselves internalized.     I shall give three illustrations of the philosophical potentialities of this mode of internal-ization, including a suggestion for the solution of my third initial problem (Problem C), that of the accommodation, within my approach, of the phenomena of privileged access and incorrigibility.    As I have already remarked, it may be possible in a sufficiently enriched theory to define concepts which have to be treated as primitive in the theory's more impoverished predecessors.     Given a type of pirot whose behaviour is sufficiently complex as to require a psychological theory in which psychological concepts, along with such other items as logical connectives and quantifiers, are internalized, it will I think be possible to define a variety of judging, which I shall call "judging*", in terms of willing.     I doubt if one would wish judging* to replace the previously distinguished notion of judging; I suspect one would wish them to coexist; one would want one's relatively advanced pirots to be capable not only of the highly rational state of judging but also of the kind of judging exemplified by lower types, if only in order to attribute to such advanced pirots implicit or unconscious judgings.     There may well be more than one option for the definition of judging*; since my purpose is to illustrate a method rather than to make a substantial proposal, I shall select a relatively simple way, which may not be the best.    The central ideal is that whereas the proper specification of a (particularized) disposition, say a man's disposition to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town, would be as a disposition to entertain his brother if he believes that his brother has come to town (ct. the circularities noted in Section I), no such emendation is required if we speak of a man's will to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town.     We may expect the man to be disappointed if he discovers that his brother has actually come to town without his having had the chance to entertain him, whether or not he was at the time aware that his brother was in town.     Of course, to put his will into effect on a particular occasion, he will have to judge that his brother is in town, but no reference to such a judgement would be appropriate in the specification of the content of his will.    Here, then, is the definition which I suggest. x judges* that p just in case x wills as follows: given any situation in which (i) x wills some end E, (ii) there are two non-empty classes (K, and K2) of action-types such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K, will realize E just in case p is true, and the performance by x of a member of K, will realize E just in case p is false, (iji) there is no third non-empty class (K3) of action-types, such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K3 will realize E whether p is true or p is false: then in such a situation x is to will that he perform some action-typebelonging to K,.     Put more informally (and less accurately), x judges that p just in case x wills that, if he has to choose between a kind of action which will realize some end of his just in case p is true and a kind of action which will realize that end just in case p is false, he should will to adopt some action of the first kind.    We might be able to use the idea of higher-order states to account for a kind of indeterminacy which is frequently apparent in our desires.     Consider a disgruntled employee who wants more money; and suppose that we embrace the idea (which may very well be misguided) of representing his desire in terms of the notion of wanting that p (with the aid of quantifiers).     To represent him as wanting that he should have some increment or other, or that he should have some increment or other within certain limits, may not do justice to the facts; it might be to attribute to him too generic a desire, since he may not be thinking that any increment, or any increment within certain limits, would do.     If, however, we shift from thinking in terms of internal quantification to thinking in terms of external quantification, then we run the risk of attributing to him too specific a desire; there may not be any specific increment which is the one he wants; he may just not have yet made up his mind. It is as if we should like to plant our (existential) quantifier in an intermediate position, in the middle of the word 'want'; and that, in a way, is just what we can do.     We can suppose him (initially) to be wanting that there be some increment (some increment within certain limits) such that he wants that increment; and then, when under the influence of that want he has engaged in further reflection, or succeeded in eliciting an offer from his employer, he later reaches a position to which external quantification is appropriate; that is, there now is some particular increment such that he wants that increment.    Grice shall now try to bring the idea of higher-order states to bear on Problem C (how to accommodate privilegedaccess and, maybe, incorrigibility).     Grice sets out in stages a possible solution along these lines, which will also illustrate the application of aspects of the genitorial programme    Stage 0. We start with pirots equipped to satisfy unnested judgings and willings (i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing).    Stage 1. It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have judgings and willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other pirots; for example, if pirots are sufficiently developed to be able to will their own behaviour in advance (form intentions for future action), it could be advantageous to one pirot to anticipate the behaviour of another by judging that the second pirot wills to do A (in the future).     So we construct a higher type of pirot with this capacity, without however the capacity for reflexive states.    It would be advantageous to construct a yet higher type of pirot, with judgings and willings which relate to its own judgings or willings.     Such pirots could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings; they will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that ceteris paribus if they will that p and judge that not-p, then if they can, they make it the case that p.     To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judgings and willings; we equip them so that ceteris paribus if they will that they do not will that p and judge that they do will that p, then (if they can) they make it the case that they do not will that p (and we somehow ensure that sometimes they can do this).    It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in hand with the installation of the capacity for evaluation; but I need not concern myself with this now.]    We shall not want these pirots to depend, inreaching their second-order judgements about them-selves, on the observation of manifestational be-haviour; indeed, if self-control which involves suppressing the willing that p is what the genitor is aiming at,behaviour which manifests a pirot'sjudging that it wills that p may be part of what he hopes to prevent. So the genitor makes these pirots subject to the law that ceteris paribus if a pirot judges (wills) that p, then it judges that it judges (wills) thatp.     To build in this feature is to build in privileged access to judgings and willings.    To minimize the waste of effort which would be involved in trying to suppress a willing which a pirot mistakenly judges itself to have, the genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that ceteris paribus     if a pirot judges that it judges (wills) that P, it judges (wills) that p.     Both of these laws however are only ceteris paribus laws.    And there will be room for counter-examples.    In self-deception, for example, either law may not hold.    We may get a judgement that one wills that p without the willing that p.    And we may get willing that p without judging that one wills that p, indeed, with judging that one does not will that p.    Grice abbreviates "x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges? that p", and "x judges that x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges" that p".     Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will be no way of finding non-linguistic manifestational behaviour which distinguishes judging? that p from judging that p.     There will now be two options.    We may suppose that "judge? that p" is an inadmissible locution, which one has no basis for applying.    Or we may suppose that "x judges that p" and "x judges? that p" are manifestationally equivalent, just because there can be no distinguishing behavioural manifestation.    The second option is preferable, if we want to allow for the construction of a possibly later type, a *talking* pirot, which can EXPRESS that it judges? that p; and to maintain as a general, though probably derivative, law that ceteris paribus     if x EXPRESSES that &, x judges that ф.     The substitution of "x judges? that p" for " p" will force the admissibility of "x judges" that p".     So we shall have to adopt as a law that x judges" that piff x judges? that p.   Exactly parallel reasoning will force the adoption of the law that x judges that p if x judges? that p.    If we now define "x believes that p" as "x judges? that p", we get the result that     a believes that p iff x believes that x believes that p.     We get the result, that is to say, that     — a belief is (in this sense) incorrigible, whereas a first-order judging is only a matter for privileged access.    Is this or that Psychological Concept Eliminable?    Grice has tried to shed a little light on the question 'How is a psychological concept related to psychological theory and to psychological explanation?"    Grice has not, so far, said anything about a question which has considerably vexed some of Grice’s friends as well as himself.    Someone —let us call him the eliminator — might say:     ‘You explicitly subscribe to the idea of thinking of apsychological concept as explicable in terms of its role in a psychological law, that is to say, in terms of their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour.     You also subscribe to the idea that, where there is a psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, there is also a physiological explanation   With respect to pirots, it is supposedly the business of the engineer to make a psychological state effective by ensuring that this condition holds.     You must, however, admit that the explanation of behaviour, drawn from pirot-physiology, which is accessible to the engineer is  from a theoretical point of view, greatly superior to that accessible to the genitor;     The former are, for example, drawn from a more comprehensive theory, and from one which yields  or when fully developed will yield — even in the area of behaviour, a more precise prediction.    So since the attribution of a psychological state owes any claim to truth it may have to its potentialities for the explanation of behaviour, and since these potentialities are inferior to the potentialities of this of that physiological state, Occam's Razor will dictate that attributions of psychological states, to actual creatures no less than to pirots, should be rejected en bloc as lacking truth —even though, from ignorance or to avoid excessive labour, we might in fact continue to utter them.    We have indeed come face to face with the last gasp of Primitive Animism, namely the attempted perpetuation of the myth that animals are animate.'    The eliminator should receive fuller attention than Grice can give him on this occasion, but I will provide an interim response to him, in the course of which Grice shall hope to redeem the promise made, to pursue a little further the idea that the common-sense theory which underlines this or that psychological concept can be shown to be at least in some respects true.    First, the eliminator's position should, in Grice’s view, be seen as a particular case of canonical scepticism, and should, therefore, be met in accordance with general principles for the treatment of sceptical problems.     It is necessary, but it is also insufficient, to produce a cogent argument for the falsity of his conclusion;     if we confine ourselves to this kind of argumentation we shall find ourselves confronted by the post-eliminator, who says to us     “Certainly the steps in your refutation of the eliminator are validly made.”    “But so are the steps in his argument.”    A correct view of the matter is that from a set of principles in which a psychological concept occurs crucially, and through which that psychological concept is delineated, it follows both that the eliminator is right and that he is wrong.    So much the worse, then, for the set of principles and for the concepts;    they should be rejected as incoherent.     A satisfactory rebuttal of the eliminator's position must, therefore, undermine his argument as well as overturn his conclusion.    In pursuit of the first of these objectives, Grice remarks that, to his mind, to explain a phenomenon, or a sequence of phenomena, P is, typically, to explain P qua exemplifying some particular feature or characteristic     And so, one fact — or system — may explain P qua exemplifying characteristic C, while another fact — or system — explains P qua exemplifying a different charscteristic C2.     In application to the present case, it is quite possible that one system, the physiology of the future, should explain the things we do considered as sequences of physical movements, while another system, psychological theory, explains the things we do considered as instances of sorts of behaviour.    We may, at this point, distinguish two possible principles concerning the acceptability of a system of explanation:    If a system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of a class of phenomena P will respect to a class of characteristics C, than is system S2 for the explanation of & with respect to C, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    Gricd has no quarrel with this principle.    If system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of P with respect to C1 than is system S2 for the explanation of P with respect to C2, la different class of characteristics, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    The latter principle seems to me to lack plausibility.    In general, if we want to be able to explain P qua C2, e.g. as behaviour, our interest in such explanation should not be abandoned merely because the kind of explanation available with respect to some other class of characteristics is theoretically superior to the kind available with respect to C2.     The eliminator, however, will argue that, in the present case, what we have is really a special case of the application of Principle 1;     for     since any Ca in Cz which is exemplified on a given occasion has to be realised on that occasion in some , (some sequence of physical movements), for which there is a physiological explanation, the physiological explanation of the presence of C, on that occasion is ipso facto an explanation of the presence of C2, the behavioural feature, on that occasion, and so should be regarded as displacing any psychological explanation of the presence of Ca.    To maintain this position, the eliminator must be prepared to hold that if a behavioural feature is, on an occasion, realised in a given type of physical movement sequence,  that type of a movement sequence is, in itself, a sufficient condition for the presence of the behavioural feature.    Only so can the eliminator claim that the full power and prestige of physiological explanation is transmitted from a movement to behaviour, thereby ousting psychological explanation.     But it is very dubious whether a particular a movement sequence is, in general, a sufficient condition for a behavioural feature, especially with respect to such a behavioural feature the discrimination of which is most important for the conduct of life.     Whether a man with a club is merely advancing *towards* Grice or advancing *upon* Grice may well depend on a condition distinct from the character of his movements, indeed, it would be natural to suppose, upon a psychological condition.     It might of course be claimed that any such psychological condition would, in principle, be re-expressible in psychological terms, but this claim cannot be made by one who seeks not the reduction of psychological concepts but their rejection.    If a psychological state is not to be reduced to a physiological state, the proceeds of such reduction cannot be used to bridge gaps between a movement and behaviour.    The truth seems to be that the language of behavioural description is part and parcel of the system to which psychological explanation belongs, and cannot be prised off therefrom.     Nor can the eliminator choose to be hanged for a sheep rather than for a mere lamb, by opting to jettison behavioural description along with psychological concepts.    The eliminator himself will need behavioural terms like"describe" and "report" in order to formulate his non-recommendations or predictions.    And, perhaps more importantly, if there is, or is to be, strictly speaking no such thing as the discrimination of behaviour, there are, or are to be, no such things as ways of staying alive, either to describe or to adopt.    Furthermore, even if the eliminator were to succeed in bringing psychological concepts beneath the baleful glare of Principle 1, he would only have established that other things being equal psychological concepts and psychological explanation are to be rejected.     But other things are manifestly not equal, in ways which he has not taken into account.     It is one thing to suggest, as Grice suggests, that a proper philosophical understanding of ascriptions of psychological concepts is a matter of understanding the roles of such concepts in a psychological theory which explains behaviour.    It is quite *another* thing to suppose that creatures to whom such a theory applies will (or should) be interested in the ascription of psychological states only because of their interest in having a satisfactory system for the explanation of behaviour.     The psychological theory which Grice envisages would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests, for example, on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature.     Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would (or should) regardas justified.    Grice illustrates with a little fable.     The very eminent and very dedicated neurophysiologist speaks to his wife.   "My (for at least a little while longer) dear," he says,     "I have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your actions and behaviour.”    “I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile, and nearly every desire that has moved you to act.”    “My researches, however, have made such progress that I shall no longer need to understand you in this way.”    “Instead I shall be in a position, with the aid of instruments which I shall attach to you, to assign to each bodily movement which you make in acting a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.”    “No longer shall I need to concern myself with your so-called thoughts and feelings.”    “In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight”      “I trust that you will not resist if I bring along some apparatus to help me to determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.”    Grice has a feeling that Mrs. Churchland might refuse the proffered invitation.   Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, Grice thinks, can matters of evaluation, and so of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all.     If Grice conjectures aright, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment — whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all.    We must be ever watchful against the devil of scientism, who would lead us into myopic over-concentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the devil who is even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas required to make intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that, since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay.     H. P. Grice   In his ‘Method in philosophical philosophy: from the banal to the bizarre,’ Grice presents some of his ideas about how he wants to approach philosophical psychology.  Grice’s hope is, in effect, to sketch a whole system.    This is quite an undertaking, and Grice hopes that you will bear with him if in discharging it he occupies a little more of your time than is becoming in holders of his august office.     While Grice is sure that you will be able to detect some affinities between his ideas and ideas to be found in philosophy, Grice proposes to leave such comparisons to you.     Though at certain points Grice has had his eye on  discussions, the main influences on this part of his work have lain in the past, particularly in Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.     Grice has the feeling that, among them, these philosophers have written a great deal of the story, though perhaps not always in the most legible of hands.    Grice begins by formulating, in outline, a sequence of particular problems which Grice thinks an adequate philosophical psychology must be able to lay to rest.    One concerns the real or apparent circularity with which one is liable to be faced if one attempts to provide an analysis of a central psychological concept by means of an explicit definition.    Suppose that, like some philosophers, we are attracted by the idea of giving a dispositional behaviouristic analysis of such a concept, and that we make a start on the concept of belief.     As a first shot, we try the following:    x believes that p     just in case     x is disposed to act as if p is true.    In response to obvious queries about the meaning of the phrase, 'act as if p is true', we substitute:    x is disposed, whenever x wants (desires) some end E, to act in ways which will realise E given that p is true, rather than in ways which will realise E given that p is false.     The precise form which such a definition might take is immaterial to Grice’s present purpose, provided that it has two features observable.    First,    that a further psychological concept, that of wanting, has been introduced in the definiens; and     second,    that to meet another obvious response, the concept of belief itself has to be reintroduced in the definiens.    For the disposition associated with a belief that p surely should be specified, not as a disposition to act in ways which will in realise E given that p is true, but rather as a disposition to act in ways which x *believes* will — given that p is true — realise E.     One who believes that p may often fail to act in ways that would realise E given that p is true, because he is quite unaware of the fact that such actions would realise E if p is true    Or he may quite often act in ways which would realise E only if p is false — because he mistakenly believes that such ways would realiss E if p is true.    If we turn to the concept of wanting, which the definition introduced into the definiens for belief, we seem to encounter a parallel situation.     Suppose we start with:    x wants E     just in case     x is disposed to act in ways which will realise E, rather than in ways which will realise the negation of E.     The same kind of objection, as that just raised in the case of belief, seems to compel the introduction of the concept of belief into the definiens of W, giving us:    x is disposed to act in ways which x *believes* will realise E rather than in ways which x believes will realise the negation of E.     We now meet the further objection that one who wants E can be counted on to act in such ways as these — only provided that there is no E2 which he wants more than E1.    If there is such an E2, in any situation in which & conflicts with & he may be expected to act in ways he thinks will realise the negation of E.     But the incorporation of any version of this proviso into the definiens for wanting will reintroduce the concept of wanting itself.    The situation, then, seems to be that if, along the envisaged behaviouristic lines, we attempt to provide an explicit definition for such a pair of concepts as those of belief and wanting, whichever member of the pair we start with we are driven into the very small circle of introducing into the definiens the very concept which is being defined, and also into the slightly larger circle of introducing into the definiens the other member of the pair.     The idea, suggested to Grice by this difficulty, is that we might be well advised, as a first move, to abandon the idea of looking for an explicit definition of a central psychological concept, and look instead for an implicit definition, to be provided by some form of axiomatic treatment — leaving open the possibility that, as a second move, this kind of treatment might be made the foundation for a different sort of explicit definition.     Such a procedure might well preserve an attractive feature of behaviouristic analyses, that of attempting to explain psychological concepts by relating them to appropriate forms of behaviour, while at the same time freeing us from the logical embarrassments into which such analyses seem to lead us.    We are now, however, faced with a further question.    If we are to think of a certain psychological concept as being implicitly defined by some set of laws, or quasi-laws, in which they figure, are we to attribute to such laws a contingent or a non-contingent status?    A look at some strong candidates for the position of being laws of the kind which we are seeking seems merely to reinforce the question.     Consider the principle:    ‘He who wills the end wills the means.’    — some form of which seems to me to be the idea behind both of the behaviouristic definitions just discussed.    Interpret it as saying that anyone who wills some end, and also believes that some action on his part is an indispensable means to that end, wills the action in question.     One might be inclined to say that if anyone believes that a certain line of action is indispensable to the attainment of a certain end, and yet refuses to adopt that line of action, that would count decisively against the conceptual legitimacy of saying that it is his will to attain that end.     Think Machiavelli!    To proceed in this way at least appears to involve treating the principle as a necessary truth.    On the other hand, one might also be inclined to regard the principle as offering a general account of a certain aspect of our psychological processes, as specifying a condition under which, when our will is fixed on a certain object, it will be the case that it is also fixed on a certain other object.    To take this view of the principle seems like regarding it as a psychological *law* — and, so. as contingent.     Grice’s second problem  is, then, this:     How — without a blanket rejection of Leibniz’s analytic/ synthetic distinction — are we to account for and, if possible, resolve the ambivalence concerning their status with which we seem to look upon this or that principle involving this or that psychological concept?    Cf. Conversation as rational cooperation.    To set this problem aside for a moment, the approach which Grice is interested in exploring is that of thinking of a central psychological concept as a theoretical concept.    It is a psycho-logical concepts (Italian, psychic) just because it is the primitive concept which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory, without also belonging to any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    And a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, an explanation of behaviour whichs differ from any explanation of behaviour which may be provided by, or may some day be provided by, any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    To explicate such a psychological concept is to characterize its role in the theory to which it primarily belongs, to specify, with this or that degree of detail, the laws — or quasi-laws — in which it figures, and the manner in which such a law or quasi-law, is linked to behaviour.     Now to say this much is not to say anything very new;     Grice is sure you have heard this sort of thing before.     It is also not to say very much.    Allthat has so far been given is a sketch of a programme for the philosophical treatment of a psychological concept, not even the beginnings of a philosophical treatment itself.    What is needed is rather more attention to detail than is usually offered by advocates of this approach.    We need to pursue such questions as what the special features of a psychological theory are, why such a theory should be needed, what sort of laws or generalities it should contain, and precisely how such a law may be used to explicate a familiar psychological term.     Grice shall be addressing hinself to some of these questions in the remainder of this address to you.    But, before any more is said, a further problem looms.     Grice can almost hear a murmur to the effect that such an approach to philosophical psychology is doomed from the start.     Do we *not* have privileged access to our own belief and desire?     And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our belief and our desire are incorrigible?     How, then, are such considerations as these to be rendered consistent with an approach which seems to imply that the justifiability of attributing a belief and a desire to people — and maybe animals —, including ourselves, rests on the utility of the theory to which the concepts of belief and desire belong, in providing desiderated explanations of behaviour?     This is Grice’s third problem.    Grice’s fourth problem, the Selection Problem, is connected with a different and less radical objection to the approach which Grice has just begun to sketch.     Surely, it may be said, it cannot be right to suppose that a conjunction of all the laws of a psychological theory in which a psychological concept figures is what should be used to explicate that concept.     Even if we are in a position to use any such law — which is not certain — we are not, and indeed never shall be, in a position to use all of them.    Moreover, this or that law may not be suitable.     For all we know, some modification of one or other of the following laws' might be a psychological law, possibly an underived law:    Optimism Law:     The more one wants p the more likely one is to believe p.     Optimism/Pessimism Law:     Given condition C1, the more one wants d the more likely one is to believe  d.    Given condition C2, the more one wants d, the less likely one is to believe d.    These do not seem the right kind of law to be used to explicate wanting or believing.    We need some selective principle.    What is this selective problem?    First, a preliminary observation.    If we are seeking to explicate a psychological concept by relating it to psychological theory, the theory which we invoke should be one which can be regarded as underlying our ordinary speech and thought about this or that psychological matter, and as such will have to be a part of folk-science.    There is no need to suppose that its structure would be of a sort which is appropriate for a professional theory, nor even to suppose that it would be a correct or acceptable theory; though Grice would hope that there would be a way of showing that, at least, some central parts of it would be interpretable within an acceptable professional theory — in such a way as to come out true in that theory, and that, indeed, this demand might constitute a constraint on the construction of a professional theory.     This is perhaps a latter-day version of a defence of common sense in this area.    Let us unrealistically suppose, for the purposes of schematic discussion, that we have a psychological theory which, when set out in formal dress, contains a body of underived laws, the formulation of which incorporates two primitive predicate *constants*: J and V.    These two *constants* we want to correspond, respectively, to two psychological terms    "judging" — from Latin iudicatio — and "willing — from Latin vuolere.     — which in their turn will serve as a regimented base for the explication of such familiar notions as believing and wanting.     Let us think of I and V as correlated with, or ranging over, "instantiables" leaving open the question whether these instantiables are sets or properties, or both, or neither.     Let us abbreviate the conjunction of these laws by "L", and let us ignore for the moment the obvious fact that any adequate theory along these lines would need to distinguish specific sub-instantiables under J and V, corresponding to the diversity of specific contents which judging and willing may take as modifications as "intentional objects.”    How are we to envisage the terms "judge" and "will" as being introduced?     Two closely related alternative ways suggest themselves.     First, what Grice shall call the way of Ramseified naming:     “There is just one J, and just one V     — such that L,     and     Let I be called "judging" and V be called “willing.”    On this alternative, the uniqueness claim is essential, since "judging" and "willing" are being assigned as names for this or that particular instantiable.    An alternative, which Grice may call the way of Ramsified *definition*, can dispense with the uniqueness claim.     It will run:     x judges just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates J.    x wills just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates V.    We now have available a possible explanation of the ambivalence we may feel with regard to the Leibnizian status of a psychological principle, which was the subject of a problem.    The difference between the two alternative procedures is relatively subtle, and if we do not distinguish them we may find ourselves under the pull of both.     The first alternative renders a psychological principle contingent.    The second renders the same principle non-contingent.    Let me illustrate by using an even simpler and even less realistic example.   Suppose that a psychological law tells us that     anyone, in state P, hollers.    And that we seek to use this law to introduce the term "pain" — Latin: paena.    On the first alternative, we have:     There is just one P, such that anyone, in state P, hollers.    Let us call P "pain".     Since on this alternative we are naming the state P "pain", if the utilised law is contingent, so will be the principle     Anyone who is in pain hollers.    If we use the alternative, we shall introduce "pain" as follows:     x is in pain just in case     there is a P such that:    anyone in state P hollers and     x is in state P.     On this alternative, it will be non-contingently true that anyone who is in pain hollers.     For to be in pain *is* to be in some state which involves hollering.    While this suggestion may account for the ambivalence noted, it does not of course resolve it.    To resolve it, one would have to find a reason for preferring one of the alternatives to the other.    In a somewhat devious pursuit of such a reason, let us enquire further about the character of the postulated psychological instantiable.    Is it, or can it be, identifiable with a physical instantiable?    One possible position of a sort which has been found attractive by some slightly impetuous physicalists would be to adopt the first alternative — that of Ramsified naming — and to combine it with the thesis that     the J-instantiable     is to be identified with one physiological property and     the V-instantiable     with another such property.     This position at least appears to have the feature, to which some might strongly object, of propounding a seemingly philosophical thesis which is at the mercy of a possible development in physiology.    One might add that the prospect that such a development would be favourable to the thesis does not seem to be all that bright.     The adaptiveness of an organism may well be such as to make it very much in the cards that two soecimens of the same species may, under different environmental pressures, develop different sub-systems, even different sub-systems at different times, as the physiological underlay of the same set of a psychological instantiable, and that a given physiological property may be the correlate in one sub-system of a particular psychological instantiable, while in another it is correlated with a different psychological instantiable — or with none at all.    Such a possibility would mean that a physiological property which was, for a soecimen at a particular time, correlated with a particular psychological instantiable would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that instantiable.    It would at best be sufficient, and perhaps also necessary, for the instantiable within the particular kind of sub-system prevailing in the specimen at the time.     An unqualified identification of the physical property and the psychological instantiable would now be excluded.    Faced with such a difficulty, a physicalist might resort to various manoeuvres.     He might seek to identify a particular psychological instantiable with a disjunctive property, each disjoined constituent of which is a property consistingin having a certain physiological property in a certain kind of sub-system.    Or he might relativize the notion of identity, for the purpose of psycho-physical identification, to types of sub-systems.    Or he might abandon the pursuit of identification at the level of instantiables, and restrict himself to claiming an identities between individual psychological events or states of affairs     e.g.     Smith’s believing at t that p    and physiological events or states of affairs — e.g     Smith’s brain being in such and such a state at t.    But none of these shifts has the intuitive appeal of their simplistic forebear.   Moreover, each will be open to variants of a familiar kind of objection.     For example, Smith’s judging at noon that they were out to get him might well be a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    But, to use Berkeley's phrase, it 'sounds rather harsh' to say that it is Smith’s  brain being in such and such a state at noon which is ultimately a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    For Grice’s part, Grice would hope that a much-needed general theory of categories would protect him against any thesis which would require him either to license such a locution as the last — or to resort to a never-ending stream of cries of 'Opaque context!' in order to block such a locution.    If the prime purpose of the notion of identity is, as Grice believes it to be, to license a predicate transfer, one begins to look a little silly if one first champions a particular kind of identification, and then constantly jibs at the predicate transfer which it seems to allow.    Such considerations as these can, Grice thinks, be deployed against the way of Ramsified naming even — when it is *unaccompanied* by a thesis about a psycho-physical identity.    However unlikely it may be that the future course of physiological research will favour any simple correlations between a psychological instantiabl and a physiological property, Grice does not see that he has any firm guarantee that it will not, that it will never be established that some particular kind of Smith’s brain state is associated with, say, Smith’s judging that snow is white.     If so, if Grice adopts the first alternative with its uniqueness claim, Grice has no firm guarantee against having to identity Grice’s brain's being in some particular state with Grice’s judging that snow is white, and so being landed with the embarrassments Grice has just commented upon.     Since Grice is inclined to think that he does in fact have such a guarantee although at the moment he cannot lay his hands on it, Grice is inclined to prefer the second alternative to the first.    As a pendant to the discussion just concluded, Grice expresses two prejudices.     Any psycho-physical identification which is accepted will have to be accepted on the basis of some known, or assumed, psycho-physical co-relation.    it seems to Grice that in this area all that philosophical psychology really requires is the supposition that there *is* such a co-relation.    Whether the co-relation does or do not provide a legitimate foundation for identifications seems to Grice to be more a question in the theory of identity than in the philosophy of mind.     Or philosophical psychology — since Ryle taught Grice to avoid ‘mental.’    Second, Grice is not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the advocacy of a psycho-physical identification.    Grice has in mind a concern to exclude such a ‘queer' or "mysterious' entity, as a ‘soul,’ a a purely psychic event — such as ‘Someone is hearing a noise’ — a purely psychic property, and so forth.     Grice’s taste is for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as, when they come in, they help with the house-work.    Provided that Grice can see an entity  at work, and provided that it is not detected in illicit logical behaviour — within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy —, Grice does not find such an entity as a psychic entity queer or mysterious at all.     To fangle an ontological marxism, it works; therefore, it exists —    even though such an entity, perhaps an entity which comes on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of an ens realissimum.    To exclude a honest working entity seems to Grice like metaphysical or ontological snobbery — a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best things.    Grice discusses two formal features which Grice thinks it might be desirable to attribute to some at least of this or that law or quasi-law of the theory to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Aristotle distinguishes between things which are so of necessity and things which are so for the most part, and located in the second category things which are done.    More or less conformably with this position, Grice suggests that a law which determines a psychological concept is a ceteris paribus law — which resembles a probability generalisation in that it is defeasible, but differs from it in that a ceteris paribus law does not assign a weight.    Grice envisages a system which, without inconsistency, may contain a sequence consisting of a law of the form     A's are Z,     and a modifying law of the form     A's which are B are Z'     where Z' is incompatible with Z — and of the form     A's which are B and C are Z,     and so on.     Analogous sequences can be constructed for a functional law;     if A, B, and Z are determinables we may have, in the same system:    a thing which is A to degree a are Z to degree f'     a thing which is A to degree a and B to degree B are Z to a degree which is the value of f (B, f' (a))    If we like, we can prefix "ceteris paribus" to each such generality, to ensure that     "A's are Z"     is NOT taken as synonymous with     Every A is Z.    For any such system a restriction on Modus Ponens is required, since we must not be allowed to infer from     A's are Z     and     x is both A and     B to     x is Z     if A's which are B are Z' - where Z' is incompatible with Z —     is a law.     This restriction will be analogous to the Principle of Total Evidence required for a probabilistic system;    A first approximation might run as follows:     in applying a law of the system to an individual case for the purpose of detachment, one must select the law with the most specific antecedent which is satisfied by the individual case.     Results of treating a psychological law as ceteris paribus laws which will be attractive to Grice are     first     that     It can no longer be claimed that we do not *know* any psychological law because we do not know all the restrictive conditions, and     second,     that     a psychological theory may be included in a larger theory which modifies it.    Modification does not require emendation.    If a modifying sequence terminates, its constituent law can be converted into a universal law.    Otherwise, not.    If we hold a strong version of Determinism — roughly, that there is an acceptable theory in which every phenomenon is explained — we might expect the Last Trump to herald a Presidential Address in which the Final Theory is presented, entirely free from ceteris paribus laws.    But if we accept only a weaker version, with reversed quantifiers — for every phenomenon there is an acceptable theory in which it is explained — the programme for Judgement Day will lose one leading attraction.    Other items on the agenda, however, may prove sufficiently exciting to compensate for this loss.    Grice suspects that even the latitude given to our prospective psychological folk-theory by allowing it to contain or even consist of ceteris paribus laws will not make it folksy enough.     There is, or was, in empirical psychology, a generality called "The Yerkes-Dodson Law"; based on experiments designed to test degrees of learning competence in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying periods of initial constraint, it states, in effect, that, with other factors constant, degrees of learning competence are co-related with degrees of emotional stress by a function whose values form a bell-curve.     I have some reluctance towards calling this statement the expression of a law, on the grounds that, since it does not - and could not, given that quantitative expression of degrees of competence and of stress is not available — specify the function or functions in question, it states that there is a law of a certain sort rather than actually state a law.     But whether or not the Yerkes-Dodson Law is properly so-called, it is certainly law-allusive, and the feature of being law-allusive is one which Grice would expect to find in a psychological law to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Grice turns now to the task of outlining, in a constructive way, the kind of method by which, in accordance with his programme, a particular psychological concept, and a linguistic expression for it, might be introduced.    Grice takes into account the need to clarify the routes by which a psychological sub-instantiable comes to be expressed by the combination of a general psychological VERB and a complement which specifies content.     Grice’s account will be only semi-realistic, since he considers the psychological explanation of only a very rudimentary sample of behaviour, and even with respect to that sample a proper explanation would involve apparatus which Grice omits - for example, apparatus to deal with conceptual representation and with the fact that a motivation towards a particular sort of behaviour may be frustrated.     But since Grice is attempting only to illustrate a general method, not to make a substantial proposal, these over-simplifications should not matter.     Grice constructs his account as if I espoused the first alternative: the way of Ramsified naming, rather than the second, since that considerably simplifies exposition.    A transition to the second alternative can, of course, be quite easily effected.    Let us suppose that a squarrel — a specimen something like a squirrel — has some nuts in front of it, and proceeds to gobble the nuts; and that we are interested in the *explanation* of this occurrence.     Let us call the squarrel "Toby".     Our ethological observations of Toby, and of other squarrels, tell us that Toby — and other squarrels — often gobble nuts in front of them, and also other things besides nuts, and, indeed, that they are particularly liable to do some gobbling after a relatively prolonged period in which they have done no gobbling at all.     On the basis of these observations, and perhaps a range of other observations as well, we decide that a certain behaviour of squarrels — including Toby's gobbling nuts in front of him — is a suitable subject for psychological explanation; so we undertake to introduce some theoretical apparatus which can be used to erect an explanatory bridge between Toby's having nuts in front of him, and his gobbling them.    We make the following postulations (if we have not already made them long ago):    That the appropriate explanatory law will refer to three instantiables     P,     J, and     V which (we stipulate) are to be labelled respectively     “prehend", "join", and "will"    That for any type of creature T     there is a class N of kinds of thing,     which is a class of what (we stipulate) shall be called a  "necessity” for T", and that     N (in N) is a necessity for T just in case N is *vital* for T    that is, just in case any member of T which suffers a sufficiently  prolonged non-intake of N will lose the capacity for all of those operations — including the intake of N —, the capacity for which is constitutive of membership of T     [in a fuller account this condition would require further explication).    That     if N is a necessity for T, ceteris paribus a moderately prolonged non-intake of N on the part of a member (x) of T will cause x to instantiate a particular sub-instantiable V; of "will", x's instantiation of which will (ceteris paribus) be quenched by a moderately prolonged intake of N; and     We stipulate    V; shall be called "will for N" (or, if you like, "willing N").    That     for any member x (e.g. Toby) of any creature-type T (e.g. squarrels) there is a class f of thing-types (which, we stipulate, is a class of what shall be called"thing-types familiar to x");     a class R of relations (a class of what shall be called "relations familiar to x"), and     a class  of action-types — a class of what shall be called "action-types in the repertoire of x"),     which satisfy the following conditions:    that     there are two ways (if you like, functions) w, and w, such that, ceteris paribus, if an instance of a thing-type F (familiar to x) is related to x by a relation R (familiar to x), this causes x to instantiate a sub-instantiable of prehending which corresponds in ways w, and we to F and R respectively;     which sub-instantiable (we stipulate) shall be called "prehending an F as R" le.g.    "prehending nuts as in front"    that     ceteris paribus if, for some N [e.g. 'squarrel-food'] which is a necessity for x's type, for some A which is in x's repertoire, and for some F and R familiar to x, x has sufficiently frequently, when instantiating will for N, performed A upon instances of F which have been related by R to x, and as a result has ceased to instantiate will for N:     x instantiates a corresponding [corresponding to N, A, F, R] sub-instantiable of joining; which sub-instantiable shall be called "joining N with A and F and R".    We can now formulate a law in which we no longer need to restrict N, A, F, and R to members of classes connected in certain ways with a particular creature or type of creature, as follows:    Ceteris parious,     a creature x which wills N,     prehends an F as R, and     joins N and A and F and R,     performs A.    Finally,     we can introduce "judging" by derivation from    joining";     we stipulate that     if x joins N with A and F and R, we shall speak of x as judging A, upon-F-in-R, for N le.g. judging gobbling, upon nuts (in) in front, for squarrel-food).    AdWe now have the desired explanatory bridge.    Toby has nuts in front of him    Toby is short on squarrel-food (observed or  assumed); so    (iii) Toby wills squarrel-food [by postulate 3, connect-ing will with intake of N;(iv)   Toby prehends nuts as in front [from (i) by postulate 4(a), if it is assumed that nuts and in front are familiar to Toby);v)     Toby joins squarrel-food with gobbling and nuts and in front (Toby judges gobbling, on nuts in front, for squarrel-food) [by postulate 4(b), with the aid of prior observation]; so, by the PJV Law, from (iii), (iv), and (v),    Toby gobbles;     and, since nuts are in front of him gobbles the nuts in front of him.    Grice ends the section by some general remarks about the procedure just sketched.    The strategy is relatively simple.    We invoke a certain caeteris-paribus law     in order to     introduce a psychological sub-instantiable    and their specification by reference to content:     thus     “willing N"     is introduced as the specific form of     Prichard’s willing     which is dependent on the intake and deprivation of a necessity N,     — "prehending F as R" as the variety of prehension which normally results from an F being R to one, and similarly for "joining".     Then we use a caeteris-paribus law     to eliminate reference to the psychological instantiable     and to reach the behaviour which is to be explained.     A more developed account would, no doubt, bring in an intermediate laws, relating simply to a psychological instantiable and not also to features of the common world.    The generalities used have at various points law-allusiveness.    Every reference to, for example, 'a sufficiently prolonged deprivation', 'a sufficiently frequent performance', or to 'correspondence in certain ways' in effect implies a demand on some more developed theory actually to produce a law which is here only asserted to be producible.    The psychological concept introduced have been defined only for a very narrow range of complements.    Thus,     judging     has so far been defined only for complements which correspond in a certain way with those involved in the expression of hypothetical judgements.    Judging is, one might say, so far only a species of "if-judging"; and    "will"     has been defined, so far, only for complements specifying necessities.     Attention would have to be given to the provision of procedures for extending the range of these concepts.    If the procedure is, in its general character, correct (and Grice has not even attempted to show that it is), the possibility of impact on some familiar philosophical issues is already discernible.     To consider only "prehension", which is intended as a prototype for perception:    potch and cotch    "Prehending F as R" lacks the existential implication that there *is* an F which is R to the prehender.    This condition could be added, but it would be added.     This might well please friends of the concept of a sense-datum, such as Paul.    The fact that reference to a physical situations has to be made in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions might well be very *unwelcome* to a phenomenalist.    The fact that, in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions, a demand is imposed on a further theory to define functions mapping such prehensions on to physical situations might well prove fatal to a sceptic about reality or the material world.     How can such a sceptic, who is unsceptical about descriptions of sense-experience, combine the demand implicit in such a description with a refusal to assent to the existence of the physical situation which, it seems, the further theory would require in order to be in a position to meet the demand?    Grice has so far been occupying himself with questions about the structure of the kind of psychological theory which would fulfil the function of bestowing the breath of life on a psychological concept.    Grice moves now to asking by what methods one might hope to arrive at an acceptable theory of this sort.    One procedure, which Grice des not in the least despise, would be to take as a body of data our linguistic intuitions concerning what we would or would not be prepared to say when using a psychological term.    As a first stage, to look for a principle — (perhaps involving an artificially constructed concept — which would seem to generalise a feature of this or that section of our discourse, making adjustments when a provisionally accepted principle leads to a counter-intuitive or a paradoxical result;     and, as a second stage, to attempt     to systematise the principle which has emerged piecemeal in the first stage, paying attention to the adequacy of a theory so constructed to account for the data conformably with a general criterion for the assessment of a theory.    This would be to operate in two stages approximately corresponding to what the Greeks and Leibniz called an "analytic" (or "dialectical") procedure, and a “synthetic" procedure.    Grice is, for various reasons, not happy to confine myself to the dialectical method and the synthetic method.    In applying them, many alternative theoretical options may be available, upon which will often be difficult to hit.     Grice would like, if it is possible, to find a procedure which would tell him sooner and louder if he is on the right track — a procedure, indeed, which might in the end tell Grice that a particular theory is the right one, by some test beyond that of the ease and elegance with which it accommodates the data, and saves the phenomena.      Grice suspects that a dividend of this sort is what Kant expects a transcendental argument to yield     Grice would like a basis for the construction of some analogue of a transcendental argument.     Grice is also influenced by a different consideration.     Grice is much impressed by the fact that arrays of this or that psychological concept, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with Homo sapiens sapiens — so far — at the peak.     So Grice would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity — or logically developing series — and would not leave Grice just pursuing a a separate psychological theory for each species.     The method which Grice should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course), according to a certain principle of construction, a sequence of species, to serve as a model for a given species..     Grice’s species he calls a pirot — which, Russell and Carnap tell us, karulizes elatically.    The general idea is to develop, sequentially, the psychological theory for different sup-species of a pirot, and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concept we apply to this or that suitably related species, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction — which of course is unlikely ever to be more than partial.    The principle of pirot-construction may be thought of as embodied in what I shall call a the programme of a Genitor — the main aspects of which Grice shall now formulates.    We place ourselves in the position of The Genitor, who is engaged in designing this or that living thing — or rather, as Grice shall say, an operant.     An operant may, for present purposes, be taken to be a thing for which there is a certain set of operations requiring expenditure of energy stored in the operant, a sufficient frequency of each operation in the set being necessary to maintain the operant in a condition to pertorm any in the set le. to avoid becoming an ex-operant).     Specific differences within such sets will determine different types of operant.   The genitor will at least have to design them with a view to their survival (continued operancy);     For, on certain marginal assumptions which it will be reasonable for us to make but tedious for me to enumerate, if an operant (x) is not survival-oriented, there is no basis for supposing it to exist at all; since (by the assumption) x has to be produced in some way or other by other operants of the type, x will not exist unless pro-genitors are around to produce it; and if they are to have the staying power (and other endowments) required for x's production, x, being of the same type, must be given the same attributes.     So in providing for the individual x, some provision for the continuation of the type is implicit. In order to achieve economy in assumptions, we shall suppose the genitor to be concerned only to optimize survival chances.    Since the Genitor is only a fiction, he is to be supposed only to design, not to create.     In order that his designs should be useful to philosophical psychology, he must be supposed to pass his designs on to the engineer (who, being also a fiction, also does not have the power to create):     The function of the engineer is to ensure that the designs of the genitor can be realized in an organism which behaves according to pre-psychological laws — e.g. those of physics.     Since the genitor does not know about engineering, and since he does not want to produce futile designs, he had better keep a close eye on the actual world in order to stay within the bounds of the possible.    The mode of construction is to be thought of as being relative to some very generally framed "living-condition" concerning the relation of a pirot to its environment;     the operations the capacity for which determines the type of the pirot are to be those which, given the posited condition, constitute the minimum which the pirot would require in order to optimize the chances of his remaining in a condition to perform just those operations.     Some pirots (plant-like) will not require psychological apparatus in order that their operations should be explicably performed; others will.     Within the latter class, an ascending order of psychological types would, I hope, be generated by increasing the degree of demandingness in the determiningcondition.     I cannot specify, at present, the kind of generality which is to attach to such conditions; but I have in mind such a sequence as operants which do not need to move at all to absorb sources of energy, operants which only have to make posture changes, operants which, because the sources are not constantly abundant, have to locate those sources, and (probably a good deal later in the sequence) operants who are maximally equipped to cope with an indefinite variety of physiologically tolerable environments — i.e., perhaps, a     rational pirot.      Further types (or sub-types) might be generated by varying the degree of effectiveness demanded with respect to a given living-condition.    Aristotle regarded types of soul — as I would suppose, of living thing — as forming a "logically developing series".    Grice interprets that idea as being the supposition that the psychological theory for a given type is an extension of, and includes, the psychological theory of its predecessor-type.     The realization of this idea is at least made possible by the assumption that psychological laws may be of a ceteris paribus form, and so can be modified without emendation.     If this aspect of the programme can be made good, we may hope to safeguard the unity of psychological concepts in their application to animals and to human beings.     Though, as Witters notes, certain animals can only expect such items as food, while men can expect a drought next summer, we can (if we wish) regard the concept of expectation as being determined not by the laws relating to it which are found in a single psychological theory, but by the sequences of sets of laws relating to it which are found in an ascending succession of psychological theories.    Since the Genitor is only to install psychological apparatus in so far as it is required for the generation of operations which would promote survival in a posited living-condition, no psychological concept can be instantiated by a pirot without the supposition of behaviour which manifests it.     An explanatory concept has no hold if there is nothing for it to explain.     This is why 'inner states must have outward manifestations'.     Finally, we may observe that we now have to hand a possible solution of the Selection Problem.    Only those laws which can be given a genitorial justification — which fall within 'Pure Psychology' — will be counted as helping to determine a psychological concept.     It is just because one is dubious about providing such a justification for this or that envisaged "Optimism" law that one is reluctant to regard either of them as contributing to the definition of believing and wanting.    Kant thinks that, in relation to the philosophy of nature, an idea of pure reason could legitimately be given only a regulative employment.    Somewhat  similarly, as far as philosophical psychology is concerned, Grice thinks of the genitorial programme (at least in the form just characterised) as being primarily a heuristic device.     Grice would, however, hope to be able to retain a less vivid reformulation of it, in which references to the genitor's purposes would be replaced by references to final causes, or (more positivistically) to survival-utility.    This reformulation I would hope to be able to use to cope with such matters as the Selection problem.     But , also much as Kant thinks with respect to an idea of pure reason, when it comes to ethics, the programme of the Genitor, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is *not* purely heuristic.     The thought that, if one were genitor, one would install a certain feature such as RATIO, which characteristically leads to certain forms of behaviour might conceivably be a proper step in the *evaluation* of validation of a feature such as RATIO — and of the associated behaviour.    Grice is a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to *practical* philosophy of his programme for philosophical psychology.     Grice shall suppose that the programme of the Genitor has been realised to the point at which we have designed a class of pirot which, nearly following Locke (Essay, i. 27. 8), Grice might call a ‘very intelligent, rational’ pirot.    Specimens of this pirot will be capable of putting themselves in the position of the Genitor, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task.    And, if we have done our work aright, the answer from the pirots will be the same as ours.     In virtue of the rational capacities and dispositions which we have given the pirots, and which they would give themselves, each of them will have both the capacity and the desire to raise the further question 'Why go on surviving?    And — Grice hopes — they will be able to justify his continued existence by endorsing — in virtue of the aforementioned *rational* capacities and dispositions — a set of criteria for evaluating and ordering this or that end, and by applying these criteria, both to this or that end — such as hobbling — which he may already have, as an indirect aid to survival, and to this or that end which are yet to be selected.    Such an end, Grice may say, will not necessarily be restricted to a concern for himself.     The justification of the pursuit of some system of this end and that end would, in its turn, provide a justification for his continued existence.    We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these pirots would be in a position to compile.    This manual, though perhaps short, might serve as a basis for more specialised manuals — such as a conversational manual — to be composed when the pirots have been diversified by the harsh realities of actual existence.     The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.    The pirots have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorially justified psychological theory.    So the manual will have to be formulated in terms of the concepts of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of living-conditions which have been used to set up that theory.    The manual will therefore have conceptual generality.     There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees.    So the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any ‘very intelligent rational’ pirot.    And will thus have generality of form.     And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable pirots, no pirot would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he is not likely to be subject.    Co-operation.     Indeed could he do so, even if he would.    So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee.    The manual, then, will have generality of application.    Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL.    And the ‘very intelligent, rational’ pitots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be not just the Phola Dactylus, but Homo sapiens sapiens — ourselves — in our better moments, of course — when we transubstantiate ourselves as Persons.    Grice’s purpose is to give a little thought to the question 'What is the general principle exemplified, in the construction of the pirot — in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type?     What kinds of steps are being made?'     The kinds of step with which Grice deals here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specitication of the content of the psychological state of certain pirots, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to lower pirots.    Such an expression include connectives, quantifiers, temporal modifiers, mood-indicators, modal operators, and, importantly, names and definitions of a psychological state like "judge" or will"; expressions the availability of which leads to the structural enrichment in the specification of content.     In general, these steps will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables — or, if you will, the expressions for Grice is disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to Hume; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly, or primitively, considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in Hume’s work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity.    The idea of a necessary connection between a cause and its effect is traced, roughly, to an internal impression which attends the passage of the soul or mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea.     Grice is not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization.    References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology.     Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging (A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge (A), or that he either judges [A] or judges (B), is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging (Al, or trom judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofwhich occur legitimately outside the scope of psychological verbs) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such instantiables: steps by which (one might say) such items or ideas come to be internalizedI am disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to us, and which is very important to him; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world items which, properly (or primitively) considered, are really features of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in his work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity; the idea of necessary connection is traced (roughly) to an internal impression which attends the passage of the mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea. I am not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what I have to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to me to be characteristic of internalization. References to psychological states (-states) may occur in a variety of linguistic settings which are also appropriate to references to states which have no direct connection with psychology. Like volcanic eruptions, judgings or willings may be assigned both more precise and less precise temporal locations (e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past); sometimes specifications of degree will be appropriate; judging [A] or willing [A] may be assigned a cause or an effect; and references to such y-states will be open to logical operations such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a creature will, in the future, judge [A], or that he either judges [A] or judges (B], is obviously not to attribute to him a judging distinct from judging [A], or from judging[A] and from judging [B]; nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution ofjudgings which are distinct, viz. of "future-judging [A]"(expecting [A]) and of "or-judging [A, B]" Since these arenew y-states, they will be open to the standard range of linguistic settings for references to y-states; a creature may now (or at some time in the future) future-judge [A](or past-judge [A]).     There will be both a semantic difference and a semantic connection (not necessarily the same for every case) between the terminology generated by this kind of transition and the original from which it is generated; while "x or-judges [A, B]" will not require the truth of "x judges (A] or x judges (B]", there will be a connection of meaning between the two forms of expres-sion; if a creature x or-judges its potential prey as being [in the tree, in the bush], we may expect x to wait in between the tree and the bush, constantly surveying both; or-judging [A, B] will, in short, be typically manifested in behaviour which is appropriate equally to the truth of A and to the truth of B, and which is preparatory for behaviour specially appropriate to the truth of one of the pair, to be evinced when it becomes true either that x judges [A] or that x judges [B].    This kind of transition, in which an "extrinsic" modifier attachable to y-expressions is transformed into (or replaced by) an "intrinsic" modifier (one which is specific-atory of a special (-state), I shall call first-stage internal-ization.    It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that transitions from a lower type to a higher type of pirot will often involve the addition of diversifications of a y-state to be found undiversified in the lower type of pirot; we might proceed, for example, from pirots with a capacity for simple judging to pirots with a capacity for present-judging (the counterpart of the simple judging of their predecessors), and also for future-judging (primitive expecting) and for past-judging (primitive remembering).    It may be possible always to represent developmental steps in this way; but I am not yet sure of this. It may be thatsometimes we should attribute to the less-developed pirot two distinct states, say judging and willing; and only to a more developed pirot do we assign a more generic state, say accepting, of which, once it is introduced, we may represent judging and willing as specific forms (judicatively accepting and volitively accepting).     But by whatever route we think of ourselves as arriving at it, the representation within a particular level of theory of two or more y-states as diversifications of a single generic y-state is legitimate, in my view, only if the theory includes laws relating to the generic -state which, so far from being trivially derivable from laws relating to the specific -states, can be used to derive in the theory, as special cases, some but not all generalities which hold for the specific y-states. Wemight, for example, justity the attribution to a pirot of the generic y-state of accepting, with judging and willing as diversifications, by pointing to the presence of such a law as the following: ceteris paribus, if x or-accepts (in mode m of acceptance) [A, B], and x negatively accepts, in mode m, [A], then x positively accepts, in mode m, [B].     From this law we could derive that, ceteris paribus, (a) if x or-judges [A, B] and negatively judges [A], then x positively judges [B]; and (b) if x or-wills [A, B] and negatively wills [A], then x positively wills (BJ. ( (a) and (b) are, of course, psychological counterparts of mood-variant versions of modus tollendo ponens.)    A further kind of transition is one which I shall label second-stage internalization. It involves the replacement of an "intrinsic" modifier, which signifies a differentiating feature of a specific y-state, by a corresponding operator within the content-specifications for a less specific v-state.     If, for example, we have reached by first-stage internalization the -state of future-judging [A], we may proceed by second-stage internalization to the y-state of judging [in the future, A]: similarly, we may proceed from judging (judicatively accepting) [A] to accepting [it is the case that Al, from willing (volitively accepting) [A] toaccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B).     So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old;     indeed, Grice suspects that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made. First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ.     This capacity may well require otheraccepting (let it be that Al, and from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B). So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant:    "x judges (A or B]" is semantically equivalent to "x disjunctively judges [A, B]", and if matters rested here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach y-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that second-stage internalizations cannot be introduced singly; an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrences of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old; indeed, I suspect that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made.     First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for y-states the specification of which involves embedded operators, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought; the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C, then DJ. This capacity may well require other    M-states generated by internalization should conform to the restrictions propounded in Section VII; that is to say, they should not be assigned to a pirot without     the assignment to the pirot of behaviour the presence of which they will be required to explain, and     a genitorial justification for the presence of that behaviour in the pirotIf both generic and specific y-states are to be recognized by a theory, each such state should figure non-trivially in laws of that theory.    Second-stage internalization should be invoked only when first-stage internalization is inadequate for explanatory purposes.    Where possible, full internalization should be reached by a standard two-stage progression.    VII. Higher-Order Psychological States    In this section Grice focuses on just one of the modes of content-internalization, that in which psychological concepts (or other counterparts in psychological theory) are themselves internalized.     I shall give three illustrations of the philosophical potentialities of this mode of internal-ization, including a suggestion for the solution of my third initial problem (Problem C), that of the accommodation, within my approach, of the phenomena of privileged access and incorrigibility.    As I have already remarked, it may be possible in a sufficiently enriched theory to define concepts which have to be treated as primitive in the theory's more impoverished predecessors.     Given a type of pirot whose behaviour is sufficiently complex as to require a psychological theory in which psychological concepts, along with such other items as logical connectives and quantifiers, are internalized, it will I think be possible to define a variety of judging, which I shall call "judging*", in terms of willing.     I doubt if one would wish judging* to replace the previously distinguished notion of judging; I suspect one would wish them to coexist; one would want one's relatively advanced pirots to be capable not only of the highly rational state of judging but also of the kind of judging exemplified by lower types, if only in order to attribute to such advanced pirots implicit or unconscious judgings.     There may well be more than one option for the definition of judging*; since my purpose is to illustrate a method rather than to make a substantial proposal, I shall select a relatively simple way, which may not be the best.    The central ideal is that whereas the proper specification of a (particularized) disposition, say a man's disposition to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town, would be as a disposition to entertain his brother if he believes that his brother has come to town (ct. the circularities noted in Section I), no such emendation is required if we speak of a man's will to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town.     We may expect the man to be disappointed if he discovers that his brother has actually come to town without his having had the chance to entertain him, whether or not he was at the time aware that his brother was in town.     Of course, to put his will into effect on a particular occasion, he will have to judge that his brother is in town, but no reference to such a judgement would be appropriate in the specification of the content of his will.    Here, then, is the definition which I suggest. x judges* that p just in case x wills as follows: given any situation in which (i) x wills some end E, (ii) there are two non-empty classes (K, and K2) of action-types such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K, will realize E just in case p is true, and the performance by x of a member of K, will realize E just in case p is false, (iji) there is no third non-empty class (K3) of action-types, such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K3 will realize E whether p is true or p is false: then in such a situation x is to will that he perform some action-typebelonging to K,.     Put more informally (and less accurately), x judges that p just in case x wills that, if he has to choose between a kind of action which will realize some end of his just in case p is true and a kind of action which will realize that end just in case p is false, he should will to adopt some action of the first kind.    We might be able to use the idea of higher-order states to account for a kind of indeterminacy which is frequently apparent in our desires.     Consider a disgruntled employee who wants more money; and suppose that we embrace the idea (which may very well be misguided) of representing his desire in terms of the notion of wanting that p (with the aid of quantifiers).     To represent him as wanting that he should have some increment or other, or that he should have some increment or other within certain limits, may not do justice to the facts; it might be to attribute to him too generic a desire, since he may not be thinking that any increment, or any increment within certain limits, would do.     If, however, we shift from thinking in terms of internal quantification to thinking in terms of external quantification, then we run the risk of attributing to him too specific a desire; there may not be any specific increment which is the one he wants; he may just not have yet made up his mind. It is as if we should like to plant our (existential) quantifier in an intermediate position, in the middle of the word 'want'; and that, in a way, is just what we can do.     We can suppose him (initially) to be wanting that there be some increment (some increment within certain limits) such that he wants that increment; and then, when under the influence of that want he has engaged in further reflection, or succeeded in eliciting an offer from his employer, he later reaches a position to which external quantification is appropriate; that is, there now is some particular increment such that he wants that increment.    Grice shall now try to bring the idea of higher-order states to bear on Problem C (how to accommodate privilegedaccess and, maybe, incorrigibility).     Grice sets out in stages a possible solution along these lines, which will also illustrate the application of aspects of the genitorial programme    Stage 0. We start with pirots equipped to satisfy unnested judgings and willings (i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing).    Stage 1. It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have judgings and willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other pirots; for example, if pirots are sufficiently developed to be able to will their own behaviour in advance (form intentions for future action), it could be advantageous to one pirot to anticipate the behaviour of another by judging that the second pirot wills to do A (in the future).     So we construct a higher type of pirot with this capacity, without however the capacity for reflexive states.    It would be advantageous to construct a yet higher type of pirot, with judgings and willings which relate to its own judgings or willings.     Such pirots could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings; they will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that ceteris paribus if they will that p and judge that not-p, then if they can, they make it the case that p.     To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judgings and willings; we equip them so that ceteris paribus if they will that they do not will that p and judge that they do will that p, then (if they can) they make it the case that they do not will that p (and we somehow ensure that sometimes they can do this).    It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in hand with the installation of the capacity for evaluation; but I need not concern myself with this now.]    We shall not want these pirots to depend, inreaching their second-order judgements about them-selves, on the observation of manifestational be-haviour; indeed, if self-control which involves suppressing the willing that p is what the genitor is aiming at,behaviour which manifests a pirot'sjudging that it wills that p may be part of what he hopes to prevent. So the genitor makes these pirots subject to the law that ceteris paribus if a pirot judges (wills) that p, then it judges that it judges (wills) thatp.     To build in this feature is to build in privileged access to judgings and willings.    To minimize the waste of effort which would be involved in trying to suppress a willing which a pirot mistakenly judges itself to have, the genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that ceteris paribus     if a pirot judges that it judges (wills) that P, it judges (wills) that p.     Both of these laws however are only ceteris paribus laws.    And there will be room for counter-examples.    In self-deception, for example, either law may not hold.    We may get a judgement that one wills that p without the willing that p.    And we may get willing that p without judging that one wills that p, indeed, with judging that one does not will that p.    Grice abbreviates "x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges? that p", and "x judges that x judges that x judges that p" by "x judges" that p".     Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will be no way of finding non-linguistic manifestational behaviour which distinguishes judging? that p from judging that p.     There will now be two options.    We may suppose that "judge? that p" is an inadmissible locution, which one has no basis for applying.    Or we may suppose that "x judges that p" and "x judges? that p" are manifestationally equivalent, just because there can be no distinguishing behavioural manifestation.    The second option is preferable, if we want to allow for the construction of a possibly later type, a *talking* pirot, which can EXPRESS that it judges? that p; and to maintain as a general, though probably derivative, law that ceteris paribus     if x EXPRESSES that &, x judges that ф.     The substitution of "x judges? that p" for " p" will force the admissibility of "x judges" that p".     So we shall have to adopt as a law that x judges" that piff x judges? that p.   Exactly parallel reasoning will force the adoption of the law that x judges that p if x judges? that p.    If we now define "x believes that p" as "x judges? that p", we get the result that     a believes that p iff x believes that x believes that p.     We get the result, that is to say, that     — a belief is (in this sense) incorrigible, whereas a first-order judging is only a matter for privileged access.    Is this or that Psychological Concept Eliminable?    Grice has tried to shed a little light on the question 'How is a psychological concept related to psychological theory and to psychological explanation?"    Grice has not, so far, said anything about a question which has considerably vexed some of Grice’s friends as well as himself.    Someone —let us call him the eliminator — might say:     ‘You explicitly subscribe to the idea of thinking of apsychological concept as explicable in terms of its role in a psychological law, that is to say, in terms of their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour.     You also subscribe to the idea that, where there is a psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, there is also a physiological explanation   With respect to pirots, it is supposedly the business of the engineer to make a psychological state effective by ensuring that this condition holds.     You must, however, admit that the explanation of behaviour, drawn from pirot-physiology, which is accessible to the engineer is  from a theoretical point of view, greatly superior to that accessible to the genitor;     The former are, for example, drawn from a more comprehensive theory, and from one which yields  or when fully developed will yield — even in the area of behaviour, a more precise prediction.    So since the attribution of a psychological state owes any claim to truth it may have to its potentialities for the explanation of behaviour, and since these potentialities are inferior to the potentialities of this of that physiological state, Occam's Razor will dictate that attributions of psychological states, to actual creatures no less than to pirots, should be rejected en bloc as lacking truth —even though, from ignorance or to avoid excessive labour, we might in fact continue to utter them.    We have indeed come face to face with the last gasp of Primitive Animism, namely the attempted perpetuation of the myth that animals are animate.'    The eliminator should receive fuller attention than Grice can give him on this occasion, but I will provide an interim response to him, in the course of which Grice shall hope to redeem the promise made, to pursue a little further the idea that the common-sense theory which underlines this or that psychological concept can be shown to be at least in some respects true.    First, the eliminator's position should, in Grice’s view, be seen as a particular case of canonical scepticism, and should, therefore, be met in accordance with general principles for the treatment of sceptical problems.     It is necessary, but it is also insufficient, to produce a cogent argument for the falsity of his conclusion;     if we confine ourselves to this kind of argumentation we shall find ourselves confronted by the post-eliminator, who says to us     “Certainly the steps in your refutation of the eliminator are validly made.”    “But so are the steps in his argument.”    A correct view of the matter is that from a set of principles in which a psychological concept occurs crucially, and through which that psychological concept is delineated, it follows both that the eliminator is right and that he is wrong.    So much the worse, then, for the set of principles and for the concepts;    they should be rejected as incoherent.     A satisfactory rebuttal of the eliminator's position must, therefore, undermine his argument as well as overturn his conclusion.    In pursuit of the first of these objectives, Grice remarks that, to his mind, to explain a phenomenon, or a sequence of phenomena, P is, typically, to explain P qua exemplifying some particular feature or characteristic     And so, one fact — or system — may explain P qua exemplifying characteristic C, while another fact — or system — explains P qua exemplifying a different charscteristic C2.     In application to the present case, it is quite possible that one system, the physiology of the future, should explain the things we do considered as sequences of physical movements, while another system, psychological theory, explains the things we do considered as instances of sorts of behaviour.    We may, at this point, distinguish two possible principles concerning the acceptability of a system of explanation:    If a system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of a class of phenomena P will respect to a class of characteristics C, than is system S2 for the explanation of & with respect to C, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    Gricd has no quarrel with this principle.    If system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of P with respect to C1 than is system S2 for the explanation of P with respect to C2, la different class of characteristics, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    The latter principle seems to me to lack plausibility.    In general, if we want to be able to explain P qua C2, e.g. as behaviour, our interest in such explanation should not be abandoned merely because the kind of explanation available with respect to some other class of characteristics is theoretically superior to the kind available with respect to C2.     The eliminator, however, will argue that, in the present case, what we have is really a special case of the application of Principle 1;     for     since any Ca in Cz which is exemplified on a given occasion has to be realised on that occasion in some , (some sequence of physical movements), for which there is a physiological explanation, the physiological explanation of the presence of C, on that occasion is ipso facto an explanation of the presence of C2, the behavioural feature, on that occasion, and so should be regarded as displacing any psychological explanation of the presence of Ca.    To maintain this position, the eliminator must be prepared to hold that if a behavioural feature is, on an occasion, realised in a given type of physical movement sequence,  that type of a movement sequence is, in itself, a sufficient condition for the presence of the behavioural feature.    Only so can the eliminator claim that the full power and prestige of physiological explanation is transmitted from a movement to behaviour, thereby ousting psychological explanation.     But it is very dubious whether a particular a movement sequence is, in general, a sufficient condition for a behavioural feature, especially with respect to such a behavioural feature the discrimination of which is most important for the conduct of life.     Whether a man with a club is merely advancing *towards* Grice or advancing *upon* Grice may well depend on a condition distinct from the character of his movements, indeed, it would be natural to suppose, upon a psychological condition.     It might of course be claimed that any such psychological condition would, in principle, be re-expressible in psychological terms, but this claim cannot be made by one who seeks not the reduction of psychological concepts but their rejection.    If a psychological state is not to be reduced to a physiological state, the proceeds of such reduction cannot be used to bridge gaps between a movement and behaviour.    The truth seems to be that the language of behavioural description is part and parcel of the system to which psychological explanation belongs, and cannot be prised off therefrom.     Nor can the eliminator choose to be hanged for a sheep rather than for a mere lamb, by opting to jettison behavioural description along with psychological concepts.    The eliminator himself will need behavioural terms like"describe" and "report" in order to formulate his non-recommendations or predictions.    And, perhaps more importantly, if there is, or is to be, strictly speaking no such thing as the discrimination of behaviour, there are, or are to be, no such things as ways of staying alive, either to describe or to adopt.    Furthermore, even if the eliminator were to succeed in bringing psychological concepts beneath the baleful glare of Principle 1, he would only have established that other things being equal psychological concepts and psychological explanation are to be rejected.     But other things are manifestly not equal, in ways which he has not taken into account.     It is one thing to suggest, as Grice suggests, that a proper philosophical understanding of ascriptions of psychological concepts is a matter of understanding the roles of such concepts in a psychological theory which explains behaviour.    It is quite *another* thing to suppose that creatures to whom such a theory applies will (or should) be interested in the ascription of psychological states only because of their interest in having a satisfactory system for the explanation of behaviour.     The psychological theory which Grice envisages would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests, for example, on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature.     Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would (or should) regardas justified.    Grice illustrates with a little fable.     The very eminent and very dedicated neurophysiologist speaks to his wife.   "My (for at least a little while longer) dear," he says,     "I have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your actions and behaviour.”    “I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile, and nearly every desire that has moved you to act.”    “My researches, however, have made such progress that I shall no longer need to understand you in this way.”    “Instead I shall be in a position, with the aid of instruments which I shall attach to you, to assign to each bodily movement which you make in acting a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.”    “No longer shall I need to concern myself with your so-called thoughts and feelings.”    “In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight”      “I trust that you will not resist if I bring along some apparatus to help me to determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.”    Grice has a feeling that Mrs. Churchland might refuse the proffered invitation.   Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, Grice thinks, can matters of evaluation, and so of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all.     If Grice conjectures aright, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment — whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all.    We must be ever watchful against the devil of scientism, who would lead us into myopic over-concentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the devil who is even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas required to make intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that, since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay.     H. P. Grice  In his ‘Method in philosophical philosophy: from the banal to the bizarre,’ Grice presents some of his ideas about how he wants to approach philosophical psychology.  Grice’s hope is, in effect, to sketch a whole system.    This is quite an undertaking, and Grice hopes that you will bear with him if in discharging it he occupies a little more of your time than is becoming in holders of his august office.     While Grice is sure that you will be able to detect some affinities between his ideas and ideas to be found in philosophy, Grice proposes to leave such comparisons to you.     Though at certain points Grice has had his eye on  discussions, the main influences on this part of his work have lain in the past, particularly in Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.     Grice has the feeling that, among them, these philosophers have written a great deal of the story, though perhaps not always in the most legible of hands.    Grice begins by formulating, in outline, a sequence of particular problems which Grice thinks an adequate philosophical psychology must be able to lay to rest.    One concerns the real or apparent circularity with which one is liable to be faced if one attempts to provide an analysis of a central psychological concept by means of an explicit definition.    Suppose that, like some philosophers, we are attracted by the idea of giving a dispositional behaviouristic analysis of such a concept, and that we make a start on the concept of belief.     As a first shot, we try the following:    x believes that p     just in case     x is disposed to act as if p is true.    In response to obvious queries about the meaning of the phrase, 'act as if p is true', we substitute:    x is disposed, whenever x wants (desires) some end E, to act in ways which will realise E given that p is true, rather than in ways which will realise E given that p is false.     The precise form which such a definition might take is immaterial to Grice’s present purpose, provided that it has two features observable.    First,    that a further psychological concept, that of wanting, has been introduced in the definiens; and     second,    that to meet another obvious response, the concept of belief itself has to be reintroduced in the definiens.    For the disposition associated with a belief that p surely should be specified, not as a disposition to act in ways which will in realise E given that p is true, but rather as a disposition to act in ways which x *believes* will — given that p is true — realise E.     One who believes that p may often fail to act in ways that would realise E given that p is true, because he is quite unaware of the fact that such actions would realise E if p is true    Or he may quite often act in ways which would realise E only if p is false — because he mistakenly believes that such ways would realiss E if p is true.    If we turn to the concept of wanting, which the definition introduced into the definiens for belief, we seem to encounter a parallel situation.     Suppose we start with:    x wants E     just in case     x is disposed to act in ways which will realise E, rather than in ways which will realise the negation of E.     The same kind of objection, as that just raised in the case of belief, seems to compel the introduction of the concept of belief into the definiens of W, giving us:    x is disposed to act in ways which x *believes* will realise E rather than in ways which x believes will realise the negation of E.     We now meet the further objection that one who wants E can be counted on to act in such ways as these — only provided that there is no E2 which he wants more than E1.    If there is such an E2, in any situation in which & conflicts with & he may be expected to act in ways he thinks will realise the negation of E.     But the incorporation of any version of this proviso into the definiens for wanting will reintroduce the concept of wanting itself.    The situation, then, seems to be that if, along the envisaged behaviouristic lines, we attempt to provide an explicit definition for such a pair of concepts as those of belief and wanting, whichever member of the pair we start with we are driven into the very small circle of introducing into the definiens the very concept which is being defined, and also into the slightly larger circle of introducing into the definiens the other member of the pair.     The idea, suggested to Grice by this difficulty, is that we might be well advised, as a first move, to abandon the idea of looking for an explicit definition of a central psychological concept, and look instead for an implicit definition, to be provided by some form of axiomatic treatment — leaving open the possibility that, as a second move, this kind of treatment might be made the foundation for a different sort of explicit definition.     Such a procedure might well preserve an attractive feature of behaviouristic analyses, that of attempting to explain psychological concepts by relating them to appropriate forms of behaviour, while at the same time freeing us from the logical embarrassments into which such analyses seem to lead us.    We are now, however, faced with a further question.    If we are to think of a certain psychological concept as being implicitly defined by some set of laws, or quasi-laws, in which they figure, are we to attribute to such laws a contingent or a non-contingent status?    A look at some strong candidates for the position of being laws of the kind which we are seeking seems merely to reinforce the question.     Consider the principle:    ‘He who wills the end wills the means.’    — some form of which seems to me to be the idea behind both of the behaviouristic definitions just discussed.    Interpret it as saying that anyone who wills some end, and also believes that some action on his part is an indispensable means to that end, wills the action in question.     One might be inclined to say that if anyone believes that a certain line of action is indispensable to the attainment of a certain end, and yet refuses to adopt that line of action, that would count decisively against the conceptual legitimacy of saying that it is his will to attain that end.     Think Machiavelli!    To proceed in this way at least appears to involve treating the principle as a necessary truth.    On the other hand, one might also be inclined to regard the principle as offering a general account of a certain aspect of our psychological processes, as specifying a condition under which, when our will is fixed on a certain object, it will be the case that it is also fixed on a certain other object.    To take this view of the principle seems like regarding it as a psychological *law* — and, so. as contingent.     Grice’s second problem  is, then, this:     How — without a blanket rejection of Leibniz’s analytic/ synthetic distinction — are we to account for and, if possible, resolve the ambivalence concerning their status with which we seem to look upon this or that principle involving this or that psychological concept?    Cf. Conversation as rational cooperation.    To set this problem aside for a moment, the approach which Grice is interested in exploring is that of thinking of a central psychological concept as a theoretical concept.    It is a psycho-logical concepts (Italian, psychic) just because it is the primitive concept which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory, without also belonging to any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    And a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, an explanation of behaviour whichs differ from any explanation of behaviour which may be provided by, or may some day be provided by, any presupposed theory — such as physiological theory.    To explicate such a psychological concept is to characterize its role in the theory to which it primarily belongs, to specify, with this or that degree of detail, the laws — or quasi-laws — in which it figures, and the manner in which such a law or quasi-law, is linked to behaviour.     Now to say this much is not to say anything very new;     Grice is sure you have heard this sort of thing before.     It is also not to say very much.    Allthat has so far been given is a sketch of a programme for the philosophical treatment of a psychological concept, not even the beginnings of a philosophical treatment itself.    What is needed is rather more attention to detail than is usually offered by advocates of this approach.    We need to pursue such questions as what the special features of a psychological theory are, why such a theory should be needed, what sort of laws or generalities it should contain, and precisely how such a law may be used to explicate a familiar psychological term.     Grice shall be addressing hinself to some of these questions in the remainder of this address to you.    But, before any more is said, a further problem looms.     Grice can almost hear a murmur to the effect that such an approach to philosophical psychology is doomed from the start.     Do we *not* have privileged access to our own belief and desire?     And, worse still, may it not be true that at least some of our avowals of our belief and our desire are incorrigible?     How, then, are such considerations as these to be rendered consistent with an approach which seems to imply that the justifiability of attributing a belief and a desire to people — and maybe animals —, including ourselves, rests on the utility of the theory to which the concepts of belief and desire belong, in providing desiderated explanations of behaviour?     This is Grice’s third problem.    Grice’s fourth problem, the Selection Problem, is connected with a different and less radical objection to the approach which Grice has just begun to sketch.     Surely, it may be said, it cannot be right to suppose that a conjunction of all the laws of a psychological theory in which a psychological concept figures is what should be used to explicate that concept.     Even if we are in a position to use any such law — which is not certain — we are not, and indeed never shall be, in a position to use all of them.    Moreover, this or that law may not be suitable.     For all we know, some modification of one or other of the following laws' might be a psychological law, possibly an underived law:    Optimism Law:     The more one wants p the more likely one is to believe p.     Optimism/Pessimism Law:     Given condition C1, the more one wants d the more likely one is to believe  d.    Given condition C2, the more one wants d, the less likely one is to believe d.    These do not seem the right kind of law to be used to explicate wanting or believing.    We need some selective principle.    What is this selective problem?    First, a preliminary observation.    If we are seeking to explicate a psychological concept by relating it to psychological theory, the theory which we invoke should be one which can be regarded as underlying our ordinary speech and thought about this or that psychological matter, and as such will have to be a part of folk-science.    There is no need to suppose that its structure would be of a sort which is appropriate for a professional theory, nor even to suppose that it would be a correct or acceptable theory; though Grice would hope that there would be a way of showing that, at least, some central parts of it would be interpretable within an acceptable professional theory — in such a way as to come out true in that theory, and that, indeed, this demand might constitute a constraint on the construction of a professional theory.     This is perhaps a latter-day version of a defence of common sense in this area.    Let us unrealistically suppose, for the purposes of schematic discussion, that we have a psychological theory which, when set out in formal dress, contains a body of underived laws, the formulation of which incorporates two primitive predicate *constants*: J and V.    These two *constants* we want to correspond, respectively, to two psychological terms    "judging" — from Latin iudicatio — and "willing — from Latin vuolere.     — which in their turn will serve as a regimented base for the explication of such familiar notions as believing and wanting.     Let us think of I and V as correlated with, or ranging over, "instantiables" leaving open the question whether these instantiables are sets or properties, or both, or neither.     Let us abbreviate the conjunction of these laws by "L", and let us ignore for the moment the obvious fact that any adequate theory along these lines would need to distinguish specific sub-instantiables under J and V, corresponding to the diversity of specific contents which judging and willing may take as modifications as "intentional objects.”    How are we to envisage the terms "judge" and "will" as being introduced?     Two closely related alternative ways suggest themselves.     First, what Grice shall call the way of Ramseified naming:     “There is just one J, and just one V     — such that L,     and     Let I be called "judging" and V be called “willing.”    On this alternative, the uniqueness claim is essential, since "judging" and "willing" are being assigned as names for this or that particular instantiable.    An alternative, which Grice may call the way of Ramsified *definition*, can dispense with the uniqueness claim.     It will run:     x judges just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates J.    x wills just in case there is a J and there is a V such that L, and x instantiates V.    We now have available a possible explanation of the ambivalence we may feel with regard to the Leibnizian status of a psychological principle, which was the subject of a problem.    The difference between the two alternative procedures is relatively subtle, and if we do not distinguish them we may find ourselves under the pull of both.     The first alternative renders a psychological principle contingent.    The second renders the same principle non-contingent.    Let me illustrate by using an even simpler and even less realistic example.   Suppose that a psychological law tells us that     anyone, in state P, hollers.    And that we seek to use this law to introduce the term "pain" — Latin: paena.    On the first alternative, we have:     There is just one P, such that anyone, in state P, hollers.    Let us call P "pain".     Since on this alternative we are naming the state P "pain", if the utilised law is contingent, so will be the principle     Anyone who is in pain hollers.    If we use the alternative, we shall introduce "pain" as follows:     x is in pain just in case     there is a P such that:    anyone in state P hollers and     x is in state P.     On this alternative, it will be non-contingently true that anyone who is in pain hollers.     For to be in pain *is* to be in some state which involves hollering.    While this suggestion may account for the ambivalence noted, it does not of course resolve it.    To resolve it, one would have to find a reason for preferring one of the alternatives to the other.    In a somewhat devious pursuit of such a reason, let us enquire further about the character of the postulated psychological instantiable.    Is it, or can it be, identifiable with a physical instantiable?    One possible position of a sort which has been found attractive by some slightly impetuous physicalists would be to adopt the first alternative — that of Ramsified naming — and to combine it with the thesis that     the J-instantiable     is to be identified with one physiological property and     the V-instantiable     with another such property.     This position at least appears to have the feature, to which some might strongly object, of propounding a seemingly philosophical thesis which is at the mercy of a possible development in physiology.    One might add that the prospect that such a development would be favourable to the thesis does not seem to be all that bright.     The adaptiveness of an organism may well be such as to make it very much in the cards that two soecimens of the same species may, under different environmental pressures, develop different sub-systems, even different sub-systems at different times, as the physiological underlay of the same set of a psychological instantiable, and that a given physiological property may be the correlate in one sub-system of a particular psychological instantiable, while in another it is correlated with a different psychological instantiable — or with none at all.    Such a possibility would mean that a physiological property which was, for a soecimen at a particular time, correlated with a particular psychological instantiable would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for that instantiable.    It would at best be sufficient, and perhaps also necessary, for the instantiable within the particular kind of sub-system prevailing in the specimen at the time.     An unqualified identification of the physical property and the psychological instantiable would now be excluded.    Faced with such a difficulty, a physicalist might resort to various manoeuvres.     He might seek to identify a particular psychological instantiable with a disjunctive property, each disjoined constituent of which is a property consistingin having a certain physiological property in a certain kind of sub-system.    Or he might relativize the notion of identity, for the purpose of psycho-physical identification, to types of sub-systems.    Or he might abandon the pursuit of identification at the level of instantiables, and restrict himself to claiming an identities between individual psychological events or states of affairs     e.g.     Smith’s believing at t that p    and physiological events or states of affairs — e.g     Smith’s brain being in such and such a state at t.    But none of these shifts has the intuitive appeal of their simplistic forebear.   Moreover, each will be open to variants of a familiar kind of objection.     For example, Smith’s judging at noon that they were out to get him might well be a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    But, to use Berkeley's phrase, it 'sounds rather harsh' to say that it is Smith’s  brain being in such and such a state at noon which is ultimately a case of judging something to be true on insufficient evidence.    For Grice’s part, Grice would hope that a much-needed general theory of categories would protect him against any thesis which would require him either to license such a locution as the last — or to resort to a never-ending stream of cries of 'Opaque context!' in order to block such a locution.    If the prime purpose of the notion of identity is, as Grice believes it to be, to license a predicate transfer, one begins to look a little silly if one first champions a particular kind of identification, and then constantly jibs at the predicate transfer which it seems to allow.    Such considerations as these can, Grice thinks, be deployed against the way of Ramsified naming even — when it is *unaccompanied* by a thesis about a psycho-physical identity.    However unlikely it may be that the future course of physiological research will favour any simple correlations between a psychological instantiabl and a physiological property, Grice does not see that he has any firm guarantee that it will not, that it will never be established that some particular kind of Smith’s brain state is associated with, say, Smith’s judging that snow is white.     If so, if Grice adopts the first alternative with its uniqueness claim, Grice has no firm guarantee against having to identity Grice’s brain's being in some particular state with Grice’s judging that snow is white, and so being landed with the embarrassments Grice has just commented upon.     Since Grice is inclined to think that he does in fact have such a guarantee although at the moment he cannot lay his hands on it, Grice is inclined to prefer the second alternative to the first.    As a pendant to the discussion just concluded, Grice expresses two prejudices.     Any psycho-physical identification which is accepted will have to be accepted on the basis of some known, or assumed, psycho-physical co-relation.    it seems to Grice that in this area all that philosophical psychology really requires is the supposition that there *is* such a co-relation.    Whether the co-relation does or do not provide a legitimate foundation for identifications seems to Grice to be more a question in the theory of identity than in the philosophy of mind.     Or philosophical psychology — since Ryle taught Grice to avoid ‘mental.’    Second, Grice is not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt the advocacy of a psycho-physical identification.    Grice has in mind a concern to exclude such a ‘queer' or "mysterious' entity, as a ‘soul,’ a a purely psychic event — such as ‘Someone is hearing a noise’ — a purely psychic property, and so forth.     Grice’s taste is for keeping open house for all sorts and conditions of entities, just so long as, when they come in, they help with the house-work.    Provided that Grice can see an entity  at work, and provided that it is not detected in illicit logical behaviour — within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy —, Grice does not find such an entity as a psychic entity queer or mysterious at all.     To fangle an ontological marxism, it works; therefore, it exists —    even though such an entity, perhaps an entity which comes on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of an ens realissimum.    To exclude a honest working entity seems to Grice like metaphysical or ontological snobbery — a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best things.    Grice discusses two formal features which Grice thinks it might be desirable to attribute to some at least of this or that law or quasi-law of the theory to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Aristotle distinguishes between things which are so of necessity and things which are so for the most part, and located in the second category things which are done.    More or less conformably with this position, Grice suggests that a law which determines a psychological concept is a ceteris paribus law — which resembles a probability generalisation in that it is defeasible, but differs from it in that a ceteris paribus law does not assign a weight.    Grice envisages a system which, without inconsistency, may contain a sequence consisting of a law of the form     A's are Z,     and a modifying law of the form     A's which are B are Z'     where Z' is incompatible with Z — and of the form     A's which are B and C are Z,     and so on.     Analogous sequences can be constructed for a functional law;     if A, B, and Z are determinables we may have, in the same system:    a thing which is A to degree a are Z to degree f'     a thing which is A to degree a and B to degree B are Z to a degree which is the value of f (B, f' (a))    If we like, we can prefix "ceteris paribus" to each such generality, to ensure that     "A's are Z"     is NOT taken as synonymous with     Every A is Z.    For any such system a restriction on Modus Ponens is required, since we must not be allowed to infer from     A's are Z     and     x is both A and     B to     x is Z     if A's which are B are Z' - where Z' is incompatible with Z —     is a law.     This restriction will be analogous to the Principle of Total Evidence required for a probabilistic system;    A first approximation might run as follows:     in applying a law of the system to an individual case for the purpose of detachment, one must select the law with the most specific antecedent which is satisfied by the individual case.     Results of treating a psychological law as ceteris paribus laws which will be attractive to Grice are     first     that     It can no longer be claimed that we do not *know* any psychological law because we do not know all the restrictive conditions, and     second,     that     a psychological theory may be included in a larger theory which modifies it.    Modification does not require emendation.    If a modifying sequence terminates, its constituent law can be converted into a universal law.    Otherwise, not.    If we hold a strong version of Determinism — roughly, that there is an acceptable theory in which every phenomenon is explained — we might expect the Last Trump to herald a Presidential Address in which the Final Theory is presented, entirely free from ceteris paribus laws.    But if we accept only a weaker version, with reversed quantifiers — for every phenomenon there is an acceptable theory in which it is explained — the programme for Judgement Day will lose one leading attraction.    Other items on the agenda, however, may prove sufficiently exciting to compensate for this loss.    Grice suspects that even the latitude given to our prospective psychological folk-theory by allowing it to contain or even consist of ceteris paribus laws will not make it folksy enough.     There is, or was, in empirical psychology, a generality called "The Yerkes-Dodson Law"; based on experiments designed to test degrees of learning competence in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying periods of initial constraint, it states, in effect, that, with other factors constant, degrees of learning competence are co-related with degrees of emotional stress by a function whose values form a bell-curve.     I have some reluctance towards calling this statement the expression of a law, on the grounds that, since it does not - and could not, given that quantitative expression of degrees of competence and of stress is not available — specify the function or functions in question, it states that there is a law of a certain sort rather than actually state a law.     But whether or not the Yerkes-Dodson Law is properly so-called, it is certainly law-allusive, and the feature of being law-allusive is one which Grice would expect to find in a psychological law to be used to explicate a psychological concept.    Grice turns now to the task of outlining, in a constructive way, the kind of method by which, in accordance with his programme, a particular psychological concept, and a linguistic expression for it, might be introduced.    Grice takes into account the need to clarify the routes by which a psychological sub-instantiable comes to be expressed by the combination of a general psychological VERB and a complement which specifies content.     Grice’s account will be only semi-realistic, since he considers the psychological explanation of only a very rudimentary sample of behaviour, and even with respect to that sample a proper explanation would involve apparatus which Grice omits - for example, apparatus to deal with conceptual representation and with the fact that a motivation towards a particular sort of behaviour may be frustrated.     But since Grice is attempting only to illustrate a general method, not to make a substantial proposal, these over-simplifications should not matter.     Grice constructs his account as if I espoused the first alternative: the way of Ramsified naming, rather than the second, since that considerably simplifies exposition.    A transition to the second alternative can, of course, be quite easily effected.    Let us suppose that a squarrel — a specimen something like a squirrel — has some nuts in front of it, and proceeds to gobble the nuts; and that we are interested in the *explanation* of this occurrence.     Let us call the squarrel "Toby".     Our ethological observations of Toby, and of other squarrels, tell us that Toby — and other squarrels — often gobble nuts in front of them, and also other things besides nuts, and, indeed, that they are particularly liable to do some gobbling after a relatively prolonged period in which they have done no gobbling at all.     On the basis of these observations, and perhaps a range of other observations as well, we decide that a certain behaviour of squarrels — including Toby's gobbling nuts in front of him — is a suitable subject for psychological explanation; so we undertake to introduce some theoretical apparatus which can be used to erect an explanatory bridge between Toby's having nuts in front of him, and his gobbling them.    We make the following postulations (if we have not already made them long ago):    That the appropriate explanatory law will refer to three instantiables     P,     J, and     V which (we stipulate) are to be labelled respectively     “prehend", "join", and "will"    That for any type of creature T     there is a class N of kinds of thing,     which is a class of what (we stipulate) shall be called a  "necessity” for T", and that     N (in N) is a necessity for T just in case N is *vital* for T    that is, just in case any member of T which suffers a sufficiently  prolonged non-intake of N will lose the capacity for all of those operations — including the intake of N —, the capacity for which is constitutive of membership of T     [in a fuller account this condition would require further explication).    That     if N is a necessity for T, ceteris paribus a moderately prolonged non-intake of N on the part of a member (x) of T will cause x to instantiate a particular sub-instantiable V; of "will", x's instantiation of which will (ceteris paribus) be quenched by a moderately prolonged intake of N; and     We stipulate    V; shall be called "will for N" (or, if you like, "willing N").    That     for any member x (e.g. Toby) of any creature-type T (e.g. squarrels) there is a class f of thing-types (which, we stipulate, is a class of what shall be called"thing-types familiar to x");     a class R of relations (a class of what shall be called "relations familiar to x"), and     a class  of action-types — a class of what shall be called "action-types in the repertoire of x"),     which satisfy the following conditions:    that     there are two ways (if you like, functions) w, and w, such that, ceteris paribus, if an instance of a thing-type F (familiar to x) is related to x by a relation R (familiar to x), this causes x to instantiate a sub-instantiable of prehending which corresponds in ways w, and we to F and R respectively;     which sub-instantiable (we stipulate) shall be called "prehending an F as R" le.g.    "prehending nuts as in front"    that     ceteris paribus if, for some N [e.g. 'squarrel-food'] which is a necessity for x's type, for some A which is in x's repertoire, and for some F and R familiar to x, x has sufficiently frequently, when instantiating will for N, performed A upon instances of F which have been related by R to x, and as a result has ceased to instantiate will for N:     x instantiates a corresponding [corresponding to N, A, F, R] sub-instantiable of joining; which sub-instantiable shall be called "joining N with A and F and R".    We can now formulate a law in which we no longer need to restrict N, A, F, and R to members of classes connected in certain ways with a particular creature or type of creature, as follows:    Ceteris parious,     a creature x which wills N,     prehends an F as R, and     joins N and A and F and R,     performs A.    Finally,     we can introduce "judging" by derivation from    joining";     we stipulate that     if x joins N with A and F and R, we shall speak of x as judging A, upon-F-in-R, for N le.g. judging gobbling, upon nuts (in) in front, for squarrel-food).    AdWe now have the desired explanatory bridge.    Toby has nuts in front of him    Toby is short on squarrel-food (observed or  assumed); so    (iii) Toby wills squarrel-food [by postulate 3, connect-ing will with intake of N;(iv)   Toby prehends nuts as in front [from (i) by postulate 4(a), if it is assumed that nuts and in front are familiar to Toby);v)     Toby joins squarrel-food with gobbling and nuts and in front (Toby judges gobbling, on nuts in front, for squarrel-food) [by postulate 4(b), with the aid of prior observation]; so, by the PJV Law, from (iii), (iv), and (v),    Toby gobbles;     and, since nuts are in front of him gobbles the nuts in front of him.    Grice ends the section by some general remarks about the procedure just sketched.    The strategy is relatively simple.    We invoke a certain caeteris-paribus law     in order to     introduce a psychological sub-instantiable    and their specification by reference to content:     thus     “willing N"     is introduced as the specific form of     Prichard’s willing     which is dependent on the intake and deprivation of a necessity N,     — "prehending F as R" as the variety of prehension which normally results from an F being R to one, and similarly for "joining".     Then we use a caeteris-paribus law     to eliminate reference to the psychological instantiable     and to reach the behaviour which is to be explained.     A more developed account would, no doubt, bring in an intermediate laws, relating simply to a psychological instantiable and not also to features of the common world.    The generalities used have at various points law-allusiveness.    Every reference to, for example, 'a sufficiently prolonged deprivation', 'a sufficiently frequent performance', or to 'correspondence in certain ways' in effect implies a demand on some more developed theory actually to produce a law which is here only asserted to be producible.    The psychological concept introduced have been defined only for a very narrow range of complements.    Thus,     judging     has so far been defined only for complements which correspond in a certain way with those involved in the expression of hypothetical judgements.    Judging is, one might say, so far only a species of "if-judging"; and    "will"     has been defined, so far, only for complements specifying necessities.     Attention would have to be given to the provision of procedures for extending the range of these concepts.    If the procedure is, in its general character, correct (and Grice has not even attempted to show that it is), the possibility of impact on some familiar philosophical issues is already discernible.     To consider only "prehension", which is intended as a prototype for perception:    potch and cotch    "Prehending F as R" lacks the existential implication that there *is* an F which is R to the prehender.    This condition could be added, but it would be added.     This might well please friends of the concept of a sense-datum, such as Paul.    The fact that reference to a physical situations has to be made in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions might well be very *unwelcome* to a phenomenalist.    The fact that, in the introduction of expressions for specific prehensions, a demand is imposed on a further theory to define functions mapping such prehensions on to physical situations might well prove fatal to a sceptic about reality or the material world.     How can such a sceptic, who is unsceptical about descriptions of sense-experience, combine the demand implicit in such a description with a refusal to assent to the existence of the physical situation which, it seems, the further theory would require in order to be in a position to meet the demand?    Grice has so far been occupying himself with questions about the structure of the kind of psychological theory which would fulfil the function of bestowing the breath of life on a psychological concept.    Grice moves now to asking by what methods one might hope to arrive at an acceptable theory of this sort.    One procedure, which Grice des not in the least despise, would be to take as a body of data our linguistic intuitions concerning what we would or would not be prepared to say when using a psychological term.    As a first stage, to look for a principle — (perhaps involving an artificially constructed concept — which would seem to generalise a feature of this or that section of our discourse, making adjustments when a provisionally accepted principle leads to a counter-intuitive or a paradoxical result;     and, as a second stage, to attempt     to systematise the principle which has emerged piecemeal in the first stage, paying attention to the adequacy of a theory so constructed to account for the data conformably with a general criterion for the assessment of a theory.    This would be to operate in two stages approximately corresponding to what the Greeks and Leibniz called an "analytic" (or "dialectical") procedure, and a “synthetic" procedure.    Grice is, for various reasons, not happy to confine myself to the dialectical method and the synthetic method.    In applying them, many alternative theoretical options may be available, upon which will often be difficult to hit.     Grice would like, if it is possible, to find a procedure which would tell him sooner and louder if he is on the right track — a procedure, indeed, which might in the end tell Grice that a particular theory is the right one, by some test beyond that of the ease and elegance with which it accommodates the data, and saves the phenomena.      Grice suspects that a dividend of this sort is what Kant expects a transcendental argument to yield     Grice would like a basis for the construction of some analogue of a transcendental argument.     Grice is also influenced by a different consideration.     Grice is much impressed by the fact that arrays of this or that psychological concept, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with Homo sapiens sapiens — so far — at the peak.     So Grice would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity — or logically developing series — and would not leave Grice just pursuing a a separate psychological theory for each species.     The method which Grice should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course), according to a certain principle of construction, a sequence of species, to serve as a model for a given species..     Grice’s species he calls a pirot — which, Russell and Carnap tell us, karulizes elatically.    The general idea is to develop, sequentially, the psychological theory for different sup-species of a pirot, and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concept we apply to this or that suitably related species, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction — which of course is unlikely ever to be more than partial.    The principle of pirot-construction may be thought of as embodied in what I shall call a the programme of a Genitor — the main aspects of which Grice shall now formulates.    We place ourselves in the position of The Genitor, who is engaged in designing this or that living thing — or rather, as Grice shall say, an operant.     An operant may, for present purposes, be taken to be a thing for which there is a certain set of operations requiring expenditure of energy stored in the operant, a sufficient frequency of each operation in the set being necessary to maintain the operant in a condition to pertorm any in the set le. to avoid becoming an ex-operant).     Specific differences within such sets will determine different types of operant.   The genitor will at least have to design them with a view to their survival (continued operancy);     For, on certain marginal assumptions which it will be reasonable for us to make but tedious for me to enumerate, if an operant (x) is not survival-oriented, there is no basis for supposing it to exist at all; since (by the assumption) x has to be produced in some way or other by other operants of the type, x will not exist unless pro-genitors are around to produce it; and if they are to have the staying power (and other endowments) required for x's production, x, being of the same type, must be given the same attributes.     So in providing for the individual x, some provision for the continuation of the type is implicit. In order to achieve economy in assumptions, we shall suppose the genitor to be concerned only to optimize survival chances.    Since the Genitor is only a fiction, he is to be supposed only to design, not to create.     In order that his designs should be useful to philosophical psychology, he must be supposed to pass his designs on to the engineer (who, being also a fiction, also does not have the power to create):     The function of the engineer is to ensure that the designs of the genitor can be realized in an organism which behaves according to pre-psychological laws — e.g. those of physics.     Since the genitor does not know about engineering, and since he does not want to produce futile designs, he had better keep a close eye on the actual world in order to stay within the bounds of the possible.    The mode of construction is to be thought of as being relative to some very generally framed "living-condition" concerning the relation of a pirot to its environment;     the operations the capacity for which determines the type of the pirot are to be those which, given the posited condition, constitute the minimum which the pirot would require in order to optimize the chances of his remaining in a condition to perform just those operations.     Some pirots (plant-like) will not require psychological apparatus in order that their operations should be explicably performed; others will.     Within the latter class, an ascending order of psychological types would, I hope, be generated by increasing the degree of demandingness in the determiningcondition.     I cannot specify, at present, the kind of generality which is to attach to such conditions; but I have in mind such a sequence as operants which do not need to move at all to absorb sources of energy, operants which only have to make posture changes, operants which, because the sources are not constantly abundant, have to locate those sources, and (probably a good deal later in the sequence) operants who are maximally equipped to cope with an indefinite variety of physiologically tolerable environments — i.e., perhaps, a     rational pirot.      Further types (or sub-types) might be generated by varying the degree of effectiveness demanded with respect to a given living-condition.    Aristotle regarded types of soul — as I would suppose, of living thing — as forming a "logically developing series".    Grice interprets that idea as being the supposition that the psychological theory for a given type is an extension of, and includes, the psychological theory of its predecessor-type.     The realization of this idea is at least made possible by the assumption that psychological laws may be of a ceteris paribus form, and so can be modified without emendation.     If this aspect of the programme can be made good, we may hope to safeguard the unity of psychological concepts in their application to animals and to human beings.     Though, as Witters notes, certain animals can only expect such items as food, while men can expect a drought next summer, we can (if we wish) regard the concept of expectation as being determined not by the laws relating to it which are found in a single psychological theory, but by the sequences of sets of laws relating to it which are found in an ascending succession of psychological theories.    Since the Genitor is only to install psychological apparatus in so far as it is required for the generation of operations which would promote survival in a posited living-condition, no psychological concept can be instantiated by a pirot without the supposition of behaviour which manifests it.     An explanatory concept has no hold if there is nothing for it to explain.     This is why 'inner states must have outward manifestations'.     Finally, we may observe that we now have to hand a possible solution of the Selection Problem.    Only those laws which can be given a genitorial justification — which fall within 'Pure Psychology' — will be counted as helping to determine a psychological concept.     It is just because one is dubious about providing such a justification for this or that envisaged "Optimism" law that one is reluctant to regard either of them as contributing to the definition of believing and wanting.    Kant thinks that, in relation to the philosophy of nature, an idea of pure reason could legitimately be given only a regulative employment.    Somewhat  similarly, as far as philosophical psychology is concerned, Grice thinks of the genitorial programme (at least in the form just characterised) as being primarily a heuristic device.     Grice would, however, hope to be able to retain a less vivid reformulation of it, in which references to the genitor's purposes would be replaced by references to final causes, or (more positivistically) to survival-utility.    This reformulation I would hope to be able to use to cope with such matters as the Selection problem.     But , also much as Kant thinks with respect to an idea of pure reason, when it comes to ethics, the programme of the Genitor, in its more colourful form, just may have a role which is *not* purely heuristic.     The thought that, if one were genitor, one would install a certain feature such as RATIO, which characteristically leads to certain forms of behaviour might conceivably be a proper step in the *evaluation* of validation of a feature such as RATIO — and of the associated behaviour.    Grice is a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to *practical* philosophy of his programme for philosophical psychology.     Grice shall suppose that the programme of the Genitor has been realised to the point at which we have designed a class of pirot which, nearly following Locke (Essay, i. 27. 8), Grice might call a ‘very intelligent, rational’ pirot.    Specimens of this pirot will be capable of putting themselves in the position of the Genitor, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task.    And, if we have done our work aright, the answer from the pirots will be the same as ours.     In virtue of the rational capacities and dispositions which we have given the pirots, and which they would give themselves, each of them will have both the capacity and the desire to raise the further question 'Why go on surviving?    And — Grice hopes — they will be able to justify his continued existence by endorsing — in virtue of the aforementioned *rational* capacities and dispositions — a set of criteria for evaluating and ordering this or that end, and by applying these criteria, both to this or that end — such as hobbling — which he may already have, as an indirect aid to survival, and to this or that end which are yet to be selected.    Such an end, Grice may say, will not necessarily be restricted to a concern for himself.     The justification of the pursuit of some system of this end and that end would, in its turn, provide a justification for his continued existence.    We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these pirots would be in a position to compile.    This manual, though perhaps short, might serve as a basis for more specialised manuals — such as a conversational manual — to be composed when the pirots have been diversified by the harsh realities of actual existence.     The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability.    The pirots have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorially justified psychological theory.    So the manual will have to be formulated in terms of the concepts of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of living-conditions which have been used to set up that theory.    The manual will therefore have conceptual generality.     There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees.    So the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any ‘very intelligent rational’ pirot.    And will thus have generality of form.     And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable pirots, no pirot would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he is not likely to be subject.    Co-operation.     Indeed could he do so, even if he would.    So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee.    The manual, then, will have generality of application.    Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL.    And the ‘very intelligent, rational’ pitots, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be not just the Phola Dactylus, but Homo sapiens sapiens — ourselves — in our better moments, of course — when we transubstantiate ourselves as Persons.    Grice’s purpose is to give a little thought to the question 'What is the general principle exemplified, in the construction of the pirot — in progressing from one type of pirot to a higher type?     What kinds of steps are being made?'     The kinds of step with which Grice deals here are those which culminate in a licence to include, within the specitication of the content of the psychological state of a certain pirot, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate with respect to lower pirots.    Such an expression include a connective, a quantifier, a temporal modifiers, a mood-indicator, a modal operator, and, importantly, a name and a definition of a psychological state like "judge" or will"; expressions the availability of which leads to the structural enrichment in the specification of content.     In general, these steps will be ones by which items or ideas which have, initially, a legitimate place outside the scope of psychological instantiables — or, if you will, the expression for Grice is disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of natural disposition which Hume attributes to Homo sapiens sapiens and which is very important to Hume; namely, the tendency of the mind 'to spread itself upon objects', to project into the world an item which, properly, or primitively, considered, is really a feature of our states of mind.     Though there are other examples in Hume’s work, the most famous case in which he tries to make use of this tendency to deal with a philosophical issue is his treatment of necessity.    The idea of a necessary connection between a cause and its effect is traced, roughly, to an internal impression which attends the passage of the soul or mind from an idea or impression to an associated idea.     Grice is not wholly happy about Hume's characterization of this kind of projection, but what Grice has to say will bear at least a generic resemblance to what may be found in Hume.    The following kinds of transition seem to Grice to be characteristic of internalization.    A reference to a psychological state, a psi-state, may occur in a linguistic settings which is also appropriate to a reference to a state which has no direct connection with psychology.    Like a volcanic eruption, a willing or a judging may be assigned a more precise and a less precise temporal location — e.g. last Thursday or next Tuesday, in the future or in the past);     sometimes, a specification of a degree will be appropriate;     Willing  [A] or judging A may be assigned a cause and an effect;     A reference to such a psi-state will be open to a logical operation, such as negation and disjunction.     To suppose that a pirot will, in the future, will (A), or that he either wills [A] or wills (B), is obviously not to attribute to the pirot  a willing distinct from willing (Al, or trom willing [A] and from willing [B];     nevertheless, we can allow a transition from these attributions to the attribution  of judging which are distinct, viz. of "future-willing [A]"(expecting [A]) and of "or-willing [A, B]"     Since each of these is a novel psi-state, it will be open to the standard range of linguistic settings for references to a psi-state:     a pirot may now (or at some time in the future) future-will [A](or past-will [A]).     There will be both a semantic difference and a semantic connection (not necessarily the same for every case) between the terminology generated by this kind of transition and the original from which it is generated;     while "x or-wills [A, B]" will not require the truth of "x wills (A] or x wills (B]", there will be a connection of meaning between the two forms of expression;     if a pirot or-wills its potential prey as being [in the tree, in the bush], we may expect x to wait in between the tree and the bush, constantly surveying both;   or-willing [A, B] will, in short, be typically manifested in behaviour which is appropriate equally to the truth of A and to the truth of B, and which is preparatory for behaviour specially appropriate to the truth of one of the pair, to be evinced when it becomes true either that x wills [A] or that x wills [B].    This kind of transition, in which an "extrinsic" modifier attachable to a psi-expression is transformed into (or replaced by) an "intrinsic" modifier (one which is specific-atory of a special (-state), Grice calls first-stage internalization.    It should be apparent from the foregoing discussion that transitions from a lower type to a higher type of pirot will often involve the addition of diversifications of a psi-state to be found undiversified in the lower type of pirot;     we might proceed, for example, from pirots with a capacity for simple willing to pirots with a capacity for present-willing (the counterpart of the simple judging of their predecessors), and also for future-willing (primitive expecting) and for past-willing (primitive remembering).    It may be possible always to represent developmental steps in this way;     but Grice is not yet sure of this.     It may be that sometimes we should attribute to the less-developed pirot a pair of distinct states, say judging and willing;     and only to a more developed pirot do we assign a more generic state, say accepting, of which, once it is introduced, we may represent judging and willing as specific forms (judicatively accepting and volitively accepting).    But by whatever route we think of ourselves as arriving at it, the representation within a particular level of theory of two or more y-states as diversifications of a single generic psi-state is legitimate, in Grice’s view, only if the theory includes laws relating to the generic psi-state which, so far from being trivially derivable from laws relating to the specific psi-states, can be used to derive in the theory, as special cases, some but not all generalities which hold for the specific y-states.     We might, for example, justity the attribution to a pirot of the generic psi-state of accepting, with judging and willing as diversifications, by pointing to the presence of such a law as the following:     ceteris paribus,     if x or-accepts, in mode m of acceptance, [A, B], and     x negatively accepts, in mode m, [A],     x positively accepts, in mode m, [B].     From this law we could derive that,     ceteris paribus,     (a) if x or-judges [A, B] and     negatively judges [A],     x positively judges [B]; and (b)     if x or-wills [A, B] and     negatively wills [A],     x positively wills (B    a) and (b) are, of course, psychological counterparts of mood-variant versions of modus tollendo ponens.)    A further kind of transition is one which Grice labels second-stage internalization.     It involves the replacement of an "intrinsic" modifier, which signifies a differentiating feature of a specific psi-state, by a corresponding operator within the content-specifications for a less specific psi-state.     If, for example,     we have reached by first-stage internalization the psi-state of future-judging [A],   we may proceed by second-stage internalization to the psi-state of judging [in the future, A]:     similarly,     we may proceed from judging (judicatively accepting) [A] to accepting [it is the case that Al,     from willing (volitively accepting) [A] to     accepting (let it be that Al, and     from disjunctively judging (or-judging) [A, B] to judging [A or B).     So long as the operator introduced into a content-specification has maximum scope in that specification, the result of second-stage internalization is simply to produce a notational variant.    x judges (A or B]"     is semantically equivalent to     "x disjunctively judges [A, B]",     If matters rest here, there would be no advance to a new level of theory.     To reach a new level of theory, and so to reach psi-states exemplifiable only by a higher type of pirot, provision must be made for y-states with contents in the specification of which the newly introduced operator is embedded within the scope of another operator, as in "    x judges [if A or B, C]", or in "x accepts (if A, let it be that B]".     An obvious consequence of this requirement will be that a second-stage internalization cannot be introduced singly;     an embedded operator must occur within the scope of another embeddable operator.     The unembedded occurrence of a new operator, for which translation back into the terminology of the previous level of theory is possible, secure continuity between the new level and the old;     indeed, Grice suspects that it is a general condition on the development of one theory from another that there should be cases of "overlap" to ensure continuity, and cases of non-overlap to ensure that a new theory has really been developed.    Two observations remain to be made.     First, if we enquire what theoretical purpose is likely to be served by endowing a type of pirot with the capacity for a psi-state the specification of which involves an embedded operator, one important answer is likely to be that explanation of the ranges of behaviour to be assigned to that type of pirot requires a capacity for a relatively high grade of inference, in which the passage from premisses to conclusion is encompassed, so to speak, within a single thought;     the pirot has to be capable, for example, of thinking [since, A, B, and C,  D    This capacity may well require another psi-state generated by internalization should conform to the restrictions propounded     that is to say,     The psi-state should not be assigned to a pirot without the assignment, to the pirot, of behaviour the presence of which the pirot will be required to explain,   and     a justification by the Genitor for the presence of that behaviour in the pirot    If both generic and specific psi-states are to be recognized by a theory, each such state should figure non-trivially in a law of that theory.    Second-stage internalization should be invoked only when first-stage internalization is inadequate for this or that explanatory purpose.    Where possible, full internalization should be reached by a standard two-stage internalisation.    Grice focuses on just one of the modes of content-internalization, that in which a psychological concept, or other counterparts in psychological theory, is itself internalized.     Grice gives three illustrations of the philosophical potentialities of this mode of internalization, including a suggestion for the solution of the problem of the accommodation, within his approach, of the phenomena of privileged access and incorrigibility.    As Grice has already remarked, it may be possible in a sufficiently enriched theory to define a concept which has to be treated as primitive in the theory's more impoverished predecessors.     Given a type of pirot whose behaviour is sufficiently complex as to require a psychological theory in which a psychological concept, along with such other items as a logical connective and a quantifier, are internalized, it will Grice thinks, be possible to define a variety of judging in terms of willing.     One may not wish judging* to replace the previously distinguished notion of judging;     Grice suspects one would wish them to coexist;     One would want one's relatively advanced pirots to be capable not only of the highly rational state of judging but also of the kind of judging exemplified by lower types — if only in order to attribute to such advanced pirots implicit, tacit, or unreflective, unconscious willing and judging     There may well be more than one option for the definition of judging    since Grice’s purpose is to illustrate a method rather than to make a substantial proposal, I shall select a relatively simple way, which may not be the best.    The central ideal is that, whereas the proper specification of a particularized disposition, say a man's disposition to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town, would be as a disposition to entertain his brother if he believes that his brother has come to town (ct. the circularities noted in Section I), no such emendation is required if we speak of a man's WILL to entertain his brother if his brother comes to town.     We may expect the man to be disappointed if he discovers that his brother has actually come to town without his having had the chance to entertain him, whether or not he was at the time aware that his brother was in town.     Of course, to put his will into effect on a particular occasion, he will have to judge that his brother IS in town, but no reference to such a judgement would be appropriate in the specification of the content of his will.    Here, then, is the definition which Grice suggest.     x judges that p     just in case     x wills as follows:     given any situation in which     x wills some end E,     there are two non-empty classes (K, and K2) of action-types such that     the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K, will realize E just in case p is true, and     the performance by x of a member of K, will realize E just in case p is false, (iji)     there is no third non-empty class (K3) of action-types, such that the performance by x of an action-type belonging to K3 will realize E whether p is true or p is false:      in such a situation     x is to will that he perform some action-type belonging to K,.     Put more informally (and less accurately),     x judges that p     just in case     x wills that, if he has to choose between a kind of action which will realize some end of his just in case p is true and a kind of action which will realize that end just in case p is false, he should will to adopt some action of the first kind.    We might be able to use the idea of a higher-order psi-state to account for a kind of indeterminacy which is frequently apparent in our desires.     Consider a disgruntled employee who wants more money;     and suppose that we embrace the idea (which may very well be misguided) of representing his desire in terms of the notion of wanting that p (with the aid of quantifiers).     To represent him as wanting that he should have some increment or other, or that he should have some increment or other within certain limits, may not do justice to the facts;     it might be to attribute to him too generic a desire,     since he may not be thinking that any increment, or any increment within certain limits, would do.     If, however, we shift from thinking in terms of internal quantification to thinking in terms of external quantification, we run the risk of attributing to him too specific a desire;     there may not be any specific increment which is the one he wants;     he may just not have yet made up his mind.     It is as if we should like to plant our (existential) quantifier in an intermediate position, in the middle of the word 'want';     and that, in a way, is just what we can do.     We can suppose him (initially) to be wanting that     there be some increment (some increment within certain limits)     such that     he wants that increment;     and then, when under the influence of that want he has engaged in further reflection, or succeeded in eliciting an offer from his employer,     he later reaches a position to which external quantification is appropriate;     that is, there now is some particular increment such that he wants that increment.    Grice shall now try to bring the idea of higher-order states to bear on Problem of how to accommodate privileged access and, maybe, incorrigibility    Grice sets out in stages a possible solution along these lines, which will also illustrate the application of aspects of the  programme of the Genitor    We start with a pirot equipped to satisfy unnested judgings and willings (i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing).     It would be advantageous to a pirot if they could have judgings and willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other pirots;     Rational cooperation    Conversation as rational cooperation    for example, if pirots are sufficiently developed to be able to will their own behaviour in advance (form intentions for future action), it could be advantageous to one pirot to anticipate the behaviour of another by judging that the second pirot wills to do A (in the future).     So we construct a higher type of pirot with this capacity, without however the capacity for a reflexive state    It would be advantageous to construct a yet higher type of pirot, with judgings and willings which relate to its own judgings or willings.     Such a pirot could be equipped to control or regulate their own judgings and willings;     they will presumably be already constituted so as to conform to the law that   ceteris paribus     if they will that p and judge that not-p,  if they can, they make it the case that p.     To give them some control over their judgings and willings, we need only extend the application of this law to their judgings and willings;     we equip them so that     ceteris paribus     if they will that they do NOT will that p and judge that they do will that p,     (if they can) they make it the case that they do not will that p     — and we somehow ensure that sometimes they can do this).    It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in hand with the installation of the capacity for evaluation or validity and continence; but Grice need not concern himself with this now.]    We shall not want these pirots to depend, in reaching their second-order judgements about themselves, on the observation of manifestational behaviour;   indeed, if self-control, which involves suppressing the willing that p is what the genitor is aiming at,      behaviour which manifests a pirot’s judging that it wills that p     may be part of what he hopes to prevent.     So the genitor makes these pirots subject to the law that     ceteris paribus     if a pirot wills that p,  it wills that it wills thatp.     To build in this feature is to build in privileged access to willing    To minimize the waste of effort which would be involved in trying to suppress a willing which a pirot mistakenly judges itself to have, the genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that     ceteris paribus     if a pirot wills that it wills that P, it wills that p.     Both of these laws however are only ceteris paribus laws.    And there will be room for this or that counter-example.    In self-deception, and invontinence, for example, either law may not hold.    We may get a willing that one wills that p without the willing that p.    And we may get willing that p without willing that one wills that p, indeed, with willing  that it is not the case that one wills that p.    Grice abbreviates "x wills that x wills that p" by "x wills-2 that p", and "x wills that x wills that x wills  that p" by "x wills-3" that p".     Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will be no way of finding non-linguistic manifestational behaviour which distinguishes willing2 that p from willing1 that p.     There will now be two options.    We may suppose that will2 that p" is an inadmissible locution, which one has no basis for applying.    Or we may suppose that "x wills that p" and "x wills2 that p" are manifestationally equivalent, just because there can be no distinguishing behavioural manifestation, other than conversational, that is.    The second option is preferable, if we want to allow for the construction of a later type, a *talking* pirot, which can EXPRESS that it wills2 that p; and to maintain as a general, though probably derivative, law that     ceteris paribus     if x EXPRESSES that !p, x wills that ф.     The substitution of "x wills-2 that p" for " p" will force the admissibility of "x  wills" that p".     So we shall have to adopt as a law that     x wills" that piff x wills2 that p.     Exactly parallel reasoning will force the adoption of the law that     x wills  that p if x wills2 that p.    If we now define "x wills that p" as "x wills-2that p", we get the result that     a wills that p iff x wills  that x wills that p.     We get the result, that is to say, that     — a will is (in this sense) incorrigible, whereas a first-order will is only a matter for privileged access.    Is this or that Psychological Concept Eliminable?    Grice has tried to shed a little light on the question 'How is a psychological concept related to psychological theory and to psychological explanation?"    Grice has not, so far, said anything about a question which has considerably vexed some of Grice’s friends as well as himself.    Someone —let us call him the eliminator — might say:     ‘You explicitly subscribe to the idea of thinking of apsychological concept as explicable in terms of its role in a psychological law, that is to say, in terms of their potentialities for the explanation of behaviour.     You also subscribe to the idea that, where there is a psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, there is also a physiological explanation   With respect to pirots, it is supposedly the business of the engineer to make a psychological state effective by ensuring that this condition holds.     You must, however, admit that the explanation of behaviour, drawn from pirot-physiology, which is accessible to the engineer is  from a theoretical point of view, greatly superior to that accessible to the genitor;     The former are, for example, drawn from a more comprehensive theory, and from one which yields  or when fully developed will yield — even in the area of behaviour, a more precise prediction.    So since the attribution of a psychological state owes any claim to truth it may have to its potentialities for the explanation of behaviour, and since these potentialities are inferior to the potentialities of this of that physiological state, Occam's Razor will dictate that attributions of psychological states, to actual creatures no less than to pirots, should be rejected en bloc as lacking truth —even though, from ignorance or to avoid excessive labour, we might in fact continue to utter them.    We have indeed come face to face with the last gasp of Primitive Animism, namely the attempted perpetuation of the myth that animals are animate.'    The eliminator should receive fuller attention than Grice can give him on this occasion, but I will provide an interim response to him, in the course of which Grice shall hope to redeem the promise made, to pursue a little further the idea that the common-sense theory which underlines this or that psychological concept can be shown to be at least in some respects true.    First, the eliminator's position should, in Grice’s view, be seen as a particular case of canonical scepticism, and should, therefore, be met in accordance with general principles for the treatment of sceptical problems.     It is necessary, but it is also insufficient, to produce a cogent argument for the falsity of his conclusion;     if we confine ourselves to this kind of argumentation we shall find ourselves confronted by the post-eliminator, who says to us     “Certainly the steps in your refutation of the eliminator are validly made.”    “But so are the steps in his argument.”    A correct view of the matter is that from a set of principles in which a psychological concept occurs crucially, and through which that psychological concept is delineated, it follows both that the eliminator is right and that he is wrong.    So much the worse, then, for the set of principles and for the concepts;    they should be rejected as incoherent.     A satisfactory rebuttal of the eliminator's position must, therefore, undermine his argument as well as overturn his conclusion.    In pursuit of the first of these objectives, Grice remarks that, to his mind, to explain a phenomenon, or a sequence of phenomena, P is, typically, to explain P qua exemplifying some particular feature or characteristic     And so, one fact — or system — may explain P qua exemplifying characteristic C, while another fact — or system — explains P qua exemplifying a different charscteristic C2.     In application to the present case, it is quite possible that one system, the physiology of the future, should explain the things we do considered as sequences of physical movements, while another system, psychological theory, explains the things we do considered as instances of sorts of behaviour.    We may, at this point, distinguish two possible principles concerning the acceptability of a system of explanation:    If a system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of a class of phenomena P will respect to a class of characteristics C, than is system S2 for the explanation of & with respect to C, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    Gricd has no quarrel with this principle.    If system S1 is theoretically more adequate, for the explanation of P with respect to C1 than is system S2 for the explanation of P with respect to C2, la different class of characteristics, other things being equal, S1 is to be accepted and S2 is to be rejected.    The latter principle seems to me to lack plausibility.    In general, if we want to be able to explain P qua C2, e.g. as behaviour, our interest in such explanation should not be abandoned merely because the kind of explanation available with respect to some other class of characteristics is theoretically superior to the kind available with respect to C2.     The eliminator, however, will argue that, in the present case, what we have is really a special case of the application of Principle 1;     for     since any Ca in Cz which is exemplified on a given occasion has to be realised on that occasion in some , (some sequence of physical movements), for which there is a physiological explanation, the physiological explanation of the presence of C, on that occasion is ipso facto an explanation of the presence of C2, the behavioural feature, on that occasion, and so should be regarded as displacing any psychological explanation of the presence of Ca.    To maintain this position, the eliminator must be prepared to hold that if a behavioural feature is, on an occasion, realised in a given type of physical movement sequence,  that type of a movement sequence is, in itself, a sufficient condition for the presence of the behavioural feature.    Only so can the eliminator claim that the full power and prestige of physiological explanation is transmitted from a movement to behaviour, thereby ousting psychological explanation.     But it is very dubious whether a particular a movement sequence is, in general, a sufficient condition for a behavioural feature, especially with respect to such a behavioural feature the discrimination of which is most important for the conduct of life.     Whether a man with a club is merely advancing *towards* Grice or advancing *upon* Grice may well depend on a condition distinct from the character of his movements, indeed, it would be natural to suppose, upon a psychological condition.     It might of course be claimed that any such psychological condition would, in principle, be re-expressible in psychological terms, but this claim cannot be made by one who seeks not the reduction of psychological concepts but their rejection.    If a psychological state is not to be reduced to a physiological state, the proceeds of such reduction cannot be used to bridge gaps between a movement and behaviour.    The truth seems to be that the language of behavioural description is part and parcel of the system to which psychological explanation belongs, and cannot be prised off therefrom.     Nor can the eliminator choose to be hanged for a sheep rather than for a mere lamb, by opting to jettison behavioural description along with psychological concepts.    The eliminator himself will need behavioural terms like"describe" and "report" in order to formulate his non-recommendations or predictions.    And, perhaps more importantly, if there is, or is to be, strictly speaking no such thing as the discrimination of behaviour, there are, or are to be, no such things as ways of staying alive, either to describe or to adopt.    Furthermore, even if the eliminator were to succeed in bringing psychological concepts beneath the baleful glare of Principle 1, he would only have established that other things being equal psychological concepts and psychological explanation are to be rejected.     But other things are manifestly not equal, in ways which he has not taken into account.     It is one thing to suggest, as Grice suggests, that a proper philosophical understanding of ascriptions of psychological concepts is a matter of understanding the roles of such concepts in a psychological theory which explains behaviour.    It is quite *another* thing to suppose that creatures to whom such a theory applies will (or should) be interested in the ascription of psychological states only because of their interest in having a satisfactory system for the explanation of behaviour.     The psychological theory which Grice envisages would be deficient as a theory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision for interests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than as tools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests, for example, on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather than those psychological states to another creature because of a concern for the other creature.     Within such a theory it should be possible to derive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to the theory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory (and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would (or should) regardas justified.    Grice illustrates with a little fable.     The very eminent and very dedicated neurophysiologist speaks to his wife.   "My (for at least a little while longer) dear," he says,     "I have long thought of myself as an acute and well-informed interpreter of your actions and behaviour.”    “I think I have been able to identify nearly every thought that has made you smile, and nearly every desire that has moved you to act.”    “My researches, however, have made such progress that I shall no longer need to understand you in this way.”    “Instead I shall be in a position, with the aid of instruments which I shall attach to you, to assign to each bodily movement which you make in acting a specific antecedent condition in your cortex.”    “No longer shall I need to concern myself with your so-called thoughts and feelings.”    “In the meantime, perhaps you would have dinner with me tonight”      “I trust that you will not resist if I bring along some apparatus to help me to determine, as quickly as possible, the physiological idiosyncracies which obtain in your system.”    Grice has a feeling that Mrs. Churchland might refuse the proffered invitation.   Indeed, only from within the framework of such a theory, Grice thinks, can matters of evaluation, and so of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all.     If Grice conjectures aright, the entrenched system contains the materials needed to justify its own entrenchment — whereas no rival system contains a basis for the justification of anything at all.    We must be ever watchful against the devil of scientism, who would lead us into myopic over-concentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the devil who is even so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas required to make intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that, since we do not really think but only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay.     H. P. GriceAn initial version of the idea I want to explore is that we represent the sentences (1) "John should be recovering his health by now" and (2) "John should join AA" as having the following structures; first, a common "rationality" operator 'Ace, to be heard as "it is reasonable that", "it is acceptable that", "it ought to be that", "it should be that", or in some other similar way; next, one or other of two mood-operators, which in the case of (1) are to be written as 'F' and in the case of (2) are to be written as 1; and finally a 'radical, to be represented by T' or some other lower-case letter. The structure for (1) is Acc + F + r, for (2) Acc +! + r, with each symbol falling within the scope of its prede-cessor. I am thinking of a radical in pretty much the same kind of way as recent writers who have used that term (or the term  'phrastic); I think of it as a sequence in the underlying structural representation of sentences, and I regard it as an undecided question whether there are any sentences in a natural language which contain a part which is a distinct surface counterpart of a radical (compare Wittgenstein's remarks about radicals in chemistry).  Obviously the next topic for me to take up is the characterization of mood-operators.  Moods  There are in fact two connected questions on which I shall try to find something to say. First, there is the obvious demand for acharacterization, or partial characterization, of mood-differences as they emerge in speech (which it is plausible to regard as their primary habitat); second, there is the question how, and to what extent, representations of moods, and so of mood-differences, which are suitable for application to speech may be legitimately imported into the representation of thought. We need to consider the second question, since, if the general 'rationality operator is to signify something like acceptability, then the appearances of mood-operators within its scope will be proper only if they may properly occur within the scope of the psychological verb "accept".  The easiest way for me to expound my ideas on the first of these questions is by reference to a schematic table or diagram (see Fig. 2). I should at this point reiterate my temporary contempt for the use/mention distinction; my exposition would make the hair stand on end in the soul of a person specially sensitive in this area.  But my guess is that the only historical philosophical mistake prop erly attributable to use/mention confusion is Russell's argument against Frege in "On Denoting", and that there are virtually always acceptable ways of eliminating disregard of the distinction in a particular case, though the substitutes are usually lengthy, obscure, and tedious.  I shall make three initial assumptions: (1) That I may avail myself of two species of acceptance, namely, I-acceptance and V-acceptance, which I shall, on occasion, call respectively "judging" and "will-ing". The latter pair of words are to be thought of as technical or semi-technical, though they will signify states which approximate to what we vulgarly call "thinking (that p)" and "wanting (that p)". especially in the senses in which we can speak of beasts as thinking or wanting something. I here treat 'judge and 'will' (and "accept) as primitives; their proper interpretation would be determined by their role in a psychological theory (or sequence of psychological theories) designed to account for the behaviours of members of the animal kingdom, at different levels of psychological complexity (some classes of creatures being more complex than others). (2)  That, as I suggested in a published article (the exact title of which 1 always find it difficult to remember),? at least at the point at which,  I° Grice, "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning", Foundations of Language, 4 (Aug, 1968), 225-48.](Main clause):  U to utter to H (a sentence of the form] Op, + P  (Antecedent clause)  Operation  (Preamble)  Number  (1) A  (Supplement)  |（Diferential）  (Content.)  (Radicall  (Operator) | (Mood-name)  U wills H judges U  nonel  judges  wills H  (2) A  none  wills  wills H  (з) А  [none]  wills (3,a) (U a judges  ?.H  Judicative, ('Indicative") Judicative, (Indicative')  (Main clause):  U to utter to H (a sentence of the form] Op, + P  (Antecedent clause)  Operation  (Preamble)  Number  (1) A  (Supplement)  |（Diferential）  (Content.)  (Radicall  (Operator) | (Mood-name)  U wills H judges U  nonel  judges  wills H  (2) A  none  wills  wills H  (з) А  [none]  wills (3,a) (U a judges  ?.H  Judicative, ('Indicative") Judicative, (Indicative') Volitive, ('Intentional")  Volitive-  ("Imperative"  Judicative Interrogative  wills  (8,0) (H  (4)  non| wills  wills U a judges wills (3,0) (U o wills  Judicative Interrogative  Volitive Interrogative,  (3,a) (H  wills U a wills  Volitive Interrogatives  Notes: Interrogatives: (i)  Legitimate substituends for 'o' are 'positively' and negatively: positively judging that p. and negatively judging that pis judging that not-p.  The 'uniquely existential' quantifier (3,a) is to be given a 'substitutional" interpretation. (ili) 1E the differential is supplemented (as in a B case), the quantifier is dragged back', so as to appear  immediately before 'H in the supplement.  FiG. 2. Schema of procedure-specifiers for mood-operatorsin one's syntactico-semantical theory of a particular language, one is introducing mood-differences (and possibly earlier), the proper form to use is a specification of speech-procedures; such specifiers would be of the general form "For U (utterer) to utter o if.." where the blank is replaced by the appropriate condition.  (3) That since in the preceding scheme 'O' represents a structure and not a sentence or open sentence, there is no guarantee that actual sentences in the language under treatment will contain perspicuous and unambiguous representations of their moods or sub-moods; an individual sentence may correspond to two (or more) mood-different structures; the sentence will then be structurally ambiguous (multiplex in meaning) and will have more than one reading.  The general form of a procedure-specifier for a mood-operator, as you will see from Fig, 2, involves a main clause (which comes first) and an "antecedent" clause, which follows "if". In the schematic representation of the main clause, "U" represents an utterer, "H" a hearer,  "P" a radical; and "Op." represents that operator whose number is i; for example, "Op.." would represent Operator Number 3A, which (since? F' appears in the Operator column for 3A) would be ?, F. The antecedent clause consists of a sequence whose elements are a preamble, a supplement to a differential (which is present only in a B-type case), a differential, and a radical. The preamble, which is always present, is invariant, and reads "U wills (that) H judges (that) U.... The supplement, if present, is also invariant; and the idea behind its varying presence or absence is connected, in the first instance, with the Volitive Mood (see initial assumption (2) above). It seemed to me that the difference between ordinary expressions of intention (such as "I shall not fail" or "They shall not pass") and ordinary imperatives (Like "Be a little kinder to him") could be accommodated by treating each as a special sub-mood of a superior mood; the characteristic feature of the superior mood (Volitive) is that it relates to willing that p, and in one subordinate case (the Intentional case) the utterer is concerned to reveal to the hearer that he (the utterer) wills that p, while in the other subordinate case (Imperative), U is concerned to reveal to H that U wills that H will that p. (In each case, of course, it is to be presumed that willing that p will have its standard out-come, namely, the actualization of p.) It also seemed to me thatthere is a corresponding distinction between two "uses" of ordinary indicatives; sometimes one is declaring or affirming that p. one's intention being primarily to get the hearer to think that the speaker thinks that p; while sometimes one is telling the hearer that p, that is to say, hoping to get him to think that p. It is true that in the case of indicatives, unlike that of volitives, there is no pair of devices which would ordinarily be thought of as mood-markers which serves to distinguish the sub-mood of an indicative sentence; the recognition of the sub-mood has to come from context, from the vocative use of the name of H, from the presence of a speech-act verb, or from a sentence-adverbial phrase (like  "for your information"). But I have already, in my initial assump-tions, allowed for such a situation. This A/B distinction seemed to me to be also discernible in interrogatives (of this, a little more later).  The differentials are each associated with, and serve to distin-guish, 'superior' moods (judicative, volitive) and, apart from one detail in the case of interrogatives, are invariant between 'A and B sub-moods of the superior mood; they are merely unsupple-mented or supplemented, the former for an 'A sub-mood and the latter for a 'B' sub-mood. The radical needs at this point (I hope) no further explanation, except that it might be useful to bear in mind that I have not stipulated that the radical for an 'intentional' (Volitive,) incorporate a reference to U ("be in the first person"), nor that the radical for an 'imperative' (Volitive,) incorporate a reference of H ("be in the second person"); "They shall not pass" is a legitimate intentional, as is "You shall not get away with it"; and "The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn" (said by a cap tain to a lieutenant) is a perfectly good imperative. I will give in full two examples of actual specifiers derived from the schema shown in Fig. 2.  U to utter to H I, P if U wills (that) H judges (that) U judges p. U to utter to H I, P if U wills that H judges that U wills that H wills that p Since, of the states denoted by differentials in the figure, only judging that p and willing that p are, in my view, strictly cases of acceptance that p, and the ultimate purpose of my introducing thischaracterization of moods is to reach a general account of linguistic forms which are to be conjoined, according to my proposal, with an 'acceptability operator, the first two numbered rows of the figure are (at most) what I shall have a direct use for. But since it is of some importance to me that my treatment of moods should be (and should be thought to be) on the right lines, I have added a partial account of interrogatives, and I shall say a little more. about them.  There are two varieties of interrogatives, 'Yes/No' interrogatives (for example, "Is his face clean?") and 'W' interrogatives ("Who killed Cock Robin?", "Where has my beloved gone?", "How did he fix it?"). The specifiers derivable from the schema will provide only for "Yes/No' interrogatives, though the figure could be quite easily amended so as to yield a restricted but very large class of "W interrogatives; I shall in a moment indicate how this could be done. The distinction between Judicative and Volitive Interrogatives corresponds with the difference between cases in which a questioner is indicated as being, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information ("Is he at home?"), and cases in which the questioner is indicated as being concerned to settle a problem about what he is to do ("Am I to leave the door open?", "Is the  prisoner to be released?", "Shall I go on reading?"). This difference is fairly well represented in English grammar, and much better represented in the grammars of some other languages.  (3) The A/B differences are (1 think) not marked at all in English grammar. They are, however, often quite easily detectable.  There is usually a recognizable difference between a case in which someone says, musingly or reflectively, "Is he to be trusted?" (a case in which the speaker might say that he was just wondering), and a case in which he utters the same sentence as an enquiry similarly, we can usually tell whether someone who says "Shall T accept the invitation?" is just trying to make up his mind, or is trying to get advice or instruction from his audience,  (4) The employment of the variable 'o' needs to be explained I have borrowed a little from an obscure branch of logic, once (but maybe no longer) practised, called (I think) "proto-thetic" (why?), the main rite in which was to quantify over (or through)connectives, 'o' is to have as its two substituents "positively" and  "negatively", which may modify the verbs "judge' and will; negatively judging or negatively willing that p is judging or willing that not-p. The quantifier (9,os) ... has to be treated substitutionally, as specified in note (ii). If, for example, I ask someone whether John killed Cock Robin (B case), I do not want him merely to will that I have a particular "Logical Quality" in mind which I believe to apply; I want him to have one of the "Qualities" in mind which he wants me to believe to apply. To meet this demand, supplementation must "drag back' the quantifier.  (5) To extend the schema so as to provide specifiers for 'single W-interrogatives (that is, questions like "What did the butler see?" rather than questions like "Who went where with whom at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon?"), we need just a little extra appa-ratus. We need to be able to superscribe a "W' in each interrogative operator (for example, ?Wh, ?W!), together with the proviso that a radical which follows a superscribed operator must be an  'open' radical, which contains one or more occurrences of just one free variable. And we need what I might call a 'chameleon' variable 'X, to occur only in quantifiers, so that (3)) Ex is to be regarded as a way of writing (3x) Ex, while (3)) Fy is a way of writing (Sy) Fy. To provide specifiers for W-superscribed operators, we simply delete the appearances of 'o in the specifier for the corresponding un-superscribed operator, inserting instead the quantifier (3,2) (...) at the position previously occupied by (3,∞e) (..- ).  For example: the specifiers for "Who killed Cock Robin?" (used as an enquiry) would be: "U to utter to H "? W F: x killed Cock Robin' if U wills H to judge U to will that (3,2) (H should will that U judges (x killed Cock Robin))"; in which '(3,X)' will "take on" the shape '(S,x)' since 'x' is the free variable within its scope. H. P. Grice The topic which I have chosen is one which eminently deserves a thorough, systematic, and fully theoretical treatment; such an approach would involve, I suspect, a careful analysis of the often subtly different kinds of state which may be denoted by the word  "want, together with a comprehensive examination of the role which different sorts of wanting play in the psychological equipment of rational (and non-rational) creatures. While 1 hope to touch on matters of this sort, 1 do not feel myself to be quite in a position to attempt an analysis of this kind, which would in any case be a very lengthy undertaking. So, to give direction to my discussion, and to keep it within tolerable limits, I shall relate it to some questions arising out of Aristotle's handling of this topic in the Nicomachean Ethics; such a procedure on my part may have the additional advantage of emphasizing the idea, in which I believe, that the proper habitat for such great works of the past as the Nicomachean Ethics is not the museums but the marketplaces of philosophy.  My initial Aristotelian question concerns two conditions which Aristotle supposes to have to be satisfied by whatever is to be recognized as being the good for man. At the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics 1. 4, Aristotle notes that there is general agreement that the good for man is to be identified with eudaemonia (which may or may not be well rendered as 'happiness'), and that this in turn is to be identified with living well and with doing well; but remarks that there is large-scale disagreement with respect to any further and more informative specification of eudaemonia. In I. 7 he seeksto confirm the identification of the good for man with eudaemonia by specifying two features, maximal finality (unqualified finality) and self-sufficiency, which, supposedly, both are required of anything which is to qualify as the good for man, and are also satisfied by eudaemonia. 'Maximal finality' is defined as follows: "Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things which are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else." Eudaemonia seems (intuitively) to satisfy this condition; such things as honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue (the most popular candidates for identification with the good for man and with eudaemonia) are chosen indeed for themselves (they would be worthy of choice even if nothing resulted from them); but they are also chosen for the sake of eudaemonia, since  "we judge that by means of them we shall be happy". Eudaemonia, however, is never chosen for the sake of anything other than itself.  After some preliminaries, the relevant sense of "self-sufficiency" is defined thus: "The self-sufficient we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing." Eudaemonia, again, appears to satisfy this condition too; and Aristotle adds the possibly important comment that eudaemonia is thought to be "the most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others". This remark might be taken to suggest that, in Aristotle's view, it is not merely true that the possession of eudaemonia cannot be improved upon by the addition of any other good, but it is true because eudaemonia is a special kind of good, one which it would be inappropriate to rank alongside other goods.  This passage in Nicomachean Ethics raises in my mind several queries:  (1) It is, I suspect, normally assumed by commentators that Aristotle thinks of eudaemonia as being the only item which satisfies the condition of maximal finality. This uniqueness claim is not, however, explicitly made in the passage (nor, so far as I can recollect, elsewhere); nor is it clear to me that if it were made itwould be correct. Might it not be that, for example, lazing in the sun is desired, and is desirable, for its own sake, and yet is not something which is also desirable for the sake of something else, not even for the sake of happiness? If it should turn out that there is a distinction, within the class of things desirable for their own sake (1-desirables), between those which are also desirable for the sake of endaemonia (H-desirables) and those which are not, then the further question arises whether there is any common feature which distinguishes items which are (directly) H-desirable, and, if so, what it is. This question will reappear later.  (2) Aristotle claims that honour, reason, pleasure, and virtue are all both I-desirable and H-desirable, But, at this stage in the Nicomachean Ethics, these are uneliminated candidates for identification with eudaemonia; and, indeed, Aristotle himself later identifies, at least in a sort of way, a special version of one of them (metaphysical contemplation) with eudaemonia. Suppose that it were to be established that one of these candidates (say, honour) is successful. Would not Aristotle then be committed to holding that honour is both desirable for its own sake, and also desirable for the sake of something other than honour, namely, eudaemonia, that is, honour? It is not clear, moreover, that this prima facie inconsistency can be eliminated by an appeal to the non-extensionality of the context " is desirable". For while the argument-pattern  *o is desirable for the sake of B. Bis identical with y; so, or is desirable for the sake of y' may be invalid, it is by no means clear that the argument-pattern 'o is desirable for the sake of B, necessarily B is identical with Y; so, a is desirable for the sake of y' is invalid.  And, if it were true that eudaemonia is to be identified with honour, this would presumably be a non-contingent truth.  (3) Suppose the following: (a) playing golf and playing tennis are each I-desirables, (b) each is conducive to physical fitness, which is itself I-desirable, (e) that a daily round of golf and a daily couple of hours of tennis are each sufficient for peak physical fitness, and (if you like, for simplicity), (d) that there is no third route to physical fitness. Now, X and Y accept all these suppositions; X plays golf daily, and Y plays both golf and tennis daily. It seems difficult to deny, first, that it is quite conceivable that all of the sporting activities of these gentlemen are undertaken both for their own sake and also for the sake of physical fitness, and, second, that (protanto) the life of Y is more desirable than the life of X, since Y has the value of playing tennis while X does not. The fact that in Y's life physical fitness is overdetermined does not seem to be a ground for denying that he pursues both golf and tennis for the sake of physical fitness; if we wished to deny this, it looks as if we could, in certain circumstances, be faced with the unanswerable question, "If he doesn't pursue each for the sake of physical fitness, then which one does he pursue for physical fitness?"  Let us now consider how close an analogy to this example we can construct if we search for one which replaces references to physical fitness by references to eudaemonia. We might suppose that X and Y have it in common that they have distinguished academic lives, satisfying family situations, and are healthy and prosperous; that they value, and rightly value, these aspects of their existences for their own sakes and also regard them as contributing to their eudaemonia. Each regards himself as a thoroughly happy man. But Y, unlike X, also composes poetry, an activity which he cares about and which he also thinks of as something which contributes to his endaemoria; the time which y devotes to poetic endeavour is spent by X pottering about the house doing nothing in particular. We now raise the question whether or not Y's life is more desirable than X's, on the grounds that it contains an I-desirable element, poetic composition, which X's life does not contain, and that there is no counterbalancing element present in X's life but absent in Y's.  One conceivable answer would be that Y's life is indeed more desirable than X's, since it contains an additional value, but that this fact is consistent with their being equal in respect of eudae-monia, in line with the supposition that each regards himself as thoroughly happy. If we give this answer we, in effect, reject the Aristotelian idea that eudaemonia is, in the appropriate sense, self-sufficient. There seems to me, however, to be good reason not to give this answer. Commentators have disagreed about the precise interpretation of the word "eudaemonia", but none, so far as I know, has suggested what I think of as much the most plausible conjecture; namely, that "eudaemonia" is to be understood as the name for that state or condition which one's good daemon would (if he could) ensure for one; and my good daemon is a being motivated, with respect to me, solely by concern for my well-being or happiness.To change the idiom, "eudaemonia" is the general characterization of what a full-time and unhampered fairy godmother would secure for you. The identifications regarded by Aristotle as unexcitingly correct, of eudaemonia with doing well and with living well, now begin to look like necessary truths. If this interpretation of  "eudaemonia" is correct (as I shall brazenly assume) then it would be quite impossible for Y's life to be more desirable than X's, though X and Y are equal in respect of eudaemonia; for this would amount to Y's being better off than X, though both are equally well-off!  Various other possible answers remain. It might be held that not only is Y's life more desirable than X's, but Y is more eudaemon (better off) than X. This idea preserves the proposed conceptual connection between eudaemonia and being well-off, and relies on the not wholly implausible principle that the addition of a value to a life enhances the value of that life (whatever, perhaps, the liver may think). One might think of such a principle, when more fully stated, as laying down or implying that any increase in the combined value of the H-desirable elements realized in a particular life is reflected, in a constant proportion, in an increase in the degree of happiness or well-being exemplified by that life; or, more cautiously, that the increase in happiness is not determined by a constant proportion, but rather in some manner analogous to the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility. I am inclined to see the argument of this chapter as leading towards a discreet erosion of the idea that the degree of a particular person's happiness is the value of a function the arguments of which are measures of the particular H-desirables realized in that person's life, no matter what function is suggested; but at the present moment it will be sufficient to cast doubt on the acceptability of any of the crudest versions of this idea. To revert to the case of X and Y: it seems to me that when we speak of the desirability of X's life or of Y's life, the desirability of which we are speaking is the desirability of that life from the point of view of the person whose life it is; and that it is therefore counterintuitive to suppose that, for example, X who thinks of himself as "perfectly happy" and so not to be made either better off or more happy (though perhaps more accomplished) by an injection of poetry composition, should be making a misassess-ment of what his state of well-being would be if the composition of poetry were added to his occupation. Furthermore, if the pursuitof happiness is to be the proper end, or even a proper end, of living, to suppose that the added realization of a further H-desirable to a life automatically increases the happiness or wellbeing of the possessor of that life will involve a commitment to an ethical position which I, for one, find somewhat unattractive: one would be committed to advocating too unbridled an eudae-monic expansionism.  A more attractive position would be to suppose that we should invoke, with respect to the example under consideration, an analogue not of diminishing marginal utility, but of what might be called vanishing marginal utility; to suppose, that is, that X and Y are, or at least may be, equally well-off and equally happy even though Y's life contains an H-desirable element which is lacking in X's life; that at a certain point, so to speak, the bucket of happiness is filled, and no further inpouring of realized H-desirables has any effect on its contents. This position would be analogous to the view I adopted earlier with respect to the possible over-determination of physical fitness. Even should this position be correct, it must be recognized that the really interesting work still remains to be done; that would consist in the characterization of the conditions which determine whether the realization of a particular set of H-desirables is sufficient to fill the bucket.  The main result, then, of the discussion has been to raise two matters for exploration; first, the possibility of a distinction between items which are merely I-desirable and items which are not only I-desirable but also H-desirable; and, second, the possibility that the degree of happiness exemplified by a life may be overdetermined by the set of H-desirables realized in that life, together with the need to characterize the conditions which govern such overdetermination.  (4) Let us move in a different direction. I have already remarked that, with respect to the desirability-status of happiness and of the means thereto, Aristotle subscribed to two theses, with which I have no quarrel (or, at least, shall voice no quarrel).  (A) That some things are both 1-desirable and H-desirable (are both ends in themselves and also means to happiness).  (B)  That happiness, while desirable in itself, is not desirable for the sake of any further end.I have suggested the possibility that a further thesis might be true (though I have not claimed that it is true), namely:  (C) That some things are I-desirable without being H-desirable (and, one might add, perhaps without being desirable for the sake of any further end, in which case happiness will not be the only item which is not desirable for the sake of any further end).  But there are two further as yet unmentioned theses which 1 am inclined to regard as being not only true, but also important: first,  (D) Any item which is directly H-desirable must be I-desirable.  And second,  (E) Happiness is attainable only via the realization of items which are 1-desirable (and also of course H-desirable).  Thesis (D) would allow that an item could be indirectly H-desirable without being I-desirable; engaging in morning press-ups could be such an item, but only if it were desirable for the sake of (let us say) playing cricket well, which would plainly be itself an item which was both 1-desirable and H-desirable. A thesis related to (D), namely, (D'). (An item can be directly conducive to the happiness of an individual x only if it is regarded by x as being I-desirable) seems to me very likely to be true; the question whether not only (D') but (D) are true would depend on whether a man who misconceives (if that be possible) certain items as being I-desirable could properly be said to achieve happiness through the realization of those items. To take an extreme case, could a wicked man who pervertedly regards cheating others in an ingenious way as being I-desirable, and who delights in so doing, properly be said to be (pro tanto) achieving happiness? I think Aristotle would answer negatively, and I am rather inclined to side with him; but I recognize that there is much to debate. A consequence of thesis (D), if true, would be that there cannot be a happiness-pill (a pill the taking of which leads directly to happiness); there could be (and maybe there is) a pill which leads directly to "feeling good" or to euphoria; but these states would have to be distinguishable from happiness.  Thesis (E) would imply that happiness is essentially a dependent state; happiness cannot just happen; its realization is conditionalupon the realization of one or more items which give rise to it.  Happiness should be thought of adverbially; to be happy is, for some x, to x happily or with happiness. And reflection on the interchangeability or near-interchangeability of the ideas of happiness and of well-being would suggest that the adverbial in question is an evaluation adverbial.  The importance, for present purposes, of the two latest theses is to my mind that questions are now engendered about the idea that items which are chosen (or desirable) for the sake of happiness can be thought of as items which are chosen (or desirable) as means to happiness, at least if the means-end relation is conceived as it seems very frequently to be conceived in contemporary philosophy; if, that is, x is a means to y just in case the doing or producing of x designedly causes (generates, has as an effect) the occurrence of y. For, if items the realization of which give rise to happiness were items which could be, in the above sense, means to happiness, (a) it should be conceptually possible for happiness to arise otherwise than as a consequence of the occurrence of any such items, and (b) it seems too difficult to suppose that so non-scientific a condition as the possession of intrinsic desirability should be a necessary condition of an item's giving rise to happiness. In other words, theses (D) and (E) seem to preclude the idea that what directly gives rise to happiness can be, in the currently favoured sense, a means to happiness.  The issue which I have just raised is closely related to a scholarly issue which has recently divided Aristotelian commentators; battles have raged over the question whether Aristotle conceived of eudaemonia as a 'dominant or as an 'inclusive' end. The terminology derives, I believe, from W. F. R. Hardie; but I cite a definition of the question which is given by Ackrill in a recent paper:  "By 'an inclusive end' might be meant any end combining or including two or more values or activities or goods... By 'a dominant end' might be meant a monolishic end, an end consisting of just one valued activity or good." One's initial reaction to this formulation may fall short of overwhelming enlightenment, among other things, perhaps, because the verb 'include' appears within  J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle on Eudaemonia (Dawes Hicks Lecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 5.the characterization of an inclusive end. I suspect, however, that this deficiency could be properly remedied only by a logico-metaphysical enquiry into the nature of the 'inclusion relation' (or, rather, the family of inclusion relations), which would go far beyond the limits of my present undertaking. But, to be less ambitious, let us, initially and provisionally, think of an inclusive end as being a set of ends. If happiness is in this sense an inclusive end, then we can account for some of the features displayed in the previous section. Happiness will be dependent on the realization of subordinate ends, provided that the set of ends constituting happiness may not be the empty set (a reasonable, if optimistic, assumption).  Since the "happiness set" has as its elements I-desirables, what is desirable directly for the sake of happiness must be I-desirable. And if it should turn out to be the case, contrary perhaps to the direction of my argument in the last section, that the happiness set includes all I-desirables, then we should have difficulty in finding any end for the sake of which happiness would be desirable.  So far so good, perhaps; but so far may not really be very far at all. Some reservation about the treatment of endaemonia as an inclusive end is hinted at by Ackrill:  It is not necessary to claim that Aristotle has made quite clear how there may be 'components' in the best life or how they may be interrelated The very idea of constructing a compound end out of two or more independent ends may arouse suspicion. Is the compound to be thought of as a mere aggregate or as an organized system? If the former, the move to cudaemonia seems trivial-nor is it obvious that goods can be just added together. If the latter, if there is supposed to be a unifying plan. what is it?"  From these very pertinent questions, Ackrill detaches himself, on the grounds that his primary concern is with the exposition and not with the justification of Aristotle's thought. But we cannot avail ourselves of this rain check, and so the difficulties which Ackrill touches on must receive further exposure.  Let us suppose a next-to-impossible world W, in which there are just three I-desirables, which are also H-desirables, A, B, and  C. If you like, you may think of these as being identical, respect-ively, with honour, wealth, and virtue. If, in general, happiness is  • Ibid. 10-n1.to be an inclusive end, happiness-in-W will have as its components A, B, and C, and no others. Now one might be tempted to suppose that, since it is difficult or impossible to deny that to achieve happiness-in-W it is necessary and also sufficient to realize A, to realize B, and to realize C, anyone who wanted to realize A, wanted to realize B, and wanted to realize C would ipso facto be someone who wanted to achieve happiness-in-W. But there seems to me to be a good case for regarding such an inference as invalid. To want to achieve happiness-in-W might be equivalent to wanting to realize A and to realize B and to realize C, or indeed to wanting A and B and C; but there are relatively familiar reasons for allowing that, with respect to a considerable range of psychological verbs (rep-resented by v), one cannot derive from a statement of the form  'x y's (that) A and x y's (that) B' a statement of the form 'x y's (that) A and B. For instance, it seems to me a plausible thesis that there are circumstances in which we should want to say of someone that he believed that p and that he believed that q, without being willing to allow that he believed that both p and q. The most obvious cases for the application of the distinction would perhaps be cases in which p and q are inconsistent; we can perhaps imagine someone of whom we should wish to say that he believed that he was a grotesquely incompetent creature, and that he also believed that he was a world-beater, without wishing to say of him that he believed that he was both grotesquely incompetent and a world-beater. Inconsistent beliefs are not, or are not neces-sarily, beliefs in inconsistencies. Whatever reasons there may be for allowing that a man may believe that p and beheve that g without believing that p and q would, I suspect, be mirrored in reasons for allowing that a man may want A and want B without wanting both A and B; if I want a holiday in Rome, and also want some headache pills, it does not seem to me that ipso facto I want a holiday in Rome and some headache pills.  Moreover, even if we were to sanction the disputed inference, it would not, I think, be correct to make the further supposition that a man who wants A and B (simply as a consequence of wanting A and wanting B) would, or even could, want A (or want B) for the sake of or with a view to, realizing A and B. So even if, in world W, a man could be said to want A and B and C, on the strength of wanting each one of them, some further condition wouldhave to be fulfilled before we could say of him that he wanted each of them for the sake of realizing A and B and C, that is, for the sake of achieving happiness-in-W.  In an attempt to do justice to the idea that happiness should be treated as being an 'inclusive end, let me put forward a modest proposal; not, perhaps, the only possible proposal, but one which may seem reasonably intuitive. Let us categorize, for present pur-poses, the l-desirables in world Was 'universals. I propose that to want, severally, each of these I-desirables should be regarded as equivalent to wanting the set whose members are just those I-desirables, with the understanding that a set of universals is not itself a universal. So to want A, want B, and want C is equivalent to wanting the set whose members are A, B, and C (the happiness-in-W set). To want happiness-in-W requires satisfaction of the stronger condition of wanting A and B and C, which in turn is equivalent to wanting something which is a universal, namely, a compound universal in which are included just those universals which are elements of the happiness-in-W set. 1 shall not attempt to present a necessary and sufficient condition for the fulfilment of the stronger rather than merely of the weaker condition; but I shall suggest an important sufficient condition for this state of affairs. The condition is the following: for x to want the conjunction of the members of a set, rather than merely for him to want, severally, each member of the set, it is sufficient that his wanting. severally, each member of the set should be explained by (have as one of its explanations) the fact that there is an 'open' feature F which is believed by x to be exemplified by the set, and the realization of which is desired by x. By an open feature I mean a feature the specification of which does not require the complete enumeration of the items which exemplify it. To illustrate, a certain Oxford don at one time desired to secure for himself the teach-ing, in his subject, at the colleges of Somerville, St Hugh's, St Hilda's, Lady Margaret Hall, and St Anne's. (He failed, by two colleges.)  This compound desire was based on the fact that the named colleges constituted the totality of women's colleges in Oxford, and he desired the realization of the open feature consisting in his teach-ing, in his subject, at all the women's colleges in Oxford. This sufficient condition is important in that it is, I think, fulfilled with respect to all compound desires which are rational, as distinct fromarbitrary or crazy. There can be, of course, genuinely compound desires which are non-rational, and 1 shall not attempt to specify the condition which distinguishes them; but perhaps I do not need to, since I think we may take it as a postulate that, if a desire for happiness is a compound desire, it is a rational compound desire.  The proposal which I have made does, I think, conform to acceptable general principles for metaphysical construction. For it provides for the addition to an initially given category of items (universals') of a special sub-category (compound universals") which are counterparts of certain items which are not universals but rather sets of universals. It involves, so to speak, the conversion of certain non-universals into 'new' universals, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the purpose of this conversion is to bring these non-universals, in a simple and relatively elegant way, within the scope of laws which apply to universals. It must be understood that by 'laws' I am referring to theoretical generalities which belong to any of a variety of kinds of theory, including psychological, prac-tical, and moral theories; so among such laws will be laws of various kinds relating to desires for ends and for means to ends.  If happiness is an inclusive end, and it, for it to be an inclusive end the desire for which is rational, there must be an open feature which is exemplified by the set of components of happiness, our next task is plainly to attempt to identify this feature. To further this venture I shall now examine, within the varieties of means-end relation, what is to my mind a particularly suggestive kind of case.  At the start of this section I shall offer a brief sketch of the vari-eties, or of some of the varieties, of means-end relation; this is a matter which is interesting in itself, which is largely neglected in contemporary philosophy, and which I am inclined to regard as an important bit of background in the present enquiry. I shall then consider a particular class of cases in our ordinary thinking about means and ends, which might be called cases of'end-fixing, and which might provide an important modification to our consideration of the idea that happiness is an inclusive end.  123 of1 shall introduce the term 'is contributive to' as a general expression for what I have been calling 'means-end' relation, and I shall use the phrase is contributive in way w to' to refer, in a general way, to this or that particular specific form of the con-tributiveness relation. I shall, for convenience, assume that anyone who thinks of some state of affairs or action as being contributive to the realization of a certain universal would have in mind that specific form of contributiveness which would be appropriate to the particular case. We may now say, quite unstartlingly, that x wants to do A for the sake of B just in case x wants to do A because (1) x regards his doing A as something which would be contributive in way w to the realization of B, and (2) x wants B. That leaves us the only interesting task, namely, that of giving the range of specific relations one element in which will be picked out by the phrase contributive in way w, once A and B are specified.  The most obvious mode of contributiveness, indeed one which has too often been attended to to the exclusion of all others, is that of causal antecedence; x's contributing to y here consists in x's being the (or a) causal origin of y. But even within this mode there may be more complexity than meets the eye. The causal origin may be an initiating cause, which triggers the effect in the way in which flipping a switch sets off illumination in a light bulb; or it may be a sustaining cause, the continuation of which is required in order to maintain the effect in being. In either case, the effect may be either positive or negative; I may initiate a period of non-talking in Jones by knocking him cold, or sustain one by keeping my hand over his mouth. A further dimension, in respect of which examples of each variety of causal contributiveness may vary, is that of conditionality. Doing A may be desired as something which will, given the circumstances which obtain, unconditionally originate the realization of B, or as something which will do so provided that a certain possibility is fulfilled. A specially important subclass of cases of conditional causal contributiveness is the class of cases in which the relevant possibility consists in the desire or will of some agent, either the means- taker or someone else, that B should be realized; these are cases in which x wants to do A in order to enable, or to make it possible for, himself (or someone else) to achieve the realization of B; as when, for example, x puts a corkscrew in his pocket to enable him later, should be wish to do so, to open a bottle of wine.But, for present purposes, the more interesting modes of contributiveness may well be those other than that of causal con-tributiveness. These include the following types.  (1) Specificatory contributiveness. To do A would, in the prevailing circumstances, be a specification of, or a way of, realizing  B; it being understood that, for this mode of contributiveness, B is not to be a causal property, a property consisting in being such as to cause the realization of C, where C is some further property.  A host's seating someone at his right-hand side at dinner may be a specification of treating him with respect; waving a Union Jack might be a way of showing loyalty to the Crown. In these cases, the particular action which exemplifies A is the same as the item which exemplifies B.  Two further modes involve relations of inclusion, of one or  another of the types to which such relations may belong.  To do A may contribute to the realization of B by including an item which realizes B. I may want to take a certain advertised cruise because it includes a visit to Naples. To do A may contribute to the realization of B by being included in an item which realizes B. Here we may distinguish more than one kind of case. A and B may be identical; 1 may, for example, be hospitable to someone today because I want to be hospitable to him throughout his visit to my town. In such a case the exemplification of B (hospitality) by the whole (my behaviour to him during the week) will depend on a certain distribution of exemplifications of B among the parts, such as my behaviour on particular days. We might call this kind of dependence "component-dependence". In other cases A and B are distinct, and in some of these (perhaps all) B cannot, if it is exemplified by the whole, also be exemplified by any part. These further cases subdivide in ways which are interesting but not germane to the present enquiry. We are now in a position to handle, not quite as Aristotle did, a 'paradox' about happiness raised by Aristotle, which involves Solon's dictum "Call no man happy till he is dead", I give a simplified, but I hope not distorted, version of the 'paradoxical' line of argument. If we start by suggesting that happiness is the end for man, we shall have to modify this suggestion, replacing  "happiness" by "happiness in a complete life". (Aristotle himselfapplies the qualification "in a complete life" not to happiness, but to what he gives as constituted of happiness, namely, activity of soul in accordance with excellence). For, plainly, a life which as a whole exemplifies happiness is preferable to one which does not.  But since lifelong happiness can only be exemplified by a whole life, non-predictive knowledge that the end for man is realized with respect to a particular person is attainable only at the end of the person's life, and so not (except possibly at the time of his dying gasp) by the person himself. But this is paradoxical, since the end for man should be such that non-predictive knowledge of its realization is available to those who achieve its realization.  I suggest that we need to distinguish non-propositional, attributive ends, such as happiness, and propositional ends or objectives, such as that my life, as a whole, should be happy. Now it is not in fact clear that people do, or even should, desire lifelong happiness; it may be quite in order not to think about this as an objective.  And, even if one should desire lifelong happiness, it is not clear that one should aim at it, that one should desire, and do, things for the sake of it. But let us waive these objections. The attainment of lifelong happiness, an objective, consists in the realization, in a whole life, of the attributive end happiness. This realization is component-dependent; it depends on a certain distribution of realizations of that same end in episodes or phases of that life.  But these realizations are certainly non-predictively knowable by the person whose life it is. So, if we insist that to specify the end for man is to specify an attributive end and not an objective, then the "paradox' disappears.  The special class of cases to which one might be tempted to apply the term 'end-fixing' may be approached in the following way. For any given mode of contributiveness, say causal contributiveness, the same final position, that x wants (intends, does) A as contributive to the realization of B, may be reached through more than one process of thought. In line with the canonical Aristotelian model, x may desire to realize B, then enquire what would lead to B, decide that doing A would lead to B, and so come to want, and to do, A.  Alternatively, the possibility of doing A may come to his mind, he then enquires what doing A would lead to, sees that it would lead to B, which he wants, and so he comes to want, and perhaps do, A. I now ask whether there are cases in which the followingconditions are met: (1) doing A is fixed or decided, not merely entertained as a possibility, in advance of the recognition of it as desirable with a view to B, and (2) that B is selected as an end, or as an end to be pursued on this occasion, at least partly because it is something which doing A will help to realize.  A variety of candidates, not necessarily good ones, come to mind.  (1) A man who is wrecked on a desert island decides to use his stay there to pursue what is a new end for him, namely, the study of the local flora and fauna. Here doing A (spending time on the island) is fixed but not chosen; and the specific performances, which some might think were more properly regarded as means to the pursuit of this study, are not fixed in advance of the adoption of the end. (2) A man wants (without having a reason for so want-ing) to move to a certain town; he is uncomfortable with irrational desires (or at least with this irrational desire), and so comes to want to make this move because the town has a specially salubrious cli-mate. Here, it seems, the movement of thought cannot be fully conscious; we might say that the reason why he wants to move to a specially good climate is that such a desire would justify the desire or intention, which he already has, to move to the town in question; but one would baulk at describing this as being his reason for wanting to move to a good climate.  The example which interests me is the following. A tyrant has become severely displeased with one of his ministers, and to humiliate him assigns him to the task of organizing the disposal of the palace garbage, making clear that only a high degree of efficiency will save him from a more savage fate. The minister at first strives for efficiency merely in order to escape disaster; but later, seeing that thereby he can preserve his self-respect and frustrate the tyrant's plan to humiliate him, he begins to take pride in the efficient discharge of his duties, and so to be concerned about it for its own sake. Even so, when the tyrant is overthrown and the minister is relieved of his menial duties, he leaves them without regret in spite of having been intrinsically concerned about their discharge.  One might say of the minister that he efficiently discharged his office for its own sake in order to frustrate the tyrant; and this is clearly inadequately represented as his being interested in the efficient discharge of his office both for its own sake and for thesake of frustrating the tyrant, since he hoped to achieve the latter goal by an intrinsic concern with his office. It seems clear that higher-order desires are involved; the minister wants, for its own sake, to discharge his office efficiently, and he wants to want this because he wants, by so wanting, to frustrate the tyrant. Indeed, wanting to do A for the sake of B can plausibly be represented as having two interpretations. The first interpretation is invoked if we say that a man who does A for the sake of B (1) does A because he wants to do A and (2) wants to do A for the sake of B. Here wanting A for the sake of B involves thinking that A will lead to B. But we can conceive of wanting A for the sake of B (analogously with doing A for the sake of B) as something which is accounted for by wanting to want A for the sake of B; if so, we have the second inter-pretation, one which implies not thinking that A will help to realize B, but rather thinking that wanting A will help to realize B.  The impact of this discussion, on the question of the kind of end which happiness should be taken to be, will be that, if happiness is to be regarded as an inclusive end, the components may be not the realizations of certain ends, but rather the desires for those realizations. Wanting A for the sake of happiness should be given the second mode of interpretation specified above, one which involves thinking that wanting A is one of a set of items which collectively exhibit the open feature associated with happiness.  III  My enquiry has, I hope, so far given some grounds for the favourable consideration of three theses:  happiness is an end for the sake of which certain I-desirables are desirable, but is to be regarded as an inclusive rather than a dominant end; for happiness to be a rational inclusive end, the set of its components must exemplify some particular open feature, yet to be determined; and the components of happiness may well be not universals or states of affairs the realization of which is desired for its own sake,but rather the desires for such universals or states of affairs, in which case a desire for happiness will be a higher-order desire, a desire to have, and satisfy, a set of desires which exemplifies the relevant open feature. At this point, we might be faced with a radical assault, which would run as follows. "Your whole line of enquiry consists in assuming that, when some item is desired, or desirable, for the sake of happiness, it is desired, or desirable, as a means to happiness, and in then raising, as the crucial question, what kind of an end happiness is, or what kind of means-end relation is involved. But the initial assumption is a mistake. To say of an item that it is desired for the sake of happiness should not be understood as implying that that item is desired as any kind of a means to anything. It should be understood rather as claiming that the item is desired (for its own sake) in a certain sort of way? 'for the sake of happiness' should be treated as a unitary adverbial, better heard, perhaps, as happiness-wise. To desire something happiness-wise is to take the desire for it seriously in a certain sort of way, in particular to take the desire seriously as a guide for living, to have incorporated it in one's overall plan or system for the conduct of life. If one looks at the matter this way, one can see at once that it is conceivable that these should be I-desirables which are not H-desirables; for the question whether something which is desirable is intrinsically desirable, or whether its desirability derives from the desirability of something else, is plainly a different question from the question whether or not the desire for it is to be taken seriously in the planning and direction of one's life, that is, whether the item is H-desirable. One can, moreover, do justice to two further considerations which you have, so far, been ignoring: first, that what goes to make up happiness is relative to the individual whose happiness it is, a truth which is easily seen when it is recognized that what x desires (or should desire) happiness-wise may be quite different from what y so desires; and, second, that intuition is sympathetic to the admittedly vague idea that the decision that certain items are constitutive of one's happiness is not so much a matter of judgement or belief as a matter of will. One's happiness consists in what one makes it consist in, an idea which will be easily accommodated if "for the sake of happiness' is understood in the way which I propose."There is much in this (spirited yet thoughtful) oration towards which I am sympathetic and which 1 am prepared to regard as important; in particular, the idea of linking H-desirability with desires or concerns which enter into a system for the direction of one's life, and the suggestion that the acceptance of a system of ends as constituting happiness, or one's own happiness, is less a matter of belief or judgement than of will. But, despite these attractive features, and despite its air of simplifying iconoclasm, the position which is propounded can hardly be regarded as tenable. When looked at more closely, it can be seen to be just another form of subjectivism: what are ostensibly beliefs that particular items are conducive to happiness are represented as being in fact psychological states or attitudes, other than beliefs, with regard to these items; and it is vulnerable to variants of stock objections to subjectivist manceuvres. That in common speech and thought we have application for, and so need a philosophical account of, not only the idea of desiring things for the sake of happiness but, also, that of being happy (or well-off), is passed over; and should it turn out that the position under consideration has no account to offer of the latter idea, that would be not only paradoxical but also, quite likely, theoretically disastrous. For it would seem to be the case that the construction or adoption of a system of ends for the direction of life is something which can be done well or badly, or better or less well; that being so, there will be a demand for the specification of the criteria governing this area of evaluation; and it will be difficult to avoid the idea that the conditions characteristic of a good system of ends will be determined by the fact that the adoption of a system conforming to those conditions will lead, or is likely to lead, or other things being equal will lead, to the realization of happiness; to something. that is, which the approach under consideration might well not be able to accommodate.  So it begins to look as if we may be back where we were before the start of this latest discussion. But perhaps not quite; for, per-haps, something can be done with the notion of a set or system of ends which is suitable for the direction of life. The leading idea would be of a system which is maximally stable, one whose employment for the direction of life would be maximally conduciveto its continued employment for that purpose, which would be maximally self-perpetuating. To put the matter another way, a system of ends would be stable to the extent to which, though not constitutionally immune from modification, it could accommodate changes of circumstances or vicissitudes which would impose modification upon other less stable systems. We might need to supplement the idea of stability by the idea of flexibility; a system will be flexible in so far as, should modifications be demanded, they are achievable by easy adjustment and evolution; flounder-ings, crises, and revolutions will be excluded or at a minimum.  A succession of systems of ends within a person's consciousness could then be regarded as stages in the development of a single life-scheme, rather than as the replacement of one life-scheme by another. We might find it desirable also to incorporate into the working-out of these ideas a distinction, already foreshadowed, between happiness-in-general and happiness-for-an-individual.  We might hope that it would be possible to present happiness-in-general as a system of possible ends which would be specified in highly general terms (since the specification must be arrived at in abstraction from the idiosyncrasies of particular persons and their circumstances), a system which would be determined either by its stability relative to stock vicissitudes in the human condi-tion, or (as I suspect) in some other way; and we might further hope that happiness for an individual might lie in the posses-sion, and operation for the guidance of life, of a system of ends which (a) would be a specific and personalized derivative, determined by that individual's character, abilities, and situations in the world, of the system constitutive of happiness in general; and  (b) the adoption of which would be stable for that individual in his circumstances.  The idea that happiness might be fully, or at least partially, characterized in something like this kind of way wouid receive some support if we could show reason to suppose that features which could plausibly be regarded, or which indeed actually have been regarded, as characteristic of happiness, or at least of a satisfactory system for the guidance of life, are also features which are conducive to stability. I shall list some features for which, in this regard, the prospects seem good.  Feasibility. An adopted system of ends should be workable; the more it should turn out that actions and performances dictated by the system cannot be successfully undertaken, the stronger are the grounds for modification of the system. A particular case of the operation of this feature lies in the demand that an agent should be equipped, by nature or by training, with the competencies needed for the effective prosecution of his system of ends. Autonomy. This feature is closely related to the preceding one. The less reliant one's system of ends is on aids the availability of which is not within one's control, particularly if it is within the control of others, the less dependent the system is on what Aristotle called "ektos choregia", the more stable, or the more securely stable, it will in general be. Unless one has firm guaran-tees, it is better not to have to rely on the availability of elaborate machinery or government grants. Compatibility of component ends. Initially, one might suppose that there are grounds for the modification of a system of ends in so far as the fulfilment of certain ends in the system thwarts the fulfilment of certain others. But I think we have to recognize that, characteristically, an end is such as to be realizable in varying degrees, and that it would be unrealistic to demand a system in which the realization of one end was never diminished by the realization of others. What we in fact may reasonably look for is a harmony of ends; the possibility, that is, with respect to competing ends, of finding an acceptable balance in the degrees of realization to be expected for each end. How such balances are to be determined is a large and difficult question, but their unavailability would prompt modification of the system. This feature looks like an analogue of consistency, which is commonly favoured as a feature of non-practical systems, though perhaps more by some people than by others, like Wittgenstein and Norman O. Brown. Comprehensiveness. (An analogue for completeness.) A system is comprehensive to the extent to which it yields decisions with respect to particular practical questions; the more undecidabilit-ies, the less the comprehensiveness. To be more accurate, the comprehensiveness of a system varies directly with its capacity to yield answers to those practical questions which should be decided in the light of general principles. In ordinary circumstances it would, for example, be inappropriate to try to invoke one's life-schemeto decide whether one should have beef or lamb for dinner tonight. Deficiency in comprehensiveness seems to legitimize modification.  Supportiveness of component ends. A system's stability will be increased if the pursuit of some ends enhances the pursuit of others. Such enhancement may arise in more than one way; for example, a man's dedication to mathematical studies might yield increased skill as a chess-player; or his devotion to his wife might inspire him to heightened endeavour in his business of selling encyclopaedias. Simplicity. A system's effectiveness as a guide to living will depend, in part, on how easy it is to determine its deliverances on particular questions. Ifit yields answers on practical questions, but these answers are difficult to discern, the system will be at a disadvantage when compared with another, whose greater simplicity makes its deliverances more accessible. Agreeableness. One form of agreeableness will, unless coun-teracted, automatically attach to the attainment of an object of desire, such attainment being routinely a source of satisfaction. The generation of satisfaction will, then, not provide an independent ground for preferring one system of ends to another. But other modes of agrecableness, such as being a source of delight, which are not routinely associated with the fulfilment of desire, could dis criminate independently of other features relevant to such pref-erences, between one system and another. A system the operation of which is specially agreeable would be stable not only vis-d-vis rival systems, but also against the weakening effect of incontinence: a disturbing influence is more surely met by a principle in consort with a supporting attraction than by the principle alone. However promising the signs may so far have seemed to be, I very much doubt whether the proposed characterization of happiness can be more than a partial characterization. Eirst, there seem to be features which intuition would require that an optimal system of ends should exemplify, but which cannot be represented as promotive of stability. Many people would hold that, other things being equal, a person's system of ends should be such as to involve maximal development of his natural talents; and many would hold that, where this is possible, a system should provide scope for outstanding or distinctive personal achievement. If these views arecorrect, it seems difficult to furnish for them a justifying connection with the ideas of stability and flexibility, Second, the features associated with stability seem to be, even in combination, insufficiently selective. All the listed features, except the last, seem to be systemic in character; and difficulties seem to arise with respect to them which are reminiscent of a stock objection to a familiar form of the Coherence Theory of Truth. Proponents of the idea that membership of a coherent and comprehensive system of propositions is necessary and sufficient for being true are met with the reply that a plurality of such systems, each inconsistent with the others, is conceivable, and that, to eliminate from candidacy for truth all but one member of such a plurality, it will be necessary to appeal to an extra-systematic condition, such as incorrig-ibility or certification by observation. In somewhat similar style, we can point to systems of ends which, so far as one can tell, might be undifferentiated with respect to stability and the features associated therewith, including agreeableness, yet which intuitively would be by no means equally approvable for the guidance of liv-ing; for example, such systems as might be espoused by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentleman.  To resolve such difficulties, an extra-systematic condition seems to be required, one which will differentiate ends or systems of ends in respect of value. Here I would seek to explore a road not entirely different from that taken by Aristotle. I would like to consider the possibility that the idea of happiness-in-general might be determined by reference to the essential characteristics of a human being (rational animal); the ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abund-ance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.?  P The original lecture version of this chapter concluded with this sentence:  "But I have now almost exactly reached the beginning of the paper which, till recently, you thought I was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of ethical principles. It is a pity that I have used up my time."]H. P. Grice The topic which Grice choses is one which eminently deserves a thorough, systematic, and fully theoretical treatment.    Such an approach would involve, Grice suspects, a careful analysis of the often subtly different kinds of state which may be denoted by the word "want,”together with a comprehensive examination of the role which different sorts of “wanting” play in the psychological equipment of rational, and non-rational, creatures.   While Grice hopes to touch on matters of this sort, Grice does not feel himself to be quite in a position to attempt an analysis of this kind, which would in any case be a very lengthy undertaking.     So, to give direction to Grice’s discussion, and to keep it within tolerable limits, Grice shall relate it to some questions arising out of Aristotle's handling of this topic in the Nicomachean Ethics.    Such a procedure on Grice’s part may have the additional advantage of emphasizing the idea, in which Grice believes, that the proper habitat for such great works of the past as the Nicomachean Ethics is not the museums but the marketplaces of philosophy.  Grice’s initial Aristotelian question concerns two conditions which Aristotle supposes to have to be satisfied by whatever is to be recognized as being the good for man.     At the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes that there is general agreement that the good for man is to be identified with eudaemonia — which may, or may not, be well rendered as 'happiness' — and that this in turn is to be identified with living well and with doing well.    But Aristotle remarks that there is large-scale disagreement with respect to any further and more informative specification of “eudaemonia.”    Aristotle seeks to confirm the identification of the good for man with “eudaemonia” by specifying two features,     maximal finality, or unqualified finality, and     self-sufficiency,     which, supposedly, both are required of anything which is to qualify as the good for man, and are *also* satisfied by “eudaemonia.”    Maximal finality' is defined as follows:     Now, we call that which is *in itself* worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things which are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable *in itself* and never for the sake of something else."     “Eudaemonia” seems, intuitively, to satisfy this condition.    Such things as honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue — the most popular candidates for identification with the good for man and with “eudaemonia” —  are chosen indeed for themselves — they would be worthy of choice even if nothing resulted from them.    But such things are also chosen for the sake of “eudaemonia,” since    "we judge that by means of them we shall be _happy_.”    “Eudaemonia,” however, is never chosen for the sake of anything other than itself.    After some preliminaries, the relevant sense of "self-sufficiency" is defined thus:   "The self-sufficient we now define as that which, when isolated, makes life desirable and lacking in nothing."     “Eudaemonia,” again, appears to satisfy this condition too.    And Aristotle adds the possibly important comment that “eudaemonia” is thought to be "the most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others".     This remark might be taken to suggest that, in Aristotle's view, it is not merely true that the possession of “eudaemonia” cannot be improved upon by the addition of any other good, but it is true because “eudaemonia” is a special kind of good, one which it would be inappropriate to rank alongside other goods.    This passage in Nicomachean Ethics raises in Grice’s mind several queries:    It is, Grice suspects, normally assumed by commentators that Aristotle thinks of “eudaemonia” as being the only item which satisfies the condition of maximal finality.     This uniqueness claim is not, however, explicitly made in the passage —nor, so far as Grice can recollect, elsewhere — nor is it clear to Grice that, if it were made, it would be correct.     Might it not be that, for example,     lazing in the sun     is desired, and     is desirable, for its own sake,     and yet     is not something which is also desirable for the sake of something else,     not even for the sake of “eudaemonia”?    If it should turn out that there is a distinction, within the class of     things desirable for their own sake     (1-desirables),     between those which are also     desirable for the sake of “eudaemonia”    eudaemonia-desirable    and those which are not,     the further question arises whether there is any common feature which distinguishes items which are (directly)     “eudaemonia”-desirable    and, if so, what it is.     This question will reappear later.    Aristotle claims that     honour  reason  pleasure  virtue     are all both I-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable.    But, at this stage in the Nicomachean Ethics, these four things are uneliminated candidates for *identification.* with “eudaemonia.”    And, indeed, Aristotle himself later does *identify*, at least in a sort of way, a special version of one of them - metaphysical contemplation — with “eudaemonia.”    Suppose that it were to be established that one of these candidates (say, honour) is successful.     Would not Aristotle then be committed to holding that honour is both desirable for its own sake, and also desirable for the sake of something other than honour, namely, “eudaemonia,” viz. honour?     It is not clear, moreover, that this prima-facie *inconsistency* can be eliminated by an appeal to the non-extensionality (opaqueness) of the context of the psychological verb, passive voice, modal      "is desirable".     For while the argument-pattern    o is desirable for the sake of B.     B is identical with y;     ——-    Therefore, or is desirable for the sake of y    may be invalid, it is by no means clear that the argument-pattern     o is desirable for the sake of B    necessarily, B is identical with Y    ——-    Therefore, a is desirable for the sake of y    is invalid.    And, if it were true that “eudaemonia” *is* to be *identified* with “metaphysical contemplation”, this would presumably be a non-contingent truth.    Suppose the following:     playing golf and playing tennis are each I-desirable    each is conducive to physical fitness, which is itself I-desirable    a daily round of golf and a daily couple of hours of tennis are each sufficient for peak physical fitness,     and (if you like, for simplicity),      there is no third route to physical fitness.     Now, Nowell and Smith accept all these suppositions;     Nowell plays golf daily, and     Smith plays *both* golf _and_ tennis daily.     It seems difficult to deny,     first, that     it is quite conceivable that all of the sporting activities of these gentlemen are undertaken both for their own sake and also for the sake of physical fitness, and,     second, that     (pro tanto)     the life of Smith     is more desirable than     the life of Nowell,    since Smith has the value of     *playing tennis*    while Nowell does not.     The fact that in Smith’s life physical fitness is _overdetermined_ does not seem to be a ground for denying that     Smith pursues both golf *and* tennis for the sake of physical fitness;     if we wished to deny this, it looks as if we could, in certain circumstances, be faced with the unanswerable question:    "If it is not the case that Smith pursues both golf and tennis for the sake of physical fitness, which one does he pursue for physical fitness?"    Let us now consider how close an analogy to this example we can construct if we search for one which replaces references to physical fitness by references to “eudaemonia.”    We might suppose that Nowell and Smith have it in common that they have distinguished academic lives, satisfying family situations, and are healthy and prosperous;     that they value, and rightly value, these aspects of their existences for their own sakes and     — also — regard them as contributing to their “eudaemonia.”    Each regards himself as a thoroughly happy man.     But Smith, unlike Nowell, also composes poetry, an activity which he cares about and which he also thinks of as something which contributes to his “eudaemonia.”     the time which Smith devotes to poetic endeavour is spent by Nowell pottering about the house doing nothing in particular.     We now raise the question whether or not Smith’s life is more desirable than Nowell’s, on the grounds that it contains an I-desirable element, poetic composition, which Nowell’s life does not contain, and that there is no counterbalancing element present in Nowell’s life but absent in Smith’s.    One conceivable answer would be that Smith’s life *is* indeed more desirable than Nowell’s — since it contains an additional value,     But that this fact is consistent with their being equal in respect of “eudaemonia,” in line with the supposition that each regards himself as a thoroughly happy man.    If we give this answer we, in effect, reject the Aristotelian idea that “eudaemonia” is, in the appropriate sense, self-sufficient.     There seems to Gricd, however, to be good reason *not* to give this answer.     Commentators have disagreed about the precise interpretation of the word "eudaemonia", but none, so far as Grice knows, has suggested what Gricd thinks of as much the most plausible conjecture;     namely, that     "eudaemonia" is to be understood as     the name for that state or condition which one's good daemon would, if he could, ensure for one.    And Grice’s good daemon is a being motivated, with respect to Grice, solely by concern for Grice’s well-being or “eudaemonia.”    To change the idiom,     "eudaemonia"     is the general characterization of what a full-time and unhampered fairy godmother would secure for you.     The identifications regarded by Aristotle as unexcitingly correct, of “eudaemonia” with doing well and with living well, now begin to look like necessary truths.     If this interpretation of  "eudaemonia" is correct (as Grice shall brazenly assume)     it would be quite impossible for Smith’s life to be more desirable than Nowell’s, though Nowell and Smith are *equal* in respect of “eudaemonia;”    for this would amount to Smith’s being better off than Nowell, though both are equally well-off!    Various other possible answers remain.     It might be held that not only is Smith’s life more desirable than Nowell’s, but Smith is *more* “eudaemon”, better off, than Smith.    HAPP-IER     This idea preserves the proposed conceptual connection between “eudaemonia” and being well-off, and relies on the not wholly implausible principle that the addition of a value to a life enhances the value of that life — whatever, perhaps, the liver may think.    One might think of such a principle, when more fully stated, as laying down, or implying, that any increase in the combined value of the eudaemonia-desirable elements realized in a particular life is reflected, in a constant proportion, in an increase in the degree of “eudaemonia” or well-being exemplified by that life;     or, more cautiously,     that     the increase in “eudaemonia” is *not* determined by a constant proportion, but rather in some manner analogous to the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility.     Grice is inclined to see the argument of this chapter as leading towards a discreet erosion of the idea that the degree of a particular person's “eudaemonia” is the value of a function the arguments of which are measures of the particular “eudaemonia”-desirables realized in that person's life, no matter what function is suggested;     but at the present moment it will be sufficient to cast doubt on the acceptability of any of the crudest versions of this idea.     To revert to the case of Nowell and Smith.    it seems to Grice that when we speak of the desirability of Nowell’s life or of Smith’s life, the desirability of which we are speaking is the desirability of that life from the point of view of the person whose life it is;     and that it is therefore counterintuitive to suppose that, for example, Nowell, who thinks of himself as "perfectly eudaemon" and so not to be made either better off or more “eudaemon” — though perhaps more accomplished — by an injection of poetry composition, should be making a misassessment of what his state of well-being would be if the composition of poetry were added to his occupation.     Furthermore, if the pursuit of “eudaemonia” is to be the proper end, or even a proper end, of living, to suppose that the added realization of a further “eudaemonia”-desirable to a life automatically increases the “eudaemonia” or wellbeing of the possessor of that life will involve a commitment to an ethical position which Grice, for one, find somewhat unattractive:     One would be committed to advocating too unbridled an “eudaemonic” expansionism.    A more attractive position would be to suppose that we should invoke, with respect to the example under consideration, an analogue, not of diminishing marginal utility, but of what might be called VANISHING marginal utility;     to suppose, that is, that Nowell and Smith are, or at least may be, equally well-off and equally eudaemon even though Smith’s life contains an “eudaemonia”-desirable element which is lacking in Nowell’s life;     that at a certain point, so to speak, the bucket of “eudaemonia” is filled, and no further inpouring of realized “eudaemonia”-desirables has any effect on its contents.     This position would be analogous to the view Grice adopted earlier with respect to the possible *over-*determination of physical fitness.     Even should this position be correct, it must be recognized that the really interesting work still remains to be done;     that would consist in the characterization of the conditions which determine whether the realization of a particular set of “eudaemonia”-desirables *is* sufficient to fill the bucket.    The main result, then, of the discussion has been to raise two matters for exploration;     first,     the possibility of a distinction between items which are merely I-desirable and items which are not only I-desirable but also “eudaemoni”-desirable;     and, second,     the possibility that the degree of “eudaemonia” exemplified by a life may be *overdetermined* by the set of “eudaemonia”adesirables realized in that life, together with the need to characterize the conditions which govern such overdetermination.    Let us move in a different direction.     Grice has already remarked that, with respect to the desirability-status of “eudaemonia” and of the means thereto, Aristotle subscribes to two theses, with which Grice has no quarrel (or, at least, shall voice no quarrel).    That     some things are both 1-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable     are both ends in themselves and also means to “eudaemonia.”    That “eudaemonia,” while desirable in itself, is not desirable for the sake of any further end.    Grice has suggested the possibility that a further thesis might be true (though Grice has not claimed that it is true), namely:    That     some things are I-desirable without being “eudaemonia”-desirable -and, one might add, perhaps without being desirable for the sake of any further end, in which case “eudaemonia” will not be the only item which is not desirable for the sake of any further end.    But there are two further as yet unmentioned theses which Grice is inclined to regard as being not only true, but also important:     first,    Any item which is directly “eudaemonia”-desirable must be I-desirable.    And second,    “Eudaemonia” is attainable only via the realization of items which are 1-desirable — and also of course “eudaemonia”-desirable      This Thesis would allow that an item could be indirectly “eudaemonia”-desirable without being I-desirable;     engaging in morning press-ups could be such an item,     but only if it were desirable for the sake of (let us say) playing cricket *well*, which would plainly be itself an item which was both 1-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable.     A thesis related to this, namely,     An item can be directly conducive to the “eudaemonia” of an individual x only if it is regarded by x as being I-desirable) seems to me very likely to be true;     the question whether not only the latter but the former are true would depend on whether a man who *misconceives*, if that be possible, an item as being I-desirable could properly be said to achieve “eudaemonia” through the realization of that  item.    To take an extreme case,     could a wicked man who pervertedly regards cheating his co-conversationalist in an ingenious way — flouting conversationalists’s common end — as being I-desirable, and who delights in so doing, properly be said to be, *pro tanto*, achieving “eudaemonia”?     Grice thinks Aristotle would answer negatively, and Grice is rather inclined to side with him;     But Grice recognizes that there is much to debate.     A consequence of thesis, if true, would be that there cannot be an “eudaemonia”-pill — a pill the taking of which leads directly to “eudaemonia”     there could be, and maybe there is, a pill which leads directly to "feeling good" or to euphoria;     but these states would have to be distinguishable from “eudaemonia.”    The Thesis would imply that “eudaemonia” is essentially a dependent state;   “Eudaemonia” cannot just happen;     its realization is conditional upon the realization of one or more items which give rise to it.    “Eudaemonia” should be thought of *adverbially*;     to be “eudaemon” is, for some x, to x “eudaemoniacly” or “with “eudaemonia.”    And reflection on the interchangeability or near-interchangeability of the ideas of “eudaemonia” and of well-being would suggest that the adverbial in question is an evaluation or validation adverbial.    The importance, for present purposes, of the two latest theses is to Grice’s mind that questions are now engendered about the idea that the item which is chosen (or desirable) for the sake of “eudaemonia” can be thought of as an item which is chosen (or desirable) as means to “eudaemonia”, at least if the means-end relation is conceived as it seems very frequently to be conceived in philosophy;     if, that is, x is a means to end y just in case the doing or producing of x designedly causes (generates, has as an effect) the occurrence of end y.     For, if an item the realization of which give rise to “eudaemonia” were an item which could be, in the above sense, means to the END of “eudaemonia”, (a)     it should be conceptually possible for “eudaemonia” to arise otherwise than as a consequence of the occurrence of any such an item, and (b)     it seems too difficult to suppose that so non-scientific a condition as the possession of intrinsic desirability should be a necessary condition of an item's giving rise to “eudaemonia.”    In other words, these theses seem to preclude the idea that what directly gives rise to “eudaemonia” can be, in the currently favoured sense, a means to the END of “eudaemonia.”    The issue which Grice has just raised is closely related to a scholarly issue which has recently divided Aristotelian commentators;     battles have raged over the question whether Aristotle conceives of “eudaemonia” as a 'dominant  end or as an 'inclusive' end.     The terminology derives, Grice believes, from Hardie.    but Grice cites a definition of the question which is given by Ackrill — Aristotle on aeudaemonia, The Hicks lecture, Oxford.    By 'an inclusive end' might be meant     any end that combines or includes at least *two* values or activities or goods.    By 'a dominant end' might be meant     a monolithic end, an end consisting of just *one* valued activity or good."    One's initial reaction to this formulation may fall short of overwhelming enlightenment, among other things, perhaps, because the verb 'includes’ appears within the characterization of an inclusive end.    Grice suspect, however, that this deficiency could be properly remedied only by a logico-metaphysical enquiry into the nature of the 'inclusion relation' —or, rather, the family of inclusion relations — which would go far beyond the limits of Grice’s present undertaking.     But, to be less ambitious, let us, initially and provisionally, think of an inclusive end as being a set of this or that end.    If “eudaemonia” is in this sense an inclusive end, we can account for some of the features displayed in the previous section.     “Eudaemonia” will be dependent on the realization of subordinate ends, provided that the set of ends constituting “eudaemonia” may not be the empty set — a reasonable, if optimistic, assumption.    Since the "eudaemonia” “set" has as its elements I-desirables, what is desirable directly for the sake of “eudaemonia” must be I-desirable.     And if it should turn out to be the case, contrary perhaps to the direction of Grice’s argument in the last section, that the “eudaemonia” set includes all I-desirables, we should have difficulty in finding any end for the sake of which “eudaemonia” would be desirable.    So far so good, perhaps.    But so far may not really be very far at all.     Some reservation about the treatment of “eudaemonia” as an inclusive end is hinted at by Ackrill:    It is not necessary to claim that Aristotle has made quite clear how there may be 'components' in the best life or how they may be interrelated     The very idea of constructing a compound end out of two or more independent ends may arouse suspicion.     Is the compound to be thought of as a mere aggregate or as an organized system?     If the former, the move to “eudaemonia” seems trivial.    Nor is it obvious that goods can be just added together.     If the latter, if there is supposed to be a unifying plan.     What  is it?    From these very pertinent questions, Ackrill detaches himself, on the grounds that his primary concern is with the exposition and not with the justification of Aristotle's thought.     But we cannot avail ourselves of this rain check, and so the difficulties which Ackrill touches on must receive further exposure.    Let us suppose a next-to-impossible world W, in which there are just three I-desirables, which are also “eudaemonia”-desirables, E1 and E2.    If you like, you may think of these as being identical, respectively, with “rationality” and “pleasure.”    If, in general, “eudaemonia” is to be an inclusive end,     “Eudaemonia”-in-W will have as its components E1 and E2 and no others.     Now one might be tempted to suppose that, since it is difficult or impossible to deny that to achieve “eudaemonia”-in-W it is necessary and also sufficient to realize E1 and E2, anyone who wanted to realize E1 wanted to realize E2 and would *ipso facto* be someone who wanted to achieve the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W.     But there seems to me to be a good case for regarding such an inference as invalid.     To want to achieve the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W might be equivalent to wanting to realize E1 and E2 or indeed to wanting E1 and E2    but there are relatively familiar reasons for allowing that, with respect to a considerable range of psychological verbs (represented by v), one cannot derive from a statement of the form    'x y's (that) A and x y's (that) B'     a statement of the form 'x y's (that) A and B.     Think cream and peaches.    For instance, it seems to Gricd a plausible thesis that there are circumstances in which we should want to say of someone that     he believed that p     and that     he believed that q,     without being willing to allow that     he believed that p and that q.     The most obvious cases for the application of the distinction would perhaps be cases in which     p and q     are inconsistent;     We can perhaps imagine someone of whom we should wish to say that     he believed that he was a grotesquely incompetent creature,     and that     he also believed that he was a world-beater,     without wishing to say of him that     he believed that he was both grotesquely incompetent and a world-beater.   Inconsistent beliefs are not, or are not necessarily, beliefs in inconsistencies.   Whatever reasons there may be for allowing that a man may     believe that p and beheve that q    without believing that     p and q     would, Grice suspects, be mirrored in reasons for allowing that     a man may want A and want B     without wanting both A and B;    Think peaches and cream     if     I want a holiday in Rome,     and also want some headache pills,     it does not seem to Grice that, ipso facto,     I want a holiday in Rome and some headache pills.    Implicature?     Moreover, even if we *were* to sanction the disputed inference, it would not, Grice thinks, be correct to make the further supposition that     a man who wants A and B     simply as a consequence of wanting A and wanting B    would, or even could, want A (or want B) for the sake of or with a view to, realizing A and B.     So even if, in world W, a man could be said     to want E1 and E2    on the strength of wanting each one of them,     some further condition would have to be fulfilled     before we could say of him that he wanted each of them for the sake of realizing E1 and E2, that is,     for the sake of achieving  the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W.    In an attempt to do justice to the idea that “eudaemonia” should be treated as being an 'inclusive end, Grice puts forward a modest proposal;     not, perhaps, the only possible proposal, but one which may seem reasonably intuitive.     Let us categorize, for present purposes, the l-desirables in world W as 'universals.     Grice proposes that to want, severally, each of these I-desirables should be regarded as equivalent to wanting the set whose members are just those I-desirables, with the understanding that a set of universals is not itself a universal.     So to want e1 and e2 is equivalent to wanting the set whose members are e1 and e2 — the “eudaemonia”-in-W set.    To want “eudaemonia”-in-W requires satisfaction of the stronger condition of wanting e1 and e2 which in turn is equivalent to wanting something which is a universal, namely, a compound universal in which are included just those universals which are elements of the “eudaemonia”-in-W set.     Grice shall not attempt to present a necessary and sufficient condition for the fulfilment of the stronger rather than merely of the weaker condition;     but Grice shall suggest an important sufficient condition for this state of affairs.   The condition is the following:     for x to want the conjunction of the members of a set, rather than merely for him to want, severally, each member of the set, it is sufficient that his wanting. severally, each member of the set should be explained by (have as one of its explanations) the fact that there is an 'open' feature F which is believed by x to be exemplified by the set, and the realization of which is desired by x.     By an open feature Grice means a feature the specification of which does not require the complete enumeration of the items which exemplify it.     To illustrate,     a certain Oxford don at one time desired to secure for himself the teaching, in his subject, at the colleges of     Somerville,     St Hugh's,     St Hilda's,     Lady Margaret Hall, and     St Anne's.     He fails, by two colleges.    This compound desire was based on the fact that the named colleges constituted the totality of women's colleges in Oxford, and he desired the realization of the open feature consisting in his teaching, in his subject, at every women's college at Oxford.     This sufficient condition is important in that it is, Grice thinks, fulfilled with respect to all compound desires which are rational, as distinct from arbitrary or crazy.     There can be, of course, genuinely compound desires which are non-rational, and  Grice shall not attempt to specify the condition which distinguishes them;   but perhaps Grice does not need to, since Grice thinks we may take it as a postulate that,     if a desire for “eudaemonia” is a compound desire for the realisation of at least end e1 and end e2, it is a rational compound desire.      The proposal which Grice has made does, Grice thinks, conform to acceptable general principles for metaphysical construction.     For it provides for the addition to an initially given category of items (universals') of a special sub-category (compound universals") which are counterparts of certain items which are not universals but rather sets of universals.     It involves, so to speak, the conversion of certain non-universals into 'new' universals, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the purpose of this conversion is to bring these non-universals, in a simple and relatively elegant way, within the scope of laws which apply to universals.     It must be understood that by 'laws' Grice is referring to theoretical generalities which belong to any of a variety of kinds of theory, including psychological, practical, and moral theories;     so among such laws will be laws of various kinds relating to a desire for an end and for a means to an end.    If “eudaemonia” is an inclusive end, and it, for it to be an inclusive end the desire for which is rational, there must be an open feature which is exemplified by the set of components of “eudaemonia”, our next task is plainly to attempt to identify this feature.     To further this venture Grice shall now examine, within the varieties of means-end relation, what is to Grice’s mind a particularly suggestive kind of case.    At the start of this section Grice offers a brief sketch of the varieties, or of some of the varieties, of     means-end     relation;     this is a matter which is interesting in itself, which is largely neglected in philosophy, except MACHIAVELLI, and which Gricd is inclined to regard as an important bit of background in the present enquiry.     Grice shall then consider a particular class of cases in our ordinary thinking about     means and ends,     which might be called cases of'end-fixing, and which might provide an important modification to our consideration of the idea that “eudaemonia” is an inclusive end.    Grice introduces the term 'is contributive to' as a general expression for what I have been calling     ‘means-end'     relation, and Grice shall use the phrase     “is contributive in way w to'     to refer, in a general way, to this or that particular specific form of the contributiveness relation.     Grice shall, for convenience, assume that anyone who thinks of some state of affairs or action as being contributive to the realization of a certain universal would have in mind that specific form of contributiveness which would be appropriate to the particular case.     We may now say, quite unstartlingly, that     x wants to do m as a means or for the sake of the realisation of end e      just in case     x wants to do means m     because     x regards his doing means m as something which would be contributive in way w to the realization of end e and     x wants end e.    That leaves us the only interesting task, namely, that of giving the range of specific relations one element in which will be picked out by the phrase contributive in way w, once an end e and its means m are specified.    The most obvious mode of contributiveness, indeed one which has too often been attended to to the exclusion of all others, is that of causal antecedence;   A means m’scontributing to an end e here consists in the means m’sbeing the (or a) causal origin of the end e.    But even within this mode there may be more complexity than meets the eye.   The causal origin may be an initiating cause, which triggers the effect — the end e — in the way in which flipping a switch sets off illumination in a light bulb;   or it may be a sustaining cause, the continuation of which is required in order to maintain the effect in being.     In either case, the effect — the end e — may be either positive or negative;     I may *initiate* a period of non-talking in Smith     by     knocking him cold,     or     *sustain* one by keeping Grice’s hand over his mouth.     A further dimension, in respect of which examples of each variety of causal contributiveness may vary, is that of conditionality.     Doing means m may be desired as something which will, given the circumstances which obtain, unconditionally originate the realization of end e, or as something which will do so provided that a certain possibility is fulfilled.    A specially important subclass of cases of conditional causal contributiveness is the class of cases in which the relevant possibility consists in the desire or will of some agent, either the means-taker or someone else, that the end e should be realized;     these are cases in which x wants to do means m in order to enable, or to make it possible for, himself (or someone else) to achieve the realization of end e    as when, for example, x puts a corkscrew in his pocket to enable him later, should be wish to do so, to open a bottle of wine.    But, for present purposes, the more interesting modes of contributiveness may well be those *other than* that of causal contributiveness.     These include the following types.    Specificatory contributiveness.     To do means m would, in the prevailing circumstances, be a specification of, or a way of, realizing end e.    it being understood that, for this mode of contributiveness, the end e is not to be a causal property, a property consisting in being such as to cause the realization of C, where C is some further property.    A host's     seating someone at his right-hand side     at dinner may be a specification of     treating him with respect;     waving a Union Jack     might be a way of     showing loyalty to the Crown.     In these cases, the particular action which exemplifies the means is *the same* as the item which exemplifies the realisation of the end.    Two further modes involve relations of inclusion, of one or another of the types to which such relations may belong.    To do means m may contribute to the realization of end e by including an item which realizes end e.    I may want to take a certain advertised cruise because it *includes*, contains, consists, is composed of, a visit to Naples.    To do means m may contribute to the realization of end e by being included in an item which realizes end e.    Here we may distinguish more than one kind of case.     The end and the means may be identical;     Grice may, for example,     be hospitable to someone today     because     Grice wants to be hospitable to him throughout his visit to Grice’s town.     In such a case the exemplification of the end, hospitality, by the whole, my behaviour to him during the week, will depend on a certain distribution of exemplifications of the realisation of the end among the parts, such as my behaviour on particular days.     We might call this kind of dependence "component-dependence".     In other cases the end and the means are distinct, and in some of these (perhaps all) it is not the case that the end can, if it is exemplified by the whole, also be exemplified by any part.     These further cases subdivide in ways which are interesting but not germane to the present enquiry.    We are now in a position to handle, not quite as Aristotle does, a 'paradox' or philosophisma about “eudaemonia” raised by Aristotle, which involves Solon's dictum     “Call no man happy till he is dead.”    Grice gives a simplified, but Grice hopes not distorted, version of the 'paradoxical' line of argument.     If we start by suggesting that “eudaemonia” is the end for man, we shall have to modify this suggestion, replacing "eudaemonia" by "eudaemonia in a complete life".     Aristotle himself applies the qualification "in a complete life" not to “eudaemonia”, but to what he gives as constituted of “eudaemonia,” namely, activity of soul in accordance with excellence.    For, plainly, a life which as a whole exemplifies “eudaemonia” is preferable to one which does not.    But since life-long “eudaemonia” can only be exemplified by a whole life, non-predictive knowledge that the end for man is realized with respect to a particular person is attainable only at the end of the person's life, and so not, except possibly at the time of his dying gasp, by the person himself.     But this is paradoxical, since the end for man should be such that non-predictive knowledge of its realization is available to those who achieve its realization.    Grice suggests that we need to distinguish a non-propositional, attributive end, such as “eudaemoni”, and a propositional end or objective, such as that my life, as a whole, should be “eudaemon.”    Now it is not in fact clear that people do, or even should, desire life-long “eudaemonia”;     it may be quite in order not to think about this as an objective.    And, even if one should desire life-long “eudaemonia,” it is not clear that one should aim at it, that one should desire, and do, things for the sake of it.     But let us waive these objections.    The attainment of life-long “eudaemonia,” an objective, consists in the realization, in a whole life, of the attributive end of “eudaemonia.”    This realization is component-dependent;     it depends on a certain distribution of realizations of that same end in episodes or phases of that life.    But these realizations are certainly non-predictively knowable by the person whose life it is.     So, if we insist that to specify the end for man is to specify an attributive end and not an objective, then the "paradox' disappears.    The special class of cases to which one might be tempted to apply the term 'end-fixing' may be approached in the following way.     For any given mode of contributiveness, say causal contributiveness, the same final position, that x wants (intends, does) A as contributive to the realization of B, may be reached through more than one process of thought.     In line with the canonical Aristotelian model, x may desire to realize B, then enquire what would lead to B, decide that doing A would lead to B, and so come to want, and to do, A.    Alternatively, the possibility of doing A may come to his mind, he then enquires what doing A would lead to, sees that it would lead to B, which he wants, and so he comes to want, and perhaps do, A.    Grice now asks whether there are cases in which the following conditions are met:     doing A is fixed or decided, not merely entertained as a possibility, in advance of the recognition of it as desirable with a view to B, and     that B is selected as an end, or as an end to be pursued on this occasion, at least partly because it is something which doing A will help to realize.    A variety of candidates, not necessarily good ones, come to mind.    A man who is wrecked on a desert island decides to use his stay there to pursue what is a new end for him, namely, the study of the local flora and fauna.     Here doing A (spending time on the island) is fixed but not chosen;     and the specific performances, which some might think were more properly regarded as means to the pursuit of this study, are not fixed in advance of the adoption of the end.     A man wants (without having a reason for so want-ing) to move to a certain town;     he is uncomfortable with irrational desires (or at least with this irrational desire), and so comes to want to make this move because the town has a specially salubrious climate.     Here, it seems, the movement of thought cannot be fully conscious;     we might say that the reason why he wants to move to a specially good climate is that such a desire would justify the desire or intention, which he already has, to move to the town in question; but one would baulk at describing this as being his reason for wanting to move to a good climate.    The example which interests me is the following.     A tyrant has become severely displeased with one of his ministers, and to humiliate him assigns him to the task of organizing the disposal of the palace garbage, making clear that only a high degree of efficiency will save him from a more savage fate. The minister at first strives for efficiency merely in order to escape disaster; but later, seeing that thereby he can preserve his self-respect and frustrate the tyrant's plan to humiliate him, he begins to take pride in the efficient discharge of his duties, and so to be concerned about it for its own sake. Even so, when the tyrant is overthrown and the minister is relieved of his menial duties, he leaves them without regret in spite of having been intrinsically concerned about their discharge.    One might say of the minister that he efficiently discharged his office for its own sake in order to frustrate the tyrant; and this is clearly inadequately represented as his being interested in the efficient discharge of his office both for its own sake and for thesake of frustrating the tyrant, since he hoped to achieve the latter goal by an intrinsic concern with his office.     It seems clear that higher-order desires are involved; the minister wants, for its own sake, to discharge his office efficiently, and he wants to want this because he wants, by so wanting, to frustrate the tyrant. Indeed, wanting to do A for the sake of B can plausibly be represented as having two interpretations.     The first interpretation is invoked if we say that a man who does A for the sake of B (1) does A because he wants to do A and (2) wants to do A for the sake of B. Here wanting A for the sake of B involves thinking that A will lead to B. But we can conceive of wanting A for the sake of B (analogously with doing A for the sake of B) as something which is accounted for by wanting to want A for the sake of B; if so, we have the second inter-pretation, one which implies not thinking that A will help to realize B, but rather thinking that wanting A will help to realize B.    The impact of this discussion, on the question of the kind of end which happiness should be taken to be, will be that, if happiness is to be regarded as an inclusive end, the components may be not the realizations of certain ends, but rather the desires for those realizations.     Wanting A for the sake of happiness should be given the second mode of interpretation specified above, one which involves thinking that wanting A is one of a set of items which collectively exhibit the open feature associated with happiness.    Grice’s enquiry has, Grice hopes, so far given some grounds for the favourable consideration of three theses:    “Eudaemonia” is an end for the sake of which certain I-desirables are desirable, but is to be regarded as an inclusive rather than a dominant end;    for “eudaemonia” to be a rational inclusive end, the set of its components must exemplify some particular open feature, yet to be determined; and    the components of “eudaemonia” may well be not universals or states of affairs the realization of which is desired for its own sake,but rather the desires for such universals or states of affairs, in which case a desire for happiness will be a higher-order desire, a desire to have, and satisfy, a set of desires which exemplifies the relevant open feature.    At this point, we might be faced with a radical assault, which would run as follows.     “Your whole line of enquiry consists in assuming that, when some item is desired, or desirable, for the sake of happiness, it is desired, or desirable, as a means to happiness, and in then raising, as the crucial question, what kind of an end happiness is, or what kind of means-end relation is involved. But the initial assumption is a mistake.     To say of an item that it is desired for the sake of happiness should not be understood as implying that that item is desired as any kind of a means to anything. It should be understood rather as claiming that the item is desired (for its own sake) in a certain sort of way? 'for the sake of happiness' should be treated as a unitary adverbial, better heard, perhaps, as happiness-wise.     To desire something happiness-wise is to take the desire for it seriously in a certain sort of way, in particular to take the desire seriously as a guide for living, to have incorporated it in one's overall plan or system for the conduct of life. If one looks at the matter this way, one can see at once that it is conceivable that these should be I-desirables which are not H-desirables; for the question whether something which is desirable is intrinsically desirable, or whether its desirability derives from the desirability of something else, is plainly a different question from the question whether or not the desire for it is to be taken seriously in the planning and direction of one's life, that is, whether the item is H-desirable.     One can, moreover, do justice to two further considerations which you have, so far, been ignoring: first, that what goes to make up happiness is relative to the individual whose happiness it is, a truth which is easily seen when it is recognized that what x desires (or should desire) happiness-wise may be quite different from what y so desires; and, second, that intuition is sympathetic to the admittedly vague idea that the decision that certain items are constitutive of one's happiness is not so much a matter of judgement or belief as a matter of will.     One's happiness consists in what one makes it consist in, an idea which will be easily accommodated if "for the sake of happiness' is understood in the way which I propose."There is much in this (spirited yet thoughtful) oration towards which I am sympathetic and which 1 am prepared to regard as important; in particular, the idea of linking H-desirability with desires or concerns which enter into a system for the direction of one's life, and the suggestion that the acceptance of a system of ends as constituting happiness, or one's own happiness, is less a matter of belief or judgement than of will.     But, despite these attractive features, and despite its air of simplifying iconoclasm, the position which is propounded can hardly be regarded as tenable. When looked at more closely, it can be seen to be just another form of subjectivism: what are ostensibly beliefs that particular items are conducive to happiness are represented as being in fact psychological states or attitudes, other than beliefs, with regard to these items; and it is vulnerable to variants of stock objections to subjectivist manceuvres.     That in common speech and thought we have application for, and so need a philosophical account of, not only the idea of desiring things for the sake of happiness but, also, that of being happy (or well-off), is passed over; and should it turn out that the position under consideration has no account to offer of the latter idea, that would be not only paradoxical but also, quite likely, theoretically disastrous.     For it would seem to be the case that the construction or adoption of a system of ends for the direction of life is something which can be done well or badly, or better or less well; that being so, there will be a demand for the specification of the criteria governing this area of evaluation; and it will be difficult to avoid the idea that the conditions characteristic of a good system of ends will be determined by the fact that the adoption of a system conforming to those conditions will lead, or is likely to lead, or other things being equal will lead, to the realization of happiness; to something. that is, which the approach under consideration might well not be able to accommodate.    So it begins to look as if we may be back where we were before the start of this latest discussion. But perhaps not quite; for, per-haps, something can be done with the notion of a set or system of ends which is suitable for the direction of life. The leading idea would be of a system which is maximally stable, one whose employment for the direction of life would be maximally conduciveto its continued employment for that purpose, which would be maximally self-perpetuating.     To put the matter another way, a system of ends would be stable to the extent to which, though not constitutionally immune from modification, it could accommodate changes of circumstances or vicissitudes which would impose modification upon other less stable systems. We might need to supplement the idea of stability by the idea of flexibility; a system will be flexible in so far as, should modifications be demanded, they are achievable by easy adjustment and evolution; flounder-ings, crises, and revolutions will be excluded or at a minimum.    A succession of systems of ends within a person's consciousness could then be regarded as stages in the development of a single life-scheme, rather than as the replacement of one life-scheme by another. We might find it desirable also to incorporate into the working-out of these ideas a distinction, already foreshadowed, between happiness-in-general and happiness-for-an-individual.    We might hope that it would be possible to present happiness-in-general as a system of possible ends which would be specified in highly general terms (since the specification must be arrived at in abstraction from the idiosyncrasies of particular persons and their circumstances), a system which would be determined either by its stability relative to stock vicissitudes in the human condi-tion, or (as I suspect) in some other way; and we might further hope that happiness for an individual might lie in the posses-sion, and operation for the guidance of life, of a system of ends which (a) would be a specific and personalized derivative, determined by that individual's character, abilities, and situations in the world, of the system constitutive of happiness in general; and    (b) the adoption of which would be stable for that individual in his circumstances.    The idea that happiness might be fully, or at least partially, characterized in something like this kind of way wouid receive some support if we could show reason to suppose that features which could plausibly be regarded, or which indeed actually have been regarded, as characteristic of happiness, or at least of a satisfactory system for the guidance of life, are also features which are conducive to stability. I shall list some features for which, in this regard, the prospects seem good.    Feasibility. An adopted system of ends should be workable; the more it should turn out that actions and performances dictated by the system cannot be successfully undertaken, the stronger are the grounds for modification of the system. A particular case of the operation of this feature lies in the demand that an agent should be equipped, by nature or by training, with the competencies needed for the effective prosecution of his system of ends.    Autonomy. This feature is closely related to the preceding one. The less reliant one's system of ends is on aids the availability of which is not within one's control, particularly if it is within the control of others, the less dependent the system is on what Aristotle called "ektos choregia", the more stable, or the more securely stable, it will in general be. Unless one has firm guaran-tees, it is better not to have to rely on the availability of elaborate machinery or government grants.    Compatibility of component ends. Initially, one might suppose that there are grounds for the modification of a system of ends in so far as the fulfilment of certain ends in the system thwarts the fulfilment of certain others. But I think we have to recognize that, characteristically, an end is such as to be realizable in varying degrees, and that it would be unrealistic to demand a system in which the realization of one end was never diminished by the realization of others. What we in fact may reasonably look for is a harmony of ends; the possibility, that is, with respect to competing ends, of finding an acceptable balance in the degrees of realization to be expected for each end. How such balances are to be determined is a large and difficult question, but their unavailability would prompt modification of the system. This feature looks like an analogue of consistency, which is commonly favoured as a feature of non-practical systems, though perhaps more by some people than by others, like Wittgenstein and Norman O. Brown.    Comprehensiveness. (An analogue for completeness.) A system is comprehensive to the extent to which it yields decisions with respect to particular practical questions; the more undecidabilit-ies, the less the comprehensiveness. To be more accurate, the comprehensiveness of a system varies directly with its capacity to yield answers to those practical questions which should be decided in the light of general principles. In ordinary circumstances it would, for example, be inappropriate to try to invoke one's life-schemeto decide whether one should have beef or lamb for dinner tonight.    Deficiency in comprehensiveness seems to legitimize modification.    Supportiveness of component ends. A system's stability will be increased if the pursuit of some ends enhances the pursuit of others. Such enhancement may arise in more than one way; for example, a man's dedication to mathematical studies might yield increased skill as a chess-player; or his devotion to his wife might inspire him to heightened endeavour in his business of selling encyclopaedias.    Simplicity. A system's effectiveness as a guide to living will depend, in part, on how easy it is to determine its deliverances on particular questions. Ifit yields answers on practical questions, but these answers are difficult to discern, the system will be at a disadvantage when compared with another, whose greater simplicity makes its deliverances more accessible.    Agreeableness. One form of agreeableness will, unless coun-teracted, automatically attach to the attainment of an object of desire, such attainment being routinely a source of satisfaction. The generation of satisfaction will, then, not provide an independent ground for preferring one system of ends to another. But other modes of agrecableness, such as being a source of delight, which are not routinely associated with the fulfilment of desire, could dis criminate independently of other features relevant to such pref-erences, between one system and another. A system the operation of which is specially agreeable would be stable not only vis-d-vis rival systems, but also against the weakening effect of incontinence: a disturbing influence is more surely met by a principle in consort with a supporting attraction than by the principle alone.    However promising the signs may so far have seemed to be, I very much doubt whether the proposed characterization of happiness can be more than a partial characterization. Eirst, there seem to be features which intuition would require that an optimal system of ends should exemplify, but which cannot be represented as promotive of stability. Many people would hold that, other things being equal, a person's system of ends should be such as to involve maximal development of his natural talents; and many would hold that, where this is possible, a system should provide scope for outstanding or distinctive personal achievement.     If these views arecorrect, it seems difficult to furnish for them a justifying connection with the ideas of stability and flexibility, Second, the features associated with stability seem to be, even in combination, insufficiently selective. All the listed features, except the last, seem to be systemic in character; and difficulties seem to arise with respect to them which are reminiscent of a stock objection to a familiar form of the Coherence Theory of Truth.     Proponents of the idea that membership of a coherent and comprehensive system of propositions is necessary and sufficient for being true are met with the reply that a plurality of such systems, each inconsistent with the others, is conceivable, and that, to eliminate from candidacy for truth all but one member of such a plurality, it will be necessary to appeal to an extra-systematic condition, such as incorrig-ibility or certification by observation.     In somewhat similar style, we can point to systems of ends which, so far as one can tell, might be undifferentiated with respect to stability and the features associated therewith, including agreeableness, yet which intuitively would be by no means equally approvable for the guidance of liv-ing; for example, such systems as might be espoused by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentleman.    To resolve such difficulties, an extra-systematic condition seems to be required, one which will differentiate ends or systems of ends in respect of value.     Here I would seek to explore a road not entirely different from that taken by Aristotle.     Grice would like to consider the possibility that the idea of happiness-in-general might be determined by reference to the essential characteristics of a human being (rational animal); the ends involved in the idea of happiness-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abund-ance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.    But Grice has now almost exactly reached the beginning of the essay which, till recently, you thought Grice was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of this or that ethical principle.    It is a pity that Grice used up his time.     H. P. Grice.. The topic which Grice choses is one which eminently deserves a thorough, systematic, and fully theoretical treatment.    Such an approach would involve, Grice suspects, a careful analysis of the often subtly different kinds of state which may be denoted by the word "want,”together with a comprehensive examination of the role which different sorts of “wanting” play in the psychological equipment of rational, and non-rational, creatures.   While Grice hopes to touch on matters of this sort, Grice does not feel himself to be quite in a position to attempt an analysis of this kind, which would in any case be a very lengthy undertaking.     So, to give direction to Grice’s discussion, and to keep it within tolerable limits, Grice shall relate it to some questions arising out of Aristotle's handling of this topic in the Nicomachean Ethics.    Such a procedure on Grice’s part may have the additional advantage of emphasizing the idea, in which Grice believes, that the proper habitat for such great works of the past as the Nicomachean Ethics is not the museums but the marketplaces of philosophy.  Grice’s initial Aristotelian question concerns two conditions which Aristotle supposes to have to be satisfied by whatever is to be recognized as being the good for man.     At the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes that there is general agreement that the good for man is to be identified with eudaemonia — which may, or may not, be well rendered as 'happiness' — and that this in turn is to be identified with living well and with doing well.    But Aristotle remarks that there is large-scale disagreement with respect to any further and more informative specification of “eudaemonia.”    Aristotle seeks to confirm the identification of the good for man with “eudaemonia” by specifying two features,     maximal finality, or unqualified finality, and     self-sufficiency,     which, supposedly, both are required of anything which is to qualify as the good for man, and are *also* satisfied by “eudaemonia.”    Maximal finality' is defined as follows:     Now, we call that which is *in itself* worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things which are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable *in itself* and never for the sake of something else."     “Eudaemonia” seems, intuitively, to satisfy this condition.    Such things as honour, pleasure, reason, and virtue — the most popular candidates for identification with the good for man and with “eudaemonia” —  are chosen indeed for themselves — they would be worthy of choice even if nothing resulted from them.    But such things are also chosen for the sake of “eudaemonia,” since    "we judge that by means of them we shall be _happy_.”    “Eudaemonia,” however, is never chosen for the sake of anything other than itself.    After some preliminaries, the relevant sense of "self-sufficiency" is defined thus:   "The self-sufficient we now define as that which, when isolated, makes life desirable and lacking in nothing."     “Eudaemonia,” again, appears to satisfy this condition too.    And Aristotle adds the possibly important comment that “eudaemonia” is thought to be "the most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others".     This remark might be taken to suggest that, in Aristotle's view, it is not merely true that the possession of “eudaemonia” cannot be improved upon by the addition of any other good, but it is true because “eudaemonia” is a special kind of good, one which it would be inappropriate to rank alongside other goods.    This passage in Nicomachean Ethics raises in Grice’s mind several queries:    It is, Grice suspects, normally assumed by commentators that Aristotle thinks of “eudaemonia” as being the only item which satisfies the condition of maximal finality.     This uniqueness claim is not, however, explicitly made in the passage —nor, so far as Grice can recollect, elsewhere — nor is it clear to Grice that, if it were made, it would be correct.     Might it not be that, for example,     lazing in the sun     is desired, and     is desirable, for its own sake,     and yet     is not something which is also desirable for the sake of something else,     not even for the sake of “eudaemonia”?    If it should turn out that there is a distinction, within the class of     things desirable for their own sake     (1-desirables),     between those which are also     desirable for the sake of “eudaemonia”    eudaemonia-desirable    and those which are not,     the further question arises whether there is any common feature which distinguishes items which are (directly)     “eudaemonia”-desirable    and, if so, what it is.     This question will reappear later.    Aristotle claims that     honour  reason  pleasure  virtue     are all both I-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable.    But, at this stage in the Nicomachean Ethics, these four things are uneliminated candidates for *identification.* with “eudaemonia.”    And, indeed, Aristotle himself later does *identify*, at least in a sort of way, a special version of one of them - metaphysical contemplation — with “eudaemonia.”    Suppose that it were to be established that one of these candidates (say, honour) is successful.     Would not Aristotle then be committed to holding that honour is both desirable for its own sake, and also desirable for the sake of something other than honour, namely, “eudaemonia,” viz. honour?     It is not clear, moreover, that this prima-facie *inconsistency* can be eliminated by an appeal to the non-extensionality (opaqueness) of the context of the psychological verb, passive voice, modal      "is desirable".     For while the argument-pattern    o is desirable for the sake of B.     B is identical with y;     ——-    Therefore, or is desirable for the sake of y    may be invalid, it is by no means clear that the argument-pattern     o is desirable for the sake of B    necessarily, B is identical with Y    ——-    Therefore, a is desirable for the sake of y    is invalid.    And, if it were true that “eudaemonia” *is* to be *identified* with “metaphysical contemplation”, this would presumably be a non-contingent truth.    Suppose the following:     playing golf and playing tennis are each I-desirable    each is conducive to physical fitness, which is itself I-desirable    a daily round of golf and a daily couple of hours of tennis are each sufficient for peak physical fitness,     and (if you like, for simplicity),      there is no third route to physical fitness.     Now, Nowell and Smith accept all these suppositions;     Nowell plays golf daily, and     Smith plays *both* golf _and_ tennis daily.     It seems difficult to deny,     first, that     it is quite conceivable that all of the sporting activities of these gentlemen are undertaken both for their own sake and also for the sake of physical fitness, and,     second, that     (pro tanto)     the life of Smith     is more desirable than     the life of Nowell,    since Smith has the value of     *playing tennis*    while Nowell does not.     The fact that in Smith’s life physical fitness is _overdetermined_ does not seem to be a ground for denying that     Smith pursues both golf *and* tennis for the sake of physical fitness;     if we wished to deny this, it looks as if we could, in certain circumstances, be faced with the unanswerable question:    "If it is not the case that Smith pursues both golf and tennis for the sake of physical fitness, which one does he pursue for physical fitness?"    Let us now consider how close an analogy to this example we can construct if we search for one which replaces references to physical fitness by references to “eudaemonia.”    We might suppose that Nowell and Smith have it in common that they have distinguished academic lives, satisfying family situations, and are healthy and prosperous;     that they value, and rightly value, these aspects of their existences for their own sakes and     — also — regard them as contributing to their “eudaemonia.”    Each regards himself as a thoroughly happy man.     But Smith, unlike Nowell, also composes poetry, an activity which he cares about and which he also thinks of as something which contributes to his “eudaemonia.”     the time which Smith devotes to poetic endeavour is spent by Nowell pottering about the house doing nothing in particular.     We now raise the question whether or not Smith’s life is more desirable than Nowell’s, on the grounds that it contains an I-desirable element, poetic composition, which Nowell’s life does not contain, and that there is no counterbalancing element present in Nowell’s life but absent in Smith’s.    One conceivable answer would be that Smith’s life *is* indeed more desirable than Nowell’s — since it contains an additional value,     But that this fact is consistent with their being equal in respect of “eudaemonia,” in line with the supposition that each regards himself as a thoroughly happy man.    If we give this answer we, in effect, reject the Aristotelian idea that “eudaemonia” is, in the appropriate sense, self-sufficient.     There seems to Gricd, however, to be good reason *not* to give this answer.     Commentators have disagreed about the precise interpretation of the word "eudaemonia", but none, so far as Grice knows, has suggested what Gricd thinks of as much the most plausible conjecture;     namely, that     "eudaemonia" is to be understood as     the name for that state or condition which one's good daemon would, if he could, ensure for one.    And Grice’s good daemon is a being motivated, with respect to Grice, solely by concern for Grice’s well-being or “eudaemonia.”    To change the idiom,     "eudaemonia"     is the general characterization of what a full-time and unhampered fairy godmother would secure for you.     The identifications regarded by Aristotle as unexcitingly correct, of “eudaemonia” with doing well and with living well, now begin to look like necessary truths.     If this interpretation of  "eudaemonia" is correct (as Grice shall brazenly assume)     it would be quite impossible for Smith’s life to be more desirable than Nowell’s, though Nowell and Smith are *equal* in respect of “eudaemonia;”    for this would amount to Smith’s being better off than Nowell, though both are equally well-off!    Various other possible answers remain.     It might be held that not only is Smith’s life more desirable than Nowell’s, but Smith is *more* “eudaemon”, better off, than Smith.    HAPP-IER     This idea preserves the proposed conceptual connection between “eudaemonia” and being well-off, and relies on the not wholly implausible principle that the addition of a value to a life enhances the value of that life — whatever, perhaps, the liver may think.    One might think of such a principle, when more fully stated, as laying down, or implying, that any increase in the combined value of the eudaemonia-desirable elements realized in a particular life is reflected, in a constant proportion, in an increase in the degree of “eudaemonia” or well-being exemplified by that life;     or, more cautiously,     that     the increase in “eudaemonia” is *not* determined by a constant proportion, but rather in some manner analogous to the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility.     Grice is inclined to see the argument of this chapter as leading towards a discreet erosion of the idea that the degree of a particular person's “eudaemonia” is the value of a function the arguments of which are measures of the particular “eudaemonia”-desirables realized in that person's life, no matter what function is suggested;     but at the present moment it will be sufficient to cast doubt on the acceptability of any of the crudest versions of this idea.     To revert to the case of Nowell and Smith.    it seems to Grice that when we speak of the desirability of Nowell’s life or of Smith’s life, the desirability of which we are speaking is the desirability of that life from the point of view of the person whose life it is;     and that it is therefore counterintuitive to suppose that, for example, Nowell, who thinks of himself as "perfectly eudaemon" and so not to be made either better off or more “eudaemon” — though perhaps more accomplished — by an injection of poetry composition, should be making a misassessment of what his state of well-being would be if the composition of poetry were added to his occupation.     Furthermore, if the pursuit of “eudaemonia” is to be the proper end, or even a proper end, of living, to suppose that the added realization of a further “eudaemonia”-desirable to a life automatically increases the “eudaemonia” or wellbeing of the possessor of that life will involve a commitment to an ethical position which Grice, for one, find somewhat unattractive:     One would be committed to advocating too unbridled an “eudaemonic” expansionism.    A more attractive position would be to suppose that we should invoke, with respect to the example under consideration, an analogue, not of diminishing marginal utility, but of what might be called VANISHING marginal utility;     to suppose, that is, that Nowell and Smith are, or at least may be, equally well-off and equally eudaemon even though Smith’s life contains an “eudaemonia”-desirable element which is lacking in Nowell’s life;     that at a certain point, so to speak, the bucket of “eudaemonia” is filled, and no further inpouring of realized “eudaemonia”-desirables has any effect on its contents.     This position would be analogous to the view Grice adopted earlier with respect to the possible *over-*determination of physical fitness.     Even should this position be correct, it must be recognized that the really interesting work still remains to be done;     that would consist in the characterization of the conditions which determine whether the realization of a particular set of “eudaemonia”-desirables *is* sufficient to fill the bucket.    The main result, then, of the discussion has been to raise two matters for exploration;     first,     the possibility of a distinction between items which are merely I-desirable and items which are not only I-desirable but also “eudaemoni”-desirable;     and, second,     the possibility that the degree of “eudaemonia” exemplified by a life may be *overdetermined* by the set of “eudaemonia”adesirables realized in that life, together with the need to characterize the conditions which govern such overdetermination.    Let us move in a different direction.     Grice has already remarked that, with respect to the desirability-status of “eudaemonia” and of the means thereto, Aristotle subscribes to two theses, with which Grice has no quarrel (or, at least, shall voice no quarrel).    That     some things are both 1-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable     are both ends in themselves and also means to “eudaemonia.”    That “eudaemonia,” while desirable in itself, is not desirable for the sake of any further end.    Grice has suggested the possibility that a further thesis might be true (though Grice has not claimed that it is true), namely:    That     some things are I-desirable without being “eudaemonia”-desirable -and, one might add, perhaps without being desirable for the sake of any further end, in which case “eudaemonia” will not be the only item which is not desirable for the sake of any further end.    But there are two further as yet unmentioned theses which Grice is inclined to regard as being not only true, but also important:     first,    Any item which is directly “eudaemonia”-desirable must be I-desirable.    And second,    “Eudaemonia” is attainable only via the realization of items which are 1-desirable — and also of course “eudaemonia”-desirable      This Thesis would allow that an item could be indirectly “eudaemonia”-desirable without being I-desirable;     engaging in morning press-ups could be such an item,     but only if it were desirable for the sake of (let us say) playing cricket *well*, which would plainly be itself an item which was both 1-desirable and “eudaemonia”-desirable.     A thesis related to this, namely,     An item can be directly conducive to the “eudaemonia” of an individual x only if it is regarded by x as being I-desirable) seems to me very likely to be true;     the question whether not only the latter but the former are true would depend on whether a man who *misconceives*, if that be possible, an item as being I-desirable could properly be said to achieve “eudaemonia” through the realization of that  item.    To take an extreme case,     could a wicked man who pervertedly regards cheating his co-conversationalist in an ingenious way — flouting conversationalists’s common end — as being I-desirable, and who delights in so doing, properly be said to be, *pro tanto*, achieving “eudaemonia”?     Grice thinks Aristotle would answer negatively, and Grice is rather inclined to side with him;     But Grice recognizes that there is much to debate.     A consequence of thesis, if true, would be that there cannot be an “eudaemonia”-pill — a pill the taking of which leads directly to “eudaemonia”     there could be, and maybe there is, a pill which leads directly to "feeling good" or to euphoria;     but these states would have to be distinguishable from “eudaemonia.”    The Thesis would imply that “eudaemonia” is essentially a dependent state;   “Eudaemonia” cannot just happen;     its realization is conditional upon the realization of one or more items which give rise to it.    “Eudaemonia” should be thought of *adverbially*;     to be “eudaemon” is, for some x, to x “eudaemoniacly” or “with “eudaemonia.”    And reflection on the interchangeability or near-interchangeability of the ideas of “eudaemonia” and of well-being would suggest that the adverbial in question is an evaluation or validation adverbial.    The importance, for present purposes, of the two latest theses is to Grice’s mind that questions are now engendered about the idea that the item which is chosen (or desirable) for the sake of “eudaemonia” can be thought of as an item which is chosen (or desirable) as means to “eudaemonia”, at least if the means-end relation is conceived as it seems very frequently to be conceived in philosophy;     if, that is, x is a means to end y just in case the doing or producing of x designedly causes (generates, has as an effect) the occurrence of end y.     For, if an item the realization of which give rise to “eudaemonia” were an item which could be, in the above sense, means to the END of “eudaemonia”, (a)     it should be conceptually possible for “eudaemonia” to arise otherwise than as a consequence of the occurrence of any such an item, and (b)     it seems too difficult to suppose that so non-scientific a condition as the possession of intrinsic desirability should be a necessary condition of an item's giving rise to “eudaemonia.”    In other words, these theses seem to preclude the idea that what directly gives rise to “eudaemonia” can be, in the currently favoured sense, a means to the END of “eudaemonia.”    The issue which Grice has just raised is closely related to a scholarly issue which has recently divided Aristotelian commentators;     battles have raged over the question whether Aristotle conceives of “eudaemonia” as a 'dominant  end or as an 'inclusive' end.     The terminology derives, Grice believes, from Hardie.    but Grice cites a definition of the question which is given by Ackrill — Aristotle on aeudaemonia, The Hicks lecture, Oxford.    By 'an inclusive end' might be meant     any end that combines or includes at least *two* values or activities or goods.    By 'a dominant end' might be meant     a monolithic end, an end consisting of just *one* valued activity or good."    One's initial reaction to this formulation may fall short of overwhelming enlightenment, among other things, perhaps, because the verb 'includes’ appears within the characterization of an inclusive end.    Grice suspect, however, that this deficiency could be properly remedied only by a logico-metaphysical enquiry into the nature of the 'inclusion relation' —or, rather, the family of inclusion relations — which would go far beyond the limits of Grice’s present undertaking.     But, to be less ambitious, let us, initially and provisionally, think of an inclusive end as being a set of this or that end.    If “eudaemonia” is in this sense an inclusive end, we can account for some of the features displayed in the previous section.     “Eudaemonia” will be dependent on the realization of subordinate ends, provided that the set of ends constituting “eudaemonia” may not be the empty set — a reasonable, if optimistic, assumption.    Since the "eudaemonia” “set" has as its elements I-desirables, what is desirable directly for the sake of “eudaemonia” must be I-desirable.     And if it should turn out to be the case, contrary perhaps to the direction of Grice’s argument in the last section, that the “eudaemonia” set includes all I-desirables, we should have difficulty in finding any end for the sake of which “eudaemonia” would be desirable.    So far so good, perhaps.    But so far may not really be very far at all.     Some reservation about the treatment of “eudaemonia” as an inclusive end is hinted at by Ackrill:    It is not necessary to claim that Aristotle has made quite clear how there may be 'components' in the best life or how they may be interrelated     The very idea of constructing a compound end out of two or more independent ends may arouse suspicion.     Is the compound to be thought of as a mere aggregate or as an organized system?     If the former, the move to “eudaemonia” seems trivial.    Nor is it obvious that goods can be just added together.     If the latter, if there is supposed to be a unifying plan.     What  is it?    From these very pertinent questions, Ackrill detaches himself, on the grounds that his primary concern is with the exposition and not with the justification of Aristotle's thought.     But we cannot avail ourselves of this rain check, and so the difficulties which Ackrill touches on must receive further exposure.    Let us suppose a next-to-impossible world W, in which there are just three I-desirables, which are also “eudaemonia”-desirables, E1 and E2.    If you like, you may think of these as being identical, respectively, with “rationality” and “pleasure.”    If, in general, “eudaemonia” is to be an inclusive end,     “Eudaemonia”-in-W will have as its components E1 and E2 and no others.     Now one might be tempted to suppose that, since it is difficult or impossible to deny that to achieve “eudaemonia”-in-W it is necessary and also sufficient to realize E1 and E2, anyone who wanted to realize E1 wanted to realize E2 and would *ipso facto* be someone who wanted to achieve the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W.     But there seems to me to be a good case for regarding such an inference as invalid.     To want to achieve the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W might be equivalent to wanting to realize E1 and E2 or indeed to wanting E1 and E2    but there are relatively familiar reasons for allowing that, with respect to a considerable range of psychological verbs (represented by v), one cannot derive from a statement of the form    'x y's (that) A and x y's (that) B'     a statement of the form 'x y's (that) A and B.     Think cream and peaches.    For instance, it seems to Gricd a plausible thesis that there are circumstances in which we should want to say of someone that     he believed that p     and that     he believed that q,     without being willing to allow that     he believed that p and that q.     The most obvious cases for the application of the distinction would perhaps be cases in which     p and q     are inconsistent;     We can perhaps imagine someone of whom we should wish to say that     he believed that he was a grotesquely incompetent creature,     and that     he also believed that he was a world-beater,     without wishing to say of him that     he believed that he was both grotesquely incompetent and a world-beater.   Inconsistent beliefs are not, or are not necessarily, beliefs in inconsistencies.   Whatever reasons there may be for allowing that a man may     believe that p and beheve that q    without believing that     p and q     would, Grice suspects, be mirrored in reasons for allowing that     a man may want A and want B     without wanting both A and B;    Think peaches and cream     if     I want a holiday in Rome,     and also want some headache pills,     it does not seem to Grice that, ipso facto,     I want a holiday in Rome and some headache pills.    Implicature?     Moreover, even if we *were* to sanction the disputed inference, it would not, Grice thinks, be correct to make the further supposition that     a man who wants A and B     simply as a consequence of wanting A and wanting B    would, or even could, want A (or want B) for the sake of or with a view to, realizing A and B.     So even if, in world W, a man could be said     to want E1 and E2    on the strength of wanting each one of them,     some further condition would have to be fulfilled     before we could say of him that he wanted each of them for the sake of realizing E1 and E2, that is,     for the sake of achieving  the end of “eudaemonia”-in-W.    In an attempt to do justice to the idea that “eudaemonia” should be treated as being an 'inclusive end, Grice puts forward a modest proposal;     not, perhaps, the only possible proposal, but one which may seem reasonably intuitive.     Let us categorize, for present purposes, the l-desirables in world W as 'universals.     Grice proposes that to want, severally, each of these I-desirables should be regarded as equivalent to wanting the set whose members are just those I-desirables, with the understanding that a set of universals is not itself a universal.     So to want e1 and e2 is equivalent to wanting the set whose members are e1 and e2 — the “eudaemonia”-in-W set.    To want “eudaemonia”-in-W requires satisfaction of the stronger condition of wanting e1 and e2 which in turn is equivalent to wanting something which is a universal, namely, a compound universal in which are included just those universals which are elements of the “eudaemonia”-in-W set.     Grice shall not attempt to present a necessary and sufficient condition for the fulfilment of the stronger rather than merely of the weaker condition;     but Grice shall suggest an important sufficient condition for this state of affairs.   The condition is the following:     for x to want the conjunction of the members of a set, rather than merely for him to want, severally, each member of the set, it is sufficient that his wanting. severally, each member of the set should be explained by (have as one of its explanations) the fact that there is an 'open' feature F which is believed by x to be exemplified by the set, and the realization of which is desired by x.     By an open feature Grice means a feature the specification of which does not require the complete enumeration of the items which exemplify it.     To illustrate,     a certain Oxford don at one time desired to secure for himself the teaching, in his subject, at the colleges of     Somerville,     St Hugh's,     St Hilda's,     Lady Margaret Hall, and     St Anne's.     He fails, by two colleges.    This compound desire was based on the fact that the named colleges constituted the totality of women's colleges in Oxford, and he desired the realization of the open feature consisting in his teaching, in his subject, at every women's college at Oxford.     This sufficient condition is important in that it is, Grice thinks, fulfilled with respect to all compound desires which are rational, as distinct from arbitrary or crazy.     There can be, of course, genuinely compound desires which are non-rational, and  Grice shall not attempt to specify the condition which distinguishes them;   but perhaps Grice does not need to, since Grice thinks we may take it as a postulate that,     if a desire for “eudaemonia” is a compound desire for the realisation of at least end e1 and end e2, it is a rational compound desire.      The proposal which Grice has made does, Grice thinks, conform to acceptable general principles for metaphysical construction.     For it provides for the addition to an initially given category of items (universals') of a special sub-category (compound universals") which are counterparts of certain items which are not universals but rather sets of universals.     It involves, so to speak, the conversion of certain non-universals into 'new' universals, and it seems reasonable to suppose that the purpose of this conversion is to bring these non-universals, in a simple and relatively elegant way, within the scope of laws which apply to universals.     It must be understood that by 'laws' Grice is referring to theoretical generalities which belong to any of a variety of kinds of theory, including psychological, practical, and moral theories;     so among such laws will be laws of various kinds relating to a desire for an end and for a means to an end.    If “eudaemonia” is an inclusive end, and it, for it to be an inclusive end the desire for which is rational, there must be an open feature which is exemplified by the set of components of “eudaemonia”, our next task is plainly to attempt to identify this feature.     To further this venture Grice shall now examine, within the varieties of means-end relation, what is to Grice’s mind a particularly suggestive kind of case.    At the start of this section Grice offers a brief sketch of the varieties, or of some of the varieties, of     means-end     relation;     this is a matter which is interesting in itself, which is largely neglected in philosophy, except MACHIAVELLI, and which Gricd is inclined to regard as an important bit of background in the present enquiry.     Grice shall then consider a particular class of cases in our ordinary thinking about     means and ends,     which might be called cases of'end-fixing, and which might provide an important modification to our consideration of the idea that “eudaemonia” is an inclusive end.    Grice introduces the term 'is contributive to' as a general expression for what I have been calling     ‘means-end'     relation, and Grice shall use the phrase     “is contributive in way w to'     to refer, in a general way, to this or that particular specific form of the contributiveness relation.     Grice shall, for convenience, assume that anyone who thinks of some state of affairs or action as being contributive to the realization of a certain universal would have in mind that specific form of contributiveness which would be appropriate to the particular case.     We may now say, quite unstartlingly, that     x wants to do m as a means or for the sake of the realisation of end e      just in case     x wants to do means m     because     x regards his doing means m as something which would be contributive in way w to the realization of end e and     x wants end e.    That leaves us the only interesting task, namely, that of giving the range of specific relations one element in which will be picked out by the phrase contributive in way w, once an end e and its means m are specified.    The most obvious mode of contributiveness, indeed one which has too often been attended to to the exclusion of all others, is that of causal antecedence;   A means m’scontributing to an end e here consists in the means m’sbeing the (or a) causal origin of the end e.    But even within this mode there may be more complexity than meets the eye.   The causal origin may be an initiating cause, which triggers the effect — the end e — in the way in which flipping a switch sets off illumination in a light bulb;   or it may be a sustaining cause, the continuation of which is required in order to maintain the effect in being.     In either case, the effect — the end e — may be either positive or negative;     I may *initiate* a period of non-talking in Smith     by     knocking him cold,     or     *sustain* one by keeping Grice’s hand over his mouth.     A further dimension, in respect of which examples of each variety of causal contributiveness may vary, is that of conditionality.     Doing means m may be desired as something which will, given the circumstances which obtain, unconditionally originate the realization of end e, or as something which will do so provided that a certain possibility is fulfilled.    A specially important subclass of cases of conditional causal contributiveness is the class of cases in which the relevant possibility consists in the desire or will of some agent, either the means-taker or someone else, that the end e should be realized;     these are cases in which x wants to do means m in order to enable, or to make it possible for, himself (or someone else) to achieve the realization of end e    as when, for example, x puts a corkscrew in his pocket to enable him later, should be wish to do so, to open a bottle of wine.    But, for present purposes, the more interesting modes of contributiveness may well be those *other than* that of causal contributiveness.     These include the following types.    Specificatory contributiveness.     To do means m would, in the prevailing circumstances, be a specification of, or a way of, realizing end e.    it being understood that, for this mode of contributiveness, the end e is not to be a causal property, a property consisting in being such as to cause the realization of C, where C is some further property.    A host's     seating someone at his right-hand side     at dinner may be a specification of     treating him with respect;     waving a Union Jack     might be a way of     showing loyalty to the Crown.     In these cases, the particular action which exemplifies the means is *the same* as the item which exemplifies the realisation of the end.    Two further modes involve relations of inclusion, of one or another of the types to which such relations may belong.    To do means m may contribute to the realization of end e by including an item which realizes end e.    I may want to take a certain advertised cruise because it *includes*, contains, consists, is composed of, a visit to Naples.    To do means m may contribute to the realization of end e by being included in an item which realizes end e.    Here we may distinguish more than one kind of case.     The end and the means may be identical;     Grice may, for example,     be hospitable to someone today     because     Grice wants to be hospitable to him throughout his visit to Grice’s town.     In such a case the exemplification of the end, hospitality, by the whole, my behaviour to him during the week, will depend on a certain distribution of exemplifications of the realisation of the end among the parts, such as my behaviour on particular days.     We might call this kind of dependence "component-dependence".     In other cases the end and the means are distinct, and in some of these (perhaps all) it is not the case that the end can, if it is exemplified by the whole, also be exemplified by any part.     These further cases subdivide in ways which are interesting but not germane to the present enquiry.    We are now in a position to handle, not quite as Aristotle does, a 'paradox' or philosophisma about “eudaemonia” raised by Aristotle, which involves Solon's dictum     “Call no man happy till he is dead.”    Grice gives a simplified, but Grice hopes not distorted, version of the 'paradoxical' line of argument.     If we start by suggesting that “eudaemonia” is the end for man, we shall have to modify this suggestion, replacing "eudaemonia" by "eudaemonia in a complete life".     Aristotle himself applies the qualification "in a complete life" not to “eudaemonia”, but to what he gives as constituted of “eudaemonia,” namely, activity of soul in accordance with excellence.    For, plainly, a life which as a whole exemplifies “eudaemonia” is preferable to one which does not.    But since life-long “eudaemonia” can only be exemplified by a whole life, non-predictive knowledge that the end for man is realized with respect to a particular person is attainable only at the end of the person's life, and so not, except possibly at the time of his dying gasp, by the person himself.     But this is paradoxical, since the end for man should be such that non-predictive knowledge of its realization is available to those who achieve its realization.    Grice suggests that we need to distinguish a non-propositional, attributive end, such as “eudaemoni”, and a propositional end or objective, such as that my life, as a whole, should be “eudaemon.”    Now it is not in fact clear that people do, or even should, desire life-long “eudaemonia”;     it may be quite in order not to think about this as an objective.    And, even if one should desire life-long “eudaemonia,” it is not clear that one should aim at it, that one should desire, and do, things for the sake of it.     But let us waive these objections.    The attainment of life-long “eudaemonia,” an objective, consists in the realization, in a whole life, of the attributive end of “eudaemonia.”    This realization is component-dependent;     it depends on a certain distribution of realizations of that same end in episodes or phases of that life.    But these realizations are certainly non-predictively knowable by the person whose life it is.     So, if we insist that to specify the end for man is to specify an attributive end and not an objective, then the "paradox' disappears.    The special class of cases to which one might be tempted to apply the term 'end-fixing' may be approached in the following way.     For any given mode of contributiveness, say causal contributiveness, the same final position, that x wants (intends, does) A as contributive to the realization of B, may be reached through more than one process of thought.     In line with the canonical Aristotelian model, x may desire to realize B, then enquire what would lead to B, decide that doing A would lead to B, and so come to want, and to do, A.    Alternatively, the possibility of doing A may come to his mind, he then enquires what doing A would lead to, sees that it would lead to B, which he wants, and so he comes to want, and perhaps do, A.    Grice now asks whether there are cases in which the following conditions are met:     doing A is fixed or decided, not merely entertained as a possibility, in advance of the recognition of it as desirable with a view to B, and     that B is selected as an end, or as an end to be pursued on this occasion, at least partly because it is something which doing A will help to realize.    A variety of candidates, not necessarily good ones, come to mind.    A man who is wrecked on a desert island decides to use his stay there to pursue what is a new end for him, namely, the study of the local flora and fauna.    Here doing A (spending time on the island) is fixed but not chosen;     and the specific performances, which some might think were more properly regarded as means to the pursuit of this study, are not fixed in advance of the adoption of the end.     A man wants, without having a reason for so wanting, to move to a certain town;     Heis uncomfortable with irrational desires, or at least with this irrational desire, and so comes to want to make this move because the town has a specially salubrious climate.     Here, it seems, the movement of thought cannot be fully conscious.    We might say that the reason why he wants to move to a specially good climate is that such a desire would justify the desire or intention, which he already has, to move to the town in question.    But one would baulk at describing this as being his reason for wanting to move to a good climate.    The example which interests Grice is the following.     A tyrant has become severely displeased with one of his ministers, and to humiliate him assigns him to the task of organizing the disposal of the palace garbage, making clear that only a high degree of efficiency will save him from a more savage fate.     The minister at first strives for efficiency merely in order to escape disaster.    But later, seeing that thereby he can preserve his self-respect and frustrate the tyrant's plan to humiliate him, he begins to take pride in the efficient discharge of his duties, and so to be concerned about it for its own sake.     Even so, when the tyrant is overthrown and the minister is relieved of his menial duties, he leaves them without regret in spite of having been intrinsically concerned about their discharge.    One might say of the minister that he efficiently discharged his office for its own sake in order to frustrate the tyrant.    And this is clearly inadequately represented as his being interested in the efficient discharge of his office both for its own sake and for the sake of frustrating the tyrant, since he hoped to achieve the latter goal by an intrinsic concern with his office.     It seems clear that a higher-order desire is involved.    The minister wants, for its own sake, to discharge his office efficiently, and he wants to want this because he wants, by so wanting, to frustrate the tyrant.   Indeed, wanting to do A for the sake of — as a means for — B can plausibly be represented as having two interpretations.     The first interpretation is invoked if we say that a man who does A for the sake of B does A because he wants to do A and wants to do A for the sake of B.   Here wanting A for the sake of B involves thinking that A will lead to B.     But we can conceive of wanting A for the sake of B — analogously with doing A for the sake of B — as something which is accounted for by wanting to want A for the sake of B.    If so, we have the second interpretation, one which implies not *thinking*that A will help to realize B, but rather thinking that *wanting* A will help to realize B.    The impact of this discussion, on the question of the kind of end which “eudaemonia” should be taken to be, will be that, if “eudaemonia” is to be regarded as an inclusive end, the components may be not the realizations of certain ends, but rather the *desire* for those realizations.     Wanting A for the sake of “eudaemonia”  should be given the second mode of interpretation specified above, one which involves thinking that *wanting* A is one of a set of items which collectively exhibit the open feature associated with “eudaemonia.”    Grice’s enquiry has, Grice hopes, so far given some grounds for the favourable consideration of a few theses.    “Eudaemonia” is an end for the sake of which certain I-desirables are desirable, but is to be regarded as an inclusive rather than a dominant end.    For “eudaemonia” to be a *rational* or reasonable inclusive end, the set of its components must exemplify some particular open feature, yet to be determined; and    this or that component of “eudaemonia” may well be not a universal or states of affairs the realization of which is desired for its own sake, but rather the *desire* for such a universal or states of affairs, in which case a *desire* for “eudaemonia” will be a higher-order desire, a desire to have, and satisfy, a set of desires which exemplifies the relevant open feature.    At this point, we might be faced with a radical assault, which would run as follows.     “Your whole line of enquiry consists in assuming that, when some item is desired, or desirable, for the sake of “eudaemonia,” it is desired, or desirable, as a *means* to “eudaemonia”, and in then raising, as the crucial question, what kind of an end “eudaemonia” is, or what kind of *means-end* relation is involved.     But the initial assumption is a mistake.     To say of an item that it is desired for the sake of “eudaemonia” should *not* be understood as implying that that item is desired as any kind of a *means* to anything.    It should be understood, rather, as claiming that the item is desired for its own sake in a certain sort of way?     'for the sake of “eudaemonia”' should be treated as a unitary adverbial, better heard, perhaps, as “eudaemonia”-wise.     To desire something “eudaemonia”-wise is to take the desire for it seriously in a certain sort of way, in particular to take the desire seriously as a guide for living, to have incorporated it in one's overall plan or system for the conduct of life.     If one looks at the matter this way, one can see at once that it is conceivable that these should be I-desirables which are not “eudaemonia”-desirables;     for the question whether something which is desirable is *intrinsically* desirable, or whether its desirability derives from the desirability of something else, is plainly a different question from the question whether or not the desire for it is to be taken seriously in the planning and direction of one's life, that is, whether the item is “eudaemonia”-desirable.     One can, moreover, do justice to two further considerations which you have, so far, been ignoring:    First:     that     what goes to make up “eudaemonia” is relative to the individual whose “eudaemonia” it is, a truth which is easily seen when it is recognized that     what Nowell desires (or should desire) “eudaemonia”-wise may be quite different from what Smith so desires.    and,     second,     that     intuition is sympathetic to the admittedly vague idea that the decision that certain items are constitutive of one's “eudaemonia” is not so much a matter of judgement or belief as a matter of *will.*    One's “eudaemonia” consists in what one makes it consist in, an idea which will be easily accommodated if "for the sake of “eudaemonia”' is understood in the way which Grice proposes.    Coward: Life is what you make it.    There is much in this (spirited yet thoughtful) oration towards which Grice is sympathetic and which Grice is prepared to regard as important;     in particular, the idea of linking “eudaemonia”-desirability with desires or concerns which enter into a system for the direction of one's life,     and     the suggestion that     the acceptance of a system of ends as constituting “eudaemonia,” or one's own “eudaemonia,” is less a matter of belief or judgement than of *will.*    But, despite these attractive features, and despite its air of simplifying iconoclasm, the position which is propounded can hardly be regarded as tenable.     When looked at more closely, it can be seen to be just another form of subjectivism:     What are ostensibly beliefs that particular items are conducive to “eudaemonia” are represented as being in fact psychological states or attitudes, other than beliefs, with regard to these items;     and it is vulnerable to variants of stock objections to subjectivist manceuvres.     That in common speech and thought we have application for, and so need a philosophical account of, not only the idea of desiring things for the sake of “eudaemonia” but, also, that of being “eudaemon” (or well-off), is passed over;   and should it turn out that the position under consideration has no account to offer of the latter idea, that would be not only paradoxical but also, quite likely, theoretically disastrous.     For it would seem to be the case that the construction or adoption of a system of ends for the direction of life is something which can be done     well or     badly, or     better or     less well;     that being so, there will be a demand for the specification of the criteria governing this area of evaluation; and it will be difficult to avoid the idea that the conditions characteristic of a good system of ends will be determined by the fact that the adoption of a system conforming to those conditions will lead, or is likely to lead, or other things being equal will lead, to the realization of “eudaemonia;”     to something. that is, which the approach under consideration might well not be able to accommodate.    So it begins to look as if we may be back where we were before the start of this latest discussion.     But perhaps not quite;     for, perhaps, something can be done with the notion of a set or system of ends which is suitable for the direction of life.     The leading idea would be of a system which is maximally stable, one whose employment for the direction of life would be maximally conducive to its continued employment for that purpose, which would be maximally self-perpetuating.     To put the matter another way, a system of ends would be stable to the extent to which, though not constitutionally immune from modification, it could accommodate changes of circumstances or vicissitudes which would impose modification upon other less stable systems.     We might need to supplement the idea of stability by the idea of flexibility.    A system will be flexible in so far as, should modifications be demanded, they are achievable by easy adjustment and evolution;     flounderings, crises, and revolutions will be excluded or at a minimum.    A succession of systems of ends within a person's consciousness could then be regarded as stages in the development of a single life-scheme, rather than as the replacement of one life-scheme by another.     We might find it desirable also to incorporate into the working-out of these ideas a distinction, already foreshadowed, between “eudaemona”-in-general and “eudaemonia”-for-an-individual.    Particularised.    We might hope that it would be possible to present “eudaemonia”-in-general as a system of possible ends which would be specified in highly general terms (since the specification must be arrived at in abstraction from the idiosyncrasies of particular persons and their circumstances), a system which would be determined either by its stability relative to stock vicissitudes in the human condition, or (as Grice suspects) in some other way;     and we might further hope that “eudaemonia” for an individual might lie in the possession, and operation for the guidance of life, of a system of ends which   — would be a specific and personalized derivative, determined by that individual's character, abilities, and situations in the world, of the system constitutive of “eudaemonia” in general; and    —the adoption of which would be stable for that individual in his circumstances.    The idea that “eudaemonia” might be fully, or at least partially, characterized in something like this kind of way wouid receive some support if we could show reason to suppose that features which could plausibly be regarded, or which indeed actually have been regarded, as characteristic of “eudaemonia,” or at least of a satisfactory system for the guidance of life, are also features which are conducive to stability.    Grice lists some features for which, in this regard, the prospects seem good.    Feasibility.     An adopted system of ends should be workable;     the more it should turn out that actions and performances dictated by the system cannot be successfully undertaken, the stronger are the grounds for modification of the system.     A particular case of the operation of this feature lies in the demand that an agent should be equipped, by nature or by training, with the competencies needed for the effective prosecution of his system of ends.    Autonomy.     This feature is closely related to the preceding one.     The less reliant one's system of ends is on aids the availability of which is not within one's control, particularly if it is within the control of others, the less dependent the system is on what Aristotle called "ektos choregia", the more stable, or the more securely stable, it will in general be.     Unless one has firm guarantees, it is better not to have to rely on the availability of elaborate machinery or a government grant.    Compatibility of component ends.     Initially, one might suppose that there are grounds for the modification of a system of ends in so far as the fulfilment of certain ends in the system thwarts the fulfilment of certain others.     But Grice thinks we have to recognize that, characteristically, an end is such as to be realizable in varying degrees, and that it would be unrealistic to demand a system in which the realization of one end was never diminished by the realization of others.     What we in fact may reasonably look for is a harmony of ends;     the possibility, that is, with respect to competing ends, of finding an acceptable balance in the degrees of realization to be expected for each end.     How such balances are to be determined is a large and difficult question, but their unavailability would prompt modification of the system.     This feature looks like an analogue of consistency, which is commonly favoured as a feature of non-practical systems, though perhaps more by some people than by others, like Witters and Norman O. Brown.      Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. He was educated at Clifton College,[3] then Balliol College, Oxford (B.A., M.A., Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Ph.D., Classics).    Comprehensiveness.     An analogue for completeness.     A system is comprehensive to the extent to which it yields decisions with respect to particular practical questions;     the more undecidabilities, the less the comprehensiveness.     To be more accurate, the comprehensiveness of a system varies directly with its capacity to yield answers to those practical questions which should be decided in the light of general principles.     In ordinary circumstances it would, for example, be inappropriate to try to invoke one's life-scheme to decide whether one should have beef or lamb for dinner tonight — unless you are a vegan.    Deficiency in comprehensiveness seems to legitimize modification.    Supportiveness of component ends.     A system's stability will be increased if the pursuit of some ends enhances the pursuit of others.     Such enhancement may arise in more than one way;     for example,     a man's dedication to mathematical studies might yield increased skill as a chess-player;     or     his devotion to his wife might inspire him to heightened endeavour in his business of selling encyclopaedias.    Simplicity.     A system's effectiveness as a guide to living will depend, in part, on how easy it is to determine its deliverances on particular questions.     If it yields answers on practical questions, but these answers are difficult to discern, the system will be at a disadvantage when compared with another, whose greater simplicity makes its deliverances more accessible.    Agreeableness.     One form of agreeableness will, unless counteracted, automatically attach to the attainment of an object of desire, such attainment being routinely a source of satisfaction.     The generation of satisfaction will, then, not provide an independent ground for preferring one system of ends to another.     But other modes of agreeableness, such as being a source of delight, which are not routinely associated with the fulfilment of desire, could discriminate independently of other features relevant to such preferences, between one system and another.     A system the operation of which is specially agreeable would be stable not only vis-a vis rival systems, but also against the weakening effect of incontinence: intemperanza     a disturbing influence is more surely met by a principle in consort with a supporting attraction than by the principle alone.    However promising the signs may so far have seemed to be, Grice very much doubts whether the proposed characterization of “eudaemonia” can be more than a partial characterization.     Eirst,     there seem to be features which intuition would require that an optimal system of ends should exemplify, but which cannot be represented as promotive of stability.     Many people would hold that, other things being equal, a person's system of ends should be such as to involve maximal development of his natural talents;     and many would hold that, where this is possible, a system should provide scope for outstanding or distinctive personal achievement.     If these views are correct, it seems difficult to furnish for them a justifying connection with the ideas of stability and flexibility.    Second, the features associated with stability seem to be, even in combination, insufficiently selective.     All the listed features, except the last, seem to be systemic in character;     and difficulties seem to arise with respect to them which are reminiscent of a stock objection to a familiar form of the Coherence Theory of Truth.     Proponents of the idea that membership of a coherent and comprehensive system of propositions is necessary and sufficient for being true are met with the reply that a plurality of such systems, each inconsistent with the others, is conceivable, and that, to eliminate from candidacy for truth all but one member of such a plurality, it will be necessary to appeal to an extra-systematic condition, such as incorrigibility or certification by observation.     In somewhat similar style, we can point to systems of ends which, so far as one can tell, might be undifferentiated with respect to stability and the features associated therewith, including agreeableness, yet which intuitively would be by no means equally approvable for the guidance of living;     for example, such systems as might be espoused by a hermit, by a monomaniacal stamp-collector, by an unwavering egotist, and by a well-balanced, kindly country gentleman.    To resolve such difficulties, an extra-systematic condition seems to be required, one which will differentiate ends or systems of ends in respect of *value.* or validation.    Here Grice would seek to explore a road not entirely different from that taken by Aristotle.     Grice would like to consider the possibility that the idea of “eudaemonia”-in-general might be determined by reference to the essential characteristics of a human being (rational animal); Homo sapiens sapiens    the ends involved in the idea of “eudaemonia”-in-general would, perhaps, be the realization in abundance, in various forms specific to individual men, of those capacities with which a creature-constructor would have to endow creatures in order to make them maximally viable in human living conditions, that is, in the widest manageable range of different environments.    But Grice has now almost exactly reached the beginning of the essay which, till recently, you thought Grice was going to read to you tonight, on the derivability of this or that ethical principle.    It is a pity that Grice used up his time.     H. P. Grice.    Norman Oliver Brown (September 25, 1913 – October 2, 2002) was an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher. Beginning as a classical scholar,[2] his later work branched into wide-ranging, erudite, and intellectually sophisticated considerations of history, literature, psychoanalysis, culture, and other topics. Brown advanced some novel theses and in his time achieved some general notability.  Norman O. Brown Born September 25, 1913 El Oro, Mexico Died October 2, 2002 (aged 89) Santa Cruz, California Philosophical work Era 20th-century philosophy Region Western philosophy School Marxism, psychoanalysis Notable ideas Symbolic consciousness, polymorphous perversity Life edit Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. He was educated at Clifton College,[3] then Balliol College, Oxford (B.A., M.A., Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Ph.D., Classics).  In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter.[4] During the Second World War, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as a specialist on French culture. His supervisor was Carl Schorske, and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann.[5] His other friends included the historians Christopher Hilland Hayden White as well as the philosopher Stuart Hampshire. At Wesleyan University, he befriended the composer John Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.[6][7][8][9][10] Brown became a professor of classics at Wesleyan. During Brown's tenure there, Schorske became a professor of history and the two engaged in a mutually beneficial interdisciplinary discourse.[11]  In 1970, Brown was interviewed by Warren Bennis and Sam Keen for Psychology Today. Bennis asked him whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity in his books. He replied,   I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity.[12]  Work edit Brown's commentary on Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, showed a Marxist tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy for president in 1948.[4] Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud. This culminated in his classic 1959 work, Life Against Death. The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to Lionel Trilling.[13] In May 1960 Brown, who was then teaching at Wesleyan University, delivered a Phi Beta Kappa Address to Columbia University.[14]  Love's Body, published in 1966, examines "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization."[4]  In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as professor of humanities, teaching in the History of Consciousness and Literature departments.[5] He was a highly popular professor, known to friends and students alike as "Nobby". The range of courses he taught, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake, Islam, and, with Schorske, Goethe's Faust.  Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, is an anthology that includes many of Brown's later writings.[15]  In The Challenge of Islam, a collection of lectures given in 1981 and published in 2009, Brown argues that Islam challenges us to make life a work of art. Drawing on Henry Corbin's The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi, he argues that "Muhammad is the bridge between Christ and Danteand Blake."[16]  Influence on Ernest Becker edit The Denial of Death is a 1973 work of psychoanalysis and philosophy by Ernest Becker, in which the author builds on the works of Brown, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Rank.[17] It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1974.[18]  See also edit Freudo-Marxism Books edit 1947. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1953. Hesiod, Theogony. Translated and with an introduction by Norman O. Brown. Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill. 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. 1966. Love's Body. New York: Random House. 1973. Closing Time. New York: Random House. 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009. The Challenge of Islam: The Prophetic Tradition. Ed. by Jerome Neu. Santa Cruz, California: New Pacific Press. References edit  Green, Emily (19 October 2003). "The Poet of Plants". Los Angeles Times.  Thornton, Bruce S. (1997). Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Westview Press. p. 47. ISBN 0-8133-3226-5.  "Clifton College Register" Muirhead, J.A.O. p418: Bristol; J.W Arrowsmith for Old Cliftonian Society; April, 1948  Martin, Douglas (October 4, 2002). "Norman O. Brown Dies; Playful Philosopher Was 89". The New York Times.  Zaretsky, Eli (Mar–Apr 2003). "Norman O. Brown, 1913-2002". Radical Philosophy. 118: 50–52. Retrieved 7 December 2013.  Perloff, Marjorie (1994). John Cage: Composed in America. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-66056-7.  John (Milton) Cage, (Jr.) Biography. BookRags.com. 2010-11-02. Retrieved 2013-08-01.  http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/cage-radio.html John Cage on "Empty Words" and the demilitarization of language, in a radio interview, August 8, 1974  John Cage (1981). Empty Words: Writings '73–'78. Wesleyan University Press. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-8195-6067-4.  "John Cage and Norman O. Brown photographs"(PDF). Oac.cdlib.org. Retrieved 2013-10-20.  William Palmer (2001). Engagement with the Past. University Press of Kentucky. p. 100. ISBN 0-8131-7088-5.  Keen, Sam. (1974). Voices and Visions. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-064260-2.  Podhoretz, Norman. (1999). Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-684-85594-1.  Michael S. Roth, EDUCATION, FREEDOM AND DISTINCTION Remarks at the Phi Beta Kappa Initiation (2008) http://www.wesleyan.edu/president/text/2008_phibetakappa.html  Brown, Norman. (1991). Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07298-7.  "New Light on the Art of Islam | Reviews | Seven Pillars House of Wisdom". Sevenpillarshouse.org. 2010-04-27. Archived from the original on 2012-10-22. Retrieved 2013-08-01.  *Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-83240-2.  "The 1974 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction". The Pulitzer Organization. Retrieved 2023-05-18. Further reading edit In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2007 David Greenham, The Resurrection of the Body: The Work of Norman O. Brown, Lexington Books, 2006 Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, Mercury House, 2008 John Dizikes and Andrew Orlans, "Remembering Nobby: Reminiscences of John Dizikes and Andrew Orlans", March 2007, transcript published 2012 and included in Regional History Project at Special Collections, McHenry Library, UCSC or available from The Norman O Brown Appreciation Facebook group. External links edit  Wikiquote has quotations related to Norman O. Brown. A Brief Biography from UC Santa Cruz Library Article on Nobby in Metroactive Last edited 7 months ago by Οἶδα RELATED ARTICLES Life Against Death 1959 book by Norman O. Brown Wesleyan University Press American university press Love's Body 1966 book by Norman O. Brown Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0. I have been, so far, in the early stages of an attempt to estimate the prospects of what I shall now rename as an "Equivocality Thesis" with respect to certain common modals (that is, a thesis, or set of theses, with respect to particular common modals, which claims that they are univocal across the practical/alethic divide, or if they are multivocal, then their multivocality appears equally on each side of the barrier). My strategy has been to put up as good an initial case as I could in favour of representing the use of certain modals on different sides of the barrier as explicable in terms of a single set of acceptability modals, which are to be semantically barrier-indifferent; the differences between alethic and practical acceptabilities being attributed to the semantic differences between judicative and volitive mode-markers (*F' and T), together with structural differences, such as the appearance on the practical side of "two-slot" antecedents, with 'mixed' mode-markers, in acceptability conditionals, which might reasonably themselves be attributed to differences between 'H'and 'T. I have so far considered only volitive acceptabilities which might be thought of as more or less analogous to Kant's Technical Imperatives; and 1 have not yet raised any question about the inferential relations which might obtain across the barrier, in particular about the possibility that volitive acceptabilities (or some of them) might be equivalent to, or inferable from, certain alethic acceptabilities. It is time to attend to these lacunae, starting with the second. The existence of such cross-barrier inferabilities would be of interest in more than one way. (1) It would be of interest in itself, as providing some interesting general logical facts; (2) anyone who regarded practical acceptabilities as philosophically problematic, but did not feel the same way about alethic acceptabilities, might be reassured in so far as he could think of practical acceptabilities as derivable from alethic acceptabilities; (3) someone who did not regard either variety of acceptability as specially problematic, might well (and no doubt should) regard both as in need of philosophical justi-fication, and it would be a step towards such justification to show that, provided certain alethic acceptabilities are justifiable, certain practical acceptabilities are also justifiable; (4) the display of such cross-barrier relations might itself be relevant to the prospects of the "Equivocality Thesis".  I shall begin the substantial discussion of this topic by taking a common modal which I have not so far associated with any of the sub-varieties of acceptability, namely, the modal "should". In a certain sense, this is a slight cheat, since my purpose in so doing is to cover up some of the intricacies of detail which would complicate matters if I were to proceed with direct reference of modals already invoked; but as I intend shortly to lay bare some of that detail, perhaps my procedure might be regarded as an expository device, and so as only a temporary cheat.  Let us take as our example the following acceptability sentence:  "To preserve a youthful complexion, if one has a relatively insensitive skin, one should smear one's face with peanut butter before retiring at night." This fascinating recipe can be thought of as being, in my scheme of representation, expressible as "It should be, given that let one preserve a youthful complexion and that one has a relatively insensitive skin, that let one smear one's face with peanut butter before retiring", or in an abbreviated general symbolism "Should (! E, - F; I G)". Now there is at least some initial plausibility in the idea that this practical acceptability statement is satisfactory (qua true) just in case the following alethic acceptability statement is also acceptable (qua true): "It should be, given that it is the case that one smears one's skin with peanut butter before retiring and that it is the case that one has a relatively insensitive skin, that it is the case that one preserves a youthful complexion." More generally, there is some plausibility to the idea that an ex emplar of the form 'Should (I E, - E; ! G) is true just in case a corresponding examplar of the form Should (FE, -G; FE) is true.  Before proceeding further, I will attempt to deal briefly with a possible objection which might be raised at this point. I can imagine an ardent descriptivist, who first complains, in the face of someone who wishes to allow a legitimate autonomous status to practical acceptability generalizations, that truth-conditions for such generalizations are not available, and perhaps are in principle not available; so such generalizations are not to be taken seriously. We then point out to him that, at least for a class of such cases, truth-conditions are available, and that they are to be found in related alethic generalizations, a kind of generalization he accepts. He then complains that, if finding truth-conditions involves representing the practical acceptability generalizations as being true just in case related alethic generalizations are true, then practical acceptability generalizations are simply reducible to alethic generalizations, and so are not to be taken seriously for another reason, namely, that they are simply transformations of alethic generalizations, and we could perfectly well get on without them. Maybe some of you have heard some ardent descriptivists arguing in a style not so very different from this. Now a deep reply to such an objection would involve (I think) a display of the need for a system of reasoning in which the value to be transmitted by acceptable inference is not truth but practical value, together with a demonstration of the role of practical acceptability generalizations in such a system. I suspect that such a reply could be constructed, but I do not have it at my fingertips (or tongue-tip), so I shall not try to produce it. An interim reply, however, might take the following form: even though it may be true (which is by no means certain) that certain practical acceptability generalizations have the same truth-conditions as certain corresponding alethic generalizations, it is not to be supposed that the former generalizations are simply reducible to the latter (in some disrespectful sense of reducible). For though both kinds of generalization are defeasible, they are not defeasible in the same way; more exactly, what is a defeating condition for a given practical generalization is not a defeating condition for its alethic counterpart.  A generalization of the form 'should (LE, - F; ! G)' may have, as a defeating condition, 'E"; that is to say, consistently with the truth of this generalization, it may be true that should (! E & | B*, - F: 1G*) where 'G* is inconsistent with 'G. But since, in the alethic counterpart generalization should (F E, - G; - E):  'E does not occur in the antecedent, 'E* cannot be a defeating condition for this generalization. And, since liability to defeat by a certain range of defeating conditions is essential to the role which acceptability generalizations play in reasoning, this difference between a practical generalization and its alethic counterpart is sufficient to eliminate the reducibility of the former to the latter.  To return to the main theme of this section. If, without further ado, we were to accept at this point the suggestion that 'should (I E, - F; I G) is true just in case should (F F, F G; F E) is true, we should be accepting it simply on the basis of intuition (includ-ing, of course, linguistic or logical intuition under the head of "intu-ition'"). If the suggestion is correct then we should attain, at the same time, a stronger assurance that it is correct and a better theoretical understanding of the alethic and practical acceptability, if we could show why it is correct by deriving it from some general principle(s). Kant, in fact, for reasons not unlike these, sought to show the validity of a different but fairly closely related Technical Imperative by just such a method. The form which he selects is one which, in my terms, would be represented by "It is fully acceptable, given let it be that B, that let it be that A" or "It is neces-sary, given let it be that B, that let it be that A". Applying this to the one fully stated technical imperative given in Grundlegung, we get "It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its extremities two intersecting arcs". Call this statement, (o). Though he does not express himself very clearly, 1 am certain that his claim is that this imperative is validated in virtue of the fact that it is, analytically, a consequence of an indicative statement which is true and, in the present context, unproblematic, namely, the statement vouched for by geo-metry, that if one bisects a line on an unerring principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting ares. Call this statement, (B). His argument seems to be expressible as follows.  (a) It is analytic that he who wills the end (so far as reason decides his conduct), wills the indispensable means thereto,  So (2) it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A as a result of B, then one wills that B. So 3) it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one judges that if A, then A as a result of B, then if one wills that A then one wills that B.  So (4) it is analytic that, if it is true that if A, then A as a result of B, then if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B.  From which, by substitution, we derive (5): it is analytic that if ß then o.  Now it seems to me to be meritorious, on Kant's part, first that he saw a need to justify hypothetical imperatives of this sort, which it is only too easy to take for granted, and second that he invoked the principle that "he who wills the end, wills the means"; intuit-ively, this invocation seems right. Unfortunately, however, the step from (3) to (4) seems open to dispute on two different counts.  It looks as if an unwarranted 'must' has appeared in the consequent of the conditional which is claimed, in (4), as analytic; the most that, to all appearances, could be claimed as being true of the antecedent is that "if let it be that A then let it be that B. (Perhaps more serious.) It is by no means clear by what right the psychological verbs 'judge' and will, which appear in (3), are omitted in (4); how does an (alleged) analytic connection between (i) judging that if A, A as a result of B and (ii) its being the case that if one wills that A then one wills that B yield an analytic connection between (i) it's being the case that if A, A as a result of B and (ii) the 'proposition' that if let it be that A then let it be that B? Can the presence in (3) of the phrase "in so far as one is rational" legitimize this step? I do not know what remedy to propose for the first of these two difficulties; but I will attempt a reconstruction of Kant's line of argument which might provide relief from the second. It might, indeed, even be an expansion of Kant's actual thinking: but whether or not this is so, I am a very long way from being confident in its adequacy.  (1) Let us suppose it to be a fundamental psychological law that, ceteris paribus, for any creature x (of a sufficiently developed kind), no matter what A and B are, if x wills A and judges that if A, A only as a result of B, then x wills B. This I take to be a proper representation of "he who wills the end, wills the indispensable means"; and in calling it a fundamental law I mean that it is the law, or one of the laws, from which 'willing' and 'judging' derive their sense as names of concepts which explain behaviour, So, 1 assume, to reject it would be to deprive these words of their sense.  If x is a rational creature, since in this case his attitudes of acceptance are at least to some degree under his control (volitive or judicative assent can be withheld or refused), this law will hold for him only if the following is true:  (2) x wills (it is x's will) that (for any A, B) if x wills that A and judges that if A, A only as a result of B, then x is to will that B.  In so far as x proceeds rationally, x should will as specified in  only if x judges that if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B; otherwise, in willing as specified in (2), he will be willing to run the risk of passing from satisfactory attitudes to unsatisfactory ones. So, given that x wills as specified in (2): x should (qua rational judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that it A. A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B.  Since the satisfactoriness of attitudes of acceptance resolves itself into the satisfactoriness (in the sense distinguished in the previous chapter) of the contents of those attitudes (marked by the appropriate mode-markers), if x judges as specified in (3) then:  (4) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that ! A and also satisfactory that if it is the case that A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B.  And, if x judges as in (4), then (because (A & B → C) yields A → (B → C)):  (5) x should judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if A, A only because B, then it is satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B.  But if x judges that satisfactoriness is, for any A, B, transmitted in this particular way, then:  (6) x should judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B. But if any rational being should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) the first 'propositional' form yields the second, then the first propositional form does yield the second; so:  (7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B.  (A special apology for the particularly violent disregard of use and mention'; my usual reason is offered.)  Fig. 4 summarizes the steps of the argument.  1. Kant's steps  a = It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a line on an unerring prin-  ciple, that let it be that 1 draw from its extremities two intersecting arcs. ß = If one bisects a line on an unerring principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting arcs.  (t) It is analytic that (so far as he is rational) he who wills the end wills the  It is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A only as a result of B, then one wills that B. It is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one judges that if A, A as a result of B, then if one wills that A one wills that B. It is analytic that if. if A, then A as a result of B, then, if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B, It is analytic that if B, then or. I1. Reconstruction steps  (5) Fundamental law that (ceteris paribus) for any creature x (for any A, B), if x wills A and judges that if A, then A as a result of B; then x wills B.  x wills that (for any A, B) if x wills A and judges that if A, A as a result of B, then x is to will that B, x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B. × should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that ! A and also satisfactory that if + A, then I A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B. x should (qr.) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if + A, FA only because B, then it is satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let x should (q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B. (For any A. B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let it FiG. 4. Validation of technical acceptabilities It will be convenient to initiate the discussion of this topic by again referring to Kant. Kant thought that there is a special sub-class of Hypothetical Imperatives (which he called "counsels of prudence") which were like his class of Technical Imperatives, except in that the end specified in a full statement of the imperative is the special end of Happiness (one's happiness). To translate into my terminology, this seems to amount to the thesis that there is a special subclass of, for example, singular practical acceptability conditionals which exemplifies the structure "it is acceptable, given that let a (an indi-vidual) be happy, that let a be (do) G"; an additional indicative sub-antecedent ("that it is the case that a is F") might be sometimes needed, and could be added without difficulty. There would, presumably, be a corresponding special subclass of acceptability generalizations. The main characteristics which Kant would attribute to such prudential acceptability conditionals would, I think, be the following.  The foundation for such conditionals is exactly the same as that for technical imperatives; they would be treated as being, in principle, analytically consequences of indicative statements to the effect that so-and-so is a (the) means to such-and-such. The relation between my doing philosophy now and my being happy would be a causal relation not significantly different from the relation between my taking an aspirin and my being relieved of my headache. However, though the relation would be the same, the question whether in fact my doing philosophy now will promote my happiness is insoluble; to solve it, I should have to be omniscient. since I should have to determine that my doing philosophy now would lead to "a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances" The special end (happiness) of specific prudential acceptability conditionals is one which we know that, as a matter of "natural necessity", every human being has; so, unlike technical imperatives, their applicability to himself cannot be disclaimed by any human being. (4) Before we bring in the demands of morality (which will prescribe concern for our own happiness as a derivative duty), the only positive evaluation of a desire for one's happiness is an alethic evalu-ation; one ought to, or must, desire one's own happiness only in the sense that, whoever one may be, it is acceptable that it is the case that one desire one's own happiness; the 'ought' or 'must' is non-practical. (This position seems to me akin to a Humean appeal to "natural dispositions, in place of justification.)  Iwould wish to disagree with Kant in two, or possibly three, ways.  (1) Kant, I think, did not devote a great deal of thought to the nature of happiness, no doubt because he regarded it as being of little importance to the philosophical foundations of morality.  So it is not clear whether he regarded happiness as a distinct end from the variety of ends which one might pursue with a view to happiness, rather than as a complex end which includes (in some sense of "include ) some of such ends. If he did regard it as a distinct end, then I think he was wrong.  I think he was certainly wrong in thinking of something's being conducive to happiness as being on all fours with, say, something's being conducive to the relief of a headache; as, perhaps, a matter (in both cases) of causal relationship. I would like to think him wrong in thinking that (morality apart) there is no practical interpretation of 'ought' in which one ought to pursue (desire, aim at) one's own happiness. We have, then, three not unconnected questions which demand  some attention.  What is the nature of happiness? In what sense (if any) (and why) should I desire, or aim at, my own happiness? What is the nature of the connection between things which are conducive to happiness and happiness? (What, specifically, is implied by 'conducive?) Though it is fiendishly difficult, I shall take up question (C) first.  I trust that I will be forgiven if I do not present a full and coherent  answer.  Let us take a brief look at Aristotle. Aristotle was, I think, more  sophisticated in this area.  Though it is by no means beyond dispute, I am disposed to think that he did regard Happiness (eudaemonia) as a complex end 'containing' (in some sense) the ends which are constitutive of happiness; to use the jargon of recent commentators, I suspect he regarded it as an 'inclusive' and not a 'dominant' end. He certainly thought that one should (practical should') aim at one's own happiness. (The matter directly relevant to my present purpose.) I strongly suspect that he did not think that the relationship between, say, my doing philosophy and my happiness was a straightforward causal relationship. The passage which I have in mind is Nicomachean Ethics Vl. 12, 13, where he distinguishes between wisdom ("prac-tical wisdom") and cleverness (or, one might say, resourcefulness). He there makes the following statements: (a) that wisdom is not the same as cleverness, though like it, (b) that wisdom does not exist without cleverness, (c) that wisdom is always laudable (to be wise one must be virtuous), but cleverness is not always laudable, for example, in rogues, (d) that the relation between wisdom and cleverness is analogous to the relation between 'natural' virtue and virtue proper (he says this in the same place as he says (a)).  Faced with these not exactly voluminous remarks, some commentators have been led (not I think without reluctance) to interpret Aristotle as holding that the only difference between wisdom and cleverness is that the former does, and the latter does not, require the presence of virtue; to be wise is simply to be clever in good causes. Apart from the fact that additional difficulties are generated thereby, with respect to the interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics VI, to attribute this view to Aristotle does not seem to indicate a very high respect for his wisdom, particularly as the text does not seem to demand such an interpretation.  Following an idea once given me, long ago, by Austin, I would prefer to think of Aristotle as distinguishing between the characteristic manifestation of wisdom, namely, the ability to determine what one should do (what should be done), and the characteristic manifestation of cleverness, which is the ability to determine how to do what it is that should be done. On this interpretation cleverness would plainly be in a certain sense subordinate to wisdom, since opportunity for cleverness (and associated qualities) will only arise after there has been some determination of what it is that is to be done. It may also be helpful (suggestive) to think of wisdom as being (or being assimilable to) administrative ability, with cleverness being comparable with executive ability. I would also like to connect cleverness, initially, with the ability to recognize (devise) technical acceptabilities (though its scope might be larger than this, while wisdom is shown primarily in other directions. On such assumptions, expansion of the still obscure Aristotelian distinction is plainly a way of pursuing question (C), or questions closely related to it; for we will be asking what other kinds of acceptabilities (beyond 'technical acceptabilities) we need in order to engage (or engage effectively) in practical reasoning. I fear my contribution here will be sketchy and not very systematic.  We might start by exploring a little further the 'administrative/ executive distinction, a distinction which, I must admit, is extremely hazy and also not at all hard and fast (lines might be drawn, in different cases, in quite different places). A boss tells his secretary that he will be travelling on business to such-and-such places, next week, and asks her to arrange travel and accommodation for him.  I suspect that there is nothing peculiar about that. But suppose, instead of giving her those instructions, he had said to her that he wanted to travel on business somewhere or other, next week, and asked her to arrange destinations, matters to be negotiated, firms to negotiate with, and brief him about what to say to those whom he would visit. That would be a little more unusual, and the secretary might reply angrily, "I am paid to be your secretary, not to run your business for you, let alone run you." What (philosophically) differentiates the two cases?  Let us call a desire or intention D which a man has at t "ter-minal for him at t" if there is no desire or intention which he has at t, which is more specific than D; if, for example, a man wanted at ta car, but it was also true of him that he wanted a Mercedes, then his desire for a car would not be terminal. Now I think we can (roughly) distinguish (at least) three ways in which a terminal desire may be non-specific.  (1) D may be finitely non-specific; for example, a man may want a large, fierce dog (to guard his house) and not care at all what kind of large, fierce dog he acquired; any kind will do (at least within some normal range). Furthermore, he does not envisage his attitude, that any kind will do, being changed when action-time comes; he will of course get some particular kind of dog, but what kind will simply depend on such things as availability.  D may be indeterminately non-specific: that is to say the desirer may recognize, and intend, that before he acts the desire or intention D should be made more specific than it is; he has decided, say, that he wants a large, fierce dog, but has not yet decided what kind he wants. It seems to me that an indeterminately non-specific desire or intention differs from a finitely non-specific desire in a way which is relevant to the application of the concept of means-taking. If the man with the finitely non-specific desire for a large, fierce dog decides on a mastiff, that would be (or at least could be) a case of choosing a mastiff as a means to having a large, fierce dog, but not something of which getting a large, fierce dog would be an effect. But, if the man with the indeterminate desire for a large, fierce dog decides that he wants a mastiff (as a further determination of that indeterminate desire), that is not a case of means-picking at all. There is a further kind of non-specificity which I mention only with a view to completeness: a desire D may be vaguely, or indefinitely, non-specific; a man may have decided that he wants a large, fierce dog, but it may not be very well defined what could count as a large, fierce dog; a mastiff would count, and a Pekinese would not, but what about a red setter? In such cases the desire or intention needs to be interpreted, but not to be further specified. With regard to the first two kinds of non-specificity, there are some remarks to be made.  (i) We do not usually (if we are sensible) make our desires more determinate than the occasion demands; if getting a dog is not a present prospect, a man who decides exactly what kind of dog he would like is engaging in fantasy.  (2) The final stage of determination may be left to the occasion of action; if I want to buy some fancy curtains, I may leave the full determination of the kind until I see them in  Circumstances may change the status of a desire; a man may have a finitely non-specific desire for a dog until he talks to his wife, who changes things for him (making his desire inde-terminately non-specific).  (4)  Indeterminately non-specific desires may of course be founded (and well founded) on reasons, and so may be not merely desires one does have but also desires which one should have.  We may now return to the boss and his secretary. It seems to me that what the 'normally' behaved boss does (assuming that he has a very new and inexperienced secretary) is to reach a finitely non-specific desire or intention (or a set of such), communicate these to his secretary, and leave to her the implementation of this (these) intention(s); he presumes that nothing which she will do, and no problem which she will encounter, will disturb his intention (for, within reasonable limits, he does not care what she does), even though her execution of her tasks may well involve considerable skill and diplomacy (deinotes). If she is more senior, then he may well not himself reach a finitely, but only an indetermin-ately, non-specific intention, leaving it to her to complete the determination and trusting her to do so more or less as he would himself. If she reaches a position in which she is empowered to make determinate his intentions not as she thinks he would think best, but as she thinks best, then I would say that she has ceased to be a secretary and has become an administrative assistant.  This might be a convenient place to refer briefly to a distine-tion which is of some importance in practical thinking which is not just a matter of finding a means, of one sort or another, to an already fixed goal, and which is fairly closely related to the process of determination which I have been describing. This is the distinction between non-propositional ends, like power, wealth, skill at chess, gardening; and propositional or objective ends, like to get the Dean to agree with my proposal, or that my uncle should go to jail for his peculations of the family money. Non-propositional ends are in my view universals, the kind of items to be named by mass-terms or abstract nouns. I should like to regard their non-propositional appearance as genuine; I would like them to be not only things which we can be said to pursue, but also things which we can be said to care about; and I would not want to reduce caring about' to 'caring that, though of course there is an intimate connection between these kinds of caring. I would like to make the following points.  Non-propositional ends enter into the most primitive kinds of psychological explanation; the behaviour of lower animals is to be explained in terms of their wanting food, not of their wanting (say) to eat an apple. Non-propositional ends are characteristically variable in degree, and the degrees are valuationally ordered; for one who wants wealth, a greater degree of wealth is (normally) preferable to a lesser degree. They are the type, I think, to which ultimate ends which are constitutive of happiness belong; and not without reason, since their non-propositional, and often non-temporal, character renders them fit members of an enduring system which is designed to guide conduct in particular cases. The process of determination applies to them, indeed, starts with them; desire for power is (say) rendered more determinate as desire for political power; and objectives (to get the position of Prime Minister) may be reached by determination applied to non-propositional ends. Though it is clear to me that the distinction exists, and that a number of particular items can be placed on one side or another of the barrier, there is a host of uncertain examples, and the distinction is not easy to apply. Let us now look at things from her (the secretary's) angle. First, many (indeed most) of the things she does, though perhaps cases of means-finding, will not be cases of finding means of the kind which philosophers usually focus on, namely, causal means. She gets him an air-ticket, which enables, but does not cause, him to travel to Kalamazoo, Michigan; she arranges by telephone for him to stay at the Hotel Goosepimple; his being booked in there is not an effect but an intended outcome of her conversation on the telephone; and his being booked in at that hotel is not a cause of his being booked at a hotel, but a way in which that situation or circumstance is realized. Second, if during her operations she discovers that there is an epidemic of yellow fever at Kalamazoo, she does not (unless she wishes to be fired) go blindly ahead and book him in; she consults him, because something has now happened which will (if he knows of it) disturb his finitely non-specific inten-tion; indeed may confront the boss with a plurality of conflicting (or apparently conflicting) ends or desiderata; a situation which is next in line for consideration. Before turning to it, however, I think 1 should remark that the kind of features which have shown up in this interpersonal transaction are also characteristic of solitary deliberation, when the deliberator executes his own decisions.  We are now, we suppose, at a stage at which the secretary has come back to the boss to announce that if she executes the task given her (implements the decision about what to do which he has reached), there is such-and-such a snag; that is, the decision can be implemented only at the cost of a consequence which will (or which she suspects may) dispromote some further end which he wants to promote, or promote some "counter-end" which he wants to dispromote.  We may remark that this kind of problem is not something which only arises after a finitely non-specific intention has been formed; exactly parallel problems are frequently, though not invariably, encountered on the way towards a finitely non-specific intention or desire. This prompts a further comment on Aristotle's remark that, though wisdom is not identical with cleverness. wisdom does not exist without cleverness. This dictum covers two distinct truths; first, that if a man were good at deciding what to do, but terrible at executing it (he makes a hash of working out train times, he is tactless with customs officials, he irritates hotel clerks into non-cooperation), one might hesitate to confer upon him the title 'wise'; at least a modicum of cleverness is required Second, and more interestingly, cleverness is liable to be manifested at all stages of deliberation; every time a snag arises in connection with a tentative determination of one's will, provided that the snag is not blatantly obvious, some degree of cleverness is manifested in seeing that, if one does such-and-such (as one contemplates doing), then there will be the undesirable result that so-and-so. The boss may now have to determine how 'deep' the snag is, how radically his plan will have to be altered to surmount it. To lay things out a bit, the boss might (in some sense of might'), in his deliberation, have formed successively a series of indeterminately non-specific intentions (1, L, I... I,), where each member is a more specific determination of its predecessor, and 1, represents the final decision which he imparted to the secretary. He now (the idea is) goes back to this sequence to find the most general (least specific) member which is such that if he has that intention, then he is saddled with the unwanted consequences.  He then knows where modification is required. Of course, in practice he may very weil not have constructed such a convenient sequence; if he has not, then he has partially to construct one on receipt of the bad news from the secretary, to construct one (that is) which is just sufficiently well filled in to enable him to be confident that a particular element in it is the most generic intention of those he has, which generates the undesirable consequence.  Having now decided which desire or intention to remove, how does he decide what to put in its place? How, in effect, does he  "compound his surviving end or ends with the new desideratum, the attainment of the end (or the avoidance of the counter-end) which has been brought to light by the snag? Now I have to confess that in connection with this kind of problem, I used to entertain a certain kind of picture. Let us label (for simplicity) initially just two ends E' and E?, with degrees of "objective desirability" d and d. For any action a, which might realize E', or E%, there will be a certain probability P, that it will realize E', a certain probability P, that it will realize E, and a probability P., (a function of p, and p.) that it will realize both. If E' and E are inconsistent (again, for simplicity, let us suppose they are) Pre will be zero. We can now, in principle, characterize the desirability of the action a,, relative to each end (E' and E*), and to each combination of ends (here just E' and E*), as a function of the desirability of the end and the probability that the action a, will realize that end, or combination of ends. If we envisage a range of possible actions, which includes a, together with other actions, we can imagine that each such action has a certain degree of desirability relative to each end (E' and (or) E*) and to their combination. If we suppose that, for each possible action, these desirabilities can be compounded (perhaps added), then we can suppose that one particular possible action scored higher (in action-desirability relative to these ends) than any alternative possible action; and that this is the action which wins out; that is, is the action which is, or at least should, be performed. (The computation would in fact be more complex than I have described, once account is taken of the fact that the ends involved are often not definite (determinate) states of affairs (like becoming President), but are variable in respect of the degree to which they might be realized (if one's end is to make a profit from a deal, that profit might be of a varying magnitude); so one would have to consider not merely the likelihood of a particular action's realizing the end of making a profit, but also the likelihood of its realizing that end to this or that degree; and this would considerably complicate the computational problem.)  No doubt most readers are far too sensible ever to have entertained any picture even remotely resembling the "Crazy-Bayesy" one I have just described. I was not, of course, so foolish as to suppose that such a picture represents the manner in which anybody actually decides what to do, though I did (at one point) consider the possibility that it might mirror, or reflect, a process actually taking place in the physiological underpinnings of psychological states (desires and beliefs), a process in the 'animal spirits, so to speak. I rather thought that it might represent an ideal, a procedure which is certainly unrealized in fact, and quite possibly one which is in principle unrealizable in fact, but still something to which the procedures we actually use might be thought of as approxima-tions, something for which they are substitutes; with the additional thought that the closer the approximation the better the procedure.  The inspirational source of such pictures as this seems to me to be the very pervasive conception of a mechanical model for the operations of the soul; desires are like forces to which we are sub-ject; and their influence on us, in combination, is like the vectoring of forces. I am not at all sure that I regard this as a good model; the strength of its appeal may depend considerably on the fact that some model is needed, and that, if this one is not chosen, it is not clear what alternative model is available.  If we are not to make use of any variant of my one-time pic-ture, how are we to give a general representation of the treatment of conflicting or competing ends? It seems to me that, for ex-ample, the accountant with the injured wife in Boise might, in the first instance, try to keep everything, to fulfil all relevant ends; he might think of telephoning Redwood City to see if his firm could postpone for a week the preparation of their accounts. If this is ineffective, then he would operate on some system of priorities.  Looking after his wife plainly takes precedence over attention to his firm's accounting, and over visiting his mother. But having settled on measures which provide adequately for his wife's needs, he then makes whatever adjustments he can to provide for the ends which have lost the day. What he does not do, as a rule, is to com-promise; even with regard to his previous decision involving the conflict between the claims of his firm and his mother, substantially he adopted a plan which would satisfy the claims of the firm, incorporating therein a weekend with mother as a way of doing what he could for her, having given priority to the claims of the firm. Such systems of priorities seem to me to have, among their significant features, the following.  They may be quite complex, and involve sub-systems of priorities within a single main level of priority. It may be that, for me, family concerns have priority over business concerns; and also that, within the area of family concerns, matters affecting my children have priority over matters concerning Aunt Jemima, whs been living with us all these years. There is a distinction between a standing, relatively long-term system of priorities, and its application to particular occasions, with what might be thought of as divergences between the two. Even though my relations with my children have, in general, priority over my relations with Aunt Jemima, on a particular occasion I may accord priority to spending time with Aunt Jemima to get her out of one of her tantrums over taking my son to the z00 to see the hippopotami.  It seems to me that a further important feature of practical think-ing, which plays its part in simplifying the handling of problems with which such thinking is concerned, is what I might call its 'revi-sionist character (in a non-practical sense of that term). Our desires, and ascriptions of desirability, may be relative in more than one way.  They may be 'desire-relative in that my desiring A, or my regarding A as desirable, may be dependent on my desiring, or regarding as desirable, B; the desire for, or the desirability of, A may be parasitic on a desire for, or the desirability of, B. This is the familiar case of A's being desired, or desirable for the sake of B. But desires and desirabilities may be relative in another slightly less banal way, which (initially) one might think of as fact-relativity. They may be relative to some actual or supposed prevailing situation; and, relative to such prevailing situations, things may be desired or thought desirable which would not normally be so regarded. A man who has been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered may be relieved and even delighted when he hears that the sentence has been changed to beheading; and a man whose wealth runs into hundreds of millions may be considerably upset if he loses a million or so on a particular transaction. Indeed, sometimes, one is led to suspect that the richer one is, the more one is liable to mind such decre-ments; witness the story, no doubt apocryphal, that Paul Getty had pay-telephones installed in his house for the use of his guests. The phenomenon of 'fact-relativity scems to reach at least to some extent into the area of moral desirabilities. It can be used, I think, to provide a natural way of disposing of the Good Samaritan paradox; and if one recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son, one may reflect that what incensed the for so long blameless son was that there should be all that junketing about a fact-relative desirability manifested by his errant brother; why should one get a party for that?  It perhaps fits in very well with these reflections that our practical thinking, or a great part of it, should be revisionist or incremental in character; that what very frequently happens is that we find something in the prevailing situation (or the situation anticipated as prevailing) which could do with improvement or remove a blemish. We do not, normally, set to work to construct a minor Utopia, It is notable that aversions play a particularly important role in incremental deliberations; and it is perhaps just that (up to a point) the removal of objects of aversion should take precedence over the installation of objects of desire. If I have to do without something which I desire, the desired object is not (unless the desire is extreme) constantly present in imagination to remind me that 1 am doing without it; but if I have to do or have something which 1 dislike, the object of aversion is present in reality, and so difficult to escape. This revisionist kind of thinking seems to me to extend from the loftiest problems (how to plan my life, which becomes how to improve on the pattern which prevails) to the smallest (how to arrange the furniture); and it extends also, at the next move so to speak, to the projected improvements which I entertain in thought; I seck to improve on them; a master chess-player, it is said, sees at once what would be a good move for him to make; all his thought is devoted to trying to find a better one.  When one looks at the matter a little more closely, one sees that  'fact-relative' desirability is really desirability relative to an anti-cipated, expected, or feared temporal extension of the actual state of affairs which prevails (an extension which is not necessarily identical with what prevails, but which will come about unless something is done about it). And looked at a little more closely still, such desires or desirabilities are seen to be essentially comparat-ive; what we try for is thought of as better than the anticipated state which prompts us to try for it. This raises the large and difficult question, how far is desirability of its nature comparative? Is it just that the pundits have not yet given us a non-comparative concept of desirability, or is there something in the nature of desire, or in the use we want to make of the concept of desirability, which is a good reason why we cannot have, or should not have, a non-comparative concept? Or, perhaps, we do have one, which operates only in limited regions? Certainly we do not have to think in narrowly incremental ways, as is attested by those who seek to comfort us (or discomfort us) by getting us to count our blessings (or the reverse); by, for example, pointing out that being beheaded is not really so hot, or that, if you have 200 million left after a bad deal, you are not doing so badly. Are such comforters abandoning comparative desirability, or are they merely shifting the term of comparison? Do we find non-comparative desirability (perhaps among other regions) in moral regions? If we say that a man is honest, we are likely to mean that he is at least not less honest than the average; but we do not expect a man, who wants or tries to be honest, just to want or try to be averagely honest. Nor do we expect him to aspire to supreme or perfect honesty (that might be a trifle presumptuous). We do expect, perhaps, that he try to be as honest as he can, which may mean that we don't expect him to form aspirations with regard to a lifetime record of any sort for honesty, but we do expect him to try on each occasion, or limited bunch of occasions, to be impeccably honest on those occasions, even though we know (and he knows) that on some occasions at some times there will or may be lapses. If something like this interpretation be correct, it may correspond to a general feature of universals (non-propositional ends) of which one cannot have too much, a type of which certain moral universals are specimens; desirabilities in the case of such universals are, perhaps, not com-parative. But these are unworked-out speculations.  To summarize briefly this rambling, hopefully somewhat dia-gnostic, and certainly unsystematic discussion. I have suggested, in a preliminary enquiry into practical acceptability which is other than technical acceptability:  that practical thinking, which is not just means-end think-ing, includes the determination or sharpening of anteced-ently indeterminate desires and intentions; that means-end thinking is involved in the process of such determination; that a certain sort of computational model may not be suitable; that systems of priorities, both general and tailored to occasions, are central; that much, though not perhaps all, of practical thinking is revisionist and comparative in character. I turn now to a brief consideration of questions (A) and (B) which I distinguished earlier, and left on one side. These questions  are:  What is the nature of happiness? In what sense, and why, should I desire or aim at my own happiness？ 1 shall take them together.  First, question (B) seems to me to divide, on closer examina-tion, into three further questions.  Is there justification for the supposition that one should, other things being equal, voluntarily continue one's existence, rather than end it? (Given that the answer to (1) is 'yes.) Is there justification for the idea that one should desire or seck to be happy? (Given that the answer to (2) is 'yes.) Is there a way of justifying (evaluating favourably) the acceptance of some particular set of ends (as distinct from all other such sets) as constitutive of happiness (or of my happiness)? The second and third questions, particularly the third, are closely related to, and likely to be dependent on, the account of happiness provided in answer to question (A); indeed, such an account might wholly or partly provide an answer to question (3), since "happiness" might turn out to be a value-paradigmatic term, the meaning of which dictates that to be happy is to have a combination of ends which (the combination) is valuable with respect to some particular purpose or point of view.  I shall say nothing about the first two questions; one or both of these would, I suspect, require a careful treatment of the idea of Final Causes, which so far I have not even mentioned. I will discuss the third question and question (A) in the next chapter. H. P. Grice Grice has been, so far, in the early stages of an attempt to estimate the prospects of what Grice shall now rename as an "Aequi-vocality Thesis" with respect to certain common modals — that is, a thesis, or set of theses, with respect to particular common modals, which claims that     they are *univocal* across the practical/alethic divide,     or, if they are multi-vocal,  their multi-vocality appears equally on each side of the barrier.  Grice’s strategy has been to put up as good an initial case as he could in favour of representing the use of certain modals on different sides of the barrier as explicable in terms of a single set of acceptability modals, which are to be semantically barrier-indifferent.  The differences between an alethic acceptability and a practical acceptability being attributed to     the semantic differences between judicative and volitive mode-markers (*F' and T),     together with     structural differences,     such as     — the appearance, on the practical side of a "two-slot" antecedent, with a ‘mixed' mode-marker, in an acceptability conditional,     which might reasonably themselves be attributed to a difference between 'H'and 'T.     Grice has so far considered only a volitive acceptability which might be thought of as more or less analogous to Kant's Technical Imperative    and Grice has not yet raised any question about the inferential relations which might obtain across the barrier, in particular about the possibility that volitive acceptabilities (or some of them) might be equivalent to, or inferable from, certain alethic acceptabilities.     It is time to attend to these lacunae, starting with the second.     The existence of such a cross-barrier inferability would be of interest in more than one way.     It would be of interest in itself, as providing some interesting general logical facts;     anyone who regarded a practical acceptability as philosophically problematic, but did not feel the same way about alethic acceptability, might be reassured in so far as he could think of practical acceptabilities as derivable from alethic acceptabilities;      someone who did not regard either variety of acceptability as specially problematic, might well (and no doubt should) regard both as in need of philosophical justification, and it would be a step towards such a justification to show that, provided certain alethic acceptability is justifiable, certain practical acceptability is also justifiable;     the display of such a cross-barrier relation might itself be relevant to the prospects of the "aequi-vocality Thesis".  Grice begins the substantial discussion of this topic by taking a common modal which I have not so far associated with any of the sub-varieties of acceptability, namely, the modal "should".     In a certain sense, this is a slight cheat, since Grice’s purpose in so doing is to cover up some of the intricacies of detail which would complicate matters if he were to proceed with direct reference of modals already invoked;     but as Grice intends shortly to lay bare some of that detail, perhaps Grice’s procedure might be regarded as an expository device, and so as only a temporary cheat.    Let us take as our example the following acceptability sentence:    "To preserve a youthful complexion, if one has a relatively insensitive skin, one should smear one's face with peanut butter before retiring at night."     This fascinating recipe can be thought of as being, in Grice’s scheme of representation, expressible as     It should be, given that let one preserve a youthful complexion and that one has a relatively insensitive skin, that let one smear one's face with peanut butter before retiring",     or     in an abbreviated general symbolism     “Should (! E, - F; I G)".     Now there is at least some initial plausibility in the idea that this practical acceptability statement is satisfactory (qua true) just in case the following alethic acceptability statement is also acceptable (qua true):     "It should be, given that it is the case that one smears one's skin with peanut butter before retiring and that it is the case that one has a relatively insensitive skin, that it is the case that one preserves a youthful complexion."     More generally, there is some plausibility to the idea that an exemplar of the form 'Should (I E, - E; ! G) is true just in case a corresponding examplar of the form Should (FE, -G; FE) is true.    Before proceeding further, Grice will attempt to deal briefly with a possible objection which might be raised at this point.     Grice can imagine an ardent descriptivist, who first complains, in the face of someone who wishes to allow a legitimate autonomous status to practical acceptability generalizations, that truth-conditions for such generalizations are not available, and perhaps are in principle not available;     So such generalizations are not to be taken seriously.     We then point out to him that, at least for a class of such cases, truth-conditions are available, and that they are to be found in related alethic generalizations, a kind of generalization he accepts.     He then complains that, if finding truth-conditions involves representing the practical acceptability generalizations as being true just in case related alethic generalizations are true, practical acceptability generalizations are simply reducible to alethic generalizations, and so are not to be taken seriously for another reason, namely, that they are simply transformations of alethic generalizations, and we could perfectly well get on without them.     Maybe some of you have heard some ardent descriptivists arguing in a style not so very different from this.     Now a deep reply to such an objection would involve (Grice thinks) a display of the need for a system of reasoning in which the value to be transmitted by acceptable inference is not truth but practical value, together with a demonstration of the role of practical acceptability generalizations in such a system.     Grice suspects that such a reply could be constructed, but Grice does not have it at his fingertips (or tongue-tip), so Grice shall not try to produce it.     An interim reply, however, might take the following form:     even though it may be true (which is by no means certain) that certain practical acceptability generalizations have the same truth-conditions as certain corresponding alethic generalizations, it is not to be supposed that the former generalizations are simply reducible to the latter —in some disrespectful sense of reducible.    For though both kinds of generalization are defeasible, they are not defeasible in the same way;     more exactly, what is a defeating condition for a given practical generalization is not a defeating condition for its alethic counterpart.    A generalization of the form '    should (LE, - F; ! G)'     may have, as a defeating condition,     'E"; that is to say, consistently with the truth of this generalization, it may be true that should (! E & | B*, - F: 1G*) where 'G* is inconsistent with 'G.     But since, in the alethic counterpart generalization should (F E, - G; - E):    'E does not occur in the antecedent, '    E* cannot be a defeating condition for this generalization.     And, since liability to defeat by a certain range of defeating conditions is essential to the role which acceptability generalizations play in reasoning, this difference between a practical generalization and its alethic counterpart is sufficient to eliminate the reducibility of the former to the latter.    To return to the main theme of this section.     If, without further ado, we were to accept at this point the suggestion that   'should (I E, - F; I G)     is true just in case     should (F F, F G; F E)     is true, we should be accepting it simply on the basis of intuition (includ-ing, of course, linguistic or logical intuition under the head of "intuition'").     If the suggestion is correct, we should attain, at the same time, a stronger assurance that it is correct and a better theoretical understanding of the alethic and practical acceptability, if we could show why it is correct by deriving it from some general principle.    Kant, in fact, for reasons not unlike these, sought to show the validity of a different but fairly closely related Technical Imperative by just such a method.   The form which he selects is one which, in Grice’s terms, would be represented by     It is fully acceptable, given let it be that B, that let it be that A" or "    It is neces-sary, given let it be that B, that let it be that A".     Applying this to the one fully stated technical imperative given in Grundlegung, we get     "It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a line on an unerring principle, that let it be that I draw from its extremities two intersecting arcs".     Call this statement, (o).     Though Kant does not express himself very clearly, Grice is certain that Kant’s claim is that this imperative is validated in virtue of the fact that it is, analytically, a consequence of an indicative statement which is true and, in the present context, unproblematic, namely, the statement vouched for by geo-metry, that if one bisects a line on an unerring principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting ares.     Call this statement, (B).     Kant’s argument seems to be expressible as follows.      It is analytic that he who wills the end (so far as reason decides his conduct), wills the indispensable means thereto,    So (2) it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, A as a result of B, one wills that B.     So 3) it is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one judges that if A, A as a result of B, then if one wills that A then one wills that B.    So (4) it is analytic that, if it is true that if A, then A as a result of B, then if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B.    From which, by substitution, we derive (5):     it is analytic that if ß  o.    Now it seems to me to be meritorious, on Kant's part,     first     that     he saw a need to justify hypothetical imperatives of this sort, which it is only too easy to take for granted, and     second     that     Kant invokes the principle that "he who wills the end, wills the means";     Machiavelli    intuit-ively, this invocation seems right.     Unfortunately, however, the step from (3) to (4) seems open to dispute on two different counts.    It looks as if an unwarranted 'must' has appeared in the consequent of the conditional which is claimed, in (4), as analytic;     the most that, to all appearances, could be claimed as being true of the antecedent is that "if let it be that A let it be that B.    Perhaps more serious.     It is by no means clear by what right the psychological verbs 'judge' and will, which appear in (3), are omitted in (4);     how does an (alleged) analytic connection between (i) judging that if A, A as a result of B and (ii) its being the case that if one wills that A then one wills that B yield an analytic connection between (i) it's being the case that if A, A as a result of B and (ii) the 'proposition' that if let it be that A then let it be that B?   Can the presence in (3) of the phrase "in so far as one is rational" legitimize this step?    Grice does not know what remedy to propose for the first of these two difficulties;     but Grice will attempt a reconstruction of Kant's line of argument which might provide relief from the second.     It might, indeed, even be an expansion of Kant's actual thinking:     but whether or not this is so, Grice is a very long way from being confident in its adequacy.    Let us suppose it to be a fundamental psychological law that, ceteris paribus, for any creature x (of a sufficiently developed kind), no matter what A and B are, if x wills A and judges that if A, A only as a result of B,  x wills B.     This I take to be a proper representation of "he who wills the end, wills the indispensable means";     and     in calling it a fundamental law Grice means that it is the law, or one of the laws, from which 'willing' and 'judging' derive their sense as names of concepts which explain behaviour,     So, Grice assumes, to reject it would be to deprive these words of their sense.    If x is a rational creature, since in this case his attitudes of acceptance are at least to some degree under his control (volitive or judicative assent can be withheld or refused), this law will hold for him only if the following is true:  (2) x wills (it is x's will) that (for any A, B) if x wills that A and judges that if A, A only as a result of B, x is to will that B.    In so far as x proceeds rationally, x should will as specified in    only if x judges that if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B;     otherwise, in willing as specified in (2), he will be willing to run the risk of passing from satisfactory attitudes to unsatisfactory ones.     So, given that x wills as specified in (2):    x should (qua rational judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that it A.    A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B.    Since the satisfactoriness of attitudes of acceptance resolves itself into the satisfactoriness (in the sense distinguished in the previous chapter) of the contents of those attitudes (marked by the appropriate mode-markers), if x judges as specified in (3) then:    (4) x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that ! A and also satisfactory that if it is the case that A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B.    And, if x judges as in (4), then (because (A & B → C) yields A → (B → C)):  (5) x should judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if A, A only because B, then it is satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let it be that B.    But if x judges that satisfactoriness is, for any A, B, transmitted in this particular way, then:     x should judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B. But if any rational being should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) the first 'propositional' form yields the second, then the first propositional form does yield the second; so:    (7) (For any A, B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B.    A special apology for the particularly violent disregard of use and mention';     Grice’s usual reason is offered.)    Fig. summarizes the steps of the argument.    1. Kant's steps    a = It is necessary, given let it be that one bisect a line on an unerring prin-  ciple, that let it be that 1 draw from its extremities two intersecting arcs. ß = If one bisects a line on an unerring principle, then one does so only as a result of having drawn from its extremities two intersecting arcs.    It is analytic that (so far as he is rational) he who wills the end wills the    It is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one wills that A, and judges that if A, then A only as a result of B, then one wills that B.    It is analytic that (so far as one is rational) if one judges that if A, A as a result of B, then if one wills that A one wills that B.    It is analytic that if. if A, then A as a result of B, then, if let it be that A, then it must be that let it be that B,    It is analytic that if B, then or.    Reconstruction steps    Fundamental law that (ceteris paribus) for any creature x (for any A, B), if x wills A and judges that if A, then A as a result of B; x wills B.    x wills that (for any A, B) if x wills A and judges that if A, A as a result of B, then x is to will that B,    x should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory to will that A and also satisfactory to judge that if A, A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory to will that B.    × should (qua rational) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that !    A and also satisfactory that if + A, then I A only as a result of B, then it is satisfactory that ! B.    x should (qr.) judge that (for any A, B) if it is satisfactory that if + A, FA only because B, then it is satisfactory that, if let it be that A, then let    x should (q.r.) judge that (for any A, B) if A, A only because B, yields if let it be that A, then let it be that B.    (For any A. B) if A, A only because B yields if let it be that A, then let it    FiG. 4. Validation of technical acceptabilities     It will be convenient to initiate the discussion of this topic by again referring to Kant.     Kant thought that there is a special sub-class of Hypothetical Imperatives (which he called "counsels of prudence") which were like his class of Technical Imperatives, except in that the end specified in a full statement of the imperative is the special end of Happiness (one's happiness).     To translate into Grice’s terminology, this seems to amount to the thesis that there is a special subclass of, for example, singular practical acceptability conditionals which exemplifies the structure "it is acceptable, given that let a (an indi-vidual) be happy, that let a be (do) G"; an additional indicative sub-antecedent ("that it is the case that a is F") might be sometimes needed, and could be added without difficulty.     There would, presumably, be a corresponding special subclass of acceptability generalizations.     The main characteristics which Kant would attribute to such prudential acceptability conditionals would, I think, be the following.    The foundation for such conditionals is exactly the same as that for technical imperatives; they would be treated as being, in principle, analytically consequences of indicative statements to the effect that so-and-so is a (the) means to such-and-such.     The relation between my doing philosophy now and my being happy would be a causal relation not significantly different from the relation between my taking an aspirin and my being relieved of my headache.    However, though the relation would be the same, the question whether in fact my doing philosophy now will promote my happiness is insoluble; to solve it, I should have to be omniscient. since I should have to determine that my doing philosophy now would lead to "a maximum of welfare in my present and all future circumstances"    The special end (happiness) of specific prudential acceptability conditionals is one which we know that, as a matter of  "natural necessity", every human being has; so, unlike technical imperatives, their applicability to himself cannot be disclaimed by any human being. (4)   Before we bring in the demands of morality (which will prescribe concern for our own “eudaemonia” as a derivative duty), the only positive evaluation of a desire for one's happiness is an alethic evalu-ation; one ought to, or must, desire one's own happiness only in the sense that, whoever one may be, it is acceptable that it is the case that one desire one's own happiness; the 'ought' or 'must' is non-practical.     This position seems to Grice akin to a Humean appeal to "natural dispositions, in place of justification.    Grice would wish to disagree with Kant in two, or possibly three, ways.        Kant, Grice thinks, did not devote a great deal of thought to the nature of “eudaemonia,” no doubt because he regarded it as being of little importance to the philosophical foundations of morality.    So it is not clear whether he regarded happiness as a distinct end from the variety of ends which one might pursue with a view to happiness, rather than as a complex end which includes (in some sense of "include ) some of such ends. If he did regard it as a distinct end, then I think he was wrong.    Grice thinks that he was certainly wrong in thinking of something's being conducive to happiness as being on all fours with, say, something's being conducive to the relief of a headache; as, perhaps, a matter (in both cases) of causal relationship.    Grice would like to think him wrong in thinking that (morality apart) there is no practical interpretation of 'ought' in which one ought to pursue (desire, aim at) one's own happiness.    We have, then, three not unconnected questions which demand  some attention.    What is the nature of happiness?    In what sense (if any) (and why) should I desire, or aim at, my own happiness?    What is the nature of the connection between things which are conducive to happiness and happiness? (What, specifically, is implied by 'conducive?)  Though it is fiendishly difficult, I shall take up question (C) first.    I trust that I will be forgiven if I do not present a full and coherent  answer.    Let us take a brief look at Aristotle. Aristotle was, I think, more  sophisticated in this area.    Though it is by no means beyond dispute, I am disposed to think that he did regard Happiness (eudaemonia) as a complex end 'containing' (in some sense) the ends which are constitutive of happiness; to use the jargon of recent commentators, I suspect he regarded it as an 'inclusive' and not a 'dominant' end.    He certainly thought that one should (practical should') aim at one's own happiness.    (The matter directly relevant to my present purpose.) I strongly suspect that he did not think that the relationship between, say, my doing philosophy and my happiness was a straightforward causal relationship. The passage which I have in mind is Nicomachean Ethics Vl. 12, 13, where he distinguishes between wisdom ("prac-tical wisdom") and cleverness (or, one might say, resourcefulness).    He there makes the following statements: (a) that wisdom is not the same as cleverness, though like it, (b) that wisdom does not exist without cleverness, (c) that wisdom is always laudable (to be wise one must be virtuous), but cleverness is not always laudable, for example, in rogues, (d) that the relation between wisdom and cleverness is analogous to the relation between 'natural' virtue and virtue proper (he says this in the same place as he says (a)).    Faced with these not exactly voluminous remarks, some commentators have been led (not I think without reluctance) to interpret Aristotle as holding that the only difference between wisdom and cleverness is that the former does, and the latter does not, require the presence of virtue; to be wise is simply to be clever in good causes.     Apart from the fact that additional difficulties are generated thereby, with respect to the interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics, to attribute this view to Aristotle does not seem to indicate a very high respect for his wisdom, particularly as the text does not seem to demand such an interpretation.    Following an idea once given to Grice, long ago, by Austin, Grice would prefer to think of Aristotle as distinguishing between the characteristic manifestation of wisdom, namely, the ability to determine what one should do (what should be done), and the characteristic manifestation of cleverness, which is the ability to determine how to do what it is that should be done.     On this interpretation cleverness would plainly be in a certain sense subordinate to wisdom, since opportunity for cleverness (and associated qualities) will only arise after there has been some determination of what it is that is to be done.     It may also be helpful (suggestive) to think of wisdom as being (or being assimilable to) administrative ability, with cleverness being comparable with executive ability. I would also like to connect cleverness, initially, with the ability to recognize (devise) technical acceptabilities (though its scope might be larger than this, while wisdom is shown primarily in other directions.     On such assumptions, expansion of the still obscure Aristotelian distinction is plainly a way of pursuing question (C), or questions closely related to it; for we will be asking what other kinds of acceptabilities (beyond 'technical acceptabilities) we need in order to engage (or engage effectively) in practical reasoning.     I fear my contribution here will be sketchy and not very systematic.    We might start by exploring a little further the 'administrative/ executive distinction, a distinction which, I must admit, is extremely hazy and also not at all hard and fast (lines might be drawn, in different cases, in quite different places).     A boss tells his secretary that he will be travelling on business to such-and-such places, next week, and asks her to arrange travel and accommodation for him.  I suspect that there is nothing peculiar about that.     But suppose, instead of giving her those instructions, he had said to her that he wanted to travel on business somewhere or other, next week, and asked her to arrange destinations, matters to be negotiated, firms to negotiate with, and brief him about what to say to those whom he would visit. That would be a little more unusual, and the secretary might reply angrily, "I am paid to be your secretary, not to run your business for you, let alone run you." What (philosophically) differentiates the two cases?    Let us call a desire or intention D which a man has at t "ter-minal for him at t" if there is no desire or intention which he has at t, which is more specific than D; if, for example, a man wanted at ta car, but it was also true of him that he wanted a Mercedes, then his desire for a car would not be terminal. Now I think we can (roughly) distinguish (at least) three ways in which a terminal desire may be non-specific.    D may be finitely non-specific; for example, a man may want a large, fierce dog (to guard his house) and not care at all what kind of large, fierce dog he acquired; any kind will do (at least within some normal range). Furthermore, he does not envisage his attitude, that any kind will do, being changed when action-time comes; he will of course get some particular kind of dog, but what kind will simply depend on such things as availability.    D may be indeterminately non-specific: that is to say the desirer may recognize, and intend, that before he acts the desire or intention D should be made more specific than it is; he has decided, say, that he wants a large, fierce dog, but has not yet decided what kind he wants. It seems to me that an indeterminately non-specific desire or intention differs from a finitely non-specific desire in a way which is relevant to the application of the concept of means-taking. If the man with the finitely non-specific desire for a large, fierce dog decides on a mastiff, that would be (or at least could be) a case of choosing a mastiff as a means to having a large, fierce dog, but not something of which getting a large, fierce dog would be an effect. But, if the man with the indeterminate desire for a large, fierce dog decides that he wants a mastiff (as a further determination of that indeterminate desire), that is not a case of means-picking at all.    There is a further kind of non-specificity which I mention only with a view to completeness: a desire D may be vaguely, or indefinitely, non-specific; a man may have decided that he wants a large, fierce dog, but it may not be very well defined what could count as a large, fierce dog; a mastiff would count, and a Pekinese would not, but what about a red setter? In such cases the desire or intention needs to be interpreted, but not to be further specified.  With regard to the first two kinds of non-specificity, there are some remarks to be made.    We do not usually (if we are sensible) make our desires more determinate than the occasion demands; if getting a dog is not a present prospect, a man who decides exactly what kind of dog he would like is engaging in fantasy.      The final stage of determination may be left to the occasion of action; if I want to buy some fancy curtains, I may leave the full determination of the kind until I see them in  Circumstances may change the status of a desire; a man may have a finitely non-specific desire for a dog until he talks to his wife, who changes things for him (making his desire inde-terminately non-specific).    Indeterminately non-specific desires may of course be founded (and well founded) on reasons, and so may be not merely desires one does have but also desires which one should have.    We may now return to the boss and his secretary. It seems to me that what the 'normally' behaved boss does (assuming that he has a very new and inexperienced secretary) is to reach a finitely non-specific desire or intention (or a set of such), communicate these to his secretary, and leave to her the implementation of this (these) intention(s); he presumes that nothing which she will do, and no problem which she will encounter, will disturb his intention (for, within reasonable limits, he does not care what she does), even though her execution of her tasks may well involve considerable skill and diplomacy (deinotes). If she is more senior, then he may well not himself reach a finitely, but only an indetermin-ately, non-specific intention, leaving it to her to complete the determination and trusting her to do so more or less as he would himself. If she reaches a position in which she is empowered to make determinate his intentions not as she thinks he would think best, but as she thinks best, then I would say that she has ceased to be a secretary and has become an administrative assistant.    This might be a convenient place to refer briefly to a distine-tion which is of some importance in practical thinking which is not just a matter of finding a means, of one sort or another, to an already fixed goal, and which is fairly closely related to the process of determination which I have been describing. This is the distinction between non-propositional ends, like power, wealth, skill at chess, gardening; and propositional or objective ends, like to get the Dean to agree with my proposal, or that my uncle should go to jail for his peculations of the family money.     Non-propositional ends are in my view universals, the kind of items to be named by mass-terms or abstract nouns. I should like to regard their non-propositional appearance as genuine; I would like them to be not only things which we can be said to pursue, but also things which we can be said to care about; and I would not want to reduce caring about' to 'caring that, though of course there is an intimate connection between these kinds of caring. I would like to make the following points.    Non-propositional ends enter into the most primitive kinds of psychological explanation; the behaviour of lower animals is to be explained in terms of their wanting food, not of their wanting (say) to eat an apple.    Non-propositional ends are characteristically variable in degree, and the degrees are valuationally ordered; for one who wants wealth, a greater degree of wealth is (normally) preferable to a lesser degree.    They are the type, I think, to which ultimate ends which are constitutive of happiness belong; and not without reason, since their non-propositional, and often non-temporal, character renders them fit members of an enduring system which is designed to guide conduct in particular cases.    The process of determination applies to them, indeed, starts with them; desire for power is (say) rendered more determinate as desire for political power; and objectives (to get the position of Prime Minister) may be reached by determination applied to non-propositional ends.    Though it is clear to me that the distinction exists, and that a number of particular items can be placed on one side or another of the barrier, there is a host of uncertain examples, and the distinction is not easy to apply.    Let us now look at things from her (the secretary's) angle.     First, many (indeed most) of the things she does, though perhaps cases of means-finding, will not be cases of finding means of the kind which philosophers usually focus on, namely, causal means. She gets him an air-ticket, which enables, but does not cause, him to travel to Kalamazoo, Michigan; she arranges by telephone for him to stay at the Hotel Goosepimple; his being booked in there is not an effect but an intended outcome of her conversation on the telephone; and his being booked in at that hotel is not a cause of his being booked at a hotel, but a way in which that situation or circumstance is realized. Second, if during her operations she discovers that there is an epidemic of yellow fever at Kalamazoo, she does not (unless she wishes to be fired) go blindly ahead and book him in; she consults him, because something has now happened which will (if he knows of it) disturb his finitely non-specific inten-tion; indeed may confront the boss with a plurality of conflicting (or apparently conflicting) ends or desiderata; a situation which is next in line for consideration. Before turning to it, however, I think 1 should remark that the kind of features which have shown up in this interpersonal transaction are also characteristic of solitary deliberation, when the deliberator executes his own decisions.    We are now, we suppose, at a stage at which the secretary has come back to the boss to announce that if she executes the task given her (implements the decision about what to do which he has reached), there is such-and-such a snag; that is, the decision can be implemented only at the cost of a consequence which will (or which she suspects may) dispromote some further end which he wants to promote, or promote some "counter-end" which he wants to dispromote.    We may remark that this kind of problem is not something which only arises after a finitely non-specific intention has been formed; exactly parallel problems are frequently, though not invariably, encountered on the way towards a finitely non-specific intention or desire. This prompts a further comment on Aristotle's remark that, though wisdom is not identical with cleverness. wisdom does not exist without cleverness.     This dictum covers two distinct truths; first, that if a man were good at deciding what to do, but terrible at executing it (he makes a hash of working out train times, he is tactless with customs officials, he irritates hotel clerks into non-cooperation), one might hesitate to confer upon him the title 'wise'; at least a modicum of cleverness is required Second, and more interestingly, cleverness is liable to be manifested at all stages of deliberation; every time a snag arises in connection with a tentative determination of one's will, provided that the snag is not blatantly obvious, some degree of cleverness is manifested in seeing that, if one does such-and-such (as one contemplates doing), then there will be the undesirable result that so-and-so    The boss may now have to determine how 'deep' the snag is, how radically his plan will have to be altered to surmount it. To lay things out a bit, the boss might (in some sense of might'), in his deliberation, have formed successively a series of indeterminately non-specific intentions (1, L, I... I,), where each member is a more specific determination of its predecessor, and 1, represents the final decision which he imparted to the secretary.    He now (the idea is) goes back to this sequence to find the most general (least specific) member which is such that if he has that intention, then he is saddled with the unwanted consequences.    He then knows where modification is required. Of course, in practice he may very weil not have constructed such a convenient sequence; if he has not, then he has partially to construct one on receipt of the bad news from the secretary, to construct one (that is) which is just sufficiently well filled in to enable him to be confident that a particular element in it is the most generic intention of those he has, which generates the undesirable consequence.    Having now decided which desire or intention to remove, how does he decide what to put in its place? How, in effect, does he    "compound his surviving end or ends with the new desideratum, the attainment of the end (or the avoidance of the counter-end) which has been brought to light by the snag? Now I have to confess that in connection with this kind of problem, I used to entertain a certain kind of picture. Let us label (for simplicity) initially just two ends E' and E?, with degrees of "objective desirability" d and d. For any action a, which might realize E', or E%, there will be a certain probability P, that it will realize E', a certain probability P, that it will realize E, and a probability P., (a function of p, and p.) that it will realize both.     If E' and E are inconsistent (again, for simplicity, let us suppose they are) Pre will be zero. We can now, in principle, characterize the desirability of the action a,, relative to each end (E' and E*), and to each combination of ends (here just E' and E*), as a function of the desirability of the end and the probability that the action a, will realize that end, or combination of ends. If we envisage a range of possible actions, which includes a, together with other actions, we can imagine that each such action has a certain degree of desirability relative to each end (E' and (or) E*) and to their combination.     If we suppose that, for each possible action, these desirabilities can be compounded (perhaps added), then we can suppose that one particular possible action scored higher (in action-desirability relative to these ends) than any alternative possible action; and that this is the action which wins out; that is, is the action which is, or at least should, be performed.     (The computation would in fact be more complex than I have described, once account is taken of the fact that the ends involved are often not definite (determinate) states of affairs (like becoming President), but are variable in respect of the degree to which they might be realized (if one's end is to make a profit from a deal, that profit might be of a varying magnitude); so one would have to consider not merely the likelihood of a particular action's realizing the end of making a profit, but also the likelihood of its realizing that end to this or that degree; and this would considerably complicate the computational problem.)  No doubt most readers are far too sensible ever to have entertained any picture even remotely resembling the "Crazy-Bayesy" one I have just described. I was not, of course, so foolish as to suppose that such a picture represents the manner in which anybody actually decides what to do, though I did (at one point) consider the possibility that it might mirror, or reflect, a process actually taking place in the physiological underpinnings of psychological states (desires and beliefs), a process in the 'animal spirits, so to speak. I rather thought that it might represent an ideal, a procedure which is certainly unrealized in fact, and quite possibly one which is in principle unrealizable in fact, but still something to which the procedures we actually use might be thought of as approxima-tions, something for which they are substitutes; with the additional thought that the closer the approximation the better the procedure.    The inspirational source of such pictures as this seems to me to be the very pervasive conception of a mechanical model for the operations of the soul; desires are like forces to which we are sub-ject; and their influence on us, in combination, is like the vectoring of forces. I am not at all sure that I regard this as a good model; the strength of its appeal may depend considerably on the fact that some model is needed, and that, if this one is not chosen, it is not clear what alternative model is available.    If we are not to make use of any variant of my one-time pic-ture, how are we to give a general representation of the treatment of conflicting or competing ends? It seems to me that, for ex-ample, the accountant with the injured wife in Boise might, in the first instance, try to keep everything, to fulfil all relevant ends; he might think of telephoning Redwood City to see if his firm could postpone for a week the preparation of their accounts. If this is ineffective, then he would operate on some system of priorities.    Looking after his wife plainly takes precedence over attention to his firm's accounting, and over visiting his mother. But having settled on measures which provide adequately for his wife's needs, he then makes whatever adjustments he can to provide for the ends which have lost the day. What he does not do, as a rule, is to com-promise; even with regard to his previous decision involving the conflict between the claims of his firm and his mother, substantially he adopted a plan which would satisfy the claims of the firm, incorporating therein a weekend with mother as a way of doing what he could for her, having given priority to the claims of the firm. Such systems of priorities seem to me to have, among their significant features, the following.    They may be quite complex, and involve sub-systems of priorities within a single main level of priority. It may be that, for me, family concerns have priority over business concerns; and also that, within the area of family concerns, matters affecting my children have priority over matters concerning Aunt Jemima, whs been living with us all these years.    There is a distinction between a standing, relatively long-term system of priorities, and its application to particular occasions, with what might be thought of as divergences between the two.    Even though my relations with my children have, in general, priority over my relations with Aunt Jemima, on a particular occasion I may accord priority to spending time with Aunt Jemima to get her out of one of her tantrums over taking my son to the z00 to see the hippopotami.    It seems to me that a further important feature of practical think-ing, which plays its part in simplifying the handling of problems with which such thinking is concerned, is what I might call its 'revi-sionist character (in a non-practical sense of that term). Our desires, and ascriptions of desirability, may be relative in more than one way.    They may be 'desire-relative in that my desiring A, or my regarding A as desirable, may be dependent on my desiring, or regarding as desirable, B; the desire for, or the desirability of, A may be parasitic on a desire for, or the desirability of, B. This is the familiar case of A's being desired, or desirable for the sake of B. But desires and desirabilities may be relative in another slightly less banal way, which (initially) one might think of as fact-relativity. They may be relative to some actual or supposed prevailing situation; and, relative to such prevailing situations, things may be desired or thought desirable which would not normally be so regarded. A man who has been sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered may be relieved and even delighted when he hears that the sentence has been changed to beheading; and a man whose wealth runs into hundreds of millions may be considerably upset if he loses a million or so on a particular transaction.     Indeed, sometimes, one is led to suspect that the richer one is, the more one is liable to mind such decre-ments; witness the story, no doubt apocryphal, that Paul Getty had pay-telephones installed in his house for the use of his guests.   The phenomenon of 'fact-relativity scems to reach at least to some extent into the area of moral desirabilities.     It can be used, I think, to provide a natural way of disposing of the Good Samaritan paradox; and if one recalls the parable of the Prodigal Son, one may reflect that what incensed the for so long blameless son was that there should be all that junketing about a fact-relative desirability manifested by his errant brother; why should one get a party for that?    It perhaps fits in very well with these reflections that our practical thinking, or a great part of it, should be revisionist or incremental in character; that what very frequently happens is that we find something in the prevailing situation (or the situation anticipated as prevailing) which could do with improvement or remove a blemish. We do not, normally, set to work to construct a minor Utopia, It is notable that aversions play a particularly important role in incremental deliberations; and it is perhaps just that (up to a point) the removal of objects of aversion should take precedence over the installation of objects of desire. If I have to do without something which I desire, the desired object is not (unless the desire is extreme) constantly present in imagination to remind me that 1 am doing without it; but if I have to do or have something which 1 dislike, the object of aversion is present in reality, and so difficult to escape.     This revisionist kind of thinking seems to me to extend from the loftiest problems (how to plan my life, which becomes how to improve on the pattern which prevails) to the smallest (how to arrange the furniture); and it extends also, at the next move so to speak, to the projected improvements which I entertain in thought; I seck to improve on them; a master chess-player, it is said, sees at once what would be a good move for him to make; all his thought is devoted to trying to find a better one.    When one looks at the matter a little more closely, one sees that'fact-relative' desirability is really desirability relative to an anti-cipated, expected, or feared temporal extension of the actual state of affairs which prevails (an extension which is not necessarily identical with what prevails, but which will come about unless something is done about it). And looked at a little more closely still, such desires or desirabilities are seen to be essentially comparat-ive; what we try for is thought of as better than the anticipated state which prompts us to try for it.     This raises the large and difficult question, how far is desirability of its nature comparative? Is it just that the pundits have not yet given us a non-comparative concept of desirability, or is there something in the nature of desire, or in the use we want to make of the concept of desirability, which is a good reason why we cannot have, or should not have, a non-comparative concept? Or, perhaps, we do have one, which operates only in limited regions? Certainly we do not have to think in narrowly incremental ways, as is attested by those who seek to comfort us (or discomfort us) by getting us to count our blessings (or the reverse); by, for example, pointing out that being beheaded is not really so hot, or that, if you have 200 million left after a bad deal, you are not doing so badly.     Are such comforters abandoning comparative desirability, or are they merely shifting the term of comparison? Do we find non-comparative desirability (perhaps among other regions) in moral regions? If we say that a man is honest, we are likely to mean that he is at least not less honest than the average; but we do not expect a man, who wants or tries to be honest, just to want or try to be averagely honest. Nor do we expect him to aspire to supreme or perfect honesty (that might be a trifle presumptuous). We do expect, perhaps, that he try to be as honest as he can, which may mean that we don't expect him to form aspirations with regard to a lifetime record of any sort for honesty, but we do expect him to try on each occasion, or limited bunch of occasions, to be impeccably honest on those occasions, even though we know (and he knows) that on some occasions at some times there will or may be lapses. If something like this interpretation be correct, it may correspond to a general feature of universals (non-propositional ends) of which one cannot have too much, a type of which certain moral universals are specimens; desirabilities in the case of such universals are, perhaps, not com-parative. But these are unworked-out speculations.    To summarize briefly this rambling, hopefully somewhat dia-gnostic, and certainly unsystematic discussion. I have suggested, in a preliminary enquiry into practical acceptability which is other than technical acceptability:    that practical thinking, which is not just means-end think-ing, includes the determination or sharpening of anteced-ently indeterminate desires and intentions;    that means-end thinking is involved in the process of such determination;    that a certain sort of computational model may not be suitable;    that systems of priorities, both general and tailored to occasions, are central;    that much, though not perhaps all, of practical thinking is revisionist and comparative in character.    I turn now to a brief consideration of questions (A) and (B) which I distinguished earlier, and left on one side. These questions  are:    What is the nature of happiness?    In what sense, and why, should I desire or aim at my own happiness？    1 shall take them together.    First, question (B) seems to me to divide, on closer examina-tion, into three further questions.    Is there justification for the supposition that one should, other things being equal, voluntarily continue one's existence, rather than end it?    Given that the answer to (1) is 'yes.) Is there justification for the idea that one should desire or seck to be happy?    (Given that the answer to (2) is 'yes.) Is there a way of justifying (evaluating favourably) the acceptance of some particular set of ends (as distinct from all other such sets) as constitutive of happiness (or of my happiness)? The second and third questions, particularly the third, are closely related to, and likely to be dependent on, the account of happiness provided in answer to question (A); indeed, such an account might wholly or partly provide an answer to question (3), since  "happiness" might turn out to be a value-paradigmatic term, the meaning of which dictates that to be happy is to have a combination of ends which (the combination) is valuable with respect to some particular purpose or point of view.  I shall say nothing about the first two questions; one or both of these would, I suspect, require a careful treatment of the idea of Final Causes, which so far I have not even mentioned. I will discuss the third question and question (A) in the next chapter. H. P. Grice  The title which I have chosen for these lectures embodies, as I am sure you will have noticed, an ambiguity of a familiar type, an act-object ambiguity. The title-phrase [The Conception of Value] might refer to the item, whatever it may be, which one conceives, or conceives of, when one entertains the notion of value; again, it might refer to the act, operation, or undertaking in which the entertainment of that notion consists, and of which the conception (or concept) of value, in the first sense, is the distinctive object.  My introduction of this ambiguity was not accidental: for the precise nature of the connection between, on the one hand, the kind of thinking or mental state which is found, at least in primary instances, when we make attributions of value, and, on the other, the kind of item (if any) which serves as the characteristic object of such thinking is a matter which I regard as quite central to a proper study of the notion of value; my concern with it, moreover, is not an idiosyncracy, but has been shared by very many of the philosophers who, throughout the ages, have devoted themselves to this topic. Indeed a full understanding of the relationship between this or that fundamental form of thinking and the item, or class of items, which is, or at least might claim to be, a counterpart in extra-mental reality of that form of thinking seems to me a characteristic end of metaphysical enquiry. So it will not, perhaps, surprise you when I suggest, first that one should be ready to payattention not merely to the special (peculiar) character of the central questions about value but also to their general character, that is, to their place on the map of philosophical studies and their connection with other questions which are also represented in that map; and second that we should be ready, or even eager, if we can, to provide any answers which may initially find favour in our eyes with a suitable metaphysical backing. To do this might be a way, and might even be the only way, to remove the bafflement of certain people (of whom I know several) who are extremely able and highly sophisticated philosophers, particularly in the region of metaphysics, but who say, nevertheless, that they  'really just don't understand ethics'. I suspect that what they are lacking is not (of course) any competence in practical decision-making, but rather a clear picture (if one can be found) of the nature of ethical theorizing and of its proper place in the taxonomy of the enquiries which make up philosophy.  To decide whether and to what extent the kind of global approach which I have in mind would be appropriate in a treatment of fundamental problems about the nature of value, it is obviously desirable to have a reasonably well-defined identification of those problems. To judge from the philosophical literature, prominent among such issues are questions about the objectivity of value (or of values) and questions about the possibility of defending or rebutting scepticism about value (or values); and no sooner has so much been said than it becomes evident that methodological uncertainties arise at the very outset of our investigations. For it is far from clear whether the two sets of questions to which I have just alluded are identical with one another or distinct; are questions about objectivity the same as, or different from, questions about the possible range of scepticism? And if the questions are the same, which way do the identities run? Is the case for scepticism to be equated with the case for objectivity, or with the case against objectivity?I myself, in these lectures, plan to pursue my investigation of the conception of value by addressing myself, in the first instance, to questions about objectivity in this region and to the relation of such questions to questions about scepticism. And since my own pre-reflective leanings are in the direction of some form or other of objectivism, I shall, with at least a faint hope of determining whether these leanings are defensible and (indeed) whether they are coherently expressible, begin (but I hope not end) by considering the ideas of two recent anti-objectivists. Today it is the turn of the late J. L. Mackie;' tomorrow I shall turn to Philippa Foot.?  'There are no objective values' says Mackie (p. 15). Let us try to outline the steps which he takes in order to elucidate and defend this 'bald statement' (as he calls it) of his central thesis concerning the status of Ethics. First of all, he makes it clear that in denying objectivity to values he is not just talking about moral goodness, or moral value (in the strictest sense of that phrase), but it referring to a considerable range of items which could be called "values"; to items which could be 'more loosely called moral values or disvalues, like 'rightness and wrongness, duty, obliga-tion, an action being rotten and contemptible, and so on'; also to an unspecified range of non-moral values, 'notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit.  He suggests that, so far as objectivity is concerned, 'much the same considerations apply to aesthetic and to moral values, and there would be at least some initial implausibility in a view which gave the one a different status from the other'. I find myself in some uncertainty at this point about the extent of the range of values with the status of  ' U. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, and New York: Penguin Books, 1977), esp. ch. 1. All the quotations from this book were taken without change, with one exception: when quoting from Mackie's p. 17 (p. 31 below), Grice underlined 'not'.)  2 [Especially 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosoph:  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).which Mackie is concerned, and perhaps partly in consequence of this uncertainty I am not sure whether his suggestion is that, so far as relates to objectivity, it is implausible not to assign the same status to moral and to aesthetic values, or whether it is the seemingly much stronger suggestion that, so far as relates to objectivity, plausibility calls for the assignment of the same status to all values. I shall return to this question.  Mackie envisages three very different reactions to his initial 'bald statement': that of those who see it as false, pernicious, and a threat to morality; that of those who see it as a trivial truth hardly worth mentioning or arguing for; and finally that of those who regard it as meaningless or empty', as raising no real issue. Before going further into his elaboration and defence of his anti-objectivist thesis, I shall find it convenient to touch briefly on his treatment of the last of these reactions. Mackie (pp. 21-2) associates this reaction with R. M. Hare, who claimed not to understand what is meant by "the objectivity of values" and not to have met anyone who does. Hare's position is (or was) that there is a perfectly familiar activity or state called "thinking that some act is wrong" to which subjectivists and objectivists are both alluding, though the subjectivist calls this state "an attitude of disapproval" while the objectivist calls it "a moral intuition"; these are just different names for the same kind of thing and neither can be shown to be preferable to the other. As I understand Mackie's understanding of Hare, this stand-off is ensured by the fact that the subjectivist has at his disposal a counterpart move within his own theory for every move which the objectivist may try to make in order to provide a distinguishing, and justifying, mark for his view of values as objective. The objectivist, for example, may urge that if one person declares eating meat to be wrong and another declares it to be not wrong, they are, both in reality and on his theory, contradicting each other: to which the subjectivist may retort that though on some subjectivist accountsthey cannot, perhaps, be said to be contradicting each other, they can be said to be negating (or disagreeing with) one another: if, for example, one (A) is expressing or reporting the presence of disapproval of meat-eating in himself (A), and the other (B) its absence in himself (B), this would be a case of disagreement or negation; and who is to say that contradiction rather than "negation" is what the facts demand? Again, suppose the objectivist claims, with respect to the persons A and B, one of whom thinks meat-eating wrong and the other of whom thinks it not wrong, that he alone (not the subjectivist) is in a position to assert (as we should wish to be able to assert) that one of them has to be wrong; Hare's subjectivist, it seems, replies as follows:  Someone (x) thinks that A judges wrongly that meat-eating is wrong = x disapproves A's judgement that meat-eating is wrong = x disapproves A's disapproval of meat-eating = x non-disapproves meat-eating (→3 Someone x thinks that B judges wrongly that meat-eating is not wrong = x disapproves B's judgement that meat-eating is not wrong = x disapproves B's non-disapproval of meat-eating = x disapproves of meat-eating (→) Any person x must either disapprove or non-disapprove of meat-eating [disapproval might be either present or absent in him]. So, 3 [The arrow appears to be Grice's shorthand way of saying that Hare's subjectivist could hold all the above assertions to have the same force, or that some are successively weaker than their predecessors. No matter what the subjectivist holds on this point, the move from (1), (2), (3), to (4) is invalid.]  * [Grice took full advantage of the convention of parentheses and apparently used square brackets for his more important parenthetical remarks.]4. Any person x must judge that either A or B judges wrongly.  Hare adds the following further consideration (quoted by Mackie):  Think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built, and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that in both worlds the people ir hem go on being concerned about the same things—there is no difference in the 'subjective' concern which people have for things, only in their 'objective' value. Now I ask 'what is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds?" Can any answer be given except 'None whatever'?  Mackie seems to me not to handle very well this attempt at the dissolution of debates about objectivity. He concentrates on the final invocation of the indistinguishability of the two worlds, the one with and the one without objective values; and he makes three points against Hare. His first comment is that Hare's appeal to the two allegedly indistinguishable worlds does not prove what Hare wants it to prove; all that it does is to underline the point (made by Mackie himself) that it is necessary to distinguish between first-order and second-order ethics, and that the judgements or other deliverances which fall within first-order ethics may be maintained quite independently of any judgement for or against the objectivity of values, which will fall within second-order ethics; it does not show, as Hare would like it to, the emptiness or undecidability of such questions about objectivity. That such questions are not empty is, according to Mackie, indicated by his two further comments; first, that were beliefs in the objectivity of values admissible, they would provide us with a justificatory backing for our valuations, which we shall otherwise be without; and second, that were the world stocked with objective values, we would have available to us a seemingly simple way of acquiring or changing our directions of concern; one could simply let the realities of the realm of values influence one's attitudes, by 'lettingone's thinking be controlled by how things were'. Hare's failure to allow for such considerations as these is laid by Mackie at the door of Hare's "positivism", which is comparable with that of a Berkeleian who insists that appearances might be just as they are whether or not a material world lies behind them (or under them).  I am unimpressed. Mackie's first point relies crucially on a deployment of a distinction between first- and second-order ethics which is a central part of this theoretical armament, but whose nature and range of legitimate employment I find exceedingly obscure. I shall postpone further comment until I return to this element in Mackie's apparatus. As for Mackie's other points, "positivism" is, I agree, a bad word, and accusatory applications of it are good for an unreflective giggle. But I suspect that many would regard an unverifiable backing for the propriety of our concerns as being little better than no backing at all.  And while it might be held that objective values, should they exist, might exercise an influence on our subjective states, it is by no means clear to me that this is an idea which an objectivist would, or even should, regard with favour. Mackie seems to me, moreover, to have missed the real weakness in Hare's argument (at least, as presented by Mackie). The execution of the second stage of Hare's  "duplication procedure' relies essentially, but not quite explicitly, on the idea that with regard to any particular  "content" , anyone must either disapprove @ or not disapprove . This is indeed, as Hare says, a tautology, but unfortunately it does not entail the premiss which he needs so that his argument will go through; that premiss is that for any @, anyone either has an attitude of disapproval with respect to @ or an attitude of non-  disapproval with respect to . This is not a tautology, since absence of disapproval only amounts to an attitude of non-disapproval if some further condition is also fulfilled, e.g. that the person concerned has considered the matter.The upshot of this discussion is that I am prepared to concede that Mackie is right, though not for the right reasons, when he claims that Hare's attempt to establish that there is no real issue between objectivists and their opponents fails. To make this concession, however, is to condemn only Hare's attempt to show that there is no real issue; I remain perfectly free, should further argument point that way, to revive a "dissolutionist" position in a new or modified form. I turn now to the task of trying to identify more precisely the thesis about which objectivists and anti-objectivists are to be supposed to disagree; and I shall start by trying to get clear about what Mackie regards as the thesis which, as an anti-objectivist, he is concerned to maintain. First of all, it is an important part of Mackie's position to uphold the existence of a distinction between first-order and second-order topics (questions, ethical judgements) and to claim that, though both first-order and second-order questions may fall within the province of ethics, his anti-objectivist thesis, like all questions about the status of ethics, is of a second-order rather than a first-order kind. First-order ethical judgements are said to include both such items as evaluative comments about particular actions, and also broad general principles, like the principle that everyone should strive for the general happiness or that everyone should look after himself. By contrast, 'a second-order statement would say what is going on when someone makes a first-order statement, in particular whether such a statement expresses a discovery or a decision, or it may make some point about how we think and reason about moral matters, or put forward a view about the meanings of various ethical terms' (p. 9).  Mackie holds there to be a considerable measure of independence between the two realms (first-order and second-order); in particular, "moral scepticism" may belong to either of the two realms and 'one could be a second-order moral sceptic without being a first-order one, or again the other way round. A man could hold strongmoral  views, and indeed ones whose content was thoroughly conventional, while believing that they were simply attitudes and policies with regard to conduct that he and other people held. Conversely, a man could reject all established morality while believing it to be an objective truth that it was evil and corrupt' (p. 16).  A second salient feature of Mackie's version of anti-objectivism (or moral scepticism) is that it is a negative thesis. 'It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist' (p. 17). On some views which have been called objectivist, an objectivist position, despite its positive guise, would turn out to be intelligible only as the denial of some position which would bear the label of "subjectivist" , e.g. as the denial of the contention  that value statements are reducible to, or really amount to, the expression of certain attitudes like approval or  disapproval. On such an interpretation, of the pair of terms,  "objectivism"  and "subjectivism" (or  "non-  objectivism", if you like), it would be the latter term which would be, perhaps despite a negative garb, what used to be called in Oxford (with typical artless sexism) the "trouser-word". But, for Mackie, "objectivist" is not a crypto-negative term. A third salient feature is closely related to the foregoing; the assertion or denial of objectivism is not, like some second-order ethical theses, a semantic thesis (about the meaning of value terms or the character of value concepts), nor is it a logical thesis (e.g. about the structure of certain types of argument), but it is an ontological thesis; it asserts (or denies) the existence of certain items in the world of reality. Fourth and last, since Mackie's moral scepticism is proclaimed by him not to be a thesis about the meaning of what moral judgements or value statements assert, but rather about the non-presence of certain items in the real world, it seems to be open to him to hold that the real existence of values is implied by, or claimed in, what ordinary people think and say, but is nevertheless notin fact a feature of the world, with the result that the valuations spoken or thought by ordinary people are systematically and comprehensively false. This is in fact Mackie's position; his view is what he calls an "error-view": 'I conclude, then, that ordinary moral judgements include a claim to objectivity, an assumption that there are objective values in just the sense in which I am concerned to deny this' (p. 35). He compares his position with regard to values with that adopted by Boyle and Locke with regard to colours. The suggestion is (I take it) that Boyle and Locke regarded it as a false, vulgar belief that things in the real world possess such qualities as colour; real things do indeed possess certain dispositions to give us sensations of colour, and also possess certain primary qualities (of shape, size, etc.) which are the foundations of these dispositions. But neither of these types of item, which provide explanations for our sensations of colour, is to be identified with particular colours, or colour; indeed, nothing is to be identified with a particular colour. And the situation with values is analogous.  This leaves us with two questions calling for answers:  (1) Why does Mackie hold that claims to objectivity are incorporated in ordinary value judgements? (2) Why does he hold that these claims are false? With regard to the first question, one should perhaps first produce a bit of preliminary nit-picking. Mackie himself wants to hold that a claim to objectivity is incorporated in the ordinary value judgement; such a claim is therefore presumably part of the meaning of such value judgements (or the sentences in which they are expressed); and it does not seem to be, or to be regarded by Mackie as being, a platitude that such a claim is included. Mackie cannot therefore consistently assert that his anti-objectivism is not a thesis about the meaning of value averrals; the most he can claim is that though it contains a thesis about meaning, it is not restricted to a thesis about meaning. More importantly, his view that a claim to objectivity is incorporated in anordinary value judgement seems to rest, perhaps somewhat insecurely, on his suggestion (pp. 32-4) that there are two leading alternatives to the supposition that it is the function of ordinary value judgements to introduce objective values into discourse about conduct and action: non-cognitivism, which (broadly speaking) characterizes value averrals not as statements but rather as expressions of feelings, wishes, decisions, or attitudes; and naturalism, which treats them as making statements about features which are objects of actual or possible desires. Both analyses leave out, and are thought by the ordinary user of moral language to leave out, in one way or another 'the apparent authority of ethics'. The ordinary man's discomfort is relieved only if he is allowed to raise such questions as 'whether this course of action would be wrong in itself. Something like this is the everyday objectivist concept of which talk about non-natural qualities is a philosopher's reconstruction' (p. 34).  Mackie has two arguments, or bundles of argument, on which he relies to support his thesis that the objectivist elements, which according to him are embedded in ordinary value judgements, and in consequence the value judgements which embed them, are false. He calls these arguments the argument from relativity and the argument from queerness, and considers the second more important than the first. The premiss of the argument from relativity is the familiar range of differences between moral codes from one society to another, from one period to another, and from one group or class to another within a complex community. That there exist these divergences is, according to Mackie, just a fact of anthropology which does not directly support any ethical conclusion, either first-order or second-order. But it may provide indirect support for such conclusions; Mackie suggests that it is more plausible to suppose that moral beliefs reflect ways of life than the other way around: people (in general) approve of monogamy because they live monogamously, rather thanlive monogamously because they approve of monogamy.  This makes it easier to explain the divergences actually found as being the product of different ways of life than as being in one way or another distorted perceptions of objective values. The counter-suggestion that it is open to the objectivist to regard the divergent beliefs as derivative, as the outcome of the operation of a single set of agreed-upon, very general principles on diverse circumstantial assumptions, is dismissed on the grounds that often the divergent beliefs do not seem to be arrived at by derivation from general principles, but seem rather to arise from  'moral sense' or 'intuition'.  The second argument, the 'argument from queerness' consists in an elaboration, along not wholly unfamiliar lines, of the contention that the objectivist, in order to sustain his position, is committed to 'postulating value-entities and value-features of quite a different order from anything with which we are acquainted' and also to attributing to ourselves, in order to render these entities and features accessible to knowledge, a special faculty of moral intuition, a faculty utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing anything else. In this connection he focuses particularly on the so-called relation of supervenience, which has to be invoked in order to account for the connection of non-natural features with natural features, and the dependence of non-natural features upon natural features. The presence of super-venience in particular cases involves the application of a special sort of "because"; 'but just what in the world is signified by this "because"?'  Before I try to estimate the merits and demerits of Mackie's position and of the arguments by which he seeks to support it, there seem to me to be two directions of enquiry which are important in themselves, and which could be conveniently attended to at this point, particularly as consideration of them might help to give shape to an evaluation of Mackie. First of all, there are (as Mackieobserves) several different possible interpretations of the notion of objectivity, most of them mentioned by him at least in passing, but not all of them ideas which he is concerned to develop or apply. I think it might be useful to enquire what kind or degree of unity, if any, exists between these different readings of the notion of objectivity.  Second, I find myself in considerable uncertainty about the connection or lack of connection between attributions (or denials) of objectivity and the adoption (or rejection) of scepticism in one or other of its forms. Does scepticism reside in the camp of the non-objectivist (e.g. Mackie) or in that of the objectivist, or (perhaps) sometimes in one and sometimes in the other?  As regards the notion of objectivity, we have first the interpretation which seems to be the one singled out by Mackie, according to which to ascribe objectivity to a class or category of items is to assert their membership in the company of things which make up reality, their presence in the furniture of the world. We might call this sort of objectivity, metaphysical objectivity, and it is the kind of objectivity most commonly supposed to be claimed by realists for whatever it may be that they are realists about.  A main trouble with this kind of objectivity is the difficulty in seeing what it is that the objectivist could be claiming; whether, for example, in attributing objectivity to numbers or to material things he is doing anything more than shouting and banging the table as he says 'numbers exist' or 'material things are real' If the proposition that numbers exist is a consequence of the proposition that there is a number between three and five, what is the objectivist asserting that anyone would care to deny? That numbers (or values) do not just exist, they really exist?  And what does that mean? To escape this quandary, it is not uncommon to take the course which Mackie rejects, namely, to understand 'values (or numbers) are objective' as really negative in character, as a denial of the suggestion that values (or numbers) are reducible, by means of one oranother of the possible varieties of reduction, to members of some class of items which are not values (or numbers), to (for example) natural features which find favour, or to classes. Or, maybe, not any and every form of reducibility would be incompatible with objectivity, but only the kind of reducibility whose direction is to states of mind, attitudes, or appearances, to subjective items like approvals or seeming valuable. An objectivist would now be a resister, an "anti-dissolutionist", one who seeks to block certain moves to reach a theoretical simplification or economy with regard to the constituents of the world. The objectivist's prime opponent may however be a dissolu-tionist not in this commodious sense, but in a different and perhaps even more commodious sense. This opponent may be one who seeks not to dissolve the target notion (value, number, material thing, or whatever) into some one or more different and favoured items or categories of item, but rather, in one or other of a multitude of diverse ways, to dissolve the target notion altogether, to dissolve it into nothing; he may be a nihilistic dissolutionist. He may suggest that belief in the application of the target notion is a mistake, one which characteristically or inevitably grips the unschooled mind; or that such beliefs can claim only some relativized version of truth (like truth relative to a set of assumptions, or to a set of standards), not absolute truth. Mackie himself allows to some value judgements  'truth relative to standards', even though by implication he seems to deny to them "absolute" truth [whatever the ordinary man may think]. Again, the anti-objectivists may wish to suggest not that attributions of the target notion are mistakes but rather that they are inventions, or perhaps myths (that is to say, inventions which are backed by practical motivation, perhaps derived from the utility of such inventions towards the organization of some body of material; in the case of values (perhaps) the body of material might be rules or principles of conduct). As myths (or as the stuff of which myths are made) they might havefictive reality, or be "as if" real, without possessing reality proper. Or again, the target notion might be held by the anti-objectivist to be a construct (or a construction:  though possessing (or belonging to) reality, values might be held to lack (or fail to inhabit) primary or original reality; they would belong to an extension of reality provided by us. By contrast, an objectivist about values would attribute to them primary or original reality. [I should say at this point that in my view such ideas as are now being raised, that is, distinctions between "as if" or fictive entities, real but constructed entities, and primary or original reality, are among the most important and also the most difficult problems of metaphysics. The obscurity in this area is evidenced by the fact that constructed (non-original) reality might be conceived by some as possessing objectivity and by others as failing to possess objectivity; for some, deficiency in objectivity precludes truth (at least unqualified truth); for others, value claims might be true (in some cases) even though values (as constructed items) lack objectivity.]  It might seem that the wheel, in turning, has now reached the point from which its turning began; for the notion of primitive (unconstructed) reality might be regarded as the same notion as the hazy notion of "out-thereness" or of "being really real" which typified the metaphysical objectivist. It might also seem that the new  'interpretation' of objectivity is scarcely if at all less hazy than the earlier one. In an attempt to dispel the mists a little, one might offer the notion of causal efficacy as an index of metaphysical objectivity. Items might be accorded the ribbon of metaphysical objectivity just in case they were capable of acting upon other items, and attributes or features might be regarded as objective just in so far as they were attributes or features in virtue of the possession of which one item would causally influence another, in so far as they helped to explain or account for the operation of such causal influences. A special case of the fulfilment ofthis condition for objectivity would, in my view, be the capacity, possessed by some objects and some of their attributes, for being perceived, or exercising causal influence on a percipient qua percipient. Now the idea of connecting objectivity with causal efficacy seems to me one which has considerable intuitive appeal, indeed much the same kind of appeal as that which may have sustained Dr Johnson in his violent and protracted, though vicarious, assault on Bishop Berkeley. The adequacy, however, of this criterion of objectivity would be seriously, if not fatally, impaired should it turn out that the distinction between what is primitive and what is constructed applies within the scope of causal efficacy—if, that is to say, causal efficacy itself were to be sometimes primitive and sometimes constructed. It is my suspicion that this would indeed turn out to be the case. There would then, perhaps, be no quick recognition-test for objectivity; there would be no substitute for getting down to work and building the theory or system within which the target notion would have to be represented, and seeing whether it, or its representation, does or does not occupy in that theory an appropriate position which will qualify it as objective.  On the approach just considered, then, decisions about the objectivity of a given notion would involve the examination and, if necessary, a partial construction of a theory or system in which that notion (or a counterpart thereof) appears, to see whether within such a system the notion in question (or its counterpart) satisfies a certain condition. The operation of such a decision-procedure would be torpedoed if the requisite theory or system could not be constructed, if the target concept were not theory-amenable. The merits of an allegation that a given notion was not theory-amenable might depend a good deal on what kind of a theory or system was deemed to be appropriate; it would be improper (taking heed of Aristotle) to expect a moralist to furnish a system which allowed for the kind of demonstration appropriate to mathematics.But one kind of anti-objectivist (who might also be a sceptic) might claim that for some notions no kind of systematization was available; in this sense, perhaps, values might not be objective. It may be (as I think my colleague Hans Sluga has argued) that Wittgenstein was both sceptical and anti-objectivist with regard to sensa-tions. In this sense of objectivist, an objectivist would only have to believe in theory-amenability; he would not have to believe in the satisfaction, by his target notion, of any further condition within the appropriate systematization.  One further interpretation of objectivity noted by Mackie is one which I shall not pursue today. It connects objectivity with (so-called) categorical imperatives as distinct from hypothetical imperatives, and with the (alleged) automatic reason-giving force of some valuations.  Since this idea is closely related to Miss Foot's theories, I shall defer consideration of it.  I have listed a number of different versions of the idea of objectivity, and have tried to do so in a way which exhibits connections between them, so that the different versions look somewhat tidier than a mere heap. But many of the connections seem to me fairly loose [*such-and-such a notion might be taken as an interpretation of so-and-so'], and I see little reason to suppose many tight, logical connections between one and another version of objec-tivity.  So much for the panoply of possible interpretations of the notion of objectivity. I turn now to the second of the general directions of enquiry with regard to which I expressed a desire for enlightenment. How is objectivity related to scepticism? Speaking generally, I would incline towards the idea that scepticism consists in doubting or denying something which either is a received opinion, or else, at least on the face of it, to some degree deserves to be a received opinion. In the present context we are of course concerned only with philosophical scepticism; and, without any claim to originality, I would suggest that philosophicalsceptics characteristically call in question some highly general class of entity, attribute, or kind of proposition; what they question are categories, or what, if we took ordinary language as our guide, would be categories. To adduce more seeming platitudes, the objectivist is, compared with the anti-objectivist, a metaphysical infla-tionist; there are more things in his heaven and earth than an anti-objectivist Horatio would allow himself to dream of. And so, it is standardly thought, it is Horatio who is the sceptic and the objectivist who is the target of scepticism; and (often Horatio remedies his own initial scepticism by  'reducing' the suspect items to their appearances or semblances: he takes the phenomenalist cure. But here the issue becomes more complex than is ordinarily supposed: for there are to my mind not less than two forms of scepticism, which I will call "Whether?" scepticism and  "Why?" scepticism. It may be true that the run-of-the-mill objectivist, on account of his inflationary tendencies, provokes "Whether?" scepticism, and that the sceptic who seeks to remedy his own initial scepticism by taking a dose of phenomenalism is not himself open to "Whether?" scepticism. But it may also be true that the phenomenalist is a proper target for "Why?" scepticism; for he, has left himself with no way of explaining the phenomena into which he has dissolved the entities or attributes dear to the objectivist. And it may be that the objectivist, if only his favoured entities or attributes were admissible and accessible to knowledge, would be in a position to explain the phenomena; and, further, that this capability would be unaffected by the question whether the phenomena are related to possible states of the world (like sensible appearances) or to possible action (like approvals). If only he could be allowed to start, the objectivist could (under one or another interpretation) 'explain' in the one area why it seems that so and so is the case, and in the other why do so and so (eg. why pay debts).  The foregoing message, that both the true-blue, con-servative, and inflationary objectivist and the red, radical, and deflationary phenomenalist or subjectivist run into a pack of sceptical trouble, of one kind or another, and that more delicate and refined footwork is needed seems to me to be the front-page news in the work of Kant. It also seems to me that Mackie, by being wedded to if not rooted in the apparatus of empiricism, has cut himself off from this lesson. Which is a pity.  However, I must move to somewhat less impressionistic comments on Mackie's position. These comments will fall under three heads:  The alleged commitment of 'vulgar valuers', in their valuations, to claims to objectivity. The separation of value judgements into orders, with the assignment to the second order of questions or claims about the status of ethics; and the remedi-ability of an apparent incoherence in Mackie. The alleged falsity of claims of objectivity. I should say at once that though I think that the considerations which I am about to mention show that something has gone wrong (perhaps that more than one thing has gone wrong) in Mackie's account, the issues raised are so intricate, and so much bound up with (so far as I know) unsolved problems in metaphysics and semantics, that I simply do not know what prospects there might be for refurbishing Mackie's position.  1. It seems to me to be by no means as easy as Mackie seems to think to establish that the 'vulgar valuer', in his valuations, is committed to the objectivity of value(s). It is not even clear to me what kind of fact would be needed to establish such a commitment. Perhaps if the vulgar valuer, when making a valuation, (say) that stealing is wrong, were to say to himself "and by "wrong" I mean objectively wrong', that would be sufficient (at least if he added a specification of the meaning of "objective"). But nobody, not even Mackie would suppose the vulgar valuer to dothat. Mackie relies, in fact, on the alleged repugnance to the valuer of the two main rivals to an objectivist thesis about value. But even if this were sufficient to show that the vulgar valuer believes in an objectivist thesis about value, it would not be sufficient to show that an objectivist interpretation is built into what he means when he judges that stealing is wrong. There are other ways of arguing that a speaker is committed to an interpretation, for example, that he has it subconsciously (or unconsciously) in mind, or that what he says is only defensible on that interpretation. But the first direction seems not to be plausible in the present context, and Mackie is debarred from the second by the fact that he holds that what the vulgar valuer says or thinks is not defensible anyway.  To illustrate the fiendish difficulties which may arise in this region, I shall give, in relation to the valuation that stealing is wrong, four different interpretative supposi-tions-each of which would, I think, have some degree of philosophical appeal-and I shall add in each case an estimate of the impact of the supposition on the assignment of truth value to the valuation.  There is a feature W which is objective but provably vacuous of application; a vulgar valuer, when he uses "wrong", is ascribing W. Conclusion: vulgar valuation 'stealing is wrong' invariably false. A vulgar valuer thinks (wrongly) that there is a particular feature W which is objective, and when he uses "wrong" he intends to ascribe this feature, even though in fact there is no such feature. Conclusion: obscure, with choice lying between false, neither true nor false but a miscue, and meaningless (non-significant). A vulgar valuer is uncommitted about what feature "wrong" signifies; he is ascribing whatever feature it should in the end turn out to be that "wrong" signifies. Conclusion: assignment of truth value must await the researches of the semantic analyst.(d) A vulgar valuer is uncommitted about what feature "wrong" signifies; truth value is assigned in advance of analysis by vulgar methods, and such assignment limits the freedom of the semantic analyst. Conclusion: truth value assigned (as stated) by vulgar methods.  2. The idea, to which Mackie subscribes, of separating valuations into orders as a step towards the elucidation of an intuitive distinction between "substantive" and "formal" questions and theses in ethics plainly has considerable appeal; it seems by no means unpromising to regard  "substantive" theses about values as being first-order valuations (statements), and to regard "formal" theses in ethics, like theses about the logic of value, or the meaning of value terms, as being a sub-class of second-order theses, and to regard theses about the status of ethics as also falling within this subclass—to treat them, that is to say, as theses about first-order valuations. [Such second-order theses, of course, though necessarily about valuations, may or again may not themselves be valuations.] But Mackie's deployment of this idea plainly runs into trouble. For according to Mackie, vulgar valuations incorporate or entail claims to objectivity; claims to objectivity, according to him, since they fall within, or imply theses belonging to, the class of claims about the status of ethics, are second-order claims; and so, since (presumably) what incorporates or entails a second-order thesis is itself a thesis of not lower than second-order, vulgar valuations are of at least second-order. But vulgar valuations, as paradigmatic examples of substantive value theses, cannot but belong to the first order, which is absurd. Now I can suggest an explanation for the appearance on the scene of this incoherence. As I mentioned earlier, among the possible versions of the notion of objectivity are what I called a positive version and a negative version. The positive version, that to attribute objectivity to some item is to proclaim that itemto 'belong to the furniture of the world', is firmly declared by Mackie to be his version; and it is, as I have remarked, obscure enough for it to be possible (who knows?) for attributions of objectivity to belong to the first order. The negative version, that to attribute objectivity to something is to deny that statements about that thing are in this or that way eliminable or "reducible",  , is plainly of second (or  higher) order; and despite his forthright assurances, Mackie may have wobbled between these two versions.  But to explain is neither to justify nor to remedy: and I have the uneasy feeling that Mackie's troubles have a deeper source than unclarities about application of the notion of order. His "error-view" about value has an Epimenidean ring; it looks a bit as if he may be supposing vulgar valuations to say of themselves that the value which they attribute to some item or items is objective; and I feel that it may be that such self-reference, though less dramatic, is no less vitiating than would be saying of themselves that they are false. It is true that Mackie regards vulgar valuations as being, in fact, comprehensively false; but it is evident that he expects and wants that falsity to spring from the general inapplicability of the attribute being ascribed by such valuations to themselves, not from a special illegitimacy attending a valuation's ascription of the attribute to itself.  3. I find myself quite unconvinced (indeed unmoved) by the arguments which Mackie offers to support his claim that values are not objective or (should one rather say?) that there are no objective values. The first argument from relativity he regards as of lesser importance than, and indeed as ultimately having to appeal to, the second argument, the argument from queerness. This argument (so it seems to me) seeks to make mileage out of two bits of queerness: first, the queerness of the supposition that there are certain "non-natural" value-properties which are in some mysterious way "supervenient upon" more familiar natural features; and second, the queerness of the supposi-tion that the recognition of the presence of these non-natural properties motivates us, or can motivate us, without assistance from any desire or interest which we happen to have. What strikes me as queer is that the queernesses referred to by Mackie are not darkly concealed skeletons in objectivist closets which are cunningly dragged to light by him; they are, rather, conditions proclaimed by objectivists as ones which must be accommodated if we are to have a satisfactory theoretical account of conduct, or of other items qua things to which value may be properly attributed. So while these queernesses can be used to specify tasks which an objectivist could be called upon, and very likely would call on himself, to perform, and while it is not in advance certain that these tasks can be successfully performed, they cannot be used as bricks to bombard an objectivist with even before he has started to try to fulfil those tasks. It is perhaps as if someone were to say, 'I seriously doubt whether arithmetic is possible; for if it were possible it would have to be about numbers, and numbers would be very queer things indeed, quite inaccessible to any observation'; or even as if someone were to say, 'I don't see how there can be such a thing as matrimony; if there were, people would have to be bound to one another in marriage, and everything we see in real life and on the cinema-screen goes to suggest that the only way that people can be bound to one another is with ropes. H. P. Grice.  Of those who are approximately my contemporaries, Professor W. V.  Quine is one of the very few to whom I feel I owe the deepest of professional debts, the debt which is owed to someone from whom one has learned something very important about how philosophy should be done, and who has, in consequence, helped to shape one's own mode of thinking.  I hope that he will not think it inappropriate that my offering on this occasion should take the form not of a direct discussion of some part of Word and Object, but rather of an attempt to explore an alternative to one of his central positions, namely his advocacy of the idea of the general eliminability of singular terms, including names. I hope, also, that he will not be too shocked by my temerity in venturing into areas where my lack of expertise in formal logic is only too likely to be exposed. I have done my best to protect myself by consulting those who are in a position to advise me; they have suggested ideas for me to work on and have corrected some of my mistakes, but it would be too much to hope that none remain."  I. THE PROBLEM  It seems to me that there are certain quite natural inclinations which have an obvious bearing on the construction of a predicate calculus. They are as follows:  (I) To admit individual constants; that is to admit names or their representations.  To allow that sometimes a name, like "Pegasus", is not the name of any existent object; names are sometimes 'vacuous. In the light of (2), to allow individual constants to lack designata, so that sentences about Pegasus may be represented in the system. To regard Fa and ~ Fa as 'strong' contradictories; to suppose, that is, that one must be true and the other false in any conceivable state of the world. To hold that, if Pegasus does not exist, then "Pegasus does not fly" (or "It is not the case that Pegasus flies") will be true, while "Pegasus flies" will be false. To allow the inference rules U.I. and E.G. to hold generally, without special restriction, with respect to formulae containing individual constants. To admit the law of identity ((Vx) x=*) as a theorem. To suppose that, if is derivable from , then any statement represented by $ entails a corresponding statement represented by f. It is obviously difficult to accommodate all of these inclinations.  Given [by (7)] (x)x=x we can, given given derive first a =a by U.I. and then (3x)x=a by E.G. It is natural to take (3x)x=a as a representation of 'a exists'. So given (2) and (3), a representation of a false existential statement ("Pegasus exists') will be a theorem. Given (6), we may derive, by E.G., Sx) ~ Ex from ~ Fa. Given (3), this seemingly licenses an inference from "Pegasus does not fly" to "Something does not fly". But such an inference seems illegitimate if, by (5), "Pegasus does not fly" is true if Pegasus does not exist (as (2) allows). One should not be able, it seems, to assert that something does not fly on the basis of the truth of a statement to the effect that a certain admittedly non-existent object does not fly.  To meet such difficulties as these, various manoeuvres are available, which include the following:  To insist that a grammatically proper name N is only admissible as a substituend for an individual constant (is only classifiable as a name, in a certain appropriate sense of 'name') if N has a bearer. So "Pegasus" is eliminated as a substituend, and inclination (3) is rejected. To say that a statement of the form Fa, and again one of the form ~ Fa, presupposes the existence of an object named by a, and lacks a truth-value if there is no such object. [Inclinations (4) and (5) are rejected.] To exclude individual constants from the system, treating ordinary names as being reducible to definite descriptions. [Inclination (I) is rejected.] To hold that "Pegasus" does have a bearer, a bearer which has being though it does not exist, and to regard (3.x) Fx as entailing not theexistence but only the being of something which is F. [Inclination (2) is rejected.] To allow U.I. and E.G. only in conjunction with an additional premise, such as Ela, which represents a statement to the effect that a exists. [Inclination (6) is rejected.] To admit individual constants, to allow them to lack designata, and to retain normal U.I. and E.G.; but hold that inferences made in natural discourse in accordance with the inference-licences provided by the system are made subject to the 'marginal' (extra-systematic) assumption that all names which occur in the expression of such inferences have bearers. This amounts, I think, to the substitution of the concept of *entailing subject to assumption A' for the simple concept of entailment in one's account of the logical relation between the premises and the conclusions of such inferences. [Inclination (8) is rejected.]  I do not, in this paper, intend to discuss the merits or demerits of any of the proposals which I have just listed. Instead, I wish to investigate the possibility of adhering to all of the inclinations mentioned at the outset; of, after all, at least in a certain sense keeping everything. I should emphasize that I do not regard myself as committed to the suggestion which I shall endeavour to develop; my purpose is exploratory.  II. SYSTEM Q: OBJECTIVES  The suggestion with which I am concerned will involve the presentation and discussion of a first-order predicate calculus (which I shall call Q), the construction of which is based on a desire to achieve two goals:  (i) to distinguish two readings of the sentence "Pegasus does not fly" (and of other sentences containing the name "Pegasus" which do not explicitly involve any negation-device), and to provide a formal representation of these readings. The projected readings of "Pegasus does not fly" (S,) are such that on one of them an utterance of S, cannot be true, given that Pegasus does not exist and never has existed, while on the other an utterance of S, will be true just because Pegasus does not exist. ii) to allow the unqualified validity, on either reading, of a step from the assertion of S, to the assertion (suitably interpreted) of "Something [viz., Pegasus] does not fly" (S2).More fully, Q is designed to have the following properties.  U.I. and E.G. will hold without restriction with respect to any formula & containing an individual constant « [Ф(c)]; no additional premise is to be required, and the steps licensed by U.I. and E.G. will not be subject to a marginal assumption or pretence that names occurring in such steps have bearers. For some (a), $ will be true on interpretations of Q which assign no designatum to a, and some such (a) will be theorems of Q. It will be possible, with respect to any @ (a), to decide on formal grounds whether or not its truth requires that a should have a designatun. It will be possible to find, in Q, a representation of sentences such as "Pegasus exists". There will be an extension of Q in which identity is represented. III. SCOPE  The double interpretation of S, may be informally clarified as follows: if S, is taken to say that Pegasus has the property of being something which does not fly, then S, is false (since it cannot be true that a nonexistent object has a property); but if S, is taken to deny that Pegasus has the property of being something which flies, then S, is true (for the reason given in explaining why, on the first interpretation, $, is false).  It seems to be natural to regard this distinction as a distinction between differing possible scopes of the name "Pegasus". In the case of connec-tives, scope-differences mirror the order in which the connectives are introduced in the building up of a formula [the application of formation rules; and the difference between the two interpretations of S, can be represented as the difference between regarding S, as being (i) the result of substituting "Pegasus" for "x" in "x does not fly" (negation having already been introduced), or ii) the result of denying the result of substituting "Pegasus" for "x" in "x flies" (the name being introduced before negation)J.  To deal with this distinction, and to preserve the unrestricted application of U.I. and E.G., Q incorporates the following features:  (1) Normal parentheses are replaced by numerical subscripts which are appended to logical constants and to quantifiers, and which indicatescope-precedence (the higher the subscript, the larger the scope). Subscripts are attached also to individual constants and to bound variables as scope-indicators. For convenience subscripts are also attached to predicate-constants and to propositional letters. There will be a distinction between  (a)  and  (b)  ~, F,a,.  (a) will represent the reading of S, in which S, is false if Pegasus does not exist; in (a) "a" has maximal scope. In (b) "a" has minimal scope, and the non-existence of a will be a sufficient condition for the truth of (b).  So (b) may be taken to represent the second reading of S,. To give further illustration of the working of the subscript notation, in the formula Faz→, Gava H,bs 'v' takes precedence over*→*, and while the scope of each occurrence of "a" is the atomic sub-formula containing that occurrence, the scope of "b" is the whole formula.  (2) The effect of extending scope-indicators to individual constants is to provide for a new formational operation, viz., the substitution of an individual constant for a free variable. The formation rules ensure that quantification takes place only after this new operation has been per-formed; bound variables will then retain the subscripts attaching to the individual constants which quantification eliminates. The following formational stages will be, for example, involved in the building of a simple quantificational formula:  There will be, then, a distinction between 3x4 ~ 2 Fixa, and  (a) will, in Q, be derivable from ~, F,a,, but not from ~ , F,az; (b) will be derivable directly (by E.G.) only from ~, Faz, though it will bederivable indirectly from ~, Fag. This distinction will be further dis-cussed.  (3) Though it was not essential to do so, I have in fact adapted a feature of the system set out in Mates' Elementary Logic; free variables do not occur in derivations, and U.I. always involves the replacement of one or more subscripted occurrences of a bound variable by one or more correspondingly subscripted occurrences of an individual constant.  Indeed, such expressions as Fix and G,xzV, are not formulae of Q (though to refer to them I shall define the expression "segment"). F,x and G,xy are formulae, but the sole function of free variables is to allow the introduction of an individual constant at different formational stages.  Faz→, G,agV 4 H, is admitted as a formula so that one may obtain from it a formula giving maximal scope to "b", viz., the formula  (4) Closed formulae of a predicate calculus may be looked upon in two different ways. The symbols of the system may be thought of as lexical items in an artificial language. Actual lexical entries (lexical rules) are provided only for the logical constants and quantifiers; on this view an atomic formula in a normal calculus, for example Fa, will be a categorical subject-predicate sentence in that language. Alternatively, formulae may be thought of as structures underlying, and exemplified by, sentences in a language (or in languages) the actual lexical items of which are left unidentified. On this view the formula Fav Gb will be a structure exemplified by a sub-class of the sentences which exemplify the structure Fa. The method of subscripting adopted in Q reflects the first of these approaches; in an atomic formula the subscripts on individual constants are always higher than that on the predicate-constant, in consonance with the fact that affirmative categorical subject-predicate sentences, like "Socrates is wise" or "Bellerophon rode Pegasus", imply the non-vacuousness of the names which they contain. Had I adopted the second approach, I should have had to allow not only F,az, etc., but also Fa,, etc., as formulae; I should have had to provide atomic formulae which would have substitution instances, e.g., F,a,→ G,b, in which the scope of the individual constants does not embrace the whole formula.  The second approach, however, could be accommodated with appropriate changes.(5) The significance of numerical subscripts is purely ordinal; so, for example, ~ Fa, and ~17 Fa, will be equivalent. More generally, any pair of "isomorphs" will be equivalent, and Q contains a rule providing for the interderivability of isomorphs. and & will be isomorphs iff (1) subscripts apart, @ and ( are identical, and (2) relations of magnitude (=, <,>) holding between any pair of subscripts in @ are preserved between the corresponding pair of subscripts in & [the subscripts in & mirror those in @ in respect of relative magnitudes].  Professor C. D. Parsons has suggested to me a notation in which I would avoid the necessity for such a rule, and has provided me with an axiom-set for a system embodying it which appears to be equivalent to Q (Mr. George Myro has made a similar proposal). The idea is to adopt the notation employed in Principia Mathematica for indicating the scope of definite descriptions. Instead of subscripts, normal parentheses are retained and the scope of an individual constant or bound variable is indicated by an occurrence of the constant or variable in square brackets, followed by parentheses which mark the scope boundaries. So the distinction between ~, F,a, and ~, Fa, is replaced by the distinction between ~[a] (Fa) and [a] (~Fa); and the distinction between Jxy~,F,x2 and 3xa~,F,x, is replaced by the distinction between  (x) (~ [x] (Ex)) and (3x) ([x] (~ Fx)). Parson's notation may well be found more perspicuous than mine, and it may be that I should have adopted it for the purposes of this paper, though I must confess to liking the obviousness of the link between subscripts and formation-rules.  The notion of scope may now be precisely defined for Q.  If y be a logical constant or quantifier occurring in a closed formula , the scope of an occurrence of y is the largest formula in @ which (a) contains the occurrence of n, (b) does not contain an occurrence a logical constant or quantifier bearing a higher subscript than that which attaches to the occurrence of „. If , be a term (individual constant or bound variable), the scope of , is the largest segment of @ which (a) contains the occurrence of n, (b) does not contain an occurrence of a logical constant bearing a higher subscript than that which attaches to the occurrence of n.  (3) A segment is a sequence of symbols which is either (a) a formula or (b) the result of substituting subscript-preserving occurrences ofvariables for one or more occurrences of individual constants in a formula.  We may now define the important related notion of "dominance". A term 0 dominates a segment @ ift @ falls within the scope of at least one of the occurrences, in , of 0. In other words, 0 dominates @ if at least one occurrence of 0 in @ bears a subscript higher than that attaching to any logical constant in @. Dominance is intimately connected with existential commitment, as will be explained.  IV. NATURAL DEDUCTION SYSTEM Q  A. Glossary  If "n" denotes a symbol of Q, "y." denotes the result of attaching, to that symbol, a subscript denoting n. "Ф(c, a)"= a formula @ containing occurrences of an individual constant a, each such occurrence being either an occurrence of aj, or of..., or of o'. [Similarly, if desired, for "$(ap,...w,)", where "o" ('omega') denotes a variable.] "Ф" ="a formula, the highest subscript within which denotes n". If 0, and 0, are terms (individual constants or bound variables). *(02/0,) -the result of replacing each occurrence of 0, in d by an occurrence of 0z, while preserving subscripts at substitution-points'.  • [The upper symbol indicates the substituend.]  B. Provisional Set of Rules for Q  1. Symbols  (a) Predicate-constants (*F", "fl"  ,... "G .)  (b) Individual constants ("a", 'a'*  '.... "b"  .( ...  (c) Variables (*x",  ... "y"...).  (d) Logical constants ("~"  , "&", "v", "→").  (e) Quantification-symbols (V, 9"). [A quantification-symbol followed by a subscripted variable is a quantifier.]  Numerical subscripts (denoting natural numbers). Propositional letters (*p", "q",....). 2. Formulae  A subscripted n-ary predicate constant followed by n unsubscripted variables; a subscripted propositional letter. If i is a formula, $(*,+m/∞) is a formula. If is a formula, Vo+Ф(∞/«) is a formula. [NB: Substitutions are to preserve subscripts.] If m is a formula, 3c, +Ф (∞/x) is a formula. [NB: Substitutions are to preserve subscripts.] If » is a formula, ~+m is a formula. If i-m and to-n are formulae, ф 8,4, ф. 4, ф→, 4 are for- mulae. is a formula only if it can be shown, by application of (1)-(6), that p is a formula. 3. Inference-Rules  (1) [Ass] Any formula may be assumed at any point.  ....中トリャー」&』～コース♥ローキーは。then  ,... ф*+~+ ф'.  「「ゆく。♥［m-n  (6 [v+] etnml)-*-nYa 0  (7) [v -] 1f(1) 4[-m)»Ф  (2) Хра- 17+ ф₴  ・がトら、  (3) ф°  then  (4) ф'  (8) [→ +, CP] If Ф(п-и]- 41  -…・・ロートスin-ns then o  (10) [V+] If v*  ,... w*F then v'.... v*+V@n+m $ (w/∞), provided  that a does not occur in '  (I1) [V-]V,Ф+ф(x∞), provided that Vo, is the scope of Va.  (*+) +30,+mV, where v is like except that, if a occurs in ф, at least one such occurrence is replaced in & by an occurrence of . (В-)Зо„Ф, x'... x*Hy if (a/0), x'... x*H/, provided that 3c,ф is the scope of 3o, that a does not occur in any of , x',.... x*, v. [NB. All substitutions referred to in (10)-(13) will preserve sub-scripts.]  Rules (I) (13) are not peculiar to Q, except insofar as they provide for the use of numerical subscripts as substitutes for parentheses. The role of term-subscripts has so far been ignored. The following three rules do not ignore the role of term-subscripts, and are special to Q.  (14) [Dom +]If(1) a dominates ,  (2) p,x,Rtw(a)0),  then  (3) ф, x). x'+* ((2, +m/c,),... (Фк+п/ок)) [m. п> 0].  [NB. v, thus altered, must remain a formula; for example, a must not acquire a subscript already attaching to a symbol other than x.]  (14) provides for the raising of subscripts on a in 4, including the case in which initially non-dominant a comes to dominate f.  [A subscript on an occurrence of a may always be lowered.]  (16) [Iso] If @ and y are isomorphs, @+v.  V. EXISTENCE  A. Closed Formulae Containing an Individual Constant &  (i) If a dominates @ then, for any interpretation Z, @ will be true on Z only if a is non-vacuous (only if Ta+exists? is true, where '+' is a  concatenation-symbol). If a does not dominate , it may still be the case that @ is true only if a is non-vacuous (for example if @="~, ~3 F,az" or ="FazV, G,az", though not if ="F,a→,G,az"). Whether or  not it is the case will be formally decidable. Let us abbreviate " is true only if a is non-vacuous" as "ф is E-committal for &". The conditions in which ф is E-committal for a can be specified recursively:  (1)  If a dominates , is E-committal for a.  (2)  If =~,~=-mV, and is E-committal for a, then @ is E-committal for a.  (3)  If =v&,x, and either or x is E-committal for a, then $ is E-committal for a.  (4)  If =v.x, and both y and & are E-committal for a, then ф is E-committal for a.  (5)  If =→x, and both ~_* and z are E-committal for a, then ф is E-committal for a [in being greater than the number denoted by any non-term-subscript in 4].  (6)  If =Vo, or 3o,v, and (B/∞) is E-committal for x, then ф is E-committal for a.  (ii) Since Fja, → ,F,a, is true whether or not "a" is vacuous, the truth of F,a,→, Fa, (in which "a" has become dominant) requires only that a exists, and so the latter formula may be taken as one representation of  "a exists". More generally, if (for some n) a is the only individual constant in » (x) and =→n-m then @ may be taken as a representation of Ta + exists?  B. 3-quantified Formulae  An 3-quantified formula 3o,ф will represent a claim that there exists an object which satisfied the condition specified in ¢ iff (a/∞) is E-com-mittal for o. To illustrate this point, compare (i)  3x4~, Fix, and  (ii)  ヨxュ～3Fix2.  Since ~, Fa, is E-committal for "a" (is true only if a exists) while  ~, F,a, is not E-committal for "a", (i) can, and ii) cannot, be read as a claim that there exists something which is not F. The idea which lies behind the treatment of quantification in Q is that while i) and ii) may be taken as representing different senses or different interpretations of  "something is not F" or of "there is something which is not F", these locutions must be distinguished from "there exists something which is not F"', which is represented only by (i). The degree of appeal which Q will have, as a model for natural discourse, will depend on one's willingness to distinguish, for example,  "There is something such that it is not the case that it flies" from "There is something such that it is something which does not fly", and to hold that (a) is justified by its being false that Pegasus flies, while (b) can be justified only by its being true of some actual object that it does not fly. This distinction will be further discussed in the next section.  Immediately, however, it must be made clear that to accept Q as a model for natural discourse is not to accept a Meinongian viewpoint; it is not to subscribe to the idea of a duality, or plurality, of 'modes of being'. Acceptance of Q as a model might be expected to lead one to hold that while some sentences of the form "Bertrand Russell _" will be interpretable in such a way as i) to be true, and (ii) to entail not merely "there is something which _  " but also "there exists something  which __", sentences of the form "Pegasus _  " will, if interpreted  so as to be true, entail only "there is something which _  -". But from  this it would be quite illegitimate to conclude that while Bertrand Russell both exists and is (or has being), Pegasus merely is (or has being). "Exists" has a licensed occurrence both in the form of expression "there exists something which " and in the form of expression "a exists"; "is" has a licensed occurrence in the form of expression "there is something which ___", but not in the form "a is". Q creates no ontological jungle.  VI. OBJECTION CONSIDERED  It would not be surprising if the combination of the admissibility, according to the natural interpretation of Q, of appropriate readings of  the inference-patterns  a does not exist a is not F  and (2)  a is (not) F  something is (not) F  have to be regarded as Q's most counter-intuitive feature.  Consider the following dialogue between A and B at a cocktail party:  Al) Is Marmaduke Bloggs here tonight?  B(1) Marmaduke Bloggs?  A(2) You know, the Merseyside stock-broker who last month climbed  Mt. Everest on hands and knees.  B(2) Oh! Well no, he isn't here.  A(3) How do you know he isn't here?  B(3) That Marmaduke Bloggs doesn't exist; he was invented by the  journalists.  A(4) So someone isn't at this party.  B(4) Didn't you hear me say that Marmaduke Bloggs does not exist?  A(5) I heard you quite distinctly; are you under the impression that you heard me say that there exists a person who isn't at this party?  B, in his remarks (3) and (4), seemingly accepts not only inference-pattern (I) but also inference-pattern (2).  The ludicrous aspects of this dialogue need to be accounted for. The obvious explanation is, of course, that the step on which B relies is at best dubious, while the step which A adds to it is patently illegitimate; if we accept pattern (I) we should not also accept pattern (2). But there is another possible explanation, namely that  (i given (P) "a does not exist and so a is not F" the putative conclusion from (P), "Something is not F" (C), is strictly speaking (on one reading) true, but  il) given that (P) is true there will be something wrong, odd, or misleading about saying or asserting (C).  In relation to this alternative explanation, there are two cases to con-  (a) that in which the utterer of (C) knows or thinks that a does not  exist, and advances (C) on the strength of this knowledge or belief; but the non-existence of a is not public knowledge, at least so far as the speaker's audience is concerned;  (b) that which differs from (a) in that all parties to the talk-exchange are aware, or think, that a does not exist. Case (a) will not, perhaps, present too great difficulties; if there is a sense of "Something is not F" such that for this to be true some real thing must fail to be F, the knowledge that in this sense something is not F will be much more useful than the knowledge that something is not F in the other (weaker) sense; and ceteris paribus one would suppose the more useful sense of (C) to be the more popular, and so, in the absence of counter-indications, to be the one employed by someone who utters (C). Which being the case, to utter  (C) on the strength of the non-existence of a will be misleading.  Case (b) is less easy for the alternative explanation to handle, and my dialogue was designed to be an example of case (b). There is a general consideration to be borne in mind, namely that it will be very unplausible to hold both that there exists a particular interpretation or sense of an expression E, and that to use E in this sense or interpretation is always to do something which is conversationally objectionable. So the alternative explanation will have (l) to say why such a case (b) example as that provided by the dialogue is conversationally objectionable, (2) to offer some examples, which should presumably be case (b) examples, in which the utterance of (C), bearing the putative weaker interpretation would be conversationally innocuous. These tasks might be attempted as follows.  (I) To say "Something is (not) such-and-such" might be expected to have one or other of two conversational purposes; either to show that it is possible (not) to be such-and-such, countering (perhaps in anticipation) the thesis that nothing is even (not) such-and-such, or to provide a prelude to the specification (perhaps after a query) of an item which is (not) such-and-such. A's remark (4) "So someone is not at this party" cannot have either of these purposes. First, M.B. has already been agreed by A and B not to exist, and so cannot provide a counter-example to any envisaged thesis that every member of a certain set (c.g. leading local business men) is at the party. M.B., being non-existent, is not a member of any set. Second, it is clear that A's remark (4) was advanced on the strength of the belief that M.B. does not exist; so whatever specification is relevant has already been given.  (2) The following example might provide a conversationally innocuous use of (C) bearing the weaker interpretation. The cocktail party is a special one given by the Merseyside Geographical Society for its members in honour of M.B., who was at the last meeting elected a member as a recognition of his reputed exploit. A and B have been, before the party, discussing those who are expected to attend it; C has been listening, and is in the know about M.B.  C Well, someone won't be at this party  A, B Who?  C Marmaduke Bloggs  A, B But it's in his honour  C That's as may be, but he doesn't exist; he was invented by the  journalists.  Here C makes his initial remark (bearing putative weak interpretation), intending to cite M.B. in specification and to disclose his non-existence.  It should be made clear that I am not trying to prove the existence or admissibility of a weaker interpretation for (C); I am merely trying to show that the prima facie case for it is strong enough to make investigation worth-while; if the matter is worth investigation, then the formulation of Q is one direction in which such investigation should proceed, in order to see whether a systematic formal representation of such a reading of "Something is (not) F" can be constructed.  As a further consideration in favour of the acceptability of the weaker interpretation of "Something is (not) F", let me present the following  "slide":  To say "M.B. is at this party" would be to say something which is not true. To say "It is not true that M.B. is at this party" would be to say something which is true. To say "M.B. is not at this party" would be to say something which is true. M.B. is not at this party. M.B. can be truly said not to be at this party. Someone (viz. M.B.) can be truly said not to be at this party. Someone is not at this party (viz. M.B.).It seems to me plausible to suppose that remark (I) could have been uttered with truth and propriety, though with some inelegance, by B in the circumstances of the first dialogue. It also seems to me that there is sufficient difficulty in drawing a line before any one of remarks (2) to (7), and claiming that to make that remark would be to make an illegitimate transition from its legitimate predecessor, for it to be worth considering whether one should not, given the non-existence of M.B., accept all seven as being (strictly speaking) true. Slides are dangerous instruments of proof, but it may be legitimate to use them to back up a theoretical proposal. VIL. IDENTITY  So far as I can see, there will be no difficulty in formulating a system Q', as an extension of Q which includes an identity theory. In a classical second-order predicate calculus one would expect to find that the formula (VF) (Fa→Fb) (or the formula (VF) (Fa-›Fb)) is a definitional sub-stituend for, or at least is equivalent to, the formula a =b. Now in Q the sequence Fa→Fb will be incomplete, since subscripts are lacking, and there will be two significantly different ways of introducing subscripts, (i F,as→2F,be and (ii) Faz→, F,b,. In (i "a" and "b" are dominant,  and the existence of a and of b is implied; in ii) this is not the case. This difference of subscripting will reappear within a second-order predicate calculus which is an extension of Q; we shall find both (i) (a) VF,F,a,→, F,b, and (ii) (a) VE,F,a2→4 F,b,. If we introduce the symbol  * into Q, we shall also find iii) VF, F,a,,F,ba and (iv) VF,F,a,**F,b,. We may now ask whether we want to link the identity of a and b with the truth of (iii) or with the truth of (iv), or with both. If identity is linked with (iii) then any affirmative identity-formula involving a vacuous individual constant will be false; if identity is linked with (iv) any affirmative identity formula involving two vacuous individual  constants will be true.  A natural course in this situation seems to be to admit to Q' two types of identity formula, one linked with (iii) and one with (iv), particularly if one is willing to allow two interpretations of (for example) the sentence  "Pegasus is identical with Pegasus", on one of which the sentence is false because Pegasus does not exist, and on the other of which the sentence is true because Pegasus does not exist (just as "Pegasus is identical withBellerophon" will be true because neither Pegasus nor Bellerophon exist). We cannot mark this distinction in Q simply by introducing two different identity-signs, and distinguishing between (say) a,=,b, and a,=, b3. Since in both these formulae "a" and "b" are dominant, the formulae will be true only if a and b exist. Just as the difference between (iii) and (iv) lies in whether "a" and "b" are dominant or non-dominant, so must the difference between the two classes of identity formulae which we are endeavouring to express in Q'. So Q' must contain both such formulae as az=,b, (strong' identity formulae) and such formulae as aj=,b2 ('weak' identity formulae). To allow individual constants to be non-dominant in a formula which is not molecular will be a temporary departure from the practice so far adopted in Q; but in view of the possibility of eventually defining "=" in a second-order calculus which is an extension of Q one may perhaps regard this departure as justified.  Q' then might add to Q  one new symbol, "="; two new formation rules; (1)  ' =,? is a formula,  (2)  If aj+ =, Bj+, is a formula, &,+ =-Bj+, is a formula, where m> j+k and m> j+ 1.  (c) two new inference-rules  (I)  (2)  A-Vo,+,C0,-,-,0,-, [a weak identity law],  a, - Be. ф+ф(Ba). [There is substitutivity both on strong and on weak identity.]  I hope that these additions would be adequate, though I have not taken steps to assure myself that they are. I might add that to develop a representation of an interesting weak notion of identity, one such that Pegasus will be identical with Pegasus but not with Bellerophon, I think that one would need a system within which such psychological notions as "it is believed that" were represented.  VIII. SEMANTICS FOR Q  The task of providing a semantics for Q might, I think, be discharged inmore than one way; the procedure which I shall suggest will, I hope, continue the following features: (a) it will be reasonably intuitive, (b) it will not contravene the philosophical ideas underlying the construction of Q by, for example, invoking imaginary or non-real entities, (c) it will offer reasonable prospects for the provision of proofs of the soundness and completeness of Q (though I must defer the discussion of these prospects to another occasion).  A. Interpretation  The provision of an interpretation Z for Q will involve the following steps:  The specification of a non-empty domain D, within which two sub-domains are to be distinguished: the special sub-domain (which may be empty), the elements of which will be each unit set in D whose element is also in D; and the residual sub-domain, consisting of all elements of D which do not belong to the special sub-domain. The assignment of each propositional letter either to 1 or to 0. The assignment of each -ary predicate constant y to a set (the E-set of y) of ordered n-tuples, each of which has, as its elements, elements of D. An E-set may be empty. The assignment of each individual constant a to a single clement of D (the correlatum of a). If the correlatum of a belongs to the special sub-domain, it will be a unit-set whose element is also in D, and that element will be the designatum of a. If the correlatum of a is not in the special sub-domain, then & will have no designatum. [I have in mind a special case of the fulfilment of step (4), in which every individual constant has as its correlatum either an element of the special sub-domain or the null-set. Such a method of assignment seems particularly intuitive.] If an individual constant a is, in Z, assigned to a correlatum belonging to the special sub-domain, I shall say that the assignment of a is efficient. If, in Z, all individual constants are efficiently assigned, I shall say that Z is an efficient interpretation of Q  It will be noted that, as I envisage them, interpretations of Q will be of a non-standard type, in that a distinction is made between the correlation of an individual constant and its description. All individual constants are given correlata, but only those which on a given interpretation are non-vacuous have, on that interpretation, designata. Interpretations of this kind may be called Q-type interpretations.I shall use the expressions "Corr (1)" and "Corr (O)" as abbreviations, respectively, for "correlated with 1" and "correlated with 0"  *. By "atomic  formula" I shall mean a formula consisting of a subscripted n-ary predicate constant followed by a subscripted individual constant.  I shall, initially, in defining "Corr(1) on Z" ignore quantificational formulae.  If ф is atomic, @ is CorrI) on Z iff i) each individual constant in has in Z a designatum (i.e. its correlatum is a unit set in D whose element is also in D), and ii) the designata of the individual constants in , taken in the order in which the individual constants which designate them occur in , form an ordered n-tuple which is in the E-set assigned in Z to the predicate constant in ф. If no individual constant dominates , is Corr(1) on Z ifl (i If =~,V, y is Corr(0) on Z; (ii)  If =v&,x. v and z are each Corr(1) on Z;  (ili)  If ф=wv. X, either or y is Corr(1) on Z;  (iv)  If =/→,x, either is Corr(0) on Z or x is Corr(1) on Z.  If (x) is a closed formula in which & is non-dominant, and if is like « except that & dominates $, then is Corr(1) on Z iff i) v is Corr(1) on Z and (ii) a is efficiently assigned in Z. If a closed formula is not Corr(1) on Z, then it is Corr(0) on Z. To provide for quantificational formulae, some further notions are required.  An interpretation Z' is an i.c.-variant of Z iff Z' differs from Z (if at all) only in that, for at least one individual constant a, the correlatum of a in Z' is different from the correlatum of a in Z. Z' is an efficiency-preserving i.c.-variant of Z iff Z' is an i.c.-variant of Z and, for any a, if a is efficiently assigned in Z a is also efficiently assigned in Z'. Z' is an efficiency-quota-preserving i.c.-variant of Z iff Z' is an i.c.-variant of Z and the number of individual constants efficiently assigned in Z' is not less than the number efficiently assigned in Z.' Let us approach the treatment of quantificational formulae by considering the 3-quantifier. Suppose that, closely following Mates's procedure in Elementary Logic, we stipulate that Jw,ф is CorrI) on Z iff $ (a'/∞)is Corr (1) on at least one i.c.-variant of Z, where a is the first individual constant in Q. (We assume that the individual constants of Q can be ordered, and that some principle of ordering has been selected). In other words, 3w,ф will be Corr(I) on Z iff, without altering the assignment in Z of any predicate constant, there is some way of assigning &' so that ф (a/∞) is Corr(l) on that assignment. Let us also suppose that we shall define validity in Q by stipulating that @ is valid in Q iff, for any interpretation Z, ф is Corr(1) on Z.  We are now faced with a problem. Consider the "weak existential" formula 3x2~, F,x,. If we proceed as we have just suggested, we shall be forced to admit this formula as valid; if "a" is the first individual constant in Q, we have only to provide a non-efficient assignment for  "a" to ensure that on that assignment ~, Fa, is Corr(1); for any interpretation Z, some i.c.-variant of Z will provide such an assignment for "a", and so 3x4~3 F,x2 will be CorrI) on Z. But do we want to have to admit this formula as valid? First, if it is valid then I am reasonably sure that Q, as it stands, is incomplete, for I see no way in which this formula can be proved. Second, if in so far as we are inclined to regard the natural language counterparts of valid formulae as expressing conceptual truths, we shall have to say that e.g. "Someone won't be at this party", if given the 'weak' interpretation which it was supposed to bear in the conversations imagined in Section VI, will express a conceptual truth; while my argument in that section does not demand that the sentence in question express an exciting truth, I am not sure that I welcome quite the degree of triviality which is now threatened.  It is possible, however, to avoid the admission of 3x,~,F,x2 as a valid formula by adopting a slightly different semantical rule for the  3-quantifier. We stipulate that 3o,$ is Corr(I) on Z iff @ (c'/co) is Corr(I) on at least one efficiency-preserving i.c.-variant of Z. Some interpretations of Q will be efficient interpretations, in which "a" will be efficiently assigned; and in any efficiency-preserving i.c.-variant of such an interpretation "a" will remain efficiently assigned; moreover among these efficient interpretations there will be some in which the E-set assigned to  "F" contains (to speak with a slight looseness) the member of each unit-set belonging to the special sub-domain. For any efficient interpretation in which "p" is thus assigned, F,a, will be Corr(1), and ~ , F,a, will be Corr(0), on all efficiency-preserving i.c. -variants.So 3x4~gF,xz will not be Corr(1) on all interpretations, i.e. will not be valid.  A similar result may be achieved by using the notion of an efficiency-quota-preserving i.c.-variant instead of that of an efficiency-preserving i.c.-variant; and the use of the former notion must be preferred for the following reason. Suppose  that we use the latter notion;  (ii)  (iii)  that "a?" is non-efficiently assigned in Z;  that "a" is the first individual constant, and is efficiently assigned in Z;  (iv)  that "F" includes in its extension the member of each unit-set in the special sub-domain.  Then ~, Faz is Corr(1) on Z, and so (by E.G.) 3x2~, Fix, is Corr(1) on Z. But "a" is efficiently assigned in Z, so ~g F,a, is Corr(0) on every efficiency-preserving i.c.-variant of Z (since "F" includes in its extension every designable object). So x~, F,*z is Corr(0) on Z.  This contradiction is avoided if we use the notion of efficiency-quota-preserving i.c.-variant, since such a variant of Z may provide a non-efficient assignment for an individual constant which is efficiently assigned in Z itself; and so 3xz~, F,x, may be Corr(I) on Z even though "a" is efficiently assigned in Z.  So I add to the definition of "Cort(I) on Z", the following clauses:  (5) If =Vo,k, is CorrI) on Z, iff V(a'/a) is Corr(1) on every  efficiency-quota-preserving i.c.-variant of Z.  (6) If ф =3o,/, is Corr(1) on Z iff y (x'/c) is Corr(1) on at least  one efficiency-quota-preserving i.c.-variant of Z.  [In each clause, "a is to be taken as denoting the first individual constant in Q.]  Validity may be defined as follows:  ф is valid in Q iff, for any interpretation Z, ф is Corr(1) on Z.  Finally, we may, if we like, say that p is true on Z iff p is CorrI) on Z.  IX. NAMES AND DESCRIPTIONS  It might be objected that, in setting up Q in such a way as to allow for the representation of vacuous names, I have ensured the abandonment, at least in spirit, of one of the desiderata which I have had in mind; for(it might be suggested) if Q is extended so as to include a Theory of Descriptions, its individual constants will be seen to be indistinguishable, both syntactically and semantically, from unanalysed definite descrip-tions; they will be related to representations of descriptions in very much the same way as propositional letters are related to formulae, having lost the feature which is needed to distinguish them from representations of descriptions, namely that of being interpretable only by the assignment of a designatum.  I do not propose to prolong this paper by including the actual presentation of an extension of Q which includes the representation of descrip-tions, but I hope to be able to say enough about how I envisage such an extension to make it clear that there will be a formal difference between the individual constants of Q and definite descriptions. It is a familiar fact that there are at least two ways in which a notation for representing definite descriptions may be developed within a classical system; one may represent "The haberdasher of Mr. Spurgeon is bald" either by (1) G(1x. Ex) or by (2) (9x. Fx) Gx; one may, that is, treat "ix. Fx" either as a term or as being analogous to a (restricted) quantifier. The first method does not allow for the representation of scope-differences, so a general decision will have to be taken with regard to the scope of definite de-scriptions, for example that they are to have maximal scope. The second method does provide for scope-distinctions; there will be a distinction between, for example, (ix. Fx) ~ Gx and ~(1x. Fx) Gx. The apparatus of Q, however, will allow us, if we wish, to combine the first method, that of representing definite descriptions by terms, with the representation of differences of scope; we can, if we like, distinguish between c.g., ~,G,ax,F,x, and ~,G,1xgF,xz, and ensure that from the first formula we may, and from the second we may not, derive E!, 1x, F,*2. We might, alternatively, treat descriptions as syntactically analogous to restricted quantifiers, if we so desire. Let us assume (arbitrarily) that the first method is adopted, the scope-boundaries of a descriptive term being, in each direction, the first operator with a higher subscript than that borne by the iota-operator or the first sentential boundary, whichever is nearer.  Let us further assume (perhaps no less arbitrarily) that the iota-operator is introduced as a defined expression, so that such a formula as  nitional substitution for the right-hand side of the formulaG, xgF,x2→4G,x,F,x2, together with applications of the rules for subscript-adjustment.  Now, as I envisage the appropriate extension of Q, the formal difference between individual constants and descriptive terms will lie in there being a legitimate step (by E. G.) from a formula containing a non-dominant individual constant to the related "weak' existential form, e.g.. from ~, Faz to 3x4~, F,x2, while there will, for example, be no analogous step from ~ G, 1x, Fxz to 3x4~, G,x2. Such a distinction between individual constants and descriptive terms seems to me to have, at least prima facie, a basis in intuition; I have at least some inclination to say that, if Mr. Spurgeon has no haberdasher, then it would be true (though no doubt conversationally odd) to say "It is not the case that Mr. Spurgeon's haberdasher is bald" (S), even though no one has even suggested or imagined that Mr. Spurgeon has a haberdasher; even though, that is, there is no answer to the question who Mr. Spurgeon's haberdasher is or has been supposed to be, or to the question whom the speaker means by the phrase "Mr. Spurgeon's haberdasher." If that inclination is admissible, then it will naturally be accompanied by a reluctance to allow a step from S to "Someone is not bald" (S,) even when S, is given its 'weak' interpretation. I have, however, already suggested that an utterance of the sentence "It is not the case that Mr. Spurgeon is bald" (S') is not assessable for truth or falsity unless something can be said about who Mr. Spurgeon is or is supposed to be; in which case the step from S' to S, (weakly interpreted) seems less un-justifiable.  I can, nevertheless, conceive of this argument's failing to produce conviction. The following reply might be made: "If one is given the truth of S, on the basis of there being no one who is haberdasher to Mr. Spur-geon, all one has to do is first to introduce a name, say 'Bill', laying down that 'Bill' is to designate whoever is haberdasher to Mr. Spurgeon, then to state (truly) that it is not the case that Bill is bald (since there is no such person), and finally to draw the conclusion (now legitimate) that someone is not bald (on the 'weak' reading of that sentence). If only a stroke of the pen, so to speak, is required to legitimize the step from S to S, (weakly interpreted), why not legitimize the step directly, in which case the formal distinction in Q" between individual constants and descriptive terms must either disappear or else become wholly arbitrary?"A full treatment of this reply would, I suspect, be possible only within the framework of a discussion of reference too elaborate for the present occasion; I can hope only to give an indication of one of the directions in which I should have some inclination to proceed. It has been observed? that a distinction may be drawn between at least two ways in which descriptive phrases may be employed.  (I) A group of men is discussing the situation arising from the death of a business acquaintance, of whose private life they know nothing, except that (as they think) he lived extravagantly, with a household staff which included a butler. One of them says "Well, Jones' butler will be seeking a new position".  (2) Earlier, another group has just attended a party at Jones' house, at which their hats and coats were looked after by a dignified individual in dark clothes and a wing-collar, a portly man with protruding ears, whom they heard Jones addressing as "Old Boy", and who at one point was discussing with an old lady the cultivation of vegetable marrows.  One of the group says "Jones' butler got the hats and coats mixed up". i The speaker in example (1) could, without impropriety, have inserted after the descriptive phrase "Jones' butler" the clause "whoever he may be". It would require special circumstances to make a corresponding insertion appropriate in the case of example (2). On the other hand we may say, with respect to example (2), that some particular individual has been 'described as', 'referred to as', or 'called' Jones' butler by the speaker; furthermore, any one who was in a position to point out that Jones has no butler, and that the man with the protruding ears was Jones gardener, or someone hired for the occasion, would also be in a position to claim that the speaker had misdescribed that individual as Jones' butler. No such comments are in place with respect to example (I). (ii) A schematic generalized account of the difference of type between examples (I) and (2) might proceed along the following lines. Let us say that X has a dossier for a definite description & if there is a set of definite descriptions which includes &, all the members of which X supposes (in one or other of the possible sense of 'suppose") to be satisfied by one and the same item. In a type (2) case, unlike a type (I) case, the speaker intends the hearer to think (via the recognition that he is so intended) (a) that the speaker has a dossier for the definite description & which he has used, and (b) that the speaker has selected from this dossier at least partlyin the hope that the hearer has a dossier for & which 'overlaps' the speaker's dossier for & (that is, shares a substantial, or in some way specially favoured, subset with the speaker's dossier). In so far as the speaker expects the hearer to recognize this intention, he must expect the hearer to think that in certain circumstances the speaker will be prepared to replace the remark which he has made (which contains 8) by a further remark in which some element in the speaker's dossier for & is substituted for d. The standard circumstances in which it is to be supposed that the speaker would make such a replacement will be (a) if the speaker comes to think that the hearer either has no dossier for &, or has one which does not overlap the speaker's dossier for & (i.e., if the hearer appears not to have identified the item which the speaker means or is talking about), (b) if the speaker comes to think that & is a misfit in the speaker's dossier for , i.e., that & is not, after all, satisfied by the same item as that which satisfies the majority of, or each member of a specially favoured subset of, the descriptions in the dossier. In example (2) the speaker might come to think that Jones has no butler, or that though he has, it is not the butler who is the portly man with the protruding ears, etc., and whom the speaker thinks to have mixed up the hats and coats. (iii) If in a type (2) case the speaker has used a descriptive phrase (e.g.,  "Jones' butler") which in fact has no application, then what the speaker has said will, strictly speaking, be false; the truth-conditions for a type (2) statement, no less than for a type (I) statement, can be thought of as being given by a Russellian account of definite descriptions (with suitable provision for unexpressed restrictions, to cover cases in which, example, someone uses the phrase "the table" meaning thereby "the table in this room"). But though what, in such a case, a speaker has said may be false, what he meant may be true (for example, that a certain particular individual [who is in fact Jones' gardener] mixed up the hats and coats).  Let us introduce two auxiliary devices, italics and small capital let-ters, to indicate to which of the two specified modes of employment a reported use of a descriptive phrase is to be assigned. If I write "S said 'The Fis G'," I shall indicate that S was using "the F" in a type  (1), non-identificatory way, whereas if I write "S said "THE F is G",' I shall indicate that S was using "the F" in a type (2), identificatory way.  It is important to bear in mind that I am not suggesting that the differencebetween these devices represents a difference in the meaning or sense which a descriptive phrase may have on different occasions; on the con-trary, I am suggesting that descriptive phrases have no relevant systematic duplicity of meaning; their meaning is given by a Russellian account.  We may now turn to names. In my type (1) example, it might be that in view of the prospect of repeated conversational occurrences of the expression "Jones' butler," one of the group would find it convenient to say "Let us call Jones' butler 'Bill'." Using the proposed supplementa-tion, I can represent him as having remarked "Let us call Jones' butler  'Bill'." Any subsequent remark containing "Bill" will have the same truth-value as would have a corresponding remark in which "Jones' butler" replaces "Bill". If Jones has no butler, and if in consequence it is false that Jones' butler will be seeking a new position, then it will be false that Bill will be seeking a new position.  In the type (2) example, also, one of the group might have found it convenient to say "Let us call Jones' butler 'Bill'," and his intentions might have been such as to make it a correct representation of his remark for me to write that he said "Let us call JONES' BUTLER 'Bill'." If his remark is correctly thus represented, then it will nor be true that, in all conceivable circumstances, a subsequent remark containing "Bill" will have the same truth-value as would have a corresponding remark in which "Bill" is replaced by "Jones's butler". For the person whom the speaker proposes to call "Bill" will be the person whom he meant when he said "Let us call JONES'S BUTLER 'Bill'," viz., the person who looked after the hats and coats, who was addressed by Jones as "Old Boy", and so on; and if this person turns out to have been Jones's gardener and not Jones's butler, then it may be true that Bill mixed up the hats and coats and false that Jones's butler mixed up the hats and coats. Remarks of the form "Bill is such-and-such" will be inflexibly tied, as regards truth-value, not to possible remarks of the form "Jones's butler is such-and-such", but to possible remarks of the form "The person whom X meant when he said  'Let us call Jones's butler "Bill"' is such-and-such".  It is important to note that, for a definite description used in the explanation of a name to be employed in an identificatory way, it is not required that the item which the explainer means (is referring to) when he uses the description should actually exist. A person may establish or explain a use for a name & by saying "Let us call THE F &" or "THE F iscalled &" even though every definite description in his dossier for "the F" is vacuous; he may mistakenly think, or merely deceitfully intend his hearer to think, that the elements in the dossier are non-vacuous and are satisfied by a single item; and in secondary or 'parasitic' types of case, as in the narration of or commentary upon fiction, that this is so may be something which the speaker non-deceitfully pretends or feigns.  So names introduced or explained in this way may be vacuous.  I may now propound the following argument in answer to the objection that any distinction in Q between individual constants and descriptive terms will be arbitrary.  (1) For a given definite description 6, the difference between a type  and type (2) employment is not to be construed as the employment of o in one rather than another of two systematically different senses of . A name a may be introduced either so as to be inflexibly tied, as regards the truth-value of utterances containing it, to a given definite description ô, or so as to be not so tied (6 being univocally employed); so the difference between the two ways of introducing a may reasonably be regarded as involving a difference of sense or meaning for a; a sense in which a may be said to be equivalent to a definite description and a sense in which it may not. It is, then, not arbitrary so to design Q that its individual constants are to be regarded as representing, among other linguistic items, names used with one of their possible kinds of meaning, namely that in which a name is not equivalent to a definite description. X. CONCLUDING REMARKS  I do not propose to attempt the important task of extending Q so as to include the representation of psychological verb-phrases, but I should like to point out a notational advantage which any such extension could be counted on to possess. There are clearly at least two possible readings of such a sentence as "John wants someone to marry him", one in which it might be paraphrased by "John wants someone or other to marry him" and another in which it might be paraphrased by "John wants a particular person to marry him" or by "There is someone whom John wants to marry him". Symbolizing "a wants that p" by Wap, and using the apparatus of classical predicate logic, we might hope to represent reading (1)by W°(3x) (Fxa) and reading (2) by (x) (WªFxa). But suppose that John wants Martha to marry him, having been deceived into thinking that his friend William has a highly delectable sister called Martha, though in fact William is an only child. In these circumstances one is inclined to say that "John wants someone to marry him" is true on reading (2), but we cannot now represent reading (2) by (3x) (WªFxa), since Martha does not exist.  The apparatus of Q should provide us with distinct representations for two familiar readings of "John wants Martha to marry him"  , VIZ., (a)  Wy F,ba, and (b) W9*F,b,a,. Given that Martha does not exist only  (b) can be true. We should have available to us also three distinct 3-quantificational forms (together with their isomorphs):  (i)  W93x,F,xzas;  (ii)  (iii)  Since in (iii) "x" does not dominate the segment following the 3-quantifier, (iii) does not have existential force, and is suitable therefore for representing "John wants a particular person to marry him" if we have to allow for the possibility that the particular person does not actually exist. [ and (ili) will be derivable from each of (a) and (b): (ii) will be derivable only from (a).]  I have in this paper developed as strong a case as I can in support of the method of treatment of vacuous names which I have been expounding.  Whether in the end I should wish to espouse it would depend on the outcome of further work on the notion of reference.  REFERENCES  1 Iam particularly indebted to Charles Parsons and George Boolos for some extremely helpful correspondence, to George Myro for countless illuminating suggestions and criticisms, and to Benson Mates for assistance provided both by word of mouth and via his book Elementary Logic, on which I have drawn a good deal.  • I owe the idea of this type of variant to George Myro, whose invaluable help was essential to the writing of this section.  9 c.g. by K. S. Donnellan, 'Reference and Definite Descriptions', Philosophical Review  75 (1966) 281-304; as may perhaps be seen from what follows, I am not sure that L am wholly sympathetic towards the conclusions which he draws from the existence of the distinction. h. P. GriceJ. L. Speranza. Luigi Speranza. “Grice e Speranza” -- Keywords: Grice, etc. Vide: The Grice Papers, BANC, MSS. Speranza