I shall devote this Epilogue to a detailed review of the deeper aspects of the unity which I believe the essays in this volume to possess.  These deeper aspects are three in number, and I shall now enumerate them separately. The first is that the connections between the topics discussed are sometimes stronger and more interesting than the essays themselves make clear: partly this is due to the fact that these connections were not, I think, seen by me at the time at which the essays were written, and it is only in retrospect that I begin to see their number and their importance. The second aspect, on which I think the first is dependent, is that the various topics which interested me at the time at which these essays were written seem to be ones which are, first of all, important and second, topics which still interest me, and some of them, perhaps all of them, are matters which I still feel that I need to make up my mind about more thoroughly and clearly. Consequently these essays can perhaps be regarded as the first word but not the last word in a number of directions in which it is important that philosophers should go. The third and last of these deeper aspects is one that has already been remarked upon in the preface as providing the methodological theme which runs through the contents of this volume. It consists in the application of or illustration of a certain sort of way of doing philosophy, one which was one of the many ways in which philosophy was done in Oxford at the time at which I was there and which are connected with the application to philosophy of a particular kind of interest in language, particularly ordinary language. Such interest took more than one form, and I do not think that in any of the forms it has been very well articulated orexpressed or described by those who practised it; and I think it is of fundamental importance to philosophizing. The last part of this epilogue will be devoted to an attempt to make its character more clear.  I shall begin by listing the persistent or recurrent thematic strands which it seems to me I can discern in the essays appearing in this volume, and I shall then return after having listed them to consider them one by one in varying degrees of detail. I think I can detect eight such strands though some of them have more than one component and the components do not necessarily have to be accepted as a block.  The first of these main strands belongs to the philosophy of percep-tion; it involves two theses; first that the general notion of perception, the concept expressed by the verb "perceive," is properly treatable by means of causal analysis; and second that in the more specific notions connected with perception like those involving different modalities of perception like "seeing" and "hearing," various elements have to be considered but one which cannot be ignored or eliminated is the experiential quality of the sense-experiences perception involves. A third question, about the analysis of statements describing objects of perception like material objects, was also prominent in my thinking at the time at which these essays were written but does not figure largely in these pages. The second strand is a concern to defend the viability of an analytic/synthetic distinction together perhaps with one or more of such closely related distinctions as that between necessary and contingent or between a priori and a posteriori. A third strand is a defense of the rights of the ordinary man or common sense vis-à-vis the professional philosopher, the idea being that for reasons which have yet to be determined and accurately stated the ordinary man has a right to more respect from the professional philosopher than a word of thanks for having got him started.  The fourth strand relates to meaning; it consists in two theses: first, that it is necessary to distinguish between a notion of meaning which is relativized to the users of words or expressions and one that is not so relativized; and second, of the two notions the unrelativized notion is posteriori to, and has to be understood in terms of, the relativized notion; what words mean is a matter of what people mean by them.  The fifth strand is the contention that in considering the notion of meaning we should pay attention to two related distinctions. First, a distinction between those elements of meaning which are present by virtue of convention and those which are present by virtue of something other than convention; and second, between those elements ofmeaning which standardly form part of what a word or form of words asserts (or its user asserts), and those elements of meaning which rather form part of what the words or their users imply or otherwise convey or are committed to. A distinction, that is to say, (a) between conventional and nonconventional meaning and (b) between assertive and nonassertive meaning. Strand six is the idea that the use of language is one among a range of forms of rational activity and that those rational activities which do not involve the use of language are in various ways importantly parallel to those which do. This thesis may take the more specific form of holding that the kind of rational activity which the use of language involves is a form of rational cooperation; the merits of this more specific idea would of course be independent of the larger idea under which it falls.  Strands seven and eight both relate to the real or apparent opposition between the structures advocated by traditional or Aristotelian logic, on the one hand, and by modern or mathematical logic, on the other. In a certain sense these strands pull in opposite directions.  Strand seven consists in the contention that it is illegitimate to repre-sent, as some modern logicians have done, such grammatical subject phrases as "the King of France," "every schoolboy," "a rich man," and even "Bismarck" as being only ostensibly referential; that they should be genuinely referential is required both for adequate representation of ordinary discourse and to preserve a conception of the use of language as a rational activity.  Strand eight involves the thesis that, notwithstanding the claims of strand seven, genuinely referential status can be secured for the subject phrases in question by supplementing the apparatus of modern logic in various ways which would include the addition of the kind of bracketing devices which are sketched within the contents of this volume.  Strand One  I now turn to a closer examination of the first of these eight thematic strands, the strand, that is, which relates to the analysis of per-ception.' The two essays involving this strand seem to me not to be devoid of merit; the essay on the Causal Theory of Perception served to introduce what later I called the notion of Conversational Impli-  1. Cf. esp. Essays 15-16.cature which has performed, I think, some useful service in the philosophy of language, and also provided an adequate base for the rejection of a bad, though at one time popular, reason for rejecting a causal analysis of perception; and the essay called "Some Remarks about the Senses," drew attention, I think, to an important and neglected subject, namely the criteria by which one distinguishes between one modality of sense and another. But unfortunately to find a way of disposing of one bad reason for rejecting a certain thesis is not the same as to establish that thesis, nor is drawing attention to the importance of a certain question the same as answering that question.  In retrospect it seems to me that both these essays are open to criticisms which so far as I know have not been explicitly advanced In "The Causal Theory of Perception" I reverted to a position about sense-datum statements which was originally taken up by philosophers such as Paul and Ayer and some others; according to it, statements to the effect that somebody was having a sense-datum, or had a sense-datum or was having a sense-datum of a particular sort, are to be understood as alternative ways of making statements about him which are also expressible in terms of what I might call phenomenal verbs like "seem" or, more specifically, like "looks," "sounds," and "feels."  This position contrasted with the older kind of view, according to which statements about sense-data were not just alternative versions of statements which could be expressed in terms of phenomenal verbs but were items which served to account for the applicability of such a range of verbs. According to the older view, to say that someone had a sense-datum which was red or mouselike was not just an outlandish alternative way of saying it looked to him as if there was a mouse or something red before him, but was rather to specify something which explained why it looked to him as if there was something red before him or as if there were a mouse before him. The proponents of the newer view of sense-data would have justified their suggestion by pointing to the fact that sense-data and their sensible characteristics are mysterious items which themselves stand in need of explanation, and so cannot properly be regarded as explaining rather than as being explained by the applicability of the phenomenal verb-phrases associated with them. It is not clear that these criticisms of the older view are justified; might it not be that while in one sense of the word "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to "rendered intelligible") sense-data are explained in terms of phenomenal verbs,in another sense of "explained" (that which is roughly equivalent to  "accounted for") the priority is reversed, and the applicability of phenomenal verbs is explained by the availability of sense-data and their sensible feature. The newer view, moreover, itself may run into trouble. It seems to me to be a plausible view that the applicability of phenomenal verbs is itself to be understood as asserting the presence or occurrence of a certain sort of experience, one which would explain and in certain circumstances license the separate employment of a verb phrase embedded in the phenomenal verb-phrase; for it to look or seem to me as if there is something red before me is for me to have an experience which would explain and in certain unproblematic circumstances license the assertion that there is something red before me. It will be logically incoherent at one and the same time to represent the use of phenomenal verbs as indicating the existence of a ba-sis, of some sort or other, for a certain kind of assertion about perceptible objects and as telling us what that basis is. The older view of sense-data attempted to specify the basis; the newer view, apparently with my concurrence, seems to duck this question and thereby to render mysterious the interpretation of phenomenal verb-phrases.  Second, in "Some Remarks about the Senses" I allow for the possibility that there is no one criterion for the individuation of a sense, but I do not provide for the separate possibility that the critical candidates are not merely none of them paramount but are not in fact independent of one another. For example, sense organs are differentiated not by their material character, but by their function. Organs that are just like eyes would in fact be not eyes but ears if what they did was, not to see, but to hear; again, real qualities of things are those which underlie or explain various causal mechanisms, such as our being affected by vibrations or light rays. So criterial candidates run into one another; and indeed the experiential flavor or quality of experience to which I attach special importance is in fact linked with the relevant ranges of what Locke called secondary qualities which an observer attributes to the objects which he perceives; so we might end up in a position that would not have been uncongenial to Locke and Boyle, in which we hold that there are two ways of distinguishing between senses, one of which is by the character of their operations (processes studied by the sciences rather than by the ordinary citizen), and the other would be by the difference of their phenomenal char-acter, which would be something which would primarily be of interest to ordinary people rather than to scientists. These reflections sug-gest to me two ideas which I shall here specify but not argue for. The first is that, so far from being elements in the ultimate furniture of the world, sense-data are items which are imported by theorists for various purposes; such purposes might be that one should have bearers of this or that kind of relation which is needed in order to provide us with a better means for describing or explaining the world. Such relations might be causal or spatial where the space involved is not physical space but some other kind of space, like visual space, or it might be a system of relations which in certain ways are analogous to spatial relations, like relations of pitch between sounds. This idea might lead to another, namely that consideration of the nature of perception might lead us to a kind of vindication of common sense distinct from those vindications which I mention elsewhere in this epilogue, for if sense-data are to be theoretical extensions introduced or concocted by theorists, theorists will need common sense in order to tell them what it is to which theoretical extensions need to be added. Philosophers' stories derive their character and direction from the nonphilosophical stories which they supplement.  Strand Two  The second of these eight strands' consists in a belief in the possibility of vindicating one or more of the number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of "The analytic/syn-thetic distinction." I shall say nothing here about this strand not because I think it is unimportant; indeed I think it is one of the most important topics in philosophy, required in determining, not merely the answers to particular philosophical questions, but the nature of philosophy itself. It is rather that I feel that nothing less than an adequate treatment of the topic would be of any great value, and an adequate treatment of it would require a great deal of work which I have not yet been able to complete. This lacuna, however, may be somewhat mitigated by the fact that I provided some discussion of this topic in "Reply to Richards" contained in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality and by the fact that at the conclusion of this epilogue I shall also advance a slightly skittish hint of the direction in which I have some inclination to go. I hope that this treatment will serve as an interim indication of what my final position might be.  2. Cf. esp. Essay 13.The third strand' consists in a disposition on my part to uphold in one form or another the rights of the ordinary man or of common sense in the face of attacks which proceed from champions of specialist philosophical or scientific theory. All parties would, I think, agree that specialist theory has to start from some basis in ordinary thought of an informal character; the question at issue is whether the contents and views contained in that thought have to continue to be respected in some measure or other by the specialist theorist even after the specialist theorist has embarked on his own work.  According to some, at that point, the contribution of ordinary thought and speech can be ignored, like a ladder to be kicked away once the specialist has got going. My support for common sense is not eroded by the failure of many attempts made by philosophers to give a justification or basis for such support; indeed the negative part of my contribution to the subject consists in the rejection of a number of such attempts. Some of these rejections appear in discussions contained in this volume, others in other places. One form of defense of common sense is one propounded by Moore in the famous paper on that subject. This seems to consist in the presumed acceptability of the obvious; it seems to consist in that because so far as I can see no other reason is given for the acceptance of what Moore counts as propositions of common sense. If I have read Moore aright I find this form of defense of common sense unsatisfactory on the grounds that the conception of the obvious is not in an appropriate sense an objective conception. This is pointedly illustrated by the famous story of the British mathematician G. H. Hardy, who in a lecture announced that a certain mathematical proposition was obvious, at which point one of his audience demurred and said that it was not obvious to him.  Hardy then halted the lecture, paced outside the lecture room for a quarter of an hour, returned, and said "It is obvious." The trouble is that obviousness requires consent, on the part of the parties con-cerned, in the obviousness of what is thought of as obvious.  A second and different line of defense of common sense comes from Thomas Reid, who points to the need for first principles of human knowledge. Once these are secured, then various forms of derivation and deduction and inference can account for the accumulation of  3. Cf. esp. Essays 8-10.known propositions which are as it were theorems in the system of knowledge; but theorems need to look back to axioms and these axioms are things which Reid regards as matters which it is the function of common sense to provide. The fault which I find here is a conflation of the notion of axioms as being organizational items from which nonaxiomatic propositions are supposed to be derivable with an epi-stemic interpretation of axioms as providing the foundations of human knowledge; whereas it seems to me arguable and indeed plausible to suppose that the grounds for the acceptance of the contents of this or that system do not lie in the prior evidence or self-evidence of the axioms of the system but in the general character of the system in containing what one thinks it ought to contain in the way of what is knowable.  From an epistemic point of view the justifiability of the system lies in its delivering, in general, what one wants it to deliver and thinks it should deliver, rather than in the availability of a range of privileged intuitions which, happily, provide us with a sufficiency of starting points for rational inference. If common sense comes into the picture at all in this connection it seems to me that it should be with regard to a recognition in some degree or other of what the system ought to be expected to deliver to us rather than as a faculty which assures us of starting points which form the axioms of the system.  A third attempt to justify common sense is that provided by Malcolm in his interpretation of Moore; Malcolm suggested that Moore's point should be thought of as being that standard descriptions of certain sorts of situations cannot be incorrect since the standards of correctness are set by the nature of the descriptions which are standardly used to describe those situations. The trouble with this line, to my mind, is that it confuses two kinds of correctness and incorrectness.  Correctness of use or usage, whether a certain expression is properly or improperly applied, gives us one kind of correctness, that of proper application, but that an expression is correct in that sense does not guarantee it against another sort of incorrectness, namely logical in-coherence.  The final form of an attempt to justify common sense is by an appeal to Paradigm or Standard Cases; cases, that is, of the application of an expression to what are supposedly things to which that expression applies if it applies to anything at all; for example, if the expression "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like "desks" and "walls" and "pavements." The difficulty with this attempt is thatit contains as an assumption just what a skeptic who is querying common sense is concerned to deny: no doubt it may be true that if the word "solid" applies to anything at all it applies to things like  "desks," but it is the contention of the skeptic that it does not apply to anything, and therefore the fact that something is the strongest candidate does not mean that it is a successful candidate for the application of that expression. On the positive side I offered as an alternative to the appeals I have just been discussing, a proposed link between the authority of common sense and the theory of meaning. I suggested roughly that to side with the skeptic in his questioning of commonsense beliefs would be to accept an untenable divorce between the meaning of words and sentences on the one hand, and the proper specification of what speakers mean by such words and sentences on the other. This attempt to link two of the eight strands to one another now seems to me open to several objections, at least one of which I regard as fatal.  I begin with two objections which I am inclined to regard as non-fatal; the first of these is that my proposed reply to the skeptic ignores the distinction between what is propounded as, or as part of, one's message, thus being something which the speaker intends, and on the other hand what is part of the background of the message by way of being something which is implied, in which case its acceptance is often not intended but is rather assumed. That there is this distinction is true, but what is, given perfect rapport between speaker and hearer, something which a speaker implies, may, should that rapport turn out to be less than perfect, become something which the speaker is committed to asserting or propounding. If a speaker thinks his hearer has certain information which in fact the hearer does not, the speaker may, when this fact emerges, be rationally committed to giving him the information in question, so what is implied is at least potentially something which is asserted and so, potentially, something the acceptance of which is intended.  A second (I think, nonfatal) objection runs as follows: some forms of skepticism do not point to incoherences in certain kinds of mes-sage; they rely on the idea that skeptical doubts sometimes have to have been already allayed in order that one should have the foundations which are needed to allay just those doubts. To establish that I am not dreaming, I need to be assured that the experiences on which I rely to reach this assurance are waking experiences. In response to this objection, it can be argued, first, that a defense of common sensedoes not have to defend it all at once, against all forms of skeptical doubts, and, second, it might be held that with regard to the kinds of skeptical doubts which are here alluded to, what is needed is not a well-founded assurance that one's cognitive apparatus is in working order but rather that it should in fact be in working order whatever the beliefs or suppositions of its owner may be.  The serious objection is that my proposal fails to distinguish between the adoption, at a certain point in the representation of the skeptic's proposed position, of an extensional and of an intensional reading of that account. I assumed that the skeptic's position would be properly represented by an intensional reading at this point, in which case I supposed the skeptic to be committed to an incoherence; in fact, however, it is equally legitimate to take not an intensional reading but an extensional reading in which case we arrive at a formulation of the skeptic's position which, so far as has been shown, is reasonable and also immune from the objection which I proposed.  According to the intensional reading, the skeptic's position can be represented as follows: that a certain ordinary sentence s does, at least in part, mean that p, second, that in some such cases, the proposition that p is incoherent, and third, that standard speakers intend their hearers incoherently to accept that p, where "incoherently" is to be read as specifying part of what the speaker intends. That position may not perhaps be strictly speaking incoherent, but it certainly seems wildly implausible. However, there seems to be no need for the skeptic to take it and it can be avoided by an extensional interpretation of the appearance in this context, of the adverb "incoherently." According to this representation it would be possible for s to mean (in part) that p and for p to be incoherent and also for the standard speaker to intend the hearer to accept p which would be to accept something which is in fact incoherent though it would be no part of the speaker's intention that in accepting p the hearer should be accepting something which is incoherent. To this reply there seems to me to be no reply.  Despite this failure, however, there seem to remain two different directions in which a vindication of common sense or ordinary speech may be looked for. The first would lie in the thought that whether or not a given expression or range of expressions applies to a particular situation or range of situations is simply determined by whether or not it is standardly applied to such situations; the fact that in its application those who apply it may be subject to this or that form ofintellectual corruption or confusion does not affect the validity of the claim that the expression or range of expressions does apply to those situations. In a different line would be the view that the attributions and beliefs of ordinary people can only be questioned with due cause, and due cause is not that easy to come by; it has to be shown that some more or less dire consequences follow from not correcting the kind of belief in question; and if no such dire consequences can be shown then the beliefs and contentions of common sense have to be left intact.  Strand Four*  This strand has already been alluded to in the discussion of Strand 3, and consists in my views about the relation between what might roughly be described as word-meaning and as speaker's-meaning. Of all the thematic strands which I am distinguishing this is the one that has given me most trouble, and it has also engendered more heat, from other philosophers, in both directions, than any of its fellows. I shall attempt an initial presentation of the issues involved.  It has been my suggestion that there are two distinguishable meaning concepts which may be called "natural" meaning and "non-natural" meaning and that there are tests which may be brought to bear to distinguish them. We may, for example, inquire whether a particular occurrence of the verb "mean" is factive or nonfactive, that is to say whether for it to be true that so and so means that p it does or does not have to be the case that it is true that p; again, one may ask whether the use of quotation marks to enclose the specification of what is meant would be inappropriate or appropriate. If factivity is present and quotation marks would be inappropriate, we would have a case of natural meaning; otherwise the meaning involved would be nonnatural meaning. We may now ask whether there is a single overarching idea which lies behind both members of this dichotomy of uses to which the word "mean" seems to be subject. If there is such a central idea it might help to indicate to us which of the two concepts is in greater need of further analysis and elucidation and in what direction such elucidation should proceed. I have fairly recently (in Essay 18) come to believe that there is such an overarching idea and that it is indeed of some service in the proposed inquiry. The  4. Cf. esp. Essays 5-6, 7, 12.idea behind both uses of "mean" is that of consequence; if x means y then y, or something which includes y or the idea of y, is a consequence of x. In "natural" meaning, consequences are states of affairs; in "nonnatural" meaning, consequences are conceptions or complexes which involve conceptions. This perhaps suggests that of the two concepts it is "nonnatural" meaning which is more in need of further elucidation; it seems to be the more specialized of the pair, and it also seems to be the less determinate; we may, for example, ask how conceptions enter the picture and whether what enters the picture is the conceptions themselves or their justifiability. On these counts I should look favorably on the idea that if further analysis should be required for one of the pair the notion of "nonnatural" meaning would be first in line.  There are factors which support the suitability of further analysis for the concept of "nonnatural" meaning. "MeaningNN  " ("non-  natural meaning") does not look as if it names an original feature of items in the world, for two reasons which are possibly not mutually independent: (a) given suitable background conditions, meaningN can be changed by fiat; (b) the presence of meaningn is dependent on a framework provided by a linguistic, or at least a communication-engaged community.  It seems to me, then, at least reasonable and possibly even manda-tory, to treat the meaning of words, or of other communication ve-hicles, as analyzable in terms of features of word users or other com-municators; nonrelativized uses of "meaningn" are posterior to and explicable through relativized uses involving reference to word users or communicators. More specifically, what sentences mean is what (standardly) users of such sentences mean by them; that is to say, what psychological attitudes toward what propositional objects such users standardly intend (more precisely, M-intend) to produce by their utterance. Sentence-meaning then will be explicable either in terms of psychological attitudes which are standardly M-intended to produce in hearers by sentence utterers or to attitudes taken up by hearers toward the activities of sentence utterers.  At this point we begin to run into objections. The first to be considered is one brought by Mrs. J. Jack, whose position I find not wholly clear. She professes herself in favor of "a broadly 'Gricean' enter-  5. In an as yet unpublished paper entitled "The Rights and Wrongs of Grice on Mean-ing."prise" but wishes to discard various salient elements in my account (we might call these "narrowly Gricean theses"). What, precisely, is  "broad Griceanism"? She declares herself in favor of the enterprise of giving an account of meaning in terms of psychological attitudes, and this suggests that she favors the idea of an analysis, in psychological terms, of the concept of meaning, but considers that I have gone wrong, perhaps even radically wrong, in my selection of the ingredients of such an analysis.  But she also reproves me for "reductionism," in terms which suggest that whatever account or analysis of meaning is to be offered, it should not be one which is "reductionist," which might or might not be equivalent to a demand that a proper analysis should not be a proper reductive analysis. But what kind of analysis is to be provided?  What I think we cannot agree to allow her to do is to pursue the goal of giving a lax reductive analysis of meaning, that is, a reductive analysis which is unhampered by the constraints which characteristically attach to reductive analysis, like the avoidance of circularity; a goal, to which, to my mind several of my opponents have in fact addressed themselves. ((In this connection I should perhaps observe that though my earlier endeavors in the theory of meaning were attempts to provide a reductive analysis, I have never (I think) espoused reduction-ism, which to my mind involves the idea that semantic concepts are unsatisfactory or even unintelligible, unless they can be provided with interpretations in terms of some predetermined, privileged, and favored array of concepts; in this sense of "reductionism" a felt ad hoc need for reductive analysis does not have to rest on a reductionist foundation. Reductive analysis might be called for to get away from unclarity not to get to some predesignated clarifiers.)) I shall for the moment assume that the demand that I face is for a form of reductive analysis which is less grievously flawed than the one which I in fact offered; and I shall reserve until later consideration of the idea that what is needed is not any kind of reductive analysis but rather some other mode of explication of the concept of meaning.  The most general complaint, which comes from Strawson, Searle, and Mrs. Jack, seems to be that I have, wholly or partially, misidentified the intended (or M-intended) effect in communication; according to me it is some form of acceptance (for example, belief or desire), whereas it should be held to be understanding, comprehension, or (to use an Austinian designation) "uptake." One form of the cavil (the more extreme form) would maintain that the immediate intended tar-get is always "uptake," though this or that form of acceptance may be an ulterior target; a less extreme form might hold that the immediate target is sometimes, but not invariably, "uptake." I am also not wholly clear whether my opponents are thinking of "uptake" as referring to an understanding of a sentence (or other such expression) as a sentence or expression in a particular language, or as referring to a comprehension of its occasion-meaning (what the sentence or expression means on this occasion in this speaker's mouth). But my bafflement arises primarily from the fact that it seems to me that my analysis already invokes an analyzed version of an intention toward some form of "uptake" (or a passable substitute therefor), when I claim that in meaning a hearer is intended to recognize himself as intended to be the subject of a particular form of acceptance, and to take on such an acceptance for that reason. Does the objector reject this analysis and if so why? And in any case his position hardly seems satisfactory when we see that it involves attributing to speakers an intention which is specified in terms of the very notion of meaning which is being analyzed (or in terms of a dangerously close relative of that notion). Circularity seems to be blatantly abroad.  This question is closely related to, and is indeed one part of, the vexed question whether, in my original proposal, I was right to embrace a self-denial of the use of semantic concepts in the specification of the intentions which are embedded in meaning, a renunciation which was motivated by fear of circularity. A clear view of the position is not assisted by the fact that it seems uncertain what should, or should not, be counted as a deployment of semantic notions.  So far we seem to have been repelling boarders without too much difficulty; but I fear that intruders, whose guise is not too unlike that of the critics whom we have been considering, may offer, in the end at least, more trouble. First, it might be suggested that there is a certain arbitrariness in my taking relativized meaning as tantamount to a speaker's meaning something by an utterance; there are other notions which might compete for this spot, in particular the notion of something's meaning something to a hearer. Why should the claims of "meaning to," that is of passive or recipient's meaning, be inferior to those of "meaning by" (that is, of acting or agent's meaning)? Indeed a thought along these lines might lie behind the advocacy of  "uptake" as being sometimes or even always the target of semantic intention.  A possible reply to the champion of passive meaning would run asfollows: (1) If we maintain our present program, relativized meaning is an intermediate analytic stage between nonrelativized meaning and a "semantics-free" ("s-free") paraphrase of statements about mean-ing. So, given our present course, the fact (if it should be a fact) that there is no obviously available s-free paraphrase for "meaning to" would be a reason against selecting "meaning to" as an approved specimen of relativized meaning. (2) There does however seem in fact to be an s-free paraphrase for "meaning to," though it is one in which is embedded that paraphrase which has already been suggested for  "meaning by"; "s means p to X" would be interpreted as saying  "X knows what the present speaker does (alternatively a standard speaker would) mean by an utterance of s"; and at the next stage of analysis we introduce the proffered s-free paraphrase for "meaning by." So "meaning to" will merely look back to "meaning by," and the cavil will come to naught.  At least in its present form. But an offshoot of it seems to be available which might be less easy to dispose of. I shall first formulate a sketch of a proposed line of argument against my analysis of mean-ing, and then consider briefly two ways in which this argumentation might be resisted.  First, the argument.  In the treatment of language, we need to consider not only the relation of language to communication, but also, and concurrently, the relation of language to thought. A plausible position is that, for one reason or another, language is indispensable for thought, either as an instrument for its expression or, even more centrally, as the vehicle, or the material, in which thought is couched. We may at some point have to pay more attention to the details of these seeming variants, but for the present let us assume the stronger view that for one reason or another the occurrence of thought requires, either invariably or at least in all paradigmatic cases, the presence of a "linguistic flow." The "linguistic flows" in question need to attain at least a certain level of comprehensibility from the point of view of the thinker; while it is plain that not all thinking (some indeed might say that no thinking) is entirely free from confusion and incoherence, too great a departure of the language-flow from comprehensibility will destroy its character as (or as the expression of) thought; and this in turn will undermine the primary function of thought as an explanation of bodily behavior. Attempts to represent the comprehensibility, to the thinker, of the expression of thought by an appeal to either of the relativized concepts of meaning so far distinguished encounter serious, if not fatal, difficulties. While it is not impossible to mean something by what one says to oneself in one's head, the occurrence of such a phenomenon seems to be restricted to special cases of self-exhortation ("what I kept telling myself was......"), and not to be a general feature of thinking as such. Again, recognition of a linguistic sequence as meaning something to me seems appropriate (perhaps) when I finally catch on to the way in which I am supposed to take that se-quence, and so to instances in which I am being addressed by another not to those in which I address myself; such a phrase as "I couldn't get myself to understand what I was telling myself" seems dubiously admissible. So an admission of the indispensability of language to thought carries with it a commitment to the priority of nonrelativized meaning to either of the designated relativized conceptions; and there are no other promising relativized candidates. So nonrelativized meaning is noneliminable. The foregoing resistance to the idea of eliminating nonrelativized meaning by reductive analysis couched in terms of one or the other variety of relativized meaning might, perhaps, be reinforced by an attempt to exhibit the invalidity of a form of argument on which, it might be thought, the proponent of such reduction might be relying.  While the normal vehicles of interpersonal communication are words, this is not exclusively the case; gestures, signs, and pictorial items sometimes occur, at times even without linguistic concomitants. That fact might lead to the supposition that nonlinguistic forms of communication are pre-linguistic, and do not depend on linguistic mean-ing. A closely related form of reflection would suggest that if it is the case (as it seems to be) that sometimes the elements of trains of thought are nonlinguistic, then prelinguistic thinking is a genuine pos-sibility. (This was a live issue in the latter part of the nineteenth cen-tury.) But, it may be said, both of these lines of argument are incon-clusive, for closely related reasons. The fact that on occasion the vehicles of communication or of thought may be wholly nonlinguistic does not show that such vehicles are prelinguistic; it may well be that such vehicles could only fulfill their function as vehicles against a background of linguistic competence without which they would be lost. If, for example, they operate as substitutes for language, lan-  guage for which they are substitutes needs perhaps to be available to their users.  We now find ourselves in a serious intellectual bind. (1) Our initial attention to the operation of language in communication has provided powerful support for the idea that the meaning of words or other communication devices should be identified with the potentiality of such words or devices for causing or being caused by particular ranges of thought or psychological attitudes. When we are on this tack we are inexorably drawn toward the kind of psychological reductionism exhibited in my own essays about Meaning. (2) When our attention is focused on the appearance of language in thinking we are no less strongly drawn in the opposite direction; language now seems constitutive of thought rather than something the intelligibility of which derives from its relation to thought.  We cannot have it both ways at one and the same time. This dilemma can be amplified along the following lines. (1) States of thought, or psychological attitudes cannot be prelinguistic in char-acter. (2) Thought states therefore presuppose linguistic thought-episodes which are constitutive of them. (3) Such linguistic thought-episodes, to fulfill their function, must be intelligible sequences of words or of licensed word-substitutes. (4) Intelligibility requires ap: propriate causal relation to thought states. (5) So these thought states in question, which lie behind intelligibility, cannot themselves be built up out of linguistic sequences or word-flows. (6) So some thought states are prelinguistic (a thesis which contradicts thesis 1).  It appears to me that the seemingly devastating effect of the preceding line of argument arises from the commission by the arguer of two logical mistakes-or rather, perhaps, of a single logical mistake which is committed twice over in substantially similar though superficially different forms. The first time round the victim of the mistake is myself, the second time round the victim is the truth. In the first stage of the argument it is maintained that the word-flows which are supposedly constitutive of thought will have to satisfy the condition of being significant or meaningful and that the interpretation of this notion of meaningfulness resists expansion into a relativized form, and resists also the application of any pattern of analysis proposed by me. The second time round the arguer contends that any word-flow which is held to be constitutive of an instance of thinking will have to be supposed to be a significant word-flow and that the fulfillment of this condition requires a certain kind of causal connection with ad-  missible psychological states or processes and that to fulfill their function at this point neither the states in question nor the processes connected with them can be regarded as being constituted by further word-flows; the word-flows associated with thinking in order to provide for meaningfulness will have to be extralinguistic, or prelinguis-tic, in contradiction to the thesis that thinking is never in any relevant sense prelinguistic.  At this point we are surely entitled to confront the propounder of the cited argument with two questions. (1) Why should he assume that i shall be called upon to identify the notion of significance, which applies to the word-flows of thought, directly with any favored locution involving the notion of meaning which can be found in my work, or to any analysis suggested by me for such a locution? Why should not the link between the significance of word-flows involved in thinking and suggestions offered by me for the analysis of meaning be much less direct than the propounder of the argument envisages? (2) With what right, in the later stages of the argument, does the pro-pounder of the argument assume that if the word-flows involved in thought have to be regarded as significant, this will require not merely the provision at some stage of a reasonable assurance that this will be so but also the incorporation within the defining characterization of thinking of a special condition explicitly stipulating the significance of constitutive word-flows, despite the fact that the addition of such a condition will introduce a fairly blatant contradiction?  While, then, we shall be looking for reasonable assurance that the word-flows involved in thinking are intelligible, we shall not wish to court disaster by including a requirement that may be suggested as a distinct stipulated condition governing their admissibility as word-flows which are constitutive of thinking; and we may even retain an open mind on the question whether the assurance that we are seeking is to be provided as the conclusion of a deductive argument rather than by some other kind of inferential step.  The following more specific responses seem to me to be appropriate at this point.  (1) Since we shall be concerned with a language which is or which has been in general use, we may presume the accessibility of a class of mature speakers of that language, who by practice or by precept can generate for us open ranges of word-sequences which are, or again are not, admissible sentences of that language.  A favorable verdict from the body of mature speakers will establish particular sentences both as significant and, on that account, as expressive of psychological states such as a belief that Queen Anne is dead or a strong desire to be somewhere else. But the envisaged favorable verdicts on the part of mature speakers will only establish particular sentences as expressive of certain psychological states in general; they will not confer upon the sentences expressiveness of psychological states relative to particular individuals. For that stage to be reached some further determination is required Experience tells us that any admissible sentence in the language is open to either of two modes of production, which I will call "overt" and "sotto voce." The precise meaning of these labels will require further determination, but the ideas with which i am operating are as follows. (a) "Overt" production is one or another of the kinds of production, which will be characteristic of communication. (b) "Sotto voce" production which has some connection with, though is possibly not to be identified as, "unspoken production," is typically the kind of production involved in thinking. (c) Any creature which is equipped for the effective overt production of a particular sequence is also thereby equipped for its effective sotto voce production.  (4) We have reached a point at which we have envisaged an indefinite multitude of linguistic sequences certified by the body of mature speakers not merely as legitimate sentences of their language but also as expressive of psychological states in general, though not of psychological states relevant to any particular speaker. It seems then that we need to ask what should be added to guarantee that the sentences in the repertoire of a particular speaker should be recognized by him not merely as expressive of psychological states in general but as expressive of his psychological states in particular. I would suggest that what is needed to ensure that he recognizes a suitable portion of his repertoire of sentences as being expressive relative to himself is that he should be the center of a life story which fits in with the idea that he, rather than someone else, is the subject of the attributed psychological states. If this condition is fulfilled, we can think of him, perhaps, not merely as linguistically fluent but also as linguistically proficient; he is in a position to apply a favored stock of sentences to himself. It would of course be incredible, though perhaps logically conceivable, for someone to be linguistically fluent without being linguistically proficient.  It is of course common form, as the world goes, for persons who are linguistically fluent and linguistically proficient to become so by natural methods, that is to say, as a result of experience and training, but we may draw attention to the abstract possibility that the attri-butes in question might be the outcome not of natural but of artificial processes; they might, for example, be achieved by some sort of phys-iological engineering. Are we to allow such a fantasy as being con-  ceivable, and if not, why not?  I shall conclude the discussion of Strand Four with two distinct and  seemingly unconnected reflections.  (A) We might be well advised to consider more closely the nature of representation and its connection with meaning, and to do so in the light of three perhaps not implausible suppositions.  (1) That representation by means of verbal formulations is an arti-ficial and noniconic mode of representation. (2) That to replace an iconic system of representation by a noniconic system will be to introduce a new and more powerful extension of the original system, one which can do everything the former system can do and more besides.  (3) That every artificial or noniconic system is founded upon an an-  tecedent natural iconic system.  Descriptive representation must look back to and in part do the work of prior iconic representation. That work will consist in the representation of objects and situations in the world in something like the sense in which a team of Australian cricketers may represent Aus-tralia; they do on behalf of Australia something which Australia can-not do for itself, namely engage in a game of cricket. Similarly our representations (initially iconic but also noniconic) enable objects and situations in the world to do something which they cannot do for themselves, namely govern our actions and behavior.  (B) It remains to inquire whether there is any reasonable alternative program for the problems about meaning other than of the provision of a reductive analysis of the concept of meaning. The only alternative which I can think of would be that of treating "meaning" as a theo-retical concept which, together perhaps with other theoretical con-cepts, would provide for the primitive predicates involved in a seman-tic system, an array whose job it would be to provide the laws and hypotheses in terms of which the phenomena of meaning are to be explained. If this direction is taken, the meaning of particular express-sions will be a matter of hypothesis and conjecture rather than of intuition, since the application of theoretical concepts is not generally  thought of as reachable by intuition or observation. But some of those like Mrs. Jack who object to the reductive analysis of meaning are also anxious that meanings should be intuitively recognizable. How this result is to be achieved I do not know.  Strand Five  Strand Five is perhaps most easily approached through an inquiry whether there is any kind, type, mode, or region of signification which has special claims to centrality, and so might offer itself as a core around which more peripheral cases of signification might clus-ter, perhaps in a dependent posture. I suggest that there is a case for the supposition of the existence of such a central or primary range of cases of signification; and further that when the question of a more precise characterization of this range is raised, we are not at a loss how to proceed. There seem to be in fact not merely one, but two ways of specifying a primary range, each of which has equally good claim to what might be called "best candidate status." It is of course a question which will await final decision whether these candidates are distinct from one another. We should recognize that at the start we shall be moving fairly large conceptual slabs around a somewhat crudely fashioned board and that we are likely only to reach sharper conceptual definition as the inquiry proceeds.  We need to ask whether there is a feature, albeit initially hazy, which we may label "centrality, " which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of signification from nonprimary ranges.  There seems to be a good chance that the answer is "Yes." If some instances of signification are distinguishable from others as relatively direct rather than indirect, straightforward rather than devious, plain rather than convoluted, definite rather than indefinite, or as exhibiting other distinguishing marks of similar general character, it would seem to be not unreasonable to regard such significations as belonging to a primary range. Might it not be that the capacity to see through a glass darkly presupposes, and is not presupposed by, a capacity at least occasionally to achieve full and unhampered vision with the naked eye?  But when we come to ask for a more precise delineation of the initially hazy feature of centrality, which supposedly distinguishes primary from nonprimary ranges of signification, we find ourselves confronted by two features, which I shall call respectively "formality"  and "dictiveness," with seemingly equally strong claims to provide for us a rationally reconstructed interpretation of the initially hazy feature of centrality.  Our initial intuitive investigation alerts us to a distinction within the domain of significations between those which are composite or complex and those which are noncomposite or simple; and they also suggest to us that the primary range of significations should be thought of as restricted to simple or noncomposite significations; those which are complex can be added at a later stage. Within the field left by this first restriction, it will be appealing to look for a subordinate central range of items whose signification may be thought of as being in some appropriate sense direct rather than in-direct, and our next task will be to clarify the meaning, or meanings, in this context of the word "direct." One class of cases of signification with a seemingly good claim to centrality would be those in which the items or situations signified are picked out as such by their falling under the conventional meaning of the signifying expression rather than by some more informal or indirect relationship to the signifying expression. "The President's advisers approved the idea" perhaps would, and "those guys in the White House kitchen said 'Heigh Ho'" perhaps would not, meet with special favor under this test, which would without question need a fuller and more cautious exposition.  Perhaps, however, for present purposes a crude distinction between conventional or formal signification and nonconventional or informal signification will suffice.  A second and seemingly not inferior suggestion would be that a special centrality should be attributed to those instances of signification in which what is signified either is, or forms part of, or is specially and appropriately connected with what the signifying expression (or its user) says as distinct from implies, suggests, hints, or in some other less than fully direct manner conveys. We might perhaps summarily express this suggestion as being that special centrality attaches to those instances of signification in which what is signi-ied is or is part of the "dictive" content of the signifying expres-ion. We should now, perhaps, try to relate these suggestions to one another.  Is the material just sketched best regarded as offering two different formulations of a single criterion of centrality, or as offering two distinct characterizations of such centrality? It seems fairly clear to me that, assuming the adequacy for present purposes of the formulation  of the issues involved, two distinct criteria are in fact being offered.  One may be called the presence or absence of formality (whether or not the relevant signification is part of the conventional meaning of the signifying expression); the other may be called the presence or absence of dictive content, or dictiveness (whether or not the relevant signification is part of what the signifying expression says); and it seems that formality and informality may each be combined with dic-tiveness or again with nondictiveness. So the two distinctions seem to be logically independent of one another. Let us try to substantiate this claim.  If I make a standard statement of fact such as "The chairman of the Berkeley Philosophy Department is in the Department office." what is signified is, or at least may for present purposes be treated as being, the conventional meaning of the signifying expression; so formality is present. What is signified is also what the signifying expression says; so dictiveness is also present. Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Dar-ien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I," his hearer might well be somewhat baffled; and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the onetime activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase "on the other hand." But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement. So we seem to have a case of a condition which is part of what the words conventionally mean without being part of what the words say; that is, we have formality without dictiveness. Suppose someone, in a suitable context, says "Heigh-ho." It is possible that he might thereby mean something like "Well that's the way the world goes." Or again if someone were to say "He's just an evangelist," he might mean, perhaps, "He is a sanctimonious, hypo-critical, racist, reactionary, money-grubber." If in each case his meaning were as suggested, it might well be claimed that what he meant was in fact what his words said; in which case his words would be dictive but their dictive content would be nonformal and not part of the conventional meaning of the words used. We should thus find dictiveness without formality.(4) At a Department meeting, one of my colleagues provides a sustained exhibition of temperamental perversity and caprice; at the close of the meeting I say to him, "Excuse me, madam," or alterna-tively, I usher him through the door with an elaborate courtly bow. In such a case perhaps it might be said that what my words or my bow convey is that he has been behaving like a prima donna; but they do not say that this is so, nor is it part of the conventional meaning of any words or gestures used by me that this is so. Here something is conveyed or signified without formality and without dictiveness. There seems then to be a good prima-facie case for regarding formality and dictiveness as independent criteria of centrality. Before we pursue this matter and the questions which arise from it, it might be useful to consider a little further the details of the mechanism by which, in the second example, we achieve what some might regard as a slightly startling result that formality may be present independently of dictiveness. The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels. One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand." The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker's words.  We may note that a related kind of nonformal (as distinct from formal) implicature may sometimes be present. It may, for example, be the case that a speaker signals himself, by his use of such words as  "so" or "therefore," as performing the speech-act of explaining will be plausible only on the assumption that the speaker accepts as true one or more further unmentioned ground-floor matters of fact. His acceptance of such further matters of fact has to be supposed in order to rationalize the explanation which he offers. In such a case we mayperhaps say that the speaker does not formally implicate the matters of fact in question.  A problem which now faces us is that there seem to be two "best candidates," each of which in different ways suggests the admissibility of an "inner/outer" distinction, and we need to be assured that there is nothing objectionable or arbitrary about the emergence of this seemingly competitive plurality. The feature of formality, or conventional signification, suggests such a distinction, since we can foresee a distinction between an inner range of characteristics which belong directly to the conventional meaning of a signifying expression, and an outer range of characteristics which, although not themselves directly part of the conventional meaning of a given signifying expres-sion, are invariably, perhaps as a matter of natural necessity, concomitant with other characteristics which do directly belong to the conventional meaning of the signifying expression. Again, if there is an inner range of characteristics which belong to the dictive content of a signifying expression as forming part of what such an expression says, it is foreseeable that there will be an outer range of cases involving characteristics which, though not part of what a signifying expression says, do form part of what such an expression conveys in some gentler and less forthright manner-part, for example, of what it hints or suggests.  To take the matter further, I suspect that we shall need to look more closely at the detailed constitution of the two "best candidates." At this point I have confined myself to remarking that dictiveness seems to be restricted to the ground-floor level, however that may be determined, while formality seems to be unrestricted with regard to level. But there may well be other important differences between the two concepts. Let us turn first to formality, which, to my mind, may prove to be in somewhat better shape than dictiveness. To say this is not in the least to deny that it involves serious and difficult problems; indeed, if some are to be believed-for example, those who align themselves with Quine in a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion-these problems may turn out to be insuperable, and may drive us into a form of skepticism. But one might well in such an event regard the skepticism as imposed by the intractability of the subject-matter, not by the ineptitude of the theorist. He may well have done his best.  Some of the most pressing questions which arise concerning theconcept of formality will be found in a fourfold list, which I have compiled, of topics related to formality. First and foremost among these is the demand for a theoretically adequate specification of conditions which will authorize the assignment of truth conditions to suitably selected expressions, thereby endowing those expressions with a conventional signification. It is plain that such provision is needed if signification is to get off the ground; meanings are not natural growths and need to be conferred or instituted. But the mere fact that they are needed is insufficient to show that they are available; we might be left in the skeptic's position of seeing clearly what is needed, and yet being at the same time totally unable to attain it. We should not, of course, confuse the suggestion that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the exercise of rationality with the suggestion that there is no rationally acceptable theoretical account of what the exercise of rationality consists in; but though distinct these suggestions may not be independent; for it is conceivably true that the exercise of rationality can exist only if there is a theoretically adequate account, accessible to human reason, of what it is that constitutes rationality; in which case an acceptance of the second suggestion will entail an acceptance of the first suggestion. These remarks are intended to raise, but not to settle, the question whether our adoption of linguistic conventions is to be explained by appeal to a general capacity for the adoption of conventions (the sort of explanation offered by Stephen Schiffer in Meaning), here I intend neither to endorse nor to reject the possibility of such an explanation. Similar troubles might attend a superficially different presentation of the enterprise, according to which what is being sought and, one hopes, legitimately fixed by fiat would be not conventional meanings for certain expressions, but a solid guarantee that, in certain conditions, in calling something a so-and-so, one would not be miscalling it a so and so. The conditions in question would of course have to be conditions of truth.  Inquiries of the kind just mentioned might profitably be reinforced by attention to other topics contained in my fourfold list. Another of these would involve the provision of an inventory which will be an example of what I propose to call a "semi-inferential sequence." An example of such a sequence might be the following:  (I) It is, speaking extensionally, general practice to treat @ as signifying F.  (IL) It is, speaking intensionally, general practice to treat b as signifying F.(III) It is generally accepted that it is legitimate to treat @ as signifying F.  (IV) It is legitimate to treat @ as signifying F.  (V) ¢ does signify F.  Explanatory Remarks  What is involved in the phenomenon of treating ¢ (an expres-sion) as signifying F has not been, and would need to be, explicitly stated A "semi-inferential sequence" is not a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by its predecessor in the sequence. It is rather a sequence in which each element is entailed or implied by a conjunction of its predecessor with an identifiable and verifiable supplementary condition, a condition which however has not been explicitly specified Some semi-inferential sequences will be "concept-determining" sequences. In such sequences the final member will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure which has appeared previously in the sequence, though only as embedded within a larger structure which specifies some psychological state or practice of some rational being or class of rational beings. It is my suggestion that, for certain valuational or semantic con-cepts, the institution of truth-conditions for such concepts is possible only via the mediation of a semi-inferential concept-determining se-quence. To speak extensionally is to base a claim to generality on actual frequencies. To speak intensionally is to base a claim to generality on the adoption of or adherence to a rule the observance of which may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency. The practical modalities involved in (III) and (IV) may be restricted by an appended modifier, such as "from a logical point of view" or "from the point of view of good manners." It might also be valuable to relate the restricted field of inferences connected with semantic proprieties to the broader and quite possibly analogous field of inferences connected with practical proprieties in general, which it would be the business of ethics to systematize. If skepticism about linguistic proprieties could not be prevented fromexpanding into skepticism about improprieties of any and every kind, that might be a heavier price than the linguistic skeptic would be prepared to pay.  It would be unwise at this point to neglect a further direction of inquiry, namely proper characterization of the relation between words on the one hand, and on the other the sounds or shapes which constitute their physical realizations. Such reflections may be expected to throw light on the precise sense in which words are instru-ments, and may well be of interest both in themselves and as a needed antidote to the facile acceptance of such popular but dubiously well founded hypotheses about language as the alleged type-token distinc-tion. It is perhaps natural to assume that in the case of words the fundamental entities are particular shapes and sounds (word tokens) and that words, in the sense of word-types are properly regarded as classes or sets of mutually resembling word tokens. But I think that such a view can be seen to be in conflict with common sense (to whatever extent that is a drawback). John's rendering of the word "soot" may be indistinguishable from James's rendering of the word "suit"; but it does not follow from this that when they produce these render-ings, they are uttering the same word, or producing different tokens of the same word-type. Indeed there is something tempting about the idea that, in order to allow for all admissible vagaries of rendering, what are to count for a given person as renderings of particular words can only be determined by reference to more or less extended segments of his discourse; and this in turn perhaps prompts the idea that particular audible or visible renderings of words are only established as such by being conceived by the speaker or writer as realizations of just those words. One might say perhaps the words come first and only later come their realizations.  Together with these reflections goes a further line of thought.  Spades are commonly and standardly used for such purposes as digging garden beds; and when they are so used, we may speak indifferently of using a spade to dig the bed and of using a spade (simpliciter).  On a windy day when I am in the garden, I may wish to prevent my papers from blowing away, and to achieve this result, I may put my spade on top of them. In such a case I think I might be said to be using a spade to secure the papers but not to be using a spade (sim-pliciter) unless perhaps I were to make an eccentric but regular use of the spade for this purpose. When it comes, however, to the use for this or that purpose of words, it may well be that my freedom of speech is more radically constrained. I may be the proud possessor ofa brass plaque shaped as a written representation of the word  "mother." Maybe on a windy day I put this plaque on top of my papers to secure them. But if I do so, it seems to be wrong to speak of me as having used the word "mother" to secure my papers. Words may be instruments but if so, they seem to be essentially confined to a certain region of employment, as instruments of communication. To attempt to use them outside that region is to attempt the conceptually impossible. Such phenonema as this need systematic explanation.  On the face of it, the factors at work in the determination of the presence or absence of dictiveness form a more motley collection than those which bear on the presence of formality. The presence or absence of an appropriate measure of ardor on behalf of a thesis, a conscientious reluctance to see one's statements falsified or un-confirmed, an excessive preoccupation with what is actually or potentially noncontroversial background material, an overindulgence in caution with respect to the strength to be attributed to an idea which one propounds, and a deviousness or indirectness of expression which helps to obscure even the identity of such an idea, might well be thought to have little in common, and in consequence to impart an unappealing fragmentation to the notion of dictive content. But perhaps these factors exhibit greater unity than at first appears; perhaps they can be viewed as specifying different ways in which a speaker's alignment with an idea or thesis may be displayed or obscured; and since in communication in a certain sense all must be public, if an idea or thesis is too heavily obscured, then it can no longer be regarded as having been propounded. So strong support for some idea, a distaste for having one's already issued statements discredited, an unexciting harmony the function of which is merely to establish a reference, and a tentative or veiled formulation of a thesis may perhaps be seen as embodying descending degrees of intensity in a speaker's alignment to whatever idea he is propounding. If so, we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or an-other, have drawn a distinction between "phrastics" and "neustics, philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or im-peratively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tenta-tively.  In this connection it would perhaps be appropriate to elaboratesomewhat the characters of tentativeness and obliqueness which are specially visible in cases of "low commitment." First "suggestion." Suggesting that so-and-so seems to me to be, with varying degrees of obviousness, different from (a) stating or maintaining that so-and-so  (b) asserting it to be likely or probable that so-and-so (c) asserting it to be possible that so-and-so, where presumably "it is possible" means "it is not certain that it is not the case that so-and-so." Suggesting that so-and-so is perhaps more like, though still by no means exactly like, asserting there to be some evidence that so-and-so. Stan-dardly, to suggest that so-and-so invites a response, and, if the suggestion is reasonable, the response it invites is to meet in one way or another the case which the maker of the suggestion, somewhat like a grand jury, supposes there to be in favor of the possibility that so-and-so. The existence of such a case will require that there should be a truthful fact or set of facts which might be explained by the hypothesis that so-and-so together with certain other facts or assumptions, though the speaker is not committed to the claim that such an explanation would in fact be correct. Suggesting seems to me to be related to, though in certain respects different from, hinting. In what seem to me to be standard cases of hinting one makes, explicitly, a statement which does, or might, justify the idea that there is a case for supposing that so-and-so; but what there might be a case for supposing, namely that so-and-so, is not explicitly mentioned but is left to the audience to identify. Obviously the more devious the hinting, the greater is the chance that the speaker will fail to make contact with his audience, and so will escape without having committed himself to anything.  Strand Six®  Strand Six deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle. In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse. I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of  6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.  Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.  It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.  Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.  I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.  A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the following way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected. (p) The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act.I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.  (1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.  False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.  (2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.  Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic. The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question.  Strands Seven and Eight?  These strands may be considered together, representing, as they do, what might be deemed a division of sympathy on my part between two different schools of thought concerning the nature and content of Logic. These consist of the Modernists, spearheaded by Russell and other mathematically oriented philosophers, and the Traditionalists, particularly the neo-Traditionalists led by Strawson in An Introduction to Logical Theory. As may be seen, my inclination has been to have one foot in each of these at least at one time warring camps. Let us consider the issues more slowly.  (A) Modernism  In their most severe and purist guise Modernists are ready to admit to the domain of Logic only first-order predicate logic with identity, though laxer spirits may be willing to add to this bare minimum some  7. Cf. esp. Essays 3, 17.more liberal studies, like that of some system of modalities. It seems to me that a Modernist might maintain any one of three different positions with respect to what he thinks of as Logic.  He might hold that what he recognizes as Logic reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives. Unless more is said, this position is perhaps somewhat low on initial plausibility. He might hold that though not every feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which deserve to be preserved, all features that is to say, which are not irremediably vitiated by obscurity or incoherence. Without claiming that features which are omitted from his preferred system are ones which are marred by obscurity or incoherence he might claim that those which are not omitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order, that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the "Cathedral of Learning." (B) Neo-Traditionalism  So far as I can now reconstruct it, Strawson's response to Modernism at the time of An Introduction to Logical Theory, ran along the following lines.  At a number of points it is clear that the apparatus of Modernism does not give a faithful account of the character of the logical connectives of ordinary discourse; these deviations appear in the treatment of the Square of Opposition, the Russellian account of Def-inite, and also of Indefinite, Descriptions, the analysis of conditionals in terms of material implication, and the representation of universal statements by universal quantifiers. Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements in Modernism are liable to involve not merely infidelity to the actual character of vulgar connectives, but also the obliteration of certain conceptions, like presupposition and the existence of truth-gaps, which are crucial to the nature of certain logically fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference. The aspects thus omitted by Modernists are not such that their presence would undermine or discredit the connectives in the analysis of which they would appear. Like Cyrano de Bergerac's nose, they are features which are prominent without being disfiguring. Though they are not, in themselves, blemishes, they do nevertheless impede the optimally comprehensive and compendious representation of the body of admissible logical inferences. We need, therefore, two kinds of logic; one, to be called the logic of language, in which in a relaxed and sometimes not fully determinate way the actual character of the connectives of ordinary discourse is faithfully represented; the other, to be called formal logic, in which, at some cost to fidelity to the actual character of vulgar logical connectives, a strictly regimented system is provided which represents with maximal ease and economy the indefinite multitude of admissible logical inferences. (C) My Reactions to These Disputes  I have never been deeply moved by the prospect of a comprehensive and compendious systematization of acceptable logical infer-ences, though the tidiness of Modernist logic does have some appeal for me. But what exerts more influence upon me is my inclination to regard propositions as constructed entities whose essential character lies in their truth-value, entities which have an indispensable role to play in a rational and scientific presentation of the domain of logical inference. From this point of view a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects, perhaps, for the rational construction of at least part of the realm of propositions, even though the fact that many complex propositions seem plainly to be non-truth-functional ensures that many problems remain. A few years after the appearance of An Introduction to Logical Theory I was devoting much attention to what might be loosely called the distinction between logical and pragmatic inferences. In the first instance this was prompted as part of an attempt to rebuff objections, primarily by followers of Wittgenstein, to the project of using "phe-nomenal" verbs, like "look" and "seem," to elucidate problems in the philosophy of perception, particularly that of explaining the problematic notion of sense-data, which seemed to me to rest on a blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction. (That is not to say, of course, that there might not be other good reasons for rejecting the project in question.) It then occurred to me that apparatus which had rendered good service in one area might be equally successful when transferred to another; and so I canvassed the idea that the alleged divergences between Modernists' Logic and vulgar logical connectives might berepresented as being a matter not of logical but of pragmatic import. The question which at this point particularly beset not only me but various other philosophers as well was the question whether it is or is not required that a nonconventional implicature should always possess maximal scope; when a sentence which used in isolation stan-dardly carries a certain implicature, is embedded in a certain linguistic context, for example appears within the scope of a negation-sign, must the embedding operator, namely the negation-sign, be interpreted only as working on the conventional import of the embedded sentence, or may it on occasion be interpreted as governing not the conventional import but the nonconventional implicatum of the embedded sentence? Only if an embedding operator may on occasion be taken as governing not the conventional import but the noncon-ventional implicatum standardly carried by the embedded sentence can the first version of my account of such linguistic phenomena as conditionals and definite descriptions be made to work. The denial of a conditional needs to be treated as denying not the conventional import but the standard implicatum attaching to an isolated use of the embedded sentence. It certainly does not seem reasonable to subscribe to an absolute ban on the possibility that an embedding locution may govern the standard nonconventional implicatum rather than the conventional import of the embedded sentence; if a friend were to tell me that he had spent the summer cleaning the Augean stables, it would be unreasonable of me to respond that he could not have been doing that since he spent the summer in Seattle and the Augean stables are not in Seattle. But where the limits of a license may lie which allows us to relate embedding operators to the standard implicata rather than to conventional meanings, I have to admit that I do not know. The second version of my mode of treatment of issues which, historically speaking, divide Modernists from Traditionalists, including neo-Traditionalists, offers insurance against the possibility that we do not have, or that we sometimes do not have, a license to treat embedding locutions as governing standard implicata rather than conventional import. It operates on the idea that even if it should prove necessary to supplement the apparatus of Modernist logic with additional conventional devices, such supplementation is in two respects undramatic and innocuous and does not involve a radical reconstruction of Modernist apparatus. It is innocuous and undramatic partly because the newly introduced conventional devices can be re-garded simply as codification, with a consequently enlarged range of utility, of pre-existing informal methods of generating implicature; and partly because the new devices do not introduce any new ideas or concepts, but are rather procedural in character. This last feature can be seen from the fact that the conventional devices which I propose are bracketing or scope devices, and to understand them is simply to know how sentences in which they initially appear can be restructured and rewritten as sentences couched in orthodox modernistic terms from which the new devices have been eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. Philosophical Method and Ordinary Language  I shall conclude this Epilogue by paying a little attention to the general character of my attitude to ordinary language. In order to fulfill this task, I should say something about what was possibly the most notable corporate achievement of my philosophical early middle age, namely the so-called method of linguistic botanizing, treated, as it often was in Oxford at the time, as a foundation for conceptual analysis in general and philosophical analysis in particular. Philosophers have not seldom proclaimed the close connection between philosophy and linguistic analysis, but so far as I know, the ruthless and unswerving association of philosophy with the study of ordinary language was peculiar to the Oxford scene, and has never been seen anywhere before or since, except as an application of the methods of philosophizing which originated in Oxford. A classic miniature example of this kind of procedure was Austin's request to Warnock to tell him the difference between playing golf correctly and playing golf properly. But also the method was commonly deployed not merely as a tool for reaching conceptual "fine-tuning" with regard to pairs of expressions or ideas, but in larger-scale attempts to systematize the range of concepts which appear in a certain conceptual region. It may well be the case that these concepts all fall under a single overarching concept, while it is at the same time true that there is no single word or phrase which gives linguistic expression to just this concept; and one goal of linguistic botanizing may be to make this concept explicit and to show how the various subordinate concepts fall under it. This program is closely linked with Austin's ideas about the desirability of  "going through the dictionary." In some cases, this may be quite a long job, as for example in the case of the word "true"; for one fea-ture of the method is that no initial assumptions are made about the subdivisions involved in subordinate lexical entries united by a single word; "true friends," "true statements," "true beliefs," "true bills,"  "true measuring instruments," "true singing voices" will not be initially distinguished from one another as involving different uses of the word "true"; that is a matter which may or may not be the outcome of the operation of linguistic botanizing; subordinations and subdivisions are not given in advance. It seems plausible to suppose that among the things which are being looked for are linguistic proprieties and improprieties: and these may be of several different kinds; so one question which will call for decision will be an identification of the variety of different ways in which proprieties and improprieties may be characterized and organized. Contradictions, incoherences, and a wealth of other forms of unsuitability will appear among the out-comes, not the starting points, of linguistic botanizing, and the nature of these outcomes will need careful consideration. Not only may single words involve a multitude of lexical entries, but different idioms and syntactical constructions appearing within the domain of a single lexical entry may still be a proper subject for even more specific linguistic botanizing. Syntax must not be ignored in the study of se-mantics.  At this point we are faced with two distinct problems. The first arises from the fact that my purpose here is not to give a historically correct account of philosophical events which actually took place in Oxford some forty years ago but rather to characterize and as far as possible to justify a certain distinctive philosophical methodology.  Now there is little doubt that those who were engaged in and possibly even dedicated to the practice of the prevailing Oxonian methodol-ogy, such persons as Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Hampshire, Urmson, Warnock, and others (including myself) had a pretty good idea of the nature of the procedures which they were putting into operation; indeed it is logically difficult to see how anyone outside this group could have had a better idea than the members of the group since the procedures are identifiable only as the procedures which these people were seeking to deploy. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether the course of actual discussions in every way embodied the authentic methodology, for a fully adequate implementation of that methodology requires a good and clear representation of the methodology itself; the more fragmentary the representation the greater the chance of inadequate implementation; and it must be admitted    that the ability of many of us to say at the time what it was that we were doing was fragmentary in the extreme. This may be an insoluble problem in the characterization of this kind of theoretical activity; to say what such an activity is presupposes the ability to perform the activity in question; and this in turn presupposes the ability to say what the activity in question is.  The second and quite different problem is that some of the critics of Oxonian philosophizing like Russell, Quine and others have exhibited strong hostility not indeed in every case to the idea that a study of language is a prime concern of philosophy, but rather to the idea that it should be a primary concern of philosophy to study ordinary language. Philosophy finds employment as part of, possibly indeed just as an auxiliary of, Science; and the thinking of the layman is what scientific thinking is supposed to supersede, not what it is supposed to be founded on. The issues are obscure, but whether or not we like scientism, we had better be clear about what it entails.  Part of the trouble may arise from an improperly conceived proposition in the minds of some self-appointed experts between "we" and "they"; between, that is, the privileged and enlightened, on the one hand, and the rabble on the other. But that is by no means the only possible stance which the learned might adopt toward the vul-gar; they might think of themselves as qualified by extended application and education to pursue further and to handle better just those interests which they devise for themselves in their salad days; after all, most professionals begin as amateurs. Or they might think of themselves as advancing in one region, on behalf of the human race, the achievements and culture of that race which other members of it perhaps enhance in other directions and which many members of it, unfortunately for them perhaps, are not equipped to advance at all. In any case, to recognize the rights of the majority to direct the efforts of the minority which forms the cultured elite is quite distinct from treating the majority as themselves constituting a cultured elite.  Perhaps the balance might be somewhat redressed if we pay attention to the striking parallels which seem to exist between the Oxford which received such a mixed reception in the mid-twentieth century, and what I might make so bold as to call that other Oxford which, more than two thousand three hundred years earlier, achieved not merely fame but veneration as the cradle of our discipline. The following is a short and maybe somewhat tendentious summary of that earlier Athenian dialectic, with details drawn mostly from Aristotlebut also to some extent from Plato and, through Plato, from Socrates himself. In Aristotle's writing the main sources are the beginning of the Topics, the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, and the end of the Posterior Analytics.  We should distinguish two kinds of knowledge, knowledge of fact and knowledge of reasons, where what the reasons account for are the facts. Knowledge proper involves both facts to be accounted for and reasons which account for them; for this reason Socrates claimed to know nothing; when we start to research, we may or may not be familiar with many facts, but whether this is so or not we cannot tell until explanations and reasons begin to become available. For explanations and reasons to be available, they must derive ultimately from first principles, but these first principles do not come ready-made; they have to be devised by the inquirer, and how this is done itself needs explanation. It is not done in one fell swoop; at any given stage researchers build on the work of their predecessors right back to their earliest predecessors who are lay inquirers. Such progressive scrutiny is called "dialectic," starts with the ideas of the Many and ends (if it ever ends) with the ideas of the Wise.  Among the methods used in dialectic (or "argumentation") is system-building, which in its turn involves higher and higher levels of abstraction. So first principles will be, roughly speaking, the smallest and most conceptually economical principles which will account for the data which the theory has to explain. The progress toward an acceptable body of first principles is not always tranquil; disputes, paradoxes, and obstructions  to progress abound, and when they are reached, recognizable types of emendation are called upon to restore progress.  (7) So the continuation of progress depends to a large extent on the possibility of "saving the phenomena," and the phenomena consist primarily of what is said, or thought, by the Wise and, before them, the Many.  I find it tempting to suppose that similar ideas underlie the twen-tieth-century Oxonian dialectic; the appeal to ordinary language might be viewed as an appeal to the ultimate source of one, though not of every, kind of human knowledge. It would indeed not be surprising were this to be so, since two senior Oxonians (Ryle and Aus-tin) were both skilled and enthusiastic students of Greek philosophy.But this initially appealing comparison between what I have been calling Oxonian Dialectic and Athenian Dialectic encounters a serious objection, connected with such phrases as "what is said" (ta le-gomena, ta Leyuena). The phrase "what is said" may be interpreted in either of two ways. (I) It may refer to a class of beliefs or opinions which are commonly or generally held, in which case it would mean much the same as such a phrase as "what is ordinarily thought." (II) It may refer to a class of ways of talking or locutions, in which case it will mean much the same as "ways in which ordinary people ordinarily talk." In the Athenian Dialectic we find the phrase used in both of these senses; sometimes, for example, Aristotle seems to be talking about locutions, as when he points out that while it is legitimate to speak of "running quickly" or "running slowly," it is not legitimate to speak of "being pleased quickly" or "being pleased slowly"; from which he draws the philosophical conclusion that running is, while pleasure is not (despite the opinions of some philosophers), a process as distinct from an activity. At other times he uses the phrase "what is said" to refer to certain generally or vulgarly held beliefs which are systematically threatened by a projected direction of philosophical theory, as the platitude that people sometimes behave incontinently seems to be threatened by a particular philosophical analysis of Will, or the near-platitude that friends are worth having for their own sake seems to be threatened by the seemingly equally platitudinous thesis that the Good Life is self-sufficient and lacking in nothing. In the Athenian Dialectic, moreover, though both interpretations are needed, the dominant one seems to be that in which what is being talked about is common opinions, not commonly used locutions or modes of speech. In the Oxonian Dialectic, on the other hand, precisely the reverse situation seems to obtain. Though some philoso-phers, most notably G. E. Moore, have maintained that certain commonly held beliefs cannot but be correct and though versions of such a thesis are discernible in certain Oxonian quarters, for example in Urmson's treatment of Paradigm Case Arguments, no general characterization of the Method of "Linguistic Botanizing" carries with it any claim about the truth-value of any of the specimens which might be subjected to Linguistic Botanizing; nor, I think, would any such characterization be improved by the incorporation of an emendation in this connection. So the harmony introduced by an assimilation of the two Dialectics seems to be delusive.  I am, however, reluctant to abandon the proposed comparison be-tween Oxonian and Athenian Dialectic quite so quickly. I would begin by recalling that as a matter of historical fact Austin professed a strong admiration for G. E. Moore. "Some like Witters" he once said,  "but Moore is my man." It is not recorded what aspects of Moore's philosophy particularly appealed to him, but the contrast with Wittgenstein strongly suggests that Moore primarily appealed to him as a champion of Common Sense, and of philosophy as the source of the analysis of Common Sense beliefs, a position for which Moore was especially famous, in contrast with the succession of less sharply defined positions about the role of philosophy taken up at various times by Wittgenstein. The question which now exercises me is why Moore's stand on this matter should have specially aroused Austin's respect, for what Moore said on this matter seems to me to be plainly inferior in quality, and indeed to be the kind of thing which Austin was more than capable of tearing to shreds had he encountered it in somebody else. Moore's treatments of this topic seem to me to suffer from two glaring defects and one important lacuna. The two glaring defects are: (1) he nowhere attempts to characterize for us the conditions which have to be satisfied by a generally held belief to make it part of a "Common Sense view of the world"; (2) even if we overlook this complaint, there is the further complaint that nowhere, so far as I know, does Moore justify the claim that the Common Sense view of the world is at least in certain respects unquestionably correct. The important lacuna is that Moore considers only one possible position about the relation between such specific statements as that "Here is one human hand and here is another" and the seemingly general philosophical statement that material objects exist. Moore takes it for granted that the statement about the human hands entails the general statement that material objects exist; but as Wittgenstein remarked,  "Surely those who deny the reality of the material world do not wish to deny that underneath my trousers I wear underpants." Moore was by no means certainly wrong on this matter, but the question which comes first, interpretation or the assessment of truth-value, is an important methodological question which Moore should have taken more seriously.  My explanation of part of Austin's by no means wholly characteristic charity lies in my conjecture that Austin saw, or thought he saw, the right reply to these complaints and mistakenly assumed that Moore himself had also seen how to reply to them. I shall develop this suggestion with the aid of a fairy tale about the philosophicalNever-Never Land which is inhabited by philosophical fairy god-mothers. Initially we distinguish three of these fairy godmothers, M* Moore's fairy godmother, A*, Austin's fairy godmother, and G* Grice's fairy godmother. The common characteristic of fairy godmothers is that they harbor explicitly all the views, whether explicit or implicit, of their godchildren. G* reports to Grice that A* mistakenly attributes to M* a distinction between two different kinds of subjects of belief, a distinction between personal believers who are individual persons or groups of persons, and nonpersonal believers who are this or that kind of abstraction, like the spirit of a particular language or even the spirit of language as such, the Common Man, the inventor of the analytic/synthetic distinction (who is distinct from Leibniz) and so forth. A distinction is now suggested between the Athenian Dialectic, the primary concern of which was to trace the development of more and more accomplished personal believers, and a different dialectic which would be focused on nonpersonal believ-ers. Since nonpersonal believers are not historical persons, their beliefs cannot be identified from their expression in any historical debates or disputes. They can be identified only from the part which they play in the practice of particular languages, or even of languages in general.  So what G* suggested to Grice ran approximately as follows. A* with or without the concurrence of the mundane Austin, attributed to Moore the recognition of a distinction between personal and non-personal, common or general beliefs, together with the idea that a Common Sense view of the world contains just those nonpersonal beliefs which could be correctly attributed to some favored nonper-sonal abstraction, such as the Common Man. More would of course need to be said about the precise nature of the distinction between the Common Man and other abstractions; but once a distinction has been recognized between personal and nonpersonal believers, at least the beginnings are visible of a road which also finds room for (1) the association of nonpersonal beliefs, or a particular variety of nonper-sonal beliefs, with the philosophical tool or instrument called Common Sense, and for (2) the appeal to the structure and content of languages, or language as such, as a key to unlock the storehouse of Common Sense, and also for (3) the demand for Oxonian Dialectic as a supplementation of Athenian Dialectic, which was directed toward personal rather than nonpersonal beliefs. G* conjectured that this represented Austin's own position about the function of Linguis-tic Botanizing, or even if this were not so, it would have been a good position for Austin to adopt about the philosophical role of Linguistic Botanizing; it would be a position very much in line with Austin's known wonder and appreciation with regard to the richness, subtlety, and ingenuity of the instrument of language. It was however also G*'s view that the attribution of such reflections to Moore would have involved the giving of credit where credit was not due; this kind of picture of ordinary language may have been Austin's but was certainly not Moore's; his conception of Common Sense was deserving of no special praise.  We also have to consider the strength or weakness of my second charge against Moore, namely that whether or not he has succeeded in providing or indeed has even attempted to provide a characterization of commonsense beliefs, he has nowhere offered us a justification of the idea that commonsense beliefs are matters of knowledge with certainty or indeed possess any special degree or kind of credibility.  Apart from the production, on occasion, of the somewhat opaque suggestion that the grounds for questioning a commonsense belief will always be more questionable than the belief itself, he seems to do little beyond asserting (1) that he himself knows for certain to be true the members of an open-ended list of commonsense beliefs, (2) that he knows for certain that others know for certain that these beliefs are true. But this is precisely the point at which many of his oppo-nents, for example Russell, would be ready to join issue with him.  It might here be instructive to compare Moore with another perhaps equally uncompromising defender of knowledge with certainty, namely Cook Wilson. Cook Wilson took the view that the very nature of knowledge was such that items which were objects of knowledge could not be false; the nature of knowledge guaranteed, perhaps logically guaranteed, the truth of its object. The difficulty here is to explain how a state of mind can in such a way guarantee the possession of a particular truth-value on the part of its object. This difficulty is severe enough to ensure that Cook Wilson's position must be rejected; for if it is accepted no room is left for the possibility of thinking that we know p when in fact it is not the case that p. This difficulty led Cook Wilson and his followers to the admission of a state of "taking for granted," which supposedly is subjectively indistinguishable from knowledge but unlike knowledge carries no guarantee of truth. But this modification amounts to surrender; for what enables us to deny that all of our so-called knowledge is really only "taking forgranted"? But while Cook Wilson finds himself landed with bad an-swers, it seems to me that Moore has no answers at all, good or bad; and whether nonanswers are superior or inferior to bad answers seems to me a question hardly worth debating.  It is in any case my firm belief that Austin would not have been sympathetic toward the attempts made by Moore and some of his followers to attribute to the deliverances of common sense, whatever these deliverances are supposed to be, any guaranteed immunity from error. I think, moreover, that he would have been right in withholding his support at this point, and we may notice that had he withheld support, he would have been at variance with some of his own junior colleagues at Oxford, particularly with philosophers like Urmson who, at least at one time, showed a disposition, which as far as I know Austin never did, to rely on so-called Arguments from Paradigm Cases. I think Austin might have thought, rightly, that those who espoused such arguments were attempting to replace by a dogmatic thesis something which they already had, which was, further-more, adequate to all legitimate philosophical needs. Austin plainly viewed ordinary language as a wonderfully subtle and well-contrived instrument, one which is fashioned not for idle display but for serious (and nonserious) use. So while there is no guarantee of immunity from error, if one is minded to find error embedded in ordinary modes of speech, one had better have a solid reason behind one. That which must be assumed to hold (other things being equal) can be legitimately rejected only if there are grounds for saying that other things are not, or may not be, equal.  At this point, we introduce a further inhabitant of the philosophical Never-Never Land, namely R* who turns out to be Ryle's fairy godmother. She propounds the idea that, far from being a basis for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, opposition to the idea that there are initially two distinct bundles of statements, bearing the labels "analytic" and "synthetic," lying around in the world of thought waiting to be noticed, provides us with the key to making the ana-lytic/synthetic distinction acceptable. The proper view will be that analytic propositions are among the inventions of theorists who are seeking, in one way or another, to organize and systematize an initially undifferentiated corpus of human knowledge. Success in this area is a matter of intellectual vision, not of good eyesight. As Plato once remarked, the ability to see horses without seeing horseness is a mark of stupidity. Such considerations as these are said to lie behindreports that yet a fifth fairy godmother, Q*, was last seen rushing headlong out of the gates of Never-Never-Land, loudly screaming and hotly pursued (in strict order of seniority) by M*, R*, A*, and G*. But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day. H. P. Grice.