GRICE'S PLAY GROUP

 By J. L. Speranza, of The Grice Club -- for The Grice Club.

Grice saw himself as a philosopher.

Strictly, Grice saw himself as an _Oxford_ philosoopher. And there is some seriousness to this claim.

He seems to have been interested only in philosophers of J. L. Austin's generation, or younger.

Why?

Well, there was this condition set by Austin ("The Master") that no-one older than himself could join his 'Play Group'!

This leaves Grice's interest focused on a few names -- starting with Austin, going to Grice himself, and including figures such as Hampshire, Urmson, and a few others.

And then we get to P. F. Strawson.

Strawson of course qualified: younger than Austin -- and more importantly, pupil of Grice. The word 'pupil' Grice uses seriously. In the footnote to his tribute to Strawson that's how he describes him.

More importantly, it was Grice's DUTY to be Strawson's pupil. Why?

Strawson was dubious as what to do with his life when he arrived fresh from London at St. John's, and he was first assigned to, of all people, J. D. Mabbott.

It was ONLY FOR A TERM that Strawson was Grice's pupil -- and not exactly in philosophy, but 'logic,' or more technically, for the 'Logic' paper as part of the fulfilment of Strawson's 'eventually second' in the P. P. E. programme.

Could Grice have just leave Strawson's mistakes go?

Grice saw a big mistake in Strawson's non-Philonian account of 'if.' And this is just ONE of the many examples on which Grice had been paying his attention since he knew he was a philosopher.

He didn't care for philosophy much, but by the mistakes in so-called professional philosopher's sloppy use of philosophical terminology -- His first unpublication was on 'not' and privation, and his first publication was on 'I.'

The topic of the 'if' has been discussed by philosophers since, well, Philo.

It is interesting that in Strawson's obituary of Grice for the British Academy, Strawson focuses on this polemic on 'if,' with the one on 'the' coming second and as a mere footnote.

More importantly, Strawson is aware that the dispute with Grice was subtle.

It concerns the distinction between 

-- When I state that if P, Q, I imply [STRAWSONIAN IMPLICATUM].

More formally:

-- When I explicitly communicate that if P, Q, I commit myself to Philo.

-- When I explicitly communicate that if P, Q, I may implicitly communicate the Strawsonian implicatum.

Now the topic of implicit communication was possibly Grice's only achievement in philosophy: it's of course his 'conversational' implicature -- with an emphasis on 'conversational.'

Strawson is ready to admit that his 'implicatum' is part of what is IMPLICITLY communicated, i. e., an implicature -- but he is not ready to qualify this as a 'mere' conversational implicature.

Now the phrase 'conversational implicature' is a technicism. It derives from the more basic notion of a 'conversational' maxim. 'Conversational' are those implicatures which derive from the following, flouting, or ignorance of the conversational 'maxims,' aimed at the maximal exchange of beliefs or other attitudes.

The place -- or locus classicus, if you must -- for this is Grice's "Indicative Conditionals" -- the title is ex post facto: his fourth William James Lecture.

At Oxford, he had been giving lectures on implicature, but was more concerned with the mechanisms rather than its applications.

In the first William James Lecture, however, Grice cites explicitly Strawson's Introduction to Logic re: the account of the 'implication' of "if."

It is obvious in that quote that Grice is NOT concerned with the so-called operators or truth-functional connectives like "and" and "or" -- in that order. Just with "if."

The 'Logic and Conversation' lecture published by Davidson and Harman is inconclusive in that respect in that it obscures the fact that 'if' had been mentioned in the 'Prolegomena,' and that Grice is just setting the scene for the fourth lecture on 'if' itself.

Now, Strawson does credit Grice in that "Introduction to Logical Theory," -- Grice, from whom 'I have never ceased to learn about logic' -- an innuendo if ever there was one: have I even STARTED!?

Grice never developed a clear account of how his argument would run for the Strawsonian implicatum being a GENERALISED conversational implicature -- not even a particularised one. That would involve an invocation of the 'conversational maxims.'

Instead, the fourth lecture on 'Indicative Conditionals,' draws on Cook, Statement and Inference, stresses the syntactic particularities of 'if' -- a sub-ordinating particle, not a co-ordinating particle like 'and' or 'or' -- and provides a syntactic way in terms of 'square parentheses' or numeric subscripts to allow for the Strawsonian implicatum to be generated.

MY FOCUS here is on the parochial character of Grice's philosophy.

He possibly didn't feel a sense of history before the institution of the Play Group. With the Play Group, he realised he was making history -- although of course, members of the Play Group do not count as just BY their contributions WITHIN the Play Group.

With a magisterial inhibiting figure like Austin, the meetings of the Play Group were ANYTHING but playful.

But as tutorial fellow at St. John's and university lecture, it was Grice's responsibility to organise seminars, and he would -- what else? -- do it in conjunction with members of this group: not just Strawson for lectures on meaning, but with Austin on Categories, and De Interpretatione, or with Pears and Thomson on the philosophy of action or with Warnock, and Quinton on the philosophy of perception.

NOW STRICTLY, GRICE was the 'Master' of the Play Group upon Austin's death -- but as Searle recollects, it was nothing like it had been (although Searle never attended a Saturday morning). Grice ellicited freedom. And then in 1967, he moved to the New World!

Strictly, too, for Austin himself, this was the SECOND PLAY GROUP -- his first one being on Thursday evenings, and at least Woozley was a member of both!

In conclusion then: Grice saw himself as a philosopher, involved in the analysis of what philosophers have to say, with an emphasis on the 'semantics' of the terms of the philosophical discourse.

But while in 'Personal Identity,' he plays Cambridge (Broad) and occasionally he will deal with Descartes ('On Clear and Distinct Perception') -- his obsession with Kant was New-World-ish -- he was merely and mainly concerned with what his interlocutors -- other full-time tutorial fellows at Oxford had to say on this and that -- Strawson in particular.

This is not to say that Grice's theory will have an appeal for anybody else -- including Martians!