Grice e Speranza

 The issue with which Grice has been mainly concerned in ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’ may be thought rather a fine point.    But it certainly is NOT an *isolated* point.  There are several philosophical theses, or dicta, which Grice would think may need to be examined - in order to see whether or not these philosophical theses or dicta are sufficiently parallel to the thesis which Grice has been discussing to be amenable to treatment of the same general kind.     Examples which occur to Grice are the following:     It is not the case that you can see a knife as a knife; you only may see what is NOT a knife as a knife.     When he says he KNOWS that the objects before him are human hands, Moore is guilty of misusing the verb "know".     For an occurrence or event to be properly said to have a CAUSE, it must be something abnormal — or unusual.     For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is RESPONSIBLE, it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned.     It is not the case that what is actual is also possible.    It is not the case that what is KNOWN by me to be the case is also BELIEVED by me to be the case.     Grice has no doubt that there will be other candidates besides the six which Grice has mentioned.    Grice must emphasize that he is not saying that all these examples are importantly similar to the thesis which I have been criticizing, only that, for all Grice knows, they may be.     To put the matter more generally,     the position adopted by Grice’s objector seems to Grice to involve a type of manoeuvre which is characteristic of more than one contemporary mode of philosophizing — but notably ordinary-language philosophy, as Austin calls it.    Grice is not condemning this kind of manoeuvre.    Grice is merely suggesting that to embark on it without due caution is to risk collision with the facts.     Before we rush ahead to exploit this or that conversational nuances — of conversational significance —  which we have detected, we should make sure that we are reasonably clear what sort of conversational nuances of conversational significance they are.     H. P. Grice.