SCL

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Scl

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: Sclavione -- Grice e Sclavione: la ragione conversazionale e il lizio di Padova. Note su Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et medicorum. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Pietro Sclavione (Abano, Veneto): la ragione conversazionale e il lizio di Padova. The comparison between Grice and Pietro Sclavione highlights two different but compatible ways of grounding reason in human communication, one pragmatic and inferential, the other naturalistic and physiological. Grice’s theory of reason‑governed conversational meaning explains how communication works at the level of shared rational expectations: speakers rely on cooperation, relevance, and intention recognition to generate meanings that go beyond what is literally said, and these meanings are regulated by norms that are epistemic rather than biological. Sclavione, by contrast, approaches conversation from the perspective of the Paduan naturalist tradition associated with Abano, explaining speech and communication as functions rooted in the body, governed by causal mechanisms of sensation, articulation, and neural organization. Where Grice is concerned with how rational agents infer meaning in dialogue, Sclavione is concerned with how speech is physically produced and received, replacing theological explanations with natural causes. Yet the two converge in their rejection of mystery as an explanatory endpoint: Grice refuses to explain meaning by appeal to convention alone without reasoned inference, while Sclavione refuses to explain speech by miracle rather than nature. Grice abstracts from physiology to describe the normative structure of conversational reasoning, whereas Sclavione grounds communication in the natural sciences while still assuming Aristotelian rational order. Together, they show how conversational reason can be understood both as a biological capacity developing in time and as a rational practice governed by rules of inference, with Grice operating at the level of meaning and justification, and Sclavione at the level of causal and functional explanation.Grice: “La ragione conversazionale e l lizio di Padova – la scuola d’Abano -- filosofia veneta -- filosofia italiana S. inspired later Italian philosophers by establishing a strictly naturalist and Aristotelian framework for human functions, including speech and communication. His non-conformism, which led to two Inquisition trials, challenges theological explanations by replacing "miraculous" causes with natural, causal mechanisms. Foundations for Naturalist Communication S.’s s influence on the philosophy of language and communication stems from his physiological treatment of these topics in works like the “Expositio Problematum”: Biological Basis of Speech: He identifies a specialised physical "speech centre" in the brain connected to specific cranial nerves, treating communication as a biological function rather than a purely spiritual or divine gift. Mechanics of Articulation: He describes speech as a physical process where the tongue "strikes" air to give sound a definite shape, providing a materialist foundation for how human thought becomes vocalised. Separation of Senses: By distinguishing the physical development of hearing from that of speech organs (like the tongue), he establishes a developmental, naturalist time-line for human communication.  Influence on Later Philosophers S.'s "science of sciences" approach made Padova a premier centre for Aristotelianism, influencing generations of thinkers to seek natural explanations for human behaviour.  Paduan School of Medicine: He founds a tradition that prioritized empirical observation and Aristotelian logic over religious authority. This environment eventually nurtures Renaissance thinkers like Pomponazzi, who further the naturalist study of the soul and human nature. The reception of pseudo-Aristotle via Abano’s edition. filosofia della lingua.  Grice: Caro Sclavione, che piacere poterti finalmente chiamare per il tuo vero cognome, e non semplicemente "da Abano"! Sarebbe come se mi chiamassero "da Harborne" — una formalità che non rende giustizia all’identità personale.  Sclavione: Grice, la tua attenzione al nome mi onora! Troppo spesso la storia ci appioppa etichette geografiche, dimenticando che dietro ogni "da Abano" o "da Harborne" c’è un pensatore con una sua voce unica.  Grice: E proprio quella voce, caro Sclavione, ha aperto strade nuove nel modo di intendere la comunicazione. La tua visione naturalista ha influenzato generazioni di filosofi, portando la conversazione su basi più concrete e fisiologiche.  Sclavione: Mi fa piacere che tu colga questo aspetto. Cercare le cause naturali, piuttosto che miracolose, è stato per me più che una scelta filosofica: una necessità. Così il nostro parlare diventa davvero umano, radicato nella natura e non solo nel mistero. The comparison between Grice and Pietro Sclavione shows how reason‑governed conversational meaning can be understood both as a formal normative structure and as a culturally inflected practice. Grice’s theory explains meaning in conversation by appeal to rational cooperation, where humor, understatement, and timing generate implicatures because speakers are presumed to act intelligently and purposively toward mutual understanding. In the lighthearted exchange with Sclavione, humor itself functions as evidence of rational control, not as distraction, illustrating Grice’s claim that conversational effectiveness depends on sensitivity to context, audience, and shared background assumptions. Sclavione’s Neapolitan perspective, as reflected in Elementi di filosofia, implicitly reinforces this view by treating reason as something that flourishes in lived circumstances rather than abstract isolation: inference improves when embedded in everyday practices such as conversation over coffee. While Grice abstracts reason into general maxims governing all competent speakers, Sclavione embodies reason as tempered by style, wit, and local intellectual habit, suggesting that rationality in conversation is not diminished by humor but often expressed through it. Together they reveal that reason‑governed meaning can be both formally analyzable and socially cultivated, with Grice providing the theory of how such meaning works and Sclavione exemplifying how it feels when practiced well. G.: There it is again, the Martyrs’ Memorial, doing its best to turn a morning walk into a thesis. S.: It improves the pavement, at least. Oxford would be morally lazier without a few gothic spikes reminding it that theology once had consequences. G.: You mean that English theology once acquired Italian manners. S.: I mean fire. G.: Fire is too simple. Even in Italy the pyrotechnics were more elaborate than the children’s version. Take Abano. They like to say he was “sent to the stake,” as if the whole business were a straight line from proposition to bonfire. In fact he dies first, and then they try him harder. S.: Posthumous zeal is still zeal. The bones burn well enough for the lesson to be legible. G.: Very good. You are already halfway to the Victorian Protestant reading of everything. One wants a victim, a doctrine, and a flame, and one dislikes historical detail because it lowers the temperature. S.: You are defending the Church now. G.: Not the Church. Distinctions. Abano is destroyed by an inquisitorial and ecclesiastical machinery, not by some cartoon “Catholic Church” in the singular, as if a man in a mitre had simply struck a match. S.: Yet you are content to let Mary Tudor stand for Marian burnings. G.: Because “Marian” is at least a historical adjective and not a metaphysical slur. Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley—those are Oxford’s own theatre of fire, and the city has made excellent municipal use of them ever since. S.: The Memorial does not let one forget it. G.: No, and the delight is that different men see different lessons in the same stone. You look at it and think: Roman cruelty with an English accent. I look at it and think: Victorian Protestantism pretending to remember the sixteenth century while really lecturing the nineteenth. S.: Meaning Newman. G.: Meaning Newman, yes, and more than Newman. The Oxford Movement, if you insist on the later label, and the fear that Oriel had begun a sort of slow return-ticket to Rome. S.: Oriel, yes. Newman, Pusey, Keble and the rest turning piety into architecture by other means. G.: Quite. Which is why the Memorial is so pleasingly dishonest. It commemorates Mary’s martyrs and simultaneously warns against what people thought Newman might culturally resurrect if left unchecked. S.: “What Newman could kill if you’d let him,” as a coarser man might put it. G.: Much coarser, and much less accurate. Newman did not want to burn anybody. He merely made enough people suspect that truth could have liturgical consequences. S.: You are sounding high-church. G.: I always do when the alternative is bad anti-Catholic history. Besides, high church is the natural condition of a man who has dined often enough beneath portraits and still remembers that the Thirty-Nine Articles once stood between a boy and matriculation. S.: Ah yes, your beloved Articles. One could sign them without reading them, and read them without understanding them, and understand them without believing them. G.: Exactly. Which is why they are philosophically useful. S.: Useful only if one enjoys absurdity. “I subscribe to what I cannot explain.” It is a marvellous English invention. G.: It is more than English. It is institutional logic in liturgical dress. The requirement was always hollow in part because the boy of seventeen at Corpus, or elsewhere, could hardly be expected to understand the full doctrinal content. S.: Yet he was expected to be committed to it. G.: Formally, yes. And that is the beauty of the later joke. One may be committed to the contents of the Articles without yet knowing what they say; but that is not the same thing as owning each proposition as one’s own avowal. S.: Which gets us back to the policeman and the monkeys. G.: Naturally. If I say, “What the policeman said is true,” I am not thereby fully committing myself to the content as if I had always believed it. When I later learn that what he said was “Monkeys can talk,” I do not say, “I withdraw my commitment.” I say, “I was wrong.” The commitment was second-order, not an act of personal doctrinal inhabitation. S.: And you want the parallel with Abano to be that the authorities took a restricted technical proposition and inflated it into total impiety. G.: Precisely. Abano says something under the conditions of natural philosophy or Aristotelian medicine. The audience hears “heresy.” They convert local philosophical commitment into global doctrinal avowal. S.: Inquisition as hostile uptake. G.: Nicely put. The hearers supply a stronger implicature than the speaker intended and then punish him for the strengthened proposition. S.: So your claim is that Abano’s affair is partly pragmatics. G.: All intellectual persecution is partly pragmatics. The proposition alone never burns; it is the public reading of the proposition that catches first. S.: Still, why fewer such spectacles at Oxford, even before Henry VIII? G.: Because England had different machinery, different forms of legal and ecclesiastical discipline, and a different university ecology. Oxford had heresy trouble enough—Wyclif, the Lollards, subscriptions, censures, statutes—but less of the highly theatrical medico-natural-philosophical combustion one gets in Italy. S.: Fewer pyrotechnics. G.: Exactly. Oxford had more compromised authority and fewer philosopher-bones. Italy had better flames. S.: The Lollards then. You promised me them properly. G.: Very well. Wyclif first, Oxford theologian, late fourteenth century, Scripture, anti-clericalism, transubstantiation troubles, the whole native package of English reform before “Reformation” becomes a capitalised national habit. S.: And the Lollards are the followers, lay and clerical, artisans and gentry, vernacular religion, anti-image tendencies, anti-pilgrimage, Bible in English, and so forth. G.: Yes. English heresy with domestic furniture. Less Padua, more parish. S.: So closer in date to Abano than the Marian martyrs are. G.: Much closer. Abano dies 1316. Wyclif comes a little later in the century; Lollardy flowers from the 1380s onward. Cranmer and company are another two centuries off. If you want a sequence, it is Abano first, then Wyclif and the Lollards, then the Marian martyrs. S.: And the kinds of danger change. G.: Exactly. Abano’s danger is university naturalism and the suspicion of illicit arts; Lollard danger is vernacular reform and anti-sacramental doctrine; Marian danger is confessional reversal in a Tudor state. S.: Which is why the Martyrs’ Memorial feels different from Italian stories. It is not scholastic-natural-philosophical risk. It is Reformation theatre. G.: Yes, and Victorian re-use of Reformation theatre. Never forget that the monument itself is a later sermon in stone. S.: You said that once and I believed you. It is still Oriel’s fault, though. G.: Not only Oriel’s. But Oriel is the center of gravity if one wants the Oxford Movement in college form. S.: Newman, Keble, Pusey by radius if not by common room. G.: Precisely. “Oxford Movement” is itself a later label. At the time the movement was more Tractarian than “Oxfordian.” But later historians need geography, and Oriel gives them a neat one. S.: And the Memorial says: beware what Oriel may end in. G.: Or what Protestants feared it might end in. Which is not the same thing. The monument is anti-Marian memory and anti-Roman warning, both at once. S.: So when you mentioned Catholic renewal you really meant Newman’s world. G.: Yes, though “renewal” is an ecumenical word for what others called Romanising contamination. S.: You are enjoying this too much. G.: Historical precision is one of my few respectable pleasures. S.: Let us return to the Articles. You said the requirement was silly because one could not expect a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old to understand them. G.: Silly and revealing. It showed that institutional subscription often wanted conformity more than comprehension. S.: Lip service. G.: Exactly. Which is where you, as a good Marian moralist, and I, as a bad high-church ironist, strangely converge. You hate the insincerity. I admire the institutional candour about insincerity. Oxford knew very well that assent often exceeded understanding. S.: And then later they dropped it. G.: Gradually, under pressure of conscience, practicality, inclusion, and not least the sheer absurdity of requiring doctrinal subscription from boys too young to digest doctrine. S.: Which brings us back to the monkey. G.: Naturally. One could say, “I am committed to the Articles,” and later discover one’s actual content was as surprising as “monkeys can talk.” The institution wanted the second-order commitment, not the full internalised avowal. S.: Abano had the reverse problem. He made a restricted first-order philosophical claim and was treated as if he had made a full anti-Christian avowal. G.: Exactly. Oxford extracts formality without substance; the inquisitorial audience imputes substance beyond formal claim. Between them, one can build a whole philosophy of misassigned commitment. S.: You should have put that on the Memorial. G.: Too long for the stone, and the Victorians preferred martyrs to speech-act theory. S.: They had the right instinct. G.: They had the better stonemasons. S.: So does Abano matter to us at all, beyond historical pyrotechnics? G.: Very much so. Not because we still ask, in Oxford voice, “Is the soul immortal?” We do not. We are too embarrassed by the noun. S.: Ryle saw to that. G.: Ryle saw to one thing only: he made “the soul” or “the ghost” sound like a category mistake in waiting. S.: Which settles Pomponazzi, Abano, and all their friends. No soul, no immortality question. G.: No. It settles one vocabulary. It does not settle the pressure behind it. S.: You mean personal identity. G.: Among other descendants. Survival, memory, personhood, continuity, consciousness, acquaintance with oneself or not, death as event or not. The old soul question migrates into newer, more respectable nouns. S.: Stout then. G.: Precisely. This is why I keep mentioning Stout. “Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy” tells you everything. Psychology and philosophy still share the old territory of psyche without daring to say soul. S.: So psyche is the soul under scientific management. G.: A little too blunt, but yes, roughly. The Greek survives where the theology is dropped. One can write psi for psychological attitudes and pretend the old ground has vanished, when in fact one is still walking on it. S.: And “philosophical psychology” is therefore closer to Aristotle than “philosophy of mind.” G.: Very much so. “Philosophy of mind” tempts one to reify. “Philosophical psychology” keeps the focus on capacities, powers, attitudes, forms of life, what the De anima tradition knew how to discuss before the soul became either a ghost or an embarrassment. S.: You are going to drag in the power structure of the soul next. G.: I might. It is an ugly phrase, but useful. The old tripartite or multi-part architecture survives in moral psychology long after metaphysical soul-talk has gone out of fashion. S.: Plato and the Republic. G.: Exactly. Socrates on Thrasymachus, the soul and the city, rulers and auxiliaries and producers, reason and spirit and appetite, all that cross-categorial traffic. One may think the doctrine silly and still admire the explanatory ambition. S.: Explain that to Ryle. G.: Ryle would say it all becomes confusion when one hypostasizes the parts. Fine. But he does not thereby eliminate the need to speak of capacities, tendencies, executive control, deliberative order, practical conflict. S.: Hence your later fondness for powers. G.: And hence my refusal to let “soul” vanish too quickly from the history, even if I do not use it in current analysis. Abano matters because he belongs to the old cluster before it was broken up into mind, self, person, psychology, and survival. S.: You are giving him a long tail. G.: Better a long tail than a short bonfire. S.: How would this play in Locke? G.: Nicely enough. Locke shifts the issue from soul-substance to personal identity and consciousness. He is already post-Pomponazzi in idiom, though the old issue lingers under the new title. S.: And then Hume, and then everyone after, and eventually Parfit. G.: Exactly. Parfit is what happens when the soul has been anatomised, the self thinned, identity loosened, and survival made possible without any metaphysical treasure-chest. S.: So Abano matters because he stands before the great translation. G.: Precisely. He is on the old side of the lexical divide, where “soul” still does the work later spread across ten nouns and two departments. S.: And Oxford’s fewer fires mean fewer dramas, but not fewer problems. G.: Exactly. Oxford translated, Italy dramatized. S.: That sounds unfair to Oxford. G.: It is accurate to Oxford. The city prefers to preserve its quarrels in architecture and examination requirements rather than in combustibles. S.: Hence the Memorial and the Articles. G.: Hence both. One monument to remembered burnings, one institutional practice of requiring assent without digestion. Both are ways of making doctrine social. S.: Which is why your high-church posture is perverse. You prefer form to sincerity. G.: I prefer knowing when form is being asked for. Sincerity without institution is sentimentality. Institution without sincerity is hypocrisy. Oxford has specialised in the second and named it tradition. S.: And Mary? G.: Mary is useful because she tells the Protestant story what it most fears: that doctrine backed by power becomes lethal. S.: And you think the Victorians used her to tell Newman’s generation the same thing. G.: Very much so. The Martyrs’ Memorial says, in effect: we know where this Roman road leads. S.: Which, in your mode, is an implicature rather than a thesis. G.: All good monuments are implicatures. They let the passer-by do some of the work. S.: Then let us say this for Abano. He may not matter as doctrine, but he matters as a case where the hearers did the wrong work. G.: Or the historically understandable work, which is not always the same as the philosophically just work. S.: There you are being charitable again. G.: One must be charitable if one wishes to understand persecution without joining it. S.: One last question. Why do Italians keep loving these figures. G.: Because they provide a native canon of intellectual risk. A university culture likes to remember the moments when thought was dangerous, especially after it has become professional. S.: Whereas Oxford remembers its dangers by stone, satire, and subscription forms. G.: And by quietly insisting that a boy might be committed to the Articles before he understood them. Which is almost as comic as a philosopher being committed to “monkeys can talk” because he trusted the policeman. S.: So the final parallel is commitment misassigned. G.: Exactly. Abano says less than his judges hear. The undergraduate affirms more than he can parse. The speaker who says “what the policeman said is true” is neither fully insane nor fully avowing monkeys. All three cases turn on the difference between formal and substantive commitment. S.: That, I admit, is worth keeping. G.: Good. Then Abano matters after all. S.: Historically. G.: And grammatically. S.: I shall not concede metaphysically. G.: Nobody is asking you to. That, too, was the trouble in Bologna. S.: And in Oxford? G.: In Oxford, the trouble is always milder. We burn fewer men and more hours. S.: Which is why Boum Vadum will never rival Bononia. G.: No. Bononia had the pyrotechnics. Boum Vadum only has the better footnotes.Grice: Caro Sclavione, ho appena letto i tuoi Elementi di filosofia e confesso che sono rimasto colpito dal fatto che tu riesca a parlare di tutto senza mai perdere il senso dell’umorismo, che è già una massima conversazionale implicita. Sclavione: Carissimo Grice, a Napoli si impara presto che la ragione funziona meglio se accompagna il caffè, altrimenti l’inferenza resta amara. Grice: Questo spiega perché le tue premesse sembrano sempre più robuste dopo colazione, mentre le conclusioni arrivano solo verso sera, quando la conversazione è ben avviata.Sclavione: E tu, Grice, dovresti ammettere che senza un po’ di spirito partenopeo anche la cooperazione conversazionale rischia di sembrare una riunione senza biscotti. Sclavione, Pietro (1390). Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et medicorum. Padova.