Grice thought that conversations were NOT zero-sum games. In symbols, the
intersection of
GA -- where that represents the goal of one conversationalist
and
GB -- the goal of the co-conversationalist
was not the empty set.
Howard Raiffa is an economics professor whose mathematical formulas for
decision making are applied to the search for a missing nuclear bomb and the
siting of an airport, and are even suggested as a way to resolve a strike by
professional hockey players.
Professor Raiffa is (unlike Grice) a co-founder of "The John F. Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard" (now "The Harvard Kennedy School" -- or "The Harvard
Kennedy", as Nancy Mitford prefers. She shays it's 'uncool' to add 'school' to
schools) and a member of the university faculty for a number of years, pioneers
what has become known as decision science (after Hampshire's and Hart's essay
on deciding, also D. F. Pears's — an academic discipline that encompasses
negotiating techniques, conflict resolution, risk analysis and game theory.
This is ALL TOO GRICEIAN TO BE MISSED.
Grice and Raiffa were innovative and often abstruse theoreticians, but both
applied their postulates (Grice preferred 'desiderata' in his 1964 Oxford
lectures on "Logic and Conversation" delivered some time later at Harvard) to
real-world cases of conflict, cooperation and compromise in planning
curriculums, publishing guidebooks and making videos.
Raiffa (but not Grice) was also the founding director of the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a joint American-Soviet research
organization that explored energy, pollution and other issues as a cooperative
venture during the Cold War ("Brrr...," said Grice).
Raiffa recalls:
"I learned a lot about the theory and practice of many-party negotiations in
the presence of extreme cultural differences."
And then he should.
In an interview, Prof. David E. Bell of the Harvard Business School said:
"Many academics cross t’s and dot i’s."
Grice and Raiffa came up with brand-new theories that helped us understand how
we should make decisions in a wide variety of circumstances.
These were practical approaches, not ivory tower constructs.
Professor Raiffa was headed for a career as an actuary when, he once said:
I decided that I really wanted to study something more cerebral — something
more theoretical.
The same happened to Grice. His father, Herbert, wanted Grice to become a
concert cellist. But Grice was brain AND BRAWN: once into "The House" at Oxford
he became the captain of the football team (i.e. soccer) and would later join
the Oxfordshire Cricket Club. In fact, THE TIMES once called him, "Professional
philosopher and amateur cricketer."
Raiffa became an applied mathematician and statistician and, after conducting a
primitive multiple-value analysis of 10 variables involved in competing job
offers, went to Harvard.
Don't say uni, varsity, university, or college! It's implicated!
Raiffa held the Frank Plumpton Ramsey professorship of managerial economics at
the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School until his retirement.
On the other hand, Grice played with RAMSIFIED NAMING and RAMSIFIED DEFINITION
in his presidential address (Pacific Division, if you must) of the APA --
that's the American Philosophical Association.
Among his Raiffa's essays are:
“Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey” (with R. Duncan Luce)
“Applied Statistical Decision Theory” (with Robert Schlaifer)
“The Art and Science of Negotiation: How to Resolve Conflicts and Get the Best
Out of Bargaining” and two more accessible volumes:
“Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty” and
“Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions” (with John S.
Hammond and Ralph L. Keeney).
The best practical advice, Professor Raiffa (and Grice) thought, is to maximize
your expected pay-off, which is the sum of all pay-offs multiplied by
probabilities, if you get my drift.
Raiffa and Grice explained that the art of compromise centers on the
willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return.
Successful artists, such as Köepcke, since McEvoy was mentioning him in
connection with Popper's TOO COMPLEX theory of contradiction, get more than
they give up.
While Grice and Raiffa’s major intellectual contributions were highly
conceptual and theoretical, they devoted his later career to practical subjects.
In helping a country's government decide where to build an airport, Raiffa (not
Grice -- he did not like flying) assisted in weighing variables like safety
(one possible location required planes to make a steep descent over mountains),
noise pollution and convenience.
Raiffa (not Grice) delivered a lecture on handicapping horse racing that helped
Navy scientists search for a hydrogen bomb lost after a B-52 crash.
(Granted, Grice was a captain with the ROYAL Navy).
The formula by Raiffa (not Grice) describes so-called Bayesian (after Bayes, a
man) methods of probability, which involve quantifying knowledge or belief.
Grice disliked quantifying over belief, but he had to. He preferred to use
subscripts:
i. Columbus believed-1 that the earth was round.
As it happens, the earth IS round.
But
ii. The Ancient Greeks believed that the earth was flat.
Since we are using 'believe' confusingly, Grice proposes
iii. The Ancient Greeks believed-2 that the earth was flat.
(vide his section on Propositional Attitudes in the MIT compilation on "Vacuous
Names" -- Grice's essay was originally published by Reidel).
In 1994, in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Prof. James K. Sebenius and
his colleague Prof. Michael A. Wheeler invoke an earlier suggestion from Raiffa
and David Lax to settle a hockey strike.
Grice avoided Oxonian strikes -- and then he moved to UC/Berkeley.
Revenue would flow into an escrow account, and neither the players nor the
owners would be paid until they resolved their differences.
The suggestion was, as a matter of fact, not adopted (But Raifa's solution is
still part of Popper's w3 of objective knowledge -- "the third realm").
Howard Raiffa was born in the Bronx on Jan. 24, 1924.
Herbert Paul Grice was born in England.
Raiffa was the son of Jacob Raiffa, who sold wool products, and the former
Hilda Kaplan.
Grice was the son of Herbert Grice ("a dreadful businessman, but he was a fine
musician," his son recalled) and Mabel Fulton.
Raiffa graduated from Evander Childs, where he was captain of the basketball
team.
Grice graduated from Clifton, where he played cricket and for his last year
there, played Ravel at the end of year party. His mother was so proud!
Math was Raiffa's (not Grice's) best subject -- Grice's was Greek -- but Raiffa
dreamed of being a basketball player or coach.
Grice got away with it, and would play football first at The House and later
cricket becoming a member of the Oxfordshire Cricket Club.
Raiffa (not Grice) was attending City College when he enlisted in the Army Air
Corps.
Grice was attending The House when he enlisted in the Royal Navy.
In the Army Air Corps, Raiffa where was a radar specialist.
In the Royal Navy, Grice was a crossword puzzle specialist -- but he was
involved in action in the North Atlantic, and later transferred to the
Admiralty.
Raiffa (not Grice) earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
Grice earned a BA in Lit. Hum.
Raiffa later earned a master’s in statistics.
Grice "earned" a MA in Lit Hum.
Raiffa (not Grice) later earned a doctorate in mathematics.
Grice never earned a doctorate since an Oxonian don was never required to earn
one -- it was thought almost improper -- "a bit too much".
All of Raifa's degrees were awarded from the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor.
All of Grice's degrees (his BA and his MA) were given by Oxford (-- "the uni,
not to town!").
In 1945, Raiffa married Estelle Schwartz.
Grice married the daughter of a naval engineer, whose brother (the daughter's
brother) was a co-student with Grice at Merton for a while).
Like Grice, Raiffa had daughter and a son.
In fact, Grice would experiment with his children with things like:
"Nothing can be green and red all over." ("Can a sweater be green and red all
over?")
Rather than his children, Grice would experiment with his children's playmates
at Oxford. Grice was interested in how they would react to synthetic a priori
statements ("No stripes allowed")
After teaching at Columbia Raiffa joined the faculty of the business school at
Harvard.
After getting his MA, Grice taught classics for a year in Lancashire but got
bored.
At Harvard, Raiffa, with Graham T. Allison Jr., Francis M. Bator, Ernest May,
Frederick Mosteller, Richard E. Neustadt, and Thomas C. Schelling (if you've
heard of him -- Lewis quotes him along with Grice in his essay on Convention,
as does S. R. Schiffer), he was a founder of the Kennedy School, which evolved
from the Graduate School of Public Administration and was renamed later.
Negotiation analysis soon became the most popular course at the Kennedy --
especially after Grice delivered his "Logic and Conversation" lectures positing
a "co-operative principle" along Kantian lines (He had revised entirely his
earlier Oxford lectures where he spoke of desiderata, and the principles of
candour and clarity, and how conversational benevolence should be balanced with
conversational self-interest; all in the goal of attaining 'helpfulness' for
the purpose of getting your implicature across).
Grice's and Raiffa’s thrust was not simply "how to win," although Grice makes
specific references to "conversational moves" in the "conversational game" (and
yes, he played cricket, which IS a zero-sum game).
Rather, Grice's and Raiffa's thrust was strongly directed toward the question
of how to create joint value.
Grice will go on to deliver the Paul Carus lectures on The Conception of Value.
If both participants in a conversation learned his lessons effectively, they
would both be better off.
Grice's and Raiffa's students engaged in sometimes cut-throat simulated
negotiations and conversations, which prompted The Harvard Crimson to ask
Raiffa (Grice was in Berkeley where he had found a beautiful villa by the bay),
whether the curriculum taught students to lie in actual business dealings.
Raiffa, almost like Grice, replied in a clever way, by citing a letter about
the former president of the University of Chicago.
Raffia told The Crimson (we don't say "The Harvard Crimson"):
"When, in the 1950 he was hauled before a congressional committee and asked if
it was true that Chicago taught communism, Robert Hutchins replied in the
affirmative."
Hutchins's memorable answer went:
"Yes. And in the medical school we teach cancer."
As if quoting Grice on implicature (Grice loved the Greek concept of analogy,
since it should be balanced with deduction), Raiffa notes:
"It is a valid analogy.
"To deal with a problem, we have to teach about it."
Meanwhile, Grice was providing a conceptual analysis of Benjamin Franklin's
motto:
iv. Honesty is the best policy.
The Crimson said that Raiffa (not Grice) concluded his course with this wish:
"When we see we could improve our profit or further maximize our desired
result, we might ask, Is this a ‘dirty dollar’ or a ‘clean one’ that we could
earn here? What would happen if everybody did this? Would we be able to sleep
at night if we did this? How would we feel if we had to explain this to our
families? I hope that in answering these questions, you will favor the course
of action embracing a higher moral standard."
On the other hand, Grice concluded his course by leaving the room -- even if
later he became obsessed with Kant, in joint lectures with Judith Baker.
Stalnaker, of MIT, not far from Harvard, sure, tries to reconcile a utilitarian
approach to Grice and concludes that Bentham won't do. To deal with Grice you
need both Aristotle's concept of 'phronesis' and Kant's theory of the
imperatives.
That's why when Jonathan Bennett reviewed Grice's festschrift for the Times
Literary Supplement, he entitled, "In the tradition of Kantotle"!
