[lit-ideas] Re: The Other Grice
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:23:58 EDT
In a message dated 6/27/2011 10:42:27 A.M, phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Derrida's argument is that the structural quality of
language use which makes possible the usage that Austin dismisses as
parasitical, is the very quality which makes language use possible.
The ability to use words in a virtually infinite number of contexts is
a condition for the possibility of language and so the attempt to
delimit a particular usage as more originary and other usages as
parasitical or derivative is arbitrary.
Grice of course disagrees -- or disagrices, if you mustn't.
Grice sees lingo as maximally exchange of informativeness. Even orders,
like "Love me!" is an exchange of info from an utterer to an addressee
("utterer informs addressee that he loves her"). It would be otiose in a
genuine
monologue to have, "Love me!" -- the utterer already knows that, and it is
useless to 'inform yourself' about stuff.
----
And so on.
There is nothing arbitrary about Grice's transcendental justification:
conversational moves are reasonable (if not rational) only on condition that
they serve towards this maximally exchange of info. Hamlet's "To be or not to
be, that is the question" is thus derivative, in that
i. it is a character in
ii. 'genuine' monologue
two otiosities wrapped in one -- and for a price!
Austin and Grice were of course contemporary and met every Saturday morning
for 25 years. Austin was slightly younger which helped. He never allowed
anyone his senior to lead the conversation, and so Grice was pretty much
welcomed. They were never friends, though. When Austin died in 1960, Grice
took the lead with those Morning meetings -- he just met at Corpus Christi,
his alma mater, but by 1967 he was pretty bored with the whole thing, and
having seen this magnificent Spanish colonial house up in the Berkeley hills,
he decided to leave his flat in Woodstock Road, Oxford and settled
permanently in this grand view to the Bay of all Bays.
When he died, he was cremated and his ashed spread over the bay he had come
to love.
I wouldn't know if Derrida ever met with Grice. There was an attempt to
teach the French the rudiments of analytic philosophy -- Urmson, Grice,
Austin, Strawson, contributed. The thing was published in French, "philosophie
analytique". The attempt failed. ("Different ligos, different mind sets", as
Coco Chanel, quoting Sapir-Whorf had predicted). A pity, because the
Encyclopedists like Diderot had dreamed of French as "lingua franca
rationalis".
Cheers,
Speranza
---- Grice and others.
---- Locke, Myself and others.
---- The other Grice
---- Grice and the other.
---- Conversations with myself.
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