Marcus Dick makes it to "Dear Carnap, Dear Van" -- and Grice

Speranza

The 'and Grice' is what I call the ObG: i.e. any post should have some Griceian implicature to it!

There was a post in the Grice Club some time ago, which was basically a quotation from P. M. S. Hacker's essay on Witters (or Wittgenstein, if you must).

I love Hacker because, with G. P. Baker, they succeeded Grice (when he left for Berkeley) as tutorial fellows in philosophy at St. John's.

Anyway,

Hacker has this thing, like I do, matter of fact, for alphabetical ordering.

And he manages to try to list the members of what J. L. Austin called his 'kindergarten' -- i.e. the members of that play group that he led and that met on Saturday mornings. The list starts -- I shall use set-theoretical formulation to please Jones:

PG = {Dick, Grice, ...}

-- the members of the class needed to fill some requisites: they had to be younger than Austin himself, and full-time Oxonian 'dons' -- no students allowed, or professors, for that matter!

In any case, note that Dick is the first in the list, followed by Grice.

I found that charming.

I don't think Hacker is trying anything too deep, or historiographical, since, for one, give me five minutes or so, and I shall find members for the play group starting with A, B, and C -- so Dick would NOT be the first!

In any case, why does this relate to Carnap's Corner?

Well, in "Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work," edited by Richard Creath, we read:

"Among it various communications from Marcus Dick, trying to get in touch with us."

So, yes, Dick made it to the Carnap annals, too!

The interesting thing is that those 'various communications' could never be reciprocated because Marcus Dick left no 'future address', if you can believe that!

Ah, well.

Quinton knew Dick from his All Souls days, and he used to say (as a reciprocation for Dick saying, "No much competition here, Richard" -- addressing Richard Wollheim) that he had never met a professional philosopher at Oxford who, like Dick, had never published 'a single word'.

Quinton is of course being hyperbolic. Why?

Well, Quine, in his autobiography, refers to Dick as being an outstanding Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard, and having produced some 'outstanding work' in that area (under Quine, of course).

So, I would think that if Dick never published a single word, he must have published (on Quine's blackboard) a symbol, or two!

The connection between Dick and Grice is more tenous, or shall I say, implicatural, in nature!

But we know that in his later phase of his philosophical development, Grice grew more formalistic and logicist. Indeed, the obituary for P. F. Strawson has a gem: Grice once told Strawson,

"If you cannot put it in symbols it's not worth saying it."

-- whatever that meant! Strawson was impressed, and retorted!

But I would think that Carnap, Grice, and why not, Dick, enjoyed the profuse use of 'symbols', or logical notation to make their ideas clear -- or not! (I have a friend who always reprimands me for putting things in 'logical formal' notation -- "Life is not algebra!" he would shout!)