Bete's and the conversation

When last "the conversation" (between Grice and Carnap) through which Speranza and I were approaching the Eternal City was in progress, the principle avenue along which progress was envisaged lead Carnap down the gauntlet provided by Grice's numerous betes noires.
My own difficulty in progressing this line was that for many of the betes we seemed to have little material from Grice to clarify exactly what it was he abhorred.

This particularly difficult because it seemed that the central thread in these abhorrences was minimalisation, and that positivism, even the relatively giving positivism of Carnap, does involve a lot of this.
My own pet thesis was that if one could probe Grice's mind one would find that what he abhorred was various dogmatic minimalisms, and that he might be persuaded to find some value in the more liberal pluralistic minimalisms in which Carnap mostly engaged.  Making this thesis stick is not so easy, particularly in relation to minimalisms on which Grice wrote little.

I have therefore in my more recently thoughts on this felt that other avenues might be more productive.  There are of course the threads identified in the retrospective epilogue, whose primary merit is that they compiled with hindsight to reflect what he actually wrote about.

There is one that seems to me at present to be of particular interest.
It is a topic which was very important to both, on which there is at first glance an irreconcilable gulf, but on which it seems to me that a conversation might well show that the gulf is illusory and that resolving the apparent conflict might be illuminating.

This is "meaning".

The gulf has already been apparent between Speranza and I, for the kind of semantics which is of primary interest to Carnap, and to myself, and which comes down from Frege, is something which is completely divested of "psychologism", in which meanings have nothing whatever to do with minds or mental entities (unless minds are the subject matter of the language under analysis).
Grice on the other hand builds his conception of semantics on speakers intentions (insofar as I understand it, which is not so much!).

This looks like tough ground for a constructive conversation but I think that when you think about the distinct interests of the two philosophers there is reason for the different attitudes, and possibilities for reconciliation appear.

Frege's interest was specifically in the language of mathematics.  Subsequent philosophers may have applied his ideas more widely, but Frege's anti-psychologism is to the best of my knowlege specific to the language of mathematics.  It is mathematical concepts which he seeks to divest of the psychological elements which were common among mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics in his day.   And in this he has been successful, almost all mathematicians today, and probably most philosophers have a completely non-psychological understanding of mathematical concepts.
Carnap's interest was in formal language for science, and the ideals of mathematical formulation and that of objectivity in science make the same kind of conception of semantics seem appropriate for languages in which scientific theories can be formalised.  To this we might add, that these languages are intended for publication rather than discussion, they are not primarily spoken but written languages, and cannot depend upon the kind of contextual clues which may contribute significantly to oral discourse. The relevant context is the literature, or some narrowly circumscribed part of it.

Grice on the other hand, was of course trying to understand how ordinary spoken language works.  In this case, it will much less often be the case that a sentence has some definite objective meaning.

Add to this, Carnap's explicit denial that one could expect to deliver a formal semantics for natural languages.

It is arguable therefore, that the different attitudes toward meaning are not in conflict, that they represent the different realities of distinct kinds of language.
Furthermore, it seems to me now that if Carnap wished to continue his opposition to certain kinds of metaphysics, then a prime target would be the metaphysics of Kripke, and that because Kripke seems to suppose himself to be obtaining objective metaphysical truths in ordinary language without adopting any special terminology, especially without making use of specific philosophical notions of necessity (which is what Carnap does), then one part of an argument against this could be to deny that ordinary language does have any such concepts.  In such an argument, the kind of attention to the realities of ordinary language which we find in Grice would be helpful.
There is some similarity here with the contribution of Grice on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, for Grice's contribution here with Strawson, is to the effect that no failure in precise enunciation of the distinction by philosophers can undermine the practical efficacy of related notions in ordinary language.   Though this is the opposite way round, ordinary discourse providing support for a philosophical distinction.  On Kripkean metaphysics the aim would be to undermine the idea that this kind of metaphysics is other than a philosophical construction.
Of course Grice might not care for such a campaign, even if it built on his insights!

Roger Jones