Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Paul Grice, and Marcus William Dick

Speranza

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

i.e. Dick is the first in the list, followed by Grice. I don't think Hacker is trying anything too deep, since, 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 The Eternal Truth?

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 the communications could not be reciprocated because Marcus Dick left no 'future address', if you can believe that!

Ah, well.

In his biography, Quine notes that Dick had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard, under one of Quine's own courses, and that he had displayed (or done, if you must) some outstanding 'work in logic'.

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