Reasons and reasoning were central to the work of Paul Grice, one of the most influential and admired philosophers of the late twentieth century. In the John Locke Lectures that Grice delivered in Oxford at the end of the 1970s, he set out his fundamental thoughts about these topics; Aspects of Reason is the long-awaited publication of those lectures. They focus on an investigation of practical necessity, as Grice contends that practical necessities are established by derivation; they are necessary because (...) they are derivable. This work sets this claim in the context of an account of reasons and reasoning, allowing Grice to defend his treatment of necessity against obvious objections and revealing how the construction of explicit derivations can play a central role in explaining and justifying thought and action. Grice was still working on Aspects of Reason during the last years of his life, and although unpolished, the book provides an intimate glimpse into the workings of his mind and will refresh and illuminate many areas of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Questions of Meaning Theories of Meaning Language, Mind and Metaphysics: Questions of Priority Semantic Theories: Davidson's Programme Analysing the Concept of Meaning: Grice's Programme Pragmatics: Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory.

Historically, interjections have been treated in two different ways: as part of language, or as non-words signifying feelings or states of mind. In this paper, I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of two contemporary approaches that reflect the historical dichotomy, and suggest a new analysis which preserves the insights of both. Interjections have a natural and a coded element, and are better analysed as falling at various points along a continuum between `showing' and `saying'. These two notions are characterised (...) in theoretical terms, and some implications of the proposed approach are considered. (shrink)

Humans are expert users of metarepresentations. How has this human metarepresentational capacity evolved? In order to contribute to the ongoing debate on this question, the chapter focuses on three more specific issues: i. How do humans metarepresent representations? ii. What came first: language, or metarepresentations? iii. Do humans have more than one metarepresentational ability?

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be explained (...) in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

We take a fresh look at emotion recognition in autistic children, by testing their recognition of three different emotions (happy, sad, and surprise). The interest in selecting these is that whereas the first two are typical “simple” emotions (caused by situations), the third is typically a “cognitive” emotion (caused by beliefs). Because subjects with autism have clear difficulties in understanding beliefs, we predicted they would show more difficulty in recognising surprise. In contrast, as they have no difficulty in understanding situations (...) as causes of emotion, we predicted they would not show deficits in recognising happy and sad. These predictions were borne out, in a comparison with a group of normal children and in a group of subjects with mental handicap. This result shows the importance of fine-grain analysis in emotion-recognition tasks, and is discussed in relation to affective and theory of mind models of autism. (shrink)