RT list: The Urmson Festchrift

As I say, thanks to D. Sperber for the update. I see he quotes as per below
 from the Urmson festschrift, without, alas, crediting, Urmson..

Urmson is in my opinion the greatest living English philosopher. Born where
 he should, in Harrogate, he lives up on a hill not far from Oxford.
 
I have corresponded with him. For one, he wrote the obit. for Grice for The
 Independent, but I don't do the Independent. He gets Grice's date of
marriage wrong, incidentally.
 
He wrote in French, Urmson did, on pragmatics, for a conference in France.
I must have the mimeo somewhere. This was an extension of his apositeness
principle in "Criteria of intensionality":
 
  A: I see that Nancy's husband no longer grows a beard
  B: You mean the postman.
 
"He is married to Nancy", "he is the local postman" are all aposite
dossiers for the assigned referent, but in different contexts.
 
As Horn and others -- myself in my PhD have noted -- it's best to see
Grice's cooperative principle and maxims as the potpourri of Oxford at her best.
 ALL of the Gricean maxims have Oxonian proper antecedents among the dons
he socialised with in Saturday mornings. It's in his "Probability" paper
where Urmson considers the quality maxims by Grice:
 
   do not say what you lack adequate evidence for
 
etc. as he applies it to the 'scales' -- he used the term! --,
 
    (know, believe)
 
    (probably, possibly)
 
etc.
 
Finally, in his ever influential "Parenthetical Verbs" (revamped by Diane
Brockway Blakemore), he considers things that all Oxonian philosophers worth
 their name should consider:
 
The order of things, in
 
    I presume Tom did it.
    Tom, I presume, did it.
    Tom did it, I presume.
 
Urmson, scorning the traditional linguists, is saying that even in the
first of the trio, "I presume" works as a parenthetical. (I love his analysis
of the hypocrisy of the British army, "I regret your son died": "I'm sorry
to report your son died", the army officer reports to the mother. "Surely we
cannot expect that he, in reporting, is being sorry. It's just the polite
parenthetical, under the circumstances."
 
One summer, I dedicated my life to collect Urmsoniana. There's "Saints and
Heroes", where he deals with Mother Theresa of Calcutta, avant la lettre,
and of course his books proper.
 
When Horn was looking for a good example of "and" (for his "Implicature" in
 his own edited handbook for Blackwell) I reminded him of Urmson's
 
    He took off his trousers and went to bed
 
that Grice later used in 1967 (but exprinted in 1989). And now Urmson
graces the rather too academic reference lists of that monumental Blackwell
companion.
 
He of course edited J. L. Austin. So without Urmson, no Austin, one would
think. Marina Sbisa was clever enough to convince Urmson that a more
thorough edition was necessary -- but I see that linguists seldom care to give the
 Urmson/Sbisa edition of Austin.
 
He also of course edited Austin's philosophical papers, but this was in
collaboration with Warnock. While Warnock dedicated his individual editorial
efforts to Sense and Sensibilia.
 
The Urmson festschrift to which Sperber/Wilson and J. Hornsby contributed
contains an interesting biblio of the man. Hare SHOULD have contributed with
his "Some subatomic particles of logic", but he got too jargonistic, and
the editors objected. I did read the essay as it was later reprinted in Mind
and I'll be damned if I saw too much jargon in it!
 
More technically philosophically, Urmson should be credited with a very tim
ely reprinting of Prichard's "Willing" and other essays that got Grice into
 serious thinking -- e.g. in "Intention and Uncertainty", where he goes
neo-Prichardian.
 
But my favourite Urmson is the Urmson on the 'ideas', in his own edited
Philosophical Dictionary, and last but not least, his sublime, The objects of
the five senses, for the British Academy.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza
   The Swimming Pool Library, Villa Speranza, Bordighera

----

Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber. 1988. Mood and the Analysis of
non-declarative sentences. In J. Dancy, J.Moravcsik & C. Taylor (eds) (1988) Human
agency: Language, duty and value. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA:
77-101.
“How are non-declarative sentences understood? How do they differ
semantically from their declarative counterparts? Answers to
these questions once made direct appeal to the notion of illocutionary
force. When they proved unsatisfactory, the fault was diagnosed as a failure to
 distinguish properly between mood and force…”
 
Received on Wed Oct 7 01:56:33 2009