What is the meaning of this, and is this an example of bad writing?
"For it will be possible to construct in terms of the formal devices a system of very general formulas, a considerable number of which can be regarded as, or are closely related to, patterns of inferences the expression of which involves some or all of the devices..." (Logic and Conversation; Grice, 1975)
Technically speaking one can have both coherence in meaning, and be bad writing. Just based on the fact that this is a famous logician in a peer-reviewed journal makes the probability of this being incoherent minuscule. As such, the meaning is absolutely coherent, but the question of whether it is bad writing is subjective. What constitutes 'bad' writing is a claim that is open to interpretation.
It is indisputable that Grice is widely recognized as a seminal expert in the philosophy of language. The fact is that H.P. Grice is a famous theorist on meaning. It would be a little bit of a stretch to claim that Grice is incoherent in any of his published writing. From WP:
One of Grice's two most influential contributions to the study of language and communication is his theory of meaning, which he began to develop in his article "Meaning", written in 1948 but published only in 1957 at the prodding of his colleague, P. F. Strawson.3 Grice further developed his theory of meaning in the fifth and sixth of his William James lectures on "Logic and Conversation", delivered at Harvard in 1967. These two lectures were initially published as "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions" in 1969 and "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning" in 1968, and were later collected with the other lectures as the first section of Studies in the Way of Words in 1989.
We'll tackle what Grice is stating in this sentence last, however, let's address the second aspect of your question: 'bad' writing.
Remember, writing is the use of a particular medium of communication to move thoughts back and forth, primarily through the use of sentences to embody propositions. There's a lot going on there philosophically! A sentence is a philosophical object that exemplifies syntax, and a proposition is one that exemplifies semantics. This can be referred to as the medium-message dichotomy. One famous quotation recognizes this generally recognized dichotomy:
"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and introduced in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.1 McLuhan proposes that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. He showed that artifacts as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content.3
What constitutes 'bad' writing is dependent on many factors, of which particularly important is the grammatical abilities of the reader. That's because how an author expresses themselves and how a reader interprets the expression are NOT the same. 'Good' writing is generally understood to be effective writing, that is, successful in an empirical sense of communicating the experiences of the author to the reader. Ideas on what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' writing are all over the Internet, and here's an example. Thus, philosophically, an argument has to be made and defended to determine if the claim that this writing is 'good' or 'bad' is true. And English teachers get paid to handle this every day.
Among philosophers, who tend to have excellent linguistic and logic skills, and who often score the highest on the LSAT (by major, along with mathematicians), this would be considered 'good' writing simply based on the fact that it was allowed to be published by professional philosophical editors who wouldn't tolerate either incoherent sentences or bad writing.
In days past, good writing was often conceived to look like a writing from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our co-temporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect...
Today Strunk and White's Elements of Style and Ernest Hemingway are the norm:
The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can't be found.
Now, as to the original quotation itself, let's break apart the complex construction:
"For it will be possible to construct in terms of the formal devices a system of very general formulas, a considerable number of which can be regarded as, or are closely related to, patterns of inferences the expression of which involves some or all of the devices..."
The easiest way of doing this is converting the surface structure (syntax) using the deep structure (semantics). Let's attempt it:
It's possible to build with formal systems. The formal systems will use formulas. Most of those general formulas will be or be like patterns of inferences. Those inferences will use the devices...
And there we have it. Instead of a single sentence, the propositions can be rewritten as a series of short sentences. The question of coherence of course is more broadly related to the passage of the text. Some philosophers such as John Searle are remarkably lucid in their prose, but most in the Western Canon resemble this. Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant are hard to tackle, but they are worth building up your grammar skills.
If you have a specific question about the grammatical constructions, feel free to post on English SE and ping me. I love diagramming sentences. If you have additional questions about the content of the paper, don't hesitate to post them as additional Q&A-style questions. Searle, Grice, and Strawson are intellectual good times!
