Thinker · TH-0321
Paul Grice
Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language who taught at St John's College, Oxford, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. In…
Also known as H. P. Grice, Herbert Paul Grice
1913 – 1988 · Birmingham, Oxford, Berkeley (California)
Traditions: Analytic
Schools: Ordinary language philosophy
Paul Grice was a British philosopher of language who taught at St John's College, Oxford, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. In 'Meaning' he analysed speaker meaning in terms of intentions aimed at being recognised, and in his William James Lectures he introduced conversational implicature: what a speaker conveys beyond what is literally said, by relying on the hearer's assumption that conversation is cooperative.
Key ideas
- Speaker meaning: to mean something is to intend a hearer to respond partly because they recognise that intention.
- Conversation runs on a cooperative principle, spelled out in maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner.
- Implicature: much of what we communicate is inferred from the assumption that the speaker is cooperative, not said outright.
- Separating what is said from what is implicated can defend simple semantics against apparent counterexamples.
Major works
- Meaning (1957)
- Logic and Conversation (William James Lectures, 1967; published 1975)
- Studies in the Way of Words (1989)
In the conversation
- Question If I must file the return, must I file it or shred it? Ross’s paradox for a tax preparer
- Question Why does logic count ‘if the moon is cheese, then 2 + 2 = 5’ as true?
- Discussion The recommendation letter that says nothing bad: Grice and the art of faint praise
- Question My debaters say ‘if the moon is cheese, then 2 + 2 = 4’ is true. Are they right?
- Question Is the logician’s ‘if’ what a contract means by ‘if’?
- Debate Twenty years of translating have convinced me that meaning is use
- Discussion Does a language model mean anything by what it writes?