Studies in the Way of Words

A collection of Grice's main papers, assembled near the end of his life with a long retrospective epilogue. Part One reprints his 1967 William James Lectures, including 'Logic and Conversation'. There Grice argues that what a speaker means often goes beyond what the words literally say, and that we work out the extra meaning by assuming the speaker is cooperating. He states a Cooperative Principle and four sets of maxims: quantity (say as much as is needed, no more), quality (say what you believe true), relation (be relevant) and manner (be clear). Meaning inferred in this way he calls conversational implicature; a reference that praises only a candidate's English and attendance at tutorials implies something it never says. He uses this to defend the logician's 'and', 'or' and 'if' against ordinary language critics. Part Two collects other essays, among them 'Meaning', which analyses non-natural meaning in terms of the speaker's intentions, 'The Causal Theory of Perception', and 'In Defense of a Dogma', written with Strawson against Quine.

Implicature and the Gricean maxims are basic tools of linguistics and philosophy of language, and they explain much of how people actually communicate.