Paul Grice

Herbert Paul Grice (13 March 1913 – 28 August 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle (with its namesake Gricean maxims), which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics.

His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.

Born and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

After a brief period teaching at Rossall School, he went back to Oxford, firstly as a graduate student at Merton College from 1936 to 1938, and then as a Lecturer, Fellow and Tutor from 1938 at St John's College.

Grice married Kathleen Watson in 1942; they had two children.

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.

In the 1957 article "Meaning", Grice describes "natural meaning" using the example of "Those spots mean (meant) measles."

And describes "non-natural meaning" using the example of "John Means that he'll be late" or "'Schnee' means 'snow'".

Grice does not define these two senses of the verb 'to mean', and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas they're used to express.

Instead, he relies on five differences in ordinary language usage to show that we use the word in (at least) two different ways.

For the rest of "Meaning", and in his discussions of meaning in "Logic and Conversation", Grice deals exclusively with non-natural meaning.

His overall approach to the study of non-natural meaning later came to be called "intention-based semantics" because it attempts to explain non-natural meaning based on the idea of speakers' intentions.

To do this, Grice distinguishes two kinds of non-natural meaning:

Utterer's meaning: What a speaker means by an utterance.

(Grice didn't introduce this label until "Logic and Conversation." The more common label in contemporary work is "speaker meaning", though Grice didn't use that term.)

Timeless meaning: The kind of meaning that can be possessed by a type of utterance such as a word or a sentence (rather than by an individual speaker).

(This is often called "conventional meaning", although Grice didn't call it that.)

The two steps in intention-based semantics are (1) to define utterer's meaning in terms of speakers' overt audience-directed intentions, and then (2) to define timeless meaning in terms of utterer's meaning.

The net effect is to define all linguistic notions of meaning in purely mental terms, and to thus shed psychological light on the semantic realm.

Grice tries to accomplish the first step by means of the following definition:

"'A meantNN something by x' is roughly equivalent to 'A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention'."

(In this definition, 'A' is a variable ranging over speakers and 'x' is a variable ranging over utterances.) Grice generalises this definition of speaker meaning later in 'Meaning' so that it applies to commands and questions, which, he argues, differ from assertions in that the speaker intends to induce an intention rather than a belief.

Grice's initial definition was controversial, and seemingly gives rise to a variety of counterexamples, and so later adherents of intention-based semantics—including Grice himself, Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Bennett, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and Stephen Neale —have attempted to improve on it in various ways while keeping the basic idea intact.

Grice next turns to the second step in his program: explaining the notion of timeless meaning in terms of the notion of utterer's meaning.

He does so very tentatively with the following definition:

"'x meansNN (timeless) that so-and-so' might as a first shot be equated with some statement or disjunction of statements about what 'people' (vague) intend (with qualifications about 'recognition') to effect by x."

The basic idea here is that the meaning of a word or sentence results from a regularity in what speakers use the word or sentence to mean.

Grice would give a much more detailed theory of timeless meaning in his sixth Logic and Conversation lecture.

A more influential attempt to expand on this component of intention-based semantics has been given by Stephen Schiffer.

Grice's most influential contribution to philosophy and linguistics is his theory of implicature, which started in his 1961 article, "The Causal Theory of Perception", and "Logic and Conversation", which was delivered at Harvard's 'William James Lectures' in 1967, and published in 1975 as a chapter in volume 3 of Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts.

According to Grice, what a speaker means by an utterance can be divided into what the speaker "says" and what the speaker thereby "implicates".

Grice makes it clear that the notion of saying he has in mind, though related to a colloquial sense of the word, is somewhat technical, referring to it as "a favored notion of 'saying' that must be further elucidated".

Nonetheless, Grice never settled on a full elucidation or definition of his favoured notion of saying, and the interpretation of this notion has become a contentious issue in the philosophy of language.

One point of controversy surrounding Grice's favoured notion of saying is the connection between it and his concept of utterer's meaning.

During the Second World War Grice served in the Royal Navy; after the war he returned to his Fellowship at St John's, which he held until 1967.

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.

He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason.

In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988.

He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989).