Herbert Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), often writing under the name Paul Grice, was a philosopher remembered mainly for his substantial contribution to the study of meaning within language, particularly his maxims of conversation. Grice's work is one of the foundations of the modern study of pragmatics. Many of his essays/papers were published in the book Studies in the Way of Words (1989).
External links
MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences entry (http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/grice.htm)
Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind entry (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/grice.html)
Grice generalizes this approach by using ‘*+R’ to represent any sentence whose underlying syntactic form divides into the mood operator * and the sentence radical R. Thus: where * is mood operator, and R a sentence radical, let ∏(*+R) be the set of all propositions associated with any sentence with the structure (*+R).
Grice suggests that it is a necessary condition of reasoning from A to B that one intend that there be a formally valid (and non-trivial) argument from A to B.
Grice objects on this ground to theories that regard only scientific knowledge as truly descriptive and explanatory and that relegate commonsense psychological explanation to a second-class role as a theory, useful in daily life, but not a theory we should endorse as a description or explanation of reality.
My suggestion is that there must be a lawlike connection between the state of affairs Bap [that a believes p] and the state of affairs that makes 'p' true such that, given Bap, it must be the case that p.
Crudely, since causal relations are lawlike, if our perceptual and cognitive apparatus is such that it is buzzing flies that cause us to have perceptual beliefs about buzzing flies, then it will be the case that we will have perceptual knowledge of this annoying aspect of our environment when the bees cause the belief.
Grice, H. "The Causal Theory of Perception," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 35, pp.
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