Herbert Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), usually publishing under the name Paul Grice, was a British educated philosopher of language, who spent the last two decades of his career in the U.S. 1913 (MCMXIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday. ... 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ...

Life

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Grice was educated first at Clifton College and then at Oxford University where he taught until 1967. 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. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989). An 1898 etching of the College Close Clifton College is a major coeducational public school in Clifton, Bristol, England. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... The John Locke lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. ...

Grice on meaning

Grice's work is one of the foundations of the modern study of pragmatics. In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ...

Grice is remembered mainly for his substantial contribution to the study of meaning within language, particularly his cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation derived from the cooperative principle, and his theory of implicatures. He proposed an intention-based theory of meaning, in which 'A meant 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 linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. ... The Co-operative Principle was described by Paul Grice, and refers to how people interact with one another. ... The philosopher Paul Grice proposed four conversational maxims that arise from the pragmatics of natural language. ... Definition An implicature is anything that is inferred from an utterance but that is not a condition for the truth of the utterance. ...

Grice understood "meaning" to have two kinds: natural and non-natural. Natural meaning had to do with cause and effect, for example with the expression "these spots mean measles". Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, had to do with the intentions of the speaker in communicating something to the listener.

Grice was most eager to explain non-natural meaning, and his studies made many important and powerful distinctions to help form that explanation. He distinguished between four kinds of content: encoded / non-encoded content and truth-conditional / non-truth-conditional content.

• Encoded content is the actual meaning attached to certain expressions, arrived at through investigation of definitions and making of literal interpretations.
• Non-encoded content are those meanings that are understood beyond an analysis of the words themselves, i.e., by looking at the context of speaking, tone of voice, and so on.
• Truth-conditional content are whatever conditions make an expression true or false.
• Non-truth-conditional content are whatever conditions that do not affect the truth or falsity of an expression.

Sometimes, expressions do not have a literal interpretation, or they do not have any truth-conditional content, and sometimes expressions can have both truth-conditional content and encoded content.

For Grice, these distinctions can explain at least three different possible varieties of expression:

• Conventional Implicature - when an expression has encoded content, but doesn't necessarily have any truth-conditions;
• Conversational Implicature - when an expression does not have encoded content, but does have truth-conditions (for example, in use of irony);
• Utterances - when an expression has both encoded content and truth-conditions.

Criticisms

The relevance theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson challenges Grice's theory of meaning. There are two ways to conceive of how thoughts can be communicated from one person to another. ... Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist, linguist and cognitive scientist, currently a Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS. He is known, amongst other things, for his work on pragmatics and in particular relevance theory; and also for his theory on “epidemiology of representations”. In the early Seventies, Sperber...

Selected writings

• 1957, "Meaning," The Philosophical Review 66: 377-88.
• 1969, "Utterer's Meaning and Intention," The Philosophical Review 78: 147-77.
• 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press.
• 1991. The Conception of Value. Oxford University Press. His 1979 John Locke Lectures.
• 2001. Aspects of Reason (Richard Warner, ed.). Oxford University Press.

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Paul Grice" -- by Richard Grandy and Richard Warner.
• MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences: "Grice." -- by Kent Bach.
• Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind: "Paul Grice" -- by Christopher Gauker.
• List of Grice links at meaning.ch
• La comunicación según Grice (spanish)