Paul Grice

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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.

Image:H. P. Grice.jpg

H. P. Grice

1 Life
2 Grice on meaning
3 Criticisms
4 Selected writings
5 External links

[edit] 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).

He was married and had two children. He lived in an old house in the Berkeley Hills.

[edit] Grice on meaning

Grice's work is one of the foundations of the modern study of pragmatics.

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'.

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.

[edit] Criticisms

The relevance theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson challenges Grice's theory of meaning.

[edit] 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.