Herbert Paul Grice usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British-educated philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.

Life

Born and raised in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College

Clifton College

Clifton College is a co-educational independent school in Clifton, Bristol, England, founded in 1862. In its early years it was notable for emphasising science in the curriculum, and for being less concerned with social elitism, e.g. by admitting day-boys on equal terms and providing a dedicated...

 and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom...

.
After a brief period teaching at Rossall School

Rossall School

Rossall School is a British, co-educational, independent school, between Cleveleys and Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was founded in 1844 by St. Vincent Beechey as a sister school to Marlborough College which had been founded the previous year...

, he went back to Oxford 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

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where he taught until his death in 1988. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures

John Locke lectures

The John Locke Lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. They are one of the world's most prestigious academic lecture series, comparable to the Gifford Lectures given in Scottish universities...

 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 and his wife lived in an old Spanish style house in the Berkeley Hills.

Grice on meaning

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

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...

.

Grice studied the differences and relationships between speaker meaning

Meaning (linguistics)

In linguistics, meaning is what is expressed by the writer or speaker, and what is conveyed to the reader or listener, provided that they talk about the same thing . In other words if the object and the name of the object and the concepts in their head are the same...

 and linguistic meaning

Linguistic meaning

The nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, was discussed by philosophers Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. According to them 'meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean '. One term in the relationship of meaning necessarily...

.

He explained nonliteral speech as the outcome of a cooperative principle

Cooperative principle

In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people interact with one another. As phrased by Paul Grice, who introduced it, it states, "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or...

, and some derived maxims of discourse. Speaker meaning is to induce a belief in one's hearers.

For some of the inferences made when we listen, he proposed different kinds of implicature

Implicature

Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatics subfield of linguistics, coined by H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied by the utterance...

s. He used that term as he claimed that 'implication' was not the right word.

The distinction between natural and nonnatural meaning

Grice understood "meaning" to refer to two rather different kinds of phenomena. Natural meaning is supposed to capture something similar to the relation between cause and effect as, for example, applied in the sentence "Those spots mean measles". This must be distinguished from what Grice calls nonnatural meaning, as present in "Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full". Grice's subsequent suggestion is that the notion of nonnatural meaning should be analysed in terms of speakers' intentions in trying to communicate something to an audience.

Grice's Paradox

In his book Studies in the Way of Words, he presents what he calls "Grice's Paradox". In it, he supposes that two chess players, Yog and Zog, play 100 games under the following conditions:

(1) Yog is white nine of ten times.

(2) There are no draws.

And the results are:

(1) Yog, when white, won 80 of 90 games.

(2) Yog, when black, won zero of ten games.

This implies that:

(i) 8/9 times, if Yog was white, Yog won.

(ii) 1/2 of the time, if Yog lost, Yog was black.

(iii) 9/10 times, either Yog wasn't white or he won.

From these statements, it might appear one could make these deductions by contraposition

Contraposition

In traditional logic, contraposition is a form of immediate inference in which from a given proposition another is inferred having for its subject the contradictory of the original predicate, and in some cases involving a change of quality . For its symbolic expression in modern logic see the rule...

 and conditional disjunction

Conditional disjunction

In logic, the term conditional disjunction can refer to:*conditioned disjunction, a ternary logical connective introduced by Alonzo Church;*a rule in classical logic that the material conditional is equivalent to the disjunction , so that these two formulas are interchangeable....

:

([a] from [ii]) If Yog was white, then 1/2 of the time Yog won.

([b] from [iii]) 9/10 times, if Yog was white, then he won.

But both (a) and (b) are untrue—they contradict (i). In fact, (ii) and (iii) don't provide enough information to use Bayesian

Bayesian

Bayesian refers to methods in probability and statistics named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes , in particular methods related to statistical inference:...

 reasoning to reach those conclusions. That might be clearer if (i)-(iii) had instead been stated like so:

(i) When Yog was white, Yog won 8/9 times. (No information is given about when Yog was black.)

(ii) When Yog lost, Yog was black 1/2 the time. (No information is given about when Yog won.)

(iii) 9/10 times, either Yog was black and won, Yog was black and lost, or Yog was white and won. (No information is provided on how the 9/10 is divided among those three situations.)

Grice's paradox shows that the exact meaning of statements involving conditionals and probabilities is more complicated than may be obvious on casual examination.

Some distinctions introduced by Grice

In the course of his investigation of speaker meaning and linguistic meaning, Grice introduced a number of interesting distinctions. For example, 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.

Conversational Maxims

Maxim of Quality: Truth

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Quantity: Information

• Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Maxim of Relation: Relevance

• Be relevant.

Maxim of Manner: Clarity

• Avoid obscurity of expression. ("Eschew obfuscation")
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief ("avoid unnecessary prolixity").
• Be orderly.

Criticisms and examinations

The relevance theory

Relevance theory

Relevance theory is a proposal by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson that seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit inferences...

 of Dan Sperber

Dan Sperber

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the...

 and Deirdre Wilson builds on and also challenges Grice's theory of meaning and his account of pragmatic inference. See Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
Grice's work is examined in detail by Stephen Neale

Stephen Neale

Stephen Roy Albert Neale is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York...

, "Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language", Linguistics and Philosophy 15: 5 (Oct. 1992).

Selected writings

• 1941. "Personal Identity", Mind 50, 330-350; reprinted in J. Perry (ed.), Personal Identity, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1975, pp. 73–95.
• 1957. "Meaning," The Philosophical Review 66: 377-88.
• 1961. "The Causal Theory of Perception", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 35 (suppl.), 121-52.
• 1968. "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning and Word Meaning", Foundations of Language 4, 225-242.
• 1969. "Vacuous Names", in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 118–145.
• 1969. "Utterer's Meaning and Intention," The Philosophical Review 78: 147-77.
• 1971. "Intention and Uncertainty", Proceedings of the British Academy, pp. 263–279.
• 1975. "Method in Philosophical Psychology: From the Banal to the Bizarre", Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (1975), pp. 23–53.
• 1975. "Logic and conversation". In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and semantics, vol 3. New York: Academic Press.
• 1978. "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation", in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9: Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, pp. 113–128.
• 1981. "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature", in P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, pp. 183–198.
• 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.

Further reading

• Siobhan Chapman, Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1403902976.

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia oа Philosophy: "http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grice/" -- by Richard E. Grandy & Richard E. Grandy .
• 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)