Paul Grice

Herbert Paul Grice (March 13, 1913 – August 28, 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.

Grice's work on the nature of meaning has influenced the philosophical study of semantics. He is known for his theory of implicature.

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 where he taught at St John's College 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 in 1988. 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 and his wife lived in an old Spanish style house in the Berkeley Hills.

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. 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.

Grice begins ‘Meaning' by using the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to distinguish what he calls "natural meaning" (as in "Those spots mean (meant) measles.") from what he calls "non-natural meaning" (as in "John means that he'll be late" or "‘Schnee' means ‘snow'"). Grice does not attempt to give definitions of these two senses of the verb ‘to mean', nor does he offer an explicit theory that distinguishes the respective concepts 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.