Paul Grice

Herbert Paul Grice (March 13, 1913, Birmingham, England – August 28, 1988, Berkeley, California), 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 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 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.

Grice on Meaning

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.

Natural vs. Non-Natural Meaning

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.

Intention-Based Semantics

For the rest of ‘Meaning’, and in his discussions of meaning in ‘Logic and Conversation’, Grice deals exclusively with non-natural meaning. His overall approach to the study of non-natural meaning later came to be called “intention-bases semantics”, because it attempts to explain non-natural meaning in terms of the notion of a speakers’ intentions. To do this, Grice distinguishes between two kinds of non-natural meaning:

Utterer’s Meaning: What a speaker means by an utterance. (Grice wouldn’t introduce this label until Logic and Conversation. The more common label in contemporary work is “speaker meaning”, although Grice didn’t use that term.)

Timeless Meaning: The kind of meaning that can be possessed by a type of utterance, such as a word or a sentence. (This is often called “conventional meaning”, although Grice didn’t call it that.)

The two steps in intention-based semantics are (1) to define utterer’s meaning in terms of speakers’ overt audience-directed intentions, and then (2) to define timeless meaning in terms of utterer’s meaning. The net effect is to define all linguistic notions of meaning in purely mental terms, and to thus shed psychological light on the semantic realm.

Grice tries to accomplish the first step by means of the following definition:

“A meant_NN 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 this definition, ‘A’ is a variable ranging over speakers and ‘x’ is a variable ranging over utterances.) Grice generalizes this definition of speaker meaning later in ‘Meaning’ so that it applies to commands and questions, which, he argues, differ from assertions in that the speaker intends to induce an intention rather than a belief. Grice’s initial definition was controversial, and seemingly gives rise to a variety of counterexamples, and so later adherents of intention-based semantics—including Grice himself, Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Bennett, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and Stephen Neale—have attempted to improve on it in various ways while keeping the basic idea intact.

Grice next turns to the second step in his program: explaining the notion of timeless meaning in terms of the notion of utterer’s meaning. He does so very tentatively with the following definition:

“x means_NN (timless) that so-and-so” might as a first shot be equated with some statement or disjunction of statements about what “people” (vague) intend (with qualifications about “recognition”) to effect by x.

The basic idea here is that the meaning of a word or sentence results from a regularity in what speakers use the word or sentence to mean. Grice would give a much more detailed theory of timeless meaning in his sixth Logic and Conversation lecture (originally published in 1968 as ‘Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning’). A more influential attempt to expand on this component of Intention-Based Semantics can be found in chapters 5 and 6 of Stephen Schiffer’s 1972 book, ' 'Meaning' '.

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 and conditional disjunction:

([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 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.

Conversational Maxims

Main article: Gricean 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 of Dan Sperber 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, "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. New York: Academic Press. 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 1-4039-0297-6.

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "[1]" -- 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)