Paul Grice

Herbert Paul Grice (1913–1988), who published as H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language. He developed the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle, including the Gricean maxims, which became key ideas in pragmatics. His work on meaning also shaped the philosophical study of semantics.

Grice was born in Birmingham and attended Clifton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After a short teaching stint at Rossall School, he returned to Oxford as a graduate student at Merton College from 1936 to 1938, then as a Lecturer, Fellow, and Tutor at St John’s College from 1938. One of his pupils was P.F. Strawson, with whom he later collaborated. During the Second World War, Grice served in the Royal Navy. He returned to his St John’s fellowship after the war and held it until 1967, when he moved to the United States to become a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death. In 1979, he returned to the UK to deliver the John Locke lectures on *Aspects of Reason*. Many of his essays were collected in his valedictory book, *Studies in the Way of Words* (1989). He married Kathleen Watson in 1942; they had two children.

Grice’s theory of meaning began with his 1957 article “Meaning,” written in 1948 at Strawson’s urging. He developed it further in the fifth and sixth of his 1967 William James lectures at Harvard, later published as “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” (1969) and “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning” (1968), and collected in *Studies in the Way of Words*. In “Meaning,” he distinguishes natural meaning (e.g., “Those spots mean measles”) from non-natural meaning (e.g., “John means that he’ll be late”). He does not define these senses but points to five differences in ordinary usage.

Grice focuses on non-natural meaning, developing what became known as intention-based semantics. He separates utterer’s meaning (what a speaker means by an utterance) from timeless meaning (the meaning of a word or sentence type). His approach defines utterer’s meaning in terms of a speaker’s overt intentions, then defines timeless meaning in terms of utterer’s meaning. His initial definition: “A meant something by x” roughly means “A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention.” He later extended this to commands and questions. This definition faced counterexamples, leading Grice and others—including Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Bennett, Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson, and Stephen Neale—to refine it. For timeless meaning, Grice tentatively proposed that “x means that so-and-so” equates to statements about what people intend by x, a notion later expanded by Schiffer.

Grice’s theory of implicature began with his 1961 article “The Causal Theory of Perception” and his 1967 William James lectures, published in 1975. It introduces the saying/implicating distinction.