Paul Grice

Dzieła

• 1957Meaning (Znaczenie)

  Mieć coś na myśli przez wypowiedź to zamierzać, by słuchacz zareagował w określony sposób, ponieważ rozpoznaje tę intencję.

• 1975Logika i konwersacja

  Wykłady Williama Jamesa z 1967 roku: implikatury konwersacyjne wynikają z zasady kooperacji i maksym ilości, jakości, relacji i sposobu.

Stanowisko

Grice gave philosophy of language two ideas that are now standard in linguistics. The first concerns meaning. In “Meaning” (1957) he analysed what a speaker means by an utterance in terms of intentions: to mean something is to intend to produce an effect in a hearer by means of the hearer’s recognising that intention. The second is conversational implicature. If a reference for a philosophy student says only that his English is excellent and he attended regularly, the writer conveys that he is no good at philosophy without saying so. Grice explained such effects by a cooperative principle – make your contribution such as is required by the purpose of the conversation – and four groups of maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. Implicatures can be cancelled, which distinguishes them from what is said. This allowed him to argue, against some ordinary language philosophers and against Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory, that words like “and” or “or” may keep their logical meaning while their use carries further suggestions. With Strawson he defended the analytic–synthetic distinction against Quine (“In Defense of a Dogma”, 1956). Searle built on and modified his account of meaning.

Życie i kontekst

Herbert Paul Grice was born in 1913 in Harborne, Birmingham, and educated at Clifton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. From 1938 he taught at St John’s College, Oxford, where P. F. Strawson was among his pupils; during the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy. Back in Oxford he belonged to the circle of philosophers who analysed ordinary language. His paper “Meaning”, written in 1948, appeared in 1957 in The Philosophical Review, reportedly after Strawson had submitted it. In 1967 he gave the William James Lectures at Harvard and moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988. His collected papers, Studies in the Way of Words, appeared in 1989; his John Locke Lectures of 1979 were published as Aspects of Reason in 2001.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• In Defense of a Dogma (with P. F. Strawson, 1956)
• The Causal Theory of Perception (1961)
• Logic and Conversation (lectures 1967, published 1975)
• Studies in the Way of Words (1989)
• Aspects of Reason (2001)