Herbert Paul Grice, universally known as Paul, was born on March 13,1913 in Birmingham, England and died on August 28, 1988 in BerkeleyCA. Grice received firsts in classical honours moderation (1933) andliterae humaniores (1935) from Corpus Christi College,Oxford. After a year teaching in a public school, he returned toOxford where, with a nearly five year interruption for service in theRoyal Navy, he taught in various positions until 1967 when he moved tothe University of California-Berkeley. He taught there past hisofficial 1979 retirement until his death in 1988. He wasphilosophically active until his death—holding discussions athis home, giving lectures and editing a collection of his work thatwas posthumously published asStudies in the Way of Words. Heis best known for his innovative work in philosophy of language, butalso made important contributions to metaphysics, ethics and to thestudy of Aristotle and Kant. His work continues to be influential (andcontroversial) outside of philosophy in linguistics and artificialintelligence. Although relatively little work was published during hislife, he had a very wide influence via lectures and unpublishedmanuscripts. The best known of these were the William James Lectureswhich he gave at Harvard in early 1967 and which circulated widely inunauthorized manuscript form until they were published as part ofStudies in the Way of Words. He also played cricket, chessand piano, each at a very high level of accomplishment. A usefulbiography including both Grice’s personal and professional lifeis Chapman 2005; the review by Potts provides more perspective on someof the points.

• 1. Overview
• 2. Defending a dogma
• 3. Conversational implicature
• 4. Meaning
• 5. Reasoning
• 6. Everyday Psychological Explanation
• 7. Ontology
• 8. Ordinary Language Philosophy
• 9. Ethics
• 10. Conclusion
• Bibliography
  • Primary Sources
  • Secondary Sources
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Overview

The best known of the works published during Grice’s lifetimewas his joint paper with Peter Strawson, “In Defense Of ADogma”, a widely reprinted defense of the analytic/syntheticdistinction against Quine’s attack in “Two Dogmas OfEmpiricism”. The best known of his ideas, that of aconversational implicature, first appeared in a 1961 paper “TheCausal Theory Of Perception”, but was a focus of the JamesLectures. In contrast to the slogan, “meaning is use”,often associated (though perhaps inaccurately) with Wittgenstein,Grice distinguished those elements of language use which were due tomeaning from those which are due to other aspects. To illustrate, thesentence “He has not been convicted of a crime yet” meansthat the person being referred to has not yet been convicted of acrime. But in many contexts, the speaker would be taken to imply thatthe person had committed at least one crime and was likely to beconvicted in the future. In “The Causal Theory ofPerception,” Grice deploys the distinction against J. L.Austin’s claim inSense and Sensibilia that a sentencelike ‘It looks to me as if I see something red’ is onlycorrectly used when someone (possibly the speaker) has reason to doubtor deny that the speaker actually sees something red. Austin’starget is sense-datum theorists who attempt to introduce sense-data byappeal to such sentences. Grice argues convincingly that, whileusing the sentence may typically imply the doubt-or-denialcondition, that implication is not part of themeaning of thesentence since the speaker can cancel the implication by adding‘I do not mean to imply that there is any reason to doubt ordeny that I see something red.’ What the speaker means on such aoccasion can be true even if the speaker is using the sentence in anusual way, and there is no reason to doubt or deny the speaker seessomething red.

This distinction between meaning and use has found many applicationsin philosophy, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Both theanalytic/synthetic distinction, which relies on a conception of truthby virtue of meaning, and the idea of a conversational implicaturerequire for their full philosophical development a theory of meaning.Grice provided the beginning of a theory of meaning starting with his1957 paper “Meaning” and elaborated in later papers (Grice1968, 1969, 1982). The basic idea was to distinguish two notions ofmeaning: what a sentence means in general apart from any use of it,and what a specific speaker means by using the sentence on aparticular occasion. Grice sees the latter notion as entirely a matterof what the speaker intends. Grice’s idea was to show that theabstract notion of sentence meaning was to be understood in terms ofwhat specific speakers intend on specific occasions.The followingsections will outline the Grice-Strawson arguments for ananalytic-synthetic distinction (Section 2), notions of conversationalimplicature (3), and then delve into his theories about meaning (4),reasoning (5), psychology (6), ontology (7), and value (8).

2. Defending a dogma

Grice and Strawson begin their article with a dissection of thevarious ways one can reject a dichotomy and conclude thatQuine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction is oneof the more extreme cases: “He declares, or seems to declare,not merely that the distinction is useless or inadequately clarified,but that it is altogether illusory, that the belief in its existenceis a philosophical mistake” (Grice & Strawson, 142).

Grice and Strawson deploy a number of arguments against Quine’sposition, but the two main ones involve the distinction between anutterance meaning something and not meaning anything, and between thekind of revision of belief that merely recognize a previous belief asfalse and the kind which involves a change of concept, and hence achange in the meaning of a word. These can both be illustrated withtheir pair of example sentences:

1. My neighbor’s three year old child understandsRussell’s theory of types.
2. My neighbor’s three year old child is an adult.

They claim that it is not difficult to understand what someone wouldmean by uttering (1), and it is fairly clear what it would take topersuade someone that (1) is not false, as seems initially evident.But in the case of (2), they argue, in effect, that with furtherinvestigation one would either conclude that the speaker was usingfamiliar words to express new concepts, or else would conclude thatnothing at all was being said. No attempt will be made here toadjudicate the dispute with Quine, who would reject both of thesedichotomies (new concepts/old concepts, something said/nothing said)as well. But the reader should note that the crucial claims are thatsomeone who asserts (2) is either asserting it with a meaning otherthan the standard conventional one, or with no meaning at all. Afurther elaboration of their claims depends therefore on elucidatingthe notion of the meaning of an utterance, and Section 4 will exploreGrice’s account of this notion further.

3. Conversational implicature

Conversational implicatures are, roughly, things that a hearer canwork out from theway something was said rather thanwhat was said. People process conversational implicatures allof the time and are mostly unaware of it. For example, if someone asks“Could you close the door?” the hearer does not usuallyanswer “Yes”, instead they perform the non-linguistic actof closing the door. In this case, although the speaker used a form ofwords that is conventionally a question, the hearer can infer that thespeaker is making a request.

Grice was the first to note this ubiquitous feature of language useand also the first to present a philosophical analysis. He begins bynoting that conversations are usually to some degree cooperativeenterprises. He then formulates the Cooperative Principle: “Makeyour conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage atwhich it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talkexchange in which you are engaged” (1989, 26).

At a more detailed level, he distinguishes four categories with morespecific maxims. The category of Quantity includes two injunctions,one to make your contribution as informative as is required, and thesecond to make it no more informative than is required. The categoryof Quality is governed by a supermaxim: “Try to make yourcontribution one that is true”. The category of Relation has asingle maxim, “Be relevant”, while the final category ofManner has a short “super” maxim “Beperspicuous” which has various submaxims (1989, 27).

Perhaps the first thing to note is that conversational maxims oftencome into conflict. One party to the conversation may be caughtbetween saying something less informative than is desired (violatingQuantity) and saying something for which there is insufficientevidence (violating Quality). One example of the application of theseprinciples given by Grice is the following exchange:

1. I’m low on gas.
2. There is a station around the corner on Main St.

In this situation the sentence B uttered does not logically imply thatthe station is open. However, the remark is irrelevant unless thestation is open, so A can infer from the combination of Manner andQuality that B believes he has good evidence that the station is open.Thus B’s utterance conversationally implicates that the stationis open. One characteristic of conversational implicatures is thatthey can be cancelled. Thus if B adds to his remark above, “butI don’t know whether it is open” then there is noconversational implicature that the station is open. This contrastswith logical or semantic implications which cannot be cancelledwithout contradiction.

The most famous application of Grice’s ideas is to the debateabout whether the truth conditions of declarative conditionalstatements, such as “If George is driving, he will belate” are accurately captured by the material conditional.Representing the sample sentences as ‘George is driving\(\rightarrow\) he will be late’ would make the sentence true ifit is false that George is driving or true that he will be late (orboth). Many writers argued that it would be inappropriate for someoneto make the assertion if they knew that George was not driving.Grice’s response is that to argue that in most circumstances itis conversationally inappropriate to make that assertion, notbecause it is false, but because it violates conversationalprinciples.

Symbolically, \(A \rightarrow B\) should not be asserted incircumstances where the speaker knows that \(A\) is false because thestatement not-\(A\) is true and simpler; similarly, if the speakersknows \(B\) is true, \(B\) is a shorter simpler statement; and if thespeaker knows both of those facts, then not-\(A\) and \(B\), is moreinformative. Thus the only circumstances in which the conditional isappropriate is where the speaker is ignorant of the truth values of\(A\) and \(B\), but has some good reason to think that if \(A\) doesprove to be true, \(B\) will as well. On this account, the truthconditions of the conditional are those of the material implication,but the appropriate assertibility of a conditional tracks theconditional probability of \(B\) given \(A\).

It should be noted that while this explanation of thecircumstances in which a conditional is asserted seems very plausible,the account does not readily extend to apparent discrepancies betweenordinary language conditionals and the material conditional when theconditional is embedded in a larger context, e.g., “Marybelieves that if George is driving, he will belate”. Mary’s believing that George will be late allowsMary to immediately form the material conditional beliefGeorge isdriving \(\rightarrow\)George will be late. But this is clearly not enough for aspeaker reporting on Mary’s beliefs to assert that Marytherefore believes that if George is driving then George will belate. Grice’s explanation cannot say why.

In the last two decades, there has been a burgeoning number ofresearchers investigating conversational implicature and Grice’sprinciples. Criticisms have come from two opposing directions. Somecritics argue that Grice’s maxims are not sufficiently workedout to explain many of the phenomena related to implicature. Forexample, in the sentence, “Joan believes that some of herstudents will fail,” there seems to be an implicature that notall of her students will fail, even though the contained sentence isnot asserted. In another direction, Wilson and Sperber, and separatelyBardzokas, argue that Grice’s principles can be derived frommore general principles and should be understood in the context ofsome version of relevance theory.

Another continuing topic generated by Grice’s ideas is therelation between semantics and pragmatics (see the entry onpragmatics). The nature of the distinction is controversial, as argued by Bach1997 and Horn 2006. Korta & Perry 2011 (Ch. 11) points out that there arevarious theoretical meanings to “proposition” and that theextent to which pragmatic principles are needed to determine theproposition expressed by an utterance depends on which understandingof proposition is in play. Two examples of the ongoing debate areLePore and Stone 2015 which argues that most, or perhaps all, of what Gricethought as pragmatic is in fact governed by linguistic rules, andRecanati 2010 which argues the contrary, that pragmatics plays alarger role than is generally recognized.

4. Meaning

Grice contends sentence and word meaning can be analyzed in terms ofwhat speakers (utterers, for Grice) mean. Utterers’ meaning, inturn, can be analyzed without semantic remainder in terms of utterershaving certain intentions. To see the idea as initially outlined inGrice’s 1957 article, “Meaning,” imagine you arestopped at night at an intersection, when the driver in an oncomingcar flashes her lights. You reason as follows: “Why is she doingthat? Oh, she must intend me to believe that my lights are not on. Ifshe has that intention, it must be that my lights are not on. So, theyare not.” To summarize:

The driver flashes her lights intending

1. that you believe that your lights are not on;
2. that you recognize her intention (1);
3. that this recognition be part of your reason for believing thatyour lights are not on.

Call such an intention an M-intention. Grice’s idea is that anutterer \(U\) means that \(p\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if \(U\)M-intends that \(p\) by uttering \(x\). We will use‘M-intends’ in this way in what follows. Utterances mayinclude, not just sounds and marks but also gesture, grunts, andgroans—anything that can signal an M-intention. The exampleillustrates an indicative M-intention; such intentions may also beimperative. In such a case, the utterer intends to get the audience toperform an action.

In the case of sentence meaning, Grice’s idea is to explicate itin terms of M-intentions. He suggests that the claim that a sentence\(x\) means that \(p\) “might as a first shot be equated withsome statement or disjunction of statements about what‘people’ (vague) intend (with qualifications about‘recognition’) to effect by \(x\)” (1957, 66). Theunderlying idea is the same as in the flashing lights example. Whenyou utter, “She brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk,”I—as a Gricean audience—reason as follows. “Thestandard use of that sentence is to utter it intending (1) that theaudience believe she brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk; (2) thatthe audience recognize the intention (1); and (3) that thisrecognition be part of the audience’s reason for believing thatshe brandished her clarinet like a tomahawk. This is a standard,non-deceptive use; hence I should believe that she brandished herclarinet like a tomahawk.”

Grice’s post-1957 work on meaning divides along two lines.First, he refines the analyses of utterer’s meaning and sentencemeaning, primarily in the 1968 article, “Utterer’sMeaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning,” and the 1969article, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions.” Second,he addresses the fact that utterers and audiences rarely, if ever,reason in the way suggested. As you read these words, for example, youare not reasoning in that way. You read and you understandstraightaway without any intervening reasoning. So how canGrice’s suggested explanation be anything but illusory? Thesepoints will be considered in turn.

In “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and WordMeaning,” Grice offers a revised version of his 1957 account ofutterers meaning. Grice remarks that in

the earlier (1957) account I took the view that the M-intended effectis, in the case of indicatives-type utterance, that the hearer shouldbelieve something, and, in the case of imperative-typeutterances, that the hearer shoulddo something. I wish forpresent purposes to make two changes here.

1. I wish to represent the M-intended effect of imperative-typeutterances as being that the hearer shouldintend to dosomething (with, of course, the ulterior intention on the part of theutter that the hearer go on to do the act in question).
2. I wish to regard the M-intended effect common to indicative-typeutterances as being, not that the hearer should believe something(though there will frequently be an ulterior intention to thateffect), but the hearer shouldthink that the uttererbelieves something.

(1968, 230).

By way of illustration, suppose \(U\), who wants the audience \(A\) toclose the door, utters ‘Close the door.’ \(U\) M-intendsthat \(A\) should intend to close the door, and note: we specify what\(U\) means using the subjunctive mood. \(U\) means that \(A\)should close the door. For the indicative case, suppose \(U\)utters ‘The door is closed,’ M-intending that \(A\)believe \(U\) believes the door is closed. We specify what \(U\) meansusing the indicative mood—thus: \(U\) means that the door isclosed.

Grice captures the role of moods in specifying meaning by introducinga special notation. He represents the indicative case this way: \(U\)means that \(\vdash\)(the door is closed); the imperative: \(U\) meansthat !(the door is closed). Here ‘the door is closed’represents a moodless, underlying syntactical element Grice calls asentence radical; it designates the moodless proposition that the dooris closed. Grice calls ‘\(\vdash\)’ and ‘!’mood operators, and he explains them contextually asfollows:

1. \(U\) means that \(\vdash(p)\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if,for some \(A\), \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending \(A\) to think \(U\)thinks that \(p\);
2. \(U\) means that \(!(p)\) by uttering x if and only, for some\(A\), if \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending (a) \(A\) to think \(U\)intends (to bring it about) that \(p\); and (b) \(A\) tointend that \(p\)—having, as part of his reason\(U\)’s intention (a).

More than two operators are required to handle the full range ofthings utterers mean, but a complete list is not necessary toformulate the revised account of meaning. The account can be stated asfollows. Given a function from psychological states onto moodoperators, if \(\psi\) is a psychological state and \(*_{\psi}\) theassociated mood operator,

\(U\) means that \(*_{\psi}(p)\) by uttering \(x\) if and only if, forsome \(A\), \(U\) utters \(x\) M-intending

1. that \(A\) should think \(U\) to \(\psi\) that \(p\); and (in somecases only), depending on \(*_{\psi}\),
2. that \(A\) should via fulfillment of (i), himself \(\psi\) that\(p\).

Grice uses his revised treatment of utterer’s meaning to refinethe very rough and preliminary account of sentence meaning (structuredutterance type meaning, in his terminology) he gave in“Meaning.” His account thereof uses the notion ofhaving a procedure in one’s repertoire. He says,

This idea seems to me to be intuitively fairly intelligible and tohave application outside the realm of linguistic, or otherwisecommunicative, performances, though it could hardly be denied that itrequires further explication. A faintly eccentric lecturer might havein his repertoire the following procedure: if he sees an attractivegirl in his audience to pause for half a minute and then take asedative. His having in his repertoire this procedure would not beincompatible with his also having two further procedures: (a) if hesees an attractive girl, to put on a pair of dark spectacles (insteadof pausing to take a sedative); (b) to pause to take a sedative whenhe sees in his audience not an attractive girl, but a particularlydistinguished colleague (1969, 233).

Turning to sentence meaning, the idea is that users of a naturallanguage like English have standard procedures for using sentences,and that—very roughly—a sentence means \(p\) among a groupof utterers when and only when that group has the procedure of usingit to M-intend that \(p\).

This is a promising start. It is undeniable that English speakers havethe procedure of using ‘The door is closed’ to mean thatthe door is closed. That is (one of the many) things we do with thatsentence. So, assuming we accept the explication of utterer’smeaning in terms of M-intentions, it undeniable that English speakershave the procedure of using that sentence to M-intend with regard tothe proposition that the door is closed. This yields the explanatorypayoff described earlier. We can see communication as a rationalactivity in which an utterer intends to produce certain results andaudiences reason their way to those results via their recognition ofthe utterer’s intention to produce that very result.

This preliminary account must be complicated, however, as it isunacceptable on three grounds. First, there are infinitely manysentences. How does an utterer associate a procedure with eachsentence of his language? If they must be acquired one by one, it willtake an infinite amount of time. Second, sentences are structuredutterance-types, where meaning of the whole is consequent (in waysdetermined by syntactic structure) on the meaning of the parts. Theaccount does not capture this aspect of sentence meaning at all.Third, the account fails to represent the complexity introduced intothe account of utterer’s meaning; there is no mention ofmoods.

These considerations lead Grice to posit that the proceduresassociated with sentences are resultant procedures arising recursivelyout of basic procedures associated with words. Grice explains that

As a first approximation, one might say that a procedure for anutterance-type \(X\) will be a resultant procedure if it is determinedby (its existence is inferable from) a knowledge of procedures (a) forparticular utterance-types which are elements in \(X\), and (b) forany sequence of utterance-types which exemplifies a particularordering of syntactic categories (a particular syntactic form) (SWW,p. 136–7).

Grice introduces a canonical form for specifying resultant procedures.He does so by generalizing the special notation he has already used inspecifying meaning. Recall that he represented the indicative case by:\(U\) means that \(\vdash\)(the door is closed);the imperative: \(U\)means that !(the door is closed). The indicative sentence‘\(\vdash\)(the door is closed)’ is associated with thepsychological state of belief: speakers can and do utter that sentencewith the intention that audiences respond by believing the door isclosed. The imperative ‘! (the door is closed)’ issimilarly associated with an audience response of action: speakers canand do utter that sentence with intention that that audiences respondby closing the door. ‘\(\vdash\)’ and ‘!’ areexamples of a type of syntactic item Grice calls a mood operator. Heassumes that the syntactic structure of sentences divides into a moodoperator and the rest of the structure. Grice uses‘\(*+\mathrm{R}\)’ to represent this division. Now let\(\mathrm{P}_{*+R}\) be the set of propositions associated with\(*+\mathrm{R}\), and \(\psi\) the psychological state or actionassociated with \(*\). Then a resultant procedure for \(*+\mathrm{R}\)takes one of two forms. \(U\) has the resultant procedure of:

1. uttering \(*+\mathrm{R}\) if, for some \(A\), \(U\) wants \(A\) to\(\psi\) that \(p\); or
2. uttering \(*+\mathrm{R}\) if, for some \(A\), \(U\) wants \(A\) tothink \(U\) to \(\psi\) that \(p\).

Call these type 1 and type 2 resultant procedures. As a definition ofsentence meaning we can say that, where \(p \in\mathrm{P}_{*+\mathrm{R}}\), \(*+\mathrm{R}\) means \(p\) in a group\(G\) if and only if members of \(G\) have, with respect to\(*+\mathrm{R}\), a type 1 or type 2 resultant procedure, the typebeing determined by the type of the mood operator \(*_{\psi}\).(Qualifications will, of course, be necessary to handle‘audienceless’ cases.)

So far, perhaps, so good. There are pleasant quibbles over details,but in broad outline, the account is a very plausible description ofmeaning. In fact, at least three authors, Bennett, Loar and Schiffer,have developed their own more detailed accounts along Gricean lines.However, when we turn from description to explanation, plausibilityappears to decline. The explanatory idea is to see communication as arational activity where audiences reason their way to beliefs orintentions via their recognition of the utterer’s intention toproduce such results. What about the problem that utterers andaudiences rarely if ever engage in such reasoning? Grice’s workon reasoning contains the answer.

Does this approach define sentence meaning in terms of speaker’sintentions without any semantic remainder? That depends on how oneinterprets

A procedure for an utterance-type \(X\) will be a resultant procedureif it is determined by (its existence is inferable from) a knowledgeof the procedures (a) for particular utterance-types which areelements in \(X\), and (b) for any sequence of utterance-types whichexemplifies a particular ordering of syntactic categories (aparticular syntactic form). (1968, 235)

One possibility is to explain at least some basic procedures in termsof the concept of reference, where reference is analyzed in terms ofspeakers’ intentions. The basic procedure for‘tiger’ for example would be to utter ‘tiger’to refer to tigers. But there is another possibility: the knowledge in(a) and (b) includes the knowledge of the semantic properties ofwords, and the semantic properties of combinations of word, wherethose properties cannot be fully analyzed in terms of speakers’intentions. Noting that the notion of a procedure is quite unclear,Grice observes that

We can, if we are lucky, identify “linguistic rules,” socalled, which are such that our linguistic practice is as if weaccepted these rules and consciously followed them. But we want to saythat this is not just an interesting fact about our linguisticpractice but also an explanation of it; and this leads us on tosuppose that “in some sense,” “implicitly,” wedo accept these rules.Now the proper interpretation of the idea thatwe do accept these rules becomes something of a mystery, if the“acceptance” of the rules is to be distinguished from theexistence of the related practices]but it seems like a mystery which,for the time being at least, we have to swallow, while recognizingthat it involves us in an as yet unsolved problem.

The appeal to implicitly followed linguistic rules casts a revealinglight on Grice as a champion of the view that communication is anexercise in rational coordination through acts of speaker meaning.Since Grice, a central question has been “[h]ow much of thiscoordination derives from interlocutors’ specific knowledge ofone another as people? How much exploits their knowledge of languageitself?” (Lepore and Stone 2015, 1). With the appeal toimplicitly followed rules, Grice has one foot squarely on“knowledge of language itself” side of that divide.

5. Reasoning

InAspects of Reason, Grice begins by considering thesuggestion that reasoning consists in “the entertainment (andoften acceptance) in thought or in speech of a set of initial ideas(propositions), together with a sequence of ideas each of which isderivable by an acceptable principle of inference from itspredecessors in the set” (2001, 5). He shows that it is scarcelyplausible to suppose that reasoning always involves the entertainmentor acceptance of a sequence of ideas—the steps in thereasoning—each of which is derivable (or taken by the reasonerto be derivable) from its predecessors.

He points out that reasoning is often, indeed typically, enthymematicin the following way. Jill reasons: “Jack broke his crown, buthe is an Englishman; therefore, he will be brave.” She does notemploy any suppressed premise. Shemerely thinks: ‘buthe is an Englishman; therefore, he will be brave’. The thoughtoccurs to her in a way that carries conviction with it, and she thinksitintending the inference signaled by‘therefore’ to be valid. Grice suggests that it is anecessary condition of reasoning from \(A\) to \(B\) that oneintend that there be a formally valid (and non-trivial)argument from \(A\) to \(B\). Grice devotes a good deal of attentionto the question of what to add to this necessary condition in order toobtain a sufficient condition. He emphasizes that we typically reasonwith the intention of producing reasons relevant to some end, and hesees this intentional activity as involving the exercise of theability to make reason-preserving transitions between sets of thoughtsor beliefs (or intentions or whatever). A transition isreason-preserving if and only if necessarily, if one has reasons forthe initial set, then one also does for the subsequent set. Like anyability, the ability to make reason-preserving transitions may beimpaired. Good reasoning consists in an unimpaired exercise of theability to make reason-preserving transitions; reasoning--good orbad--is an exercise that is not too impaired. As Grice says,“[T]o explain what reasoning is (and maybe what the term‘reasoning’ means), it is necessary in the first instanceto specify what good reasoning is, and then to stipulate that‘reasoning’ applies to good reasoning and also tosequences which approximate, to a given degree, to good reasoning; theidea of good reasoning is, in a certain sense, prior to the idea ofreasoning.”

There is an important corollary: when we articulate our reasoningexplicitly, we are typically not making previously suppressed premisesexplicit; rather, we are constructing the steps as we supply them.Suppose, for example, we were to ask Jill, “Why do you thinkthat follows?” She could answer by saying she thinks that allthe English are brave; or that the English are brave when they breaktheir crowns; or that people of Jack’s age and description arebrave provided that they are also English; and so on. In proposing oneof these alternatives, Jill is notreporting her suppressedpremise; she is advancing a premise she is willing to put forward nowas what she would—or, perhaps, should—have thought or saidthen if the question of formal validity had been raised.

Returning to meaning, why not view utterers and their audiences assimilar to Jill? You say “Jack brandished his clarinet like atomahawk,” and in response I straightaway believe that he didbrandish his clarinet in that way. Like Jill, I do notentertain—even in a suppressed way—any interveningpremises. My comprehension is immediate and automatic—unmediatedby any reasoning at all. But this does not mean that we cannot see meas intending there to be a formally valid inference from your words tomy belief. Moreover, like Jill, I could construct the missing steps.Thus: “The utterer has the resultant procedure of uttering”He brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk“ intending (1)that the audience believe that the utter believes he brandished hisclarinet like a tomahawk; (2) that the audience recognize thatintention (1); and (3) that this recognition be part of theaudience’s reason for believing that the utterer believes thathe brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk. The utterer is followingthat procedure in a non-deceptive way; hence I should believe, notonly that the utterer believes that he brandished his clarinet like atomahawk; but also, to the extent that I have confidence in theutterer, I should believe that myself.”

Similar remarks hold for you as the utterer of “Jack brandishedhis clarinet like a tomahawk.” You reason: “I recognizehim as an English speaker; hence he knows I have the procedure ofuttering ”Jack brandished his clarinet like a tomahawk“intending: (1) that my audience believe he brandished his clarinetlike a tomahawk; (2) that the audience recognize that intention (1);and (3) that this recognition be part of the audience’s reasonfor believing that I believe that he brandished his clarinet like atomahawk. He will believe that I am following that procedure here in anon-deceptive way; hence he will believe that I believe that hebrandished his clarinet like a tomahawk; and, to the extent that hehas confidence in me, he will believe that too.”

There is no denying that we can describe utterers and audiences inthis way. But should we really embrace this description as anexplanation of meaning? To see the worry, imagine we are demigods. Forour amusement, we create a race of creatures. We program language useinto their brains. We ensure, for example, that, when an uttererproduces the sounds “She brandished her clarinet like atomahawk,” audiences believe that she did. To handle deceptivecontexts, figurative language use, language instruction situations,telling jokes, and so on, we also build in heuristics that more orless reliably produce a different appropriate belief in suchsituations. When a creature utters a sentence and the audience formsthe appropriate belief, the explanation is our programming,programming that operates entirely at a physiological level that isentirely inaccessible to consciousness. So, even if an audiencereasons to a belief based on a recognition of relevant utterer’sintentions, surely that reasoning is an epiphenomenon of limitedexplanatory interest. The worry is that we may be like the creatureswe have imagined. There is extensive physiological and psychologicalevidence that our use of natural language is to be explained along thelines similar to the explanation in the case of our creatures.

Grice’s ‘Meaning Revisited’ contains an answer tothis worry. The key idea is that the account of utterers meaningspecifies anoptimal state that actual utterers rarely ifever realize. We explain this idea then return to our worry. Gricesays that,

The general idea that I want to explore, and which seems to me to havesome plausibility, is that something has been left out, by me andperhaps by others too, in the analyses, definitions, expansions and soon, of semantic notions, and particularly various notions of meaning.What has been left out … [is] the notion of value.

Though I think that in general we want to keep value notions out ofour philosophical and scientific enquiries—and some would sayout of everything else—we might consider what would happen if werelaxed this prohibition to some extent. If we did, there is a wholerange of different kinds of value predicates or expressions whichmight be admitted in different types of case. To avoid having tochoose between them, I am just going to use as a predicate the word‘optimal’ the meaning of which could of course be moreprecisely characterized later (1982, 237).

The analysis of utterers’ meaning illustrates what Grice has inmind. He suggests that, “[a]s a first approximation, what wemean by saying that a speaker, by something he says, on a particularoccasion, means that \(p\), is that he is in the optimal state withrespect to communicating, or if you like, to communicating that\(p\)” (1982, 242). The optimal state is what the analysis ofutterers’ meaning specifies.

The point is that there is no need to insist that real uttererstypically have all the intentions the analysis requires. Wenonetheless, for purposes of psychological explanation, often regardthem to have the requisite intentions. For Grice, audiences do so whenthey need tojustify the actions and beliefs that result fromutterances in their presence. For example, as a result of reading thelast sentence, you believe that we believe that audiences regardutterers as having the intentions specified in the account ofutterers’ meaning when audiences are called upon to justify thebeliefs and actions they form in response to utterances. Why are youjustified in believing this? Because you recognized that we utteredthe sentence intending, by means of recognition of that veryintention, to produce that belief. Similar remarks hold for us asutterers. Why are we justified in thinking that you will form ajustified belief in response to our utterance? Because weknow that you can supply the justification in terms of your knowledgeof our intentions.

This pattern of justifications also yields an explanation. Thejustifications explain by showing that meaning and response areinstances of people’s capacity to act rationally. Such instancesinclude actions one engaged in without prior reasoning, and which onewould have also engaged in if one had reasoned about whether to do soprior to acting. The appeal to such counterfactuals is explanatory tothe extent that speakers and audiences meet this condition: for a widerange of cases of speaker meaning, speakers reliably make utterancesand audiences reliably respond without reasoning in (more or less)ways they would have if they had reasoned with sufficient time,insight, and attention. Thus, the Gricean theory of meaning doesexplain meaning as a rational activity. Grice’s treatment ofconversational implicature also illustrates the breadth and power ofthis approach. Our demi-god example ignored this connection betweenexplanation and justification.

A further objection to Grice’s account of meaning is that youngchildren understand the meaning of utterances but are not capable ofprocessing the complexities apparently required by Gricean theory.Thompson (2007, 2008) provides one approach to defend a (neo)Griceanaccount against these arguments.

Grice’s treatment of conversational implicature illustrates thebreadth and power of this approach. Indeed, one of the motivationsGrice had in giving an account of meaning was to distinguish betweenwhat ismeant—M-intended—and what is notM-intended butimplied. Grice’s conversational maximsare principles of rational communication that audiences use toconstruct an inferential bridge from what is meant to what isimplied.

The continuing lively debates (e.g., Petrus 2010) about conversationalimplicatures and meaning, which are present in linguistics andartificial intelligence as well as philosophy, are testimony to thecontinuing importance of Grice’s seminal ideas.

6. Everyday Psychological Explanation

Grice’s views on everyday psychological explanation areintertwined with his views on rationality. Grice contends that theright picture of rationality is the picture, given us by Plato andAristotle and others, as something which essentially functions toregulate, direct, and control pre-rational impulses, inclinations, anddispositions. Both everyday psychological explanation and assessmentsof rationality employ commonsense psychological principles. By suchprinciples we mean a relatively stable body of generally-acceptedprinciples, of which the following are examples:

• If a person desires \(p\), and believes if \(p\) then \(q\),then—other things being equal—the person will desire\(q\).
• If a person desires \(p\) and desires \(q\), then—otherthings being equal—the person will act on the stronger of thetwo desires if the person acts on either.
• If a person stares at a colored surface and subsequently stares ata white surface, then—other things being equal—the personwill have an after-image.

These examples express relations among complexes consisting ofpsychological states and behavior, and, as such they serve adescriptive and explanatory function. Other principles play a moreevaluative role. Consider for example:

• If a person believes \(p\) and that \(p\) entails \(q\), and theperson believes not-\(q\), then, other things being equal, the personshould stop believing \(p\) or stop believing \(q\).

Conformity to this principle is a criterion of rationality. Thedescriptive-explanatory and evaluative principles collectively give usis a specification of how “pre-rational, impulses, inclinations,and dispositions” operate as well as a basis for evaluating thatoperation.

The essential point for our purposes is that everyday psychology hasspecial status for Grice. He argues:

The psychological theory which I envisage would be deficient as atheory to explain behaviour if it did not contain provision forinterests in the ascription of psychological states otherwise than astools for explaining and predicting behaviour, interests (for example)on the part of one creature to be able to ascribe these rather thanthose psychological states to another creature because of a concernfor the other creature. Within such a theory it should be possible toderive strong motivations on the part of the creatures subject to thetheory against the abandonment of the central concepts of the theory(and so of the theory itself), motivations which the creatures would(or should) regard as justified. Indeed, only from within theframework of such a theory, I think, can matters of evaluation, andso, of the evaluation of modes of explanation, be raised at all. If Iconjecture aright, then, the entrenched system contains the materialsneeded to justify its own entrenchment; whereas no rival systemcontains a basis for the justification of anything at all (1975b, 52).

Thus, while everyday psychology (or some preferred part of it) may notentirely accurately specify how in fact we think and act, it doesspecify how weought to think and act.

Assume everyday psychology is uniquely self-justifying in the wayGrice suggests; then we must reject the suggestion that everydaypsychology is just a rough and ready theory that we will (or could)eventually abandon without loss in favor of a more accurate andcomplete scientific theory of behavior. Grice objects on this groundto theories that regard only scientific knowledge as truly descriptiveand explanatory and that relegate commonsense psychologicalexplanation to a second-class role as a theory, useful in daily life,but not a theory we should endorse as a description or explanation ofreality. Grice remarks:

We must be ever watchful against the Devil of scientism, who wouldlead us into myopic overconcentration on the nature and importance ofknowledge, and of scientific knowledge in particular; the Devil who iseven so audacious as to tempt us to call in question the very systemof ideas require to make intelligible the idea of calling in questionanything at all; and who would even prompt us, in effect, to suggestthat since we do not really think but only think that we think, we hadbetter change our minds without undue delay (1975b, 53).

Thus, to return briefly to the theory of meaning, the picture thattheory offers of ourselves as rational communicators producingjustified psychological attitudes in each other is no mere accident,no explanatory way station to be abandoned as science progresses. Itis an ineliminable feature of the way in which we understand ourselvesand others. In addition to this result, Grice’s view ofpsychological explanation also yield consequences both for ontologyand for ethics.

7. Ontology

Grice’s ontological views are liberal. As Grice says whencommenting on the mind—body problem in ‘Method inPhilosophical Psychology’,

I am not greatly enamoured of some of the motivations which prompt theadvocacy of psychophysical identifications; I have in mind a concernto exclude such ‘queer’ or ‘mysterious’entities as souls, purely mental events, purely mental properties andso forth. My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts ofconditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they helpwith the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and providedthat they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within whichI do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even ofnumerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious atall…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism,they worktherefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those whocome on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument,may qualify for the specially favoured status ofentiarealissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me likemetaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of anybut the best objects (1975, 30–31).

Our discussion of psychological explanation shows what Grice had inmind in his reference to entities that “come on therecommendation of some form of transcendental argument, [and hence]may qualify for the specially favoured status ofentiarealissima.” Suppose—as Grice thinks—certainway of thinking, certaincategories, are part of what isentrenched. Then there are certain concepts or categories that wecannot avoid applying to reality.

This theme will not be pursued further here; rather, we turn to themore “Marxist” side of Grice’s ontology: the claimthat if entities work, they exist. We illustrate this point with theconcept of a proposition. The critical role of that notion inGrice’s theory of meaning motivates our focus on it. Quineancriticisms of the notion have placed under it under a cloud ofsuspicion, a cloud many see as hanging ominously over Grice’stheory.

One of Quine’s arguments is that synonymy is not a well-definedequivalence relation, the identity conditions for propositions areunclear and there is ‘no entity without identity’. On thisissue, Grice is not committed to an equivalence relation of synonymy(thus his remark above about indeterminacy), and he parts company withQuine over whether clear identity conditions are required. Grice, asnoted earlier, argues for such conditions. But the acceptability ofhis theory of meaning does not depend on the success of that defense.Within the theory of meaning, propositions are theoretical entities tobe understood by the role in the theory, and that role, according toGrice, does not demand a strict criterion of identity. Rather: if theywork they exist. It is worth noting in this regard that there are manyrespectable entities for which we do not have criteria or identity.Suppose my favorite restaurant moves. Is it a new restaurant with thesame name? Or suppose it changes owners and names but nothing else? Orthat it changes menu entirely? Or that it changes chefs? It would befoolish to look for a single criterion to answer thesequestions—the answers go different ways in different contexts.But surely the concept of a restaurant is a useful one and restaurantsdo exists. Quine and Grice differ on the theoretical usefulness ofpropositions. The main reason for disagreement is due to Quine’sattitude that concepts such as belief and desire are of, at most,secondary importance in the unified canonical science that is hisstandard for ontology. Grice, as we have already noted, thinks thateveryday psychological theory is of first importance.

8. Ordinary Language Philosophy

Grice was constantly concerned with philosophical methodology, and thediscussion so far omits one important methodological focus: ordinarylanguage philosophy. Although it was by no means Grice’s solephilosophical commitment, it was a central one.

Grice is a well-knowncritic of ordinary language philosophy,and one of his main targets was J. L. Austin and a style of reasoninghe popularized. Austin thought there was a relatively clear notion ofwhat it is inappropriate to say, and that we could delineatetruth-conditions by identifying instances of inappropriateness(Warner, 2012). For example, he inferred from (1) “Typically,when one acts, it would be inappropriate to say either that one actedvoluntarily or that one acted involuntarily” to (2)“Typically, when one acts, one acts neither voluntarily norinvoluntarily.” As Grice convincingly argues, the inferencefails because being untrue is not the only form of inappropriateness.Something may be true but inappropriate to say for other reasons(Grice 1960, 1975, 1981, 1989).

Grice was, however, also a life-long practitioner of ordinary languagephilosophy. He begins the “Prolegomena” toStudies inthe Way of Words by noting that “some may regard [ordinarylanguage philosophy] as an outdated style of philosophy,” but heurges us “not to be too quick to write off such a style.”Instead, he urges us to build “a theory which will enable one todistinguish between the case in which an utterance is false or failsto be true, or more generally fails to correspond to the world in somefavored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for reasons ofa different kind” (Grice 1989, 4). Much ofStudies in theWay of Words addresses this task.

Why bother to build such a theory? There are many possible answers,and Grice would no doubt have given more than one, but we focus onjust one answer, which is implicit in this work. Recall that, on hisview, commonsense psychology consists, at least in part, of a body ofself-justifying descriptive, explanatory, and evaluative principles.The principles are ‘self-justifying’ in the senseexplained earlier in section 6. An illuminating description of theseprinciples would be an illuminating description of how we think, andsuch a description would certainly be of interest. How do we get one?By carefully examining what we say. Two tenets of ordinary languagephilosophy were that a clear view of what wemean in thelanguage we use is a clear view of what wethink, and that anecessary step in getting clear view of what we mean iscloseattention to thedetails of what we say. But the detailedexamination will only reveal what we mean if we can reliablydistinguish between “the case in which an utterance is false orfails to be true, or more generally fails to correspond to the worldin some favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate forreasons of a different kind.”

9. Ethics

Grice uses this general account of reasoning to investigate moralreasoning and moral reasons. He emphasizes the connections betweenreasons, actions, and freedom. It is convenient to divideGrice’s approach into two stages (although he himself does notdo so). The first stage argues that one must regard the exercise ofrationality in the free adoption and pursuit of ends as anunrelativized good at which all persons should aim. The second stageexamines the concepts of happiness and freedom to discover principleswhich persons—conceived of as rationally adopting and pursuingends—must adopt insofar as they are to qualify as rational.

The first stage. Why think that one must regard the exerciseof rationality in the free adoption and pursuit of ends as anunrelativized good at which all persons should aim? To begin with,what does Grice mean by an “unrelativized good”? Gricegrants that the concept of unrelativized value requires defense; afterall, things have value only relative to ends and beneficiaries. So howis unrelativized value to be understood? Grice defines unrelativizedvalue “in Aristotelian style [as] whatever would seem to possesssuch value in the eyes of a duly accredited judge; and a dulyaccredited judge might be identifiable as a good person operating inconditions of freedom.” (Of course, this is still to talk aboutwhat is of value for and to persons; the point is to avoidrelativization to this or thatkind of person orkind of end.) So, why would a duly accredited judge see valuein the free rational adoption and pursuit of ends, where such value isnot ascribed because of the contribution that activity makesto someother end?

Grice’s views on commonsense psychology provide the answer. Asnoted earlier, Grice thinks that commonsense psychology exhibits twofeatures: parts of it are self-justifying; and, it contains principlesfor evaluating thought and action, where some of those principles areself-justifying. When he turns to ethics, Grice adds that commonsensepsychology represents us as exercising rationality in freely adoptingand pursuing ends; moreover, this view of ourselves is self-justifyingin the sense that we cannot coherently conceive of ourselves in anyother way. Grice’s—very plausible—claim is that a“duly accredited judge” operating from within the theoryof commonsense psychology would take the rational, free adoption andpursuit of ends as having unrelativized value. Hence, it does havesuch value.

The second stage: What principles must a free adopter andpursuer of ends embrace in order to qualify as rational? Griceaddresses this question most fully inAspects of Reason andThe Conception of Value. The idea is that the combinedrequirements of rationality (outside ethics), freedom, and happinessimpose substantive constraints on all persons. Grice develops thistheme with great insight and subtlety; however, he did not completethe project, and the intricacies of his views are best left to thedetail of his own works.

10. Conclusion

The sophistication and inventiveness of Grice’s work iswell-known. What is less well-known is its ambitious and systematicnature. Emphasizing this latter aspect has been one goal of this briefpresentation of Grice’s work, work which weaves meaning,reasoning, psychology, ontology, and value into a complex, unifiedwhole.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Books By Grice

• 1989,Studies in the Way of Words (SWW),Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press; a collection including most ofthe important works published during his lifetime.
• 1991,The Conception of Value, New York: OxfordUniversity Press; a posthumous publication of the John Locke Lectures,delivered in 1979.
• 2001,Aspects of Reason (ed. Richard Warner), Oxford:Oxford University Press; a posthumously published book exploring thenature of reasons and reasoning.

Selected Articles By Grice

• 1957, (with P F Strawson), ‘In Defence Of A Dogma’,Philosophical Review, 65: 141–58; reprinted inSWW.
• 1957, ‘Meaning’,The Philosophical Review,66: 377–88; reprinted in SWW.
• 1961, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (SupplementaryVolume), 35: 121–52; reprinted in SWW.
• 1968, ‘Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, andWord-Meaning’,Foundations of Language, 4: 225-42;reprinted in SWW.
• 1969, ‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions’, ThePhilosophical Review, 68: 147–77; reprinted in SWW.
• 1971, ‘Intention and Uncertainty’,Proceedings ofthe British Academy, 57: 263–79.
• 1975, ‘Logic and Conversation’, inThe Logic ofGrammar, D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Encino, CA: Dickenson,64–75; reprinted in SWW.
• 1975b, ‘Method in Philosophical psychology (From the Banalto the Bizarre)’,Proceedings and Addresses of the AmericanPhilosophical Association, 48: 23–53.
• 1978, ‘Further Notes on Logic and Conversation’, inSyntax and Semantics: Pragmatics, v 9, P. Cole (ed.), NewYork: Academic Press, 183–97; reprinted in SWW.
• 1981, ‘Presupposition and Conversational Implicature’,inRadical Pragmatics, P. Cole (ed.), New York: AcademicPress, 183–97.
• 1982, ‘Meaning Revisited’, inMutualKnowledge, N.V. Smith (ed.), New York: Academic Press,223–43; reprinted in SWW.

Secondary Sources

Books On Grice

• Atlas, J. D., 2005,Logic, Logic, Meaning and Conversation:Semantical Underdeterminancy, Implicature, and their Interface,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Avramides, A., 1989,Meaning and Mind: An Examination of aGricean Account of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bardzokas, V., 2010,Causality and Connectives: From Grice toRelevance, Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing Co.
• Chapman, S., 2007,Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist,London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Cosenza, G. (ed.), 2001,Paul Grice’s Heritage,Turnhout: Brepols.
• Davis, W. 1998,Implicature: Intention, Convention, andPrinciple in the Failure of Gricean Theory, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
• Grandy, R., and R. Warner, 1986,Philosophical Grounds ofRationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. (A festschrift celebrating Grice’s work, witha lengthy editorial introduction and a response by Grice.)
• Korta, K., and J. Perry, 2011,Critical Pragmatics: Aninquiry into Reference and Communication, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge
• Lepore, E., and M. Stone, 2015,Imagination and Convention:Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language, OxfordUniversity Press.
• Petrus, K, (ed.), 2010,Meaning and Analysis: New Essays onGrice, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics,Language, and Cognition.
• Recanati, F., 2010,Truth-conditional Pragmatics,Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Articles On Grice

• Bach, K., 1997 “The Semantics Pragmatics Distinction: Whatit is and Why it Matters”, in K. Turner (ed.),TheSemantics-Pragmatics Interface From Different Points of View.Amsterdam: Elsevier, 65–84.
• Baker, J., 1989, “The metaphysical construction ofvalue”,Journal of Philosophy, 10: 505–13.
• Davis, W. 2007, “Grice’s Meaning Project”,Journal of Pragmatics, 26: 41–58.
• Davies, M., 1996, “The Philosophy of Language”, inThe Blackwells Companion to Philosophy, N. Buninand E. Tsui-James (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell.
• Grandy, R. E., 1989, “On Grice on language”,Journal of Philosophy, 10: 514–25.
• Grim, P., 2011, “Simulating Grice: emergent pragmatics inspatialized game theory”, inLanguage, Games, andEvolution, edited by A. Benz, C. Ebert, G, Jager, and R. vanRooij, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
• Hazlett, A., 2007, “Grice’s razor”,Metaphilosophy, 38: 669–690.
• Horn, L., 2006, “The Border Wars–A Neo-GriceanPerspective”, von Heusinger, K. and K. Turner (editors),Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics (Current Research in theSemantics/Pragmatics Interface: Volume 16), Amsterdam: Elsevier,21–48.
• Luhti, D., 2006, “How implicatures make Grice an unordinaryordinary language philosopher”,Pragmatics, 16:247–274.
• Neale, S, 1992, “Paul Grice and the philosophy oflanguage”,Linguistics and Philosophy, 15:509–559.
• Potts, C., 2006, “Review:Paul Grice: Philosopher andLinguist”,Mind, 115: 743–747.
• Searle, J., 2007, “Grice on meaning: 50 years later”,Teorema, 26: 9–18.
• Soames, S., 2003, “Language use and the logic ofconversation”, (Ch. 9 ofPhilosophical Analysis in theTwentieth Century (Volume 2:The Age of Meaning), Princeton:Princeton University Press 197–218.
• Stalnaker, R., 1989, “On Grandy on Grice”,Journalof Philosophy, 10: 525–8.
• Strawson, P. F., 1964, “Intention and convention in speechacts”,Philosophical Review, 73: 439–60.
• Thompson, R., 2007, “Still relevant: H. P. Grice’slegacy” in “Psycholinguists and the philosophy oflanguage”,Teorema, 26: 77–109.
• –––, 2007, “Grades of Meaning,”Synthese, 161: 283–308.
• Warner, R., 1989, “Reply to Baker and Grandy”,Journal of Philosophy, 10: 528–9
• –––, 2013, “Austin, J. L.”,International Encyclopedia of Ethics, H.LaFollette (ed.), Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Ziff, P., 1967, “On H. P. Grice’s Account ofMeaning”,Analysis, 28: 1–8.

Books Developing a (more or less) Gricean account of meaning

• Bennett, J., 1976,Linguistic Behaviour, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
• Loar, B., 1981,Mind and Meaning, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
• Schiffer, S., 1972,Meaning, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.
• Wilson, D., and Sperber, D., 2012,Meaning and Relevance,New York: Cambridge University Press.

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