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Herbert Paul Grice (13 March 1913 – 28 August 1988), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle (with its namesake Gricean maxims), which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
Grice married Kathleen Watson in 1942; they had two children.
And describes "non-natural meaning" using the example of "John means that he'll be late" or "'Schnee' means 'snow'".
Grice does not define these two senses of the verb 'to mean', and does not offer an explicit theory that separates the ideas 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.Grice 1989, pp. 213–215.
To do this, Grice distinguishes two kinds of non-natural meaning:
The two steps in intention-based semantics are to define utterer's meaning in terms of speakers' overt audience-directed intentions, and then 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 meantNN 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".Grice 1989, p. 219.
(In this definition, 'A' is a variable ranging over speakers and 'x' is a variable ranging over utterances.) Grice generalises 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 1989, p. 220. Grice's initial definition was controversial, and seemingly gives rise to a variety of counterexamples,Schiffer 1972, pp.17–29. and so later adherents of intention-based semantics—including Grice himself,Grice 1968, 1989. Stephen Schiffer,Schiffer 1972, ch. 3. Jonathan Bennett,Bennett 1976, ch.5 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,Sperber and Wilson 1986, pp.21–31. and Stephen NealeNeale 1992, pp.544–550.—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 meansNN (timeless) 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.Grice 1968. A more influential attempt to expand on this component of intention-based semantics has been given by Stephen Schiffer.Schiffer 1972, chs. 4 and 5.
Grice makes it clear that the notion of saying he has in mind, though related to a colloquial sense of the word, is somewhat technical, referring to it as "a favored notion of 'saying' that must be further elucidated".Grice 1989, p.86. Nonetheless, Grice never settled on a full elucidation or definition of his favoured notion of saying, and the interpretation of this notion has become a contentious issue in the philosophy of language.
One point of controversy surrounding Grice's favoured notion of saying is the connection between it and his concept of utterer's meaning. Grice makes it clear that he takes saying to be a kind of meaning, in the sense that doing the former entails doing the latter: "I want to say that (1) "U (utterer) said that p" entails (2) "U did something x by which U meant that p" (87).Grice 1989, p.87. This condition is controversial, but Grice argues that apparent counterexamples—cases in which a speaker apparently says something without meaning it—are actually examples of what he calls "making as if to say", which can be thought of as a kind of "mock saying" or "play saying".Neale 1992, p.554.
Another point of controversy surrounding Grice's notion of saying is the relationship between what a speaker says with an expression and the expression's timeless meaning. Although he attempts to spell out the connection in detail several times,Grice 1989, pp.87–88. the most precise statement that he endorses is the following one:
In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered.Grice 1989, p.25.
Grice never spelled out what he meant by the phrase "closely related" in this passage, and philosophers of language continue to debate over its best interpretation.
In 'The Causal Theory of Perception', Grice contrasts saying (which he there also calls "stating") with "implying", but in Logic and Conversation he introduces the technical term "implicature" and its cognates "to implicate" and "implicatum" (i.e., that which is implicated).Grice 1989, p.24. Grice justifies this neologism by saying that "'Implicature' is a blanket word to avoid having to make choices between words like 'imply', 'suggest', 'indicate', and 'mean'".
Grice sums up these notions by suggesting that to implicate is to perform a "non-central" speech act, whereas to say is to perform a "central" speech act.Grice 1989, p.88. As others have more commonly put the same distinction, saying is a kind of "direct" speech act whereas implicating is an "indirect" speech act. This latter way of drawing the distinction is an important part of John Searle's influential theory of speech acts.Searle 1975.
Grice makes it clear that what a speaker conventionally implicates by uttering a sentence is part of what the speaker means in uttering it, and that it is also closely connected to what the sentence means. Nonetheless, what a speaker conventionally implicates is not a part of what the speaker says.
U's doing x might be his uttering the sentence "She was poor but she was honest". What U meant, and what the sentence means, will both contain something contributed by the word "but", and I do not want this contribution to appear in an account of what (in my favored sense) U said (but rather as a conventional implicature).
Grice did not elaborate much on the notion of conventional implicature, but many other authors have tried to give more extensive theories of it, including Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters,Karttunen and Peters 1978. Kent Bach,Bach 1999. Stephen Neale,Neale 1999. and Christopher Potts.Potts 2005.
The general principles Grice proposed are what he called Gricean maxims. According to Grice, the cooperative principle is a norm governing all cooperative interactions among humans.
Cooperative Principle: "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." (Grice 1989: 26).
The conversational maxims can be thought of as precisifications of the cooperative principle that deal specifically with communication.
Maxim of Quantity: Information
Maxim of Quality: Truth (supermaxim: "Try to make your contribution one that is true")
Maxim of Relation: Relevance
Maxim of Manner: Clarity (supermaxim: "Be perspicuous")
Grice follows his summary of the maxims by suggesting that "one might need others" (i.e. the list is not necessarily exhaustive), and goes on to say that "There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as "Be polite", that are also normally observed by participants in exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures."Grice 1989, pp.28.
Conversational implicatures are made possible, according to Grice, by the fact that the participants in a conversation always assume each other to behave according to the maxims. So, when a speaker appears to have violated a maxim by saying or making as if to say something that is false, uninformative or too informative, irrelevant, or unclear, the assumption that the speaker is in fact obeying the maxims causes the interpreter to infer a hypothesis about what the speaker really meant.Kordić 1991, pp.91–92. That an interpreter will reliably make such inferences allows speakers to intentionally "flout" the maxims—i.e., create the appearance of breaking the maxims in a way that is obvious to both speaker and interpreter—to get their implicatures across.
Perhaps Grice's best-known example of conversational implicature is the case of the reference letter, a "quantity implicature" (i.e., because it involves flouting the first maxim of Quantity):
A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: "Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc." (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? He cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only if he thinks Mr. X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.)Grice 1989, pp.33.
Given that a speaker means a given proposition p by a given utterance, Grice suggests several features which p must possess to count as a conversational implicature.
Nondetachability: "The implicature is nondetachable insofar as it is not possible to find another way of saying the same thing (or approximately the same thing) which simply lacks the implicature."Grice 1989, p.43.
Cancelability: "...a putative conversational implicature is explicitly cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of which putatively implicates that p, it is admissible to add but not p, or I do not mean to imply that p, and it is contextually cancelable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of words would simply not carry the implicature."Grice 1989, p.44.
Non-conventionality: "...conversational implicata are not part of the meaning of the expressions to the employment of which they attach."
Calculability: "The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (if present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature; it will be a conventional implicature."Grice 1989, pp.31. (See also Grice 1981, p.187 and Neale 1992, p527.)
(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 that 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.
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