Paul Grice

The British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–88) and his followers hoped to explain meaning solely in terms of beliefs and other mental states. Grice’s suggestion was that the meaning of a sentence can be understood in terms of a speaker’s intention to induce a belief in the hearer by…

Austin’s Oxford colleague H.P. (Herbert Paul) Grice (1913–88) developed a sophisticated theory of how nonliteral aspects of meaning are generated and recovered through the use of conversational maxims. The maxims result in efficient communication by facilitating rational cooperation in conversation between speakers and hearers. In “Logic and Conversation”—first…

…by the 20th-century British philosopher Paul Grice, was that personal identity consists of continuity of memory. A person’s life can be conceived as consisting of a series of momentary “person stages.” In order for the old general to be identical with the small boy, it is not required that the…

Austin’s Oxford colleague H.P. Grice (1913–88) developed a sophisticated theory of how nonliteral aspects of meaning are generated and recovered through the exploitation of general principles of rational cooperation as adapted to conversational contexts. An utterance such as She got married and raised a family, for example, would…