Pre-Griceian

By JLS
for the GC

Before Grice, ordinary-language philosophers tended to defend a use theory of meaning on which facts about word use are seen as giving direct insight into word
meaning, and the lexicon would consist of a huge range of descriptive facts about word use.

Grice (in ‘Logic & conversation’, Harvard, lecture 1, Prolegomena) was one of the first to argue that many facts about word use do not give us direct insight into word meaning, but follow from more general pragmatic principles.

On this approach, rather than trying to record every fact about word use in the lexicon, we would combine a relatively simple semantics with a general account of pragmatics or language use.

Notice that prototype semantics is a return to the old

pre-Gricean

position on which all facts about word use give direct insight into word meaning.

The Griceian argument
can be taken further, using a relatively simple semantics plus the pragmatic creation of ad hoc
concepts to account for prototypicality effects.

The argument goes beyond Grice’s because it treats lexical-pragmatic processes as contributing not only to implicatures but also to explicit
truth-conditional content, i.e. the proposition expressed.