Speranza

Until moving to America, Grice was a distinguished figure in postwar Oxford philosophy, whose main influence has been on the theories of meaning and conversation/communication.

In his “Meaning” ( Grice, 1989 , essay 14), he crucially distinguished between two general kinds of uses of the English verb, "to mean":

meaning, “natural” and “nonnatural,” illustrated respectively by

Those spots mean measles.

and

That remark, ‘He's a pig,’ means that John is greedy.

The second kind, which is the main concern of linguists and philosophers, is analyzed in terms of intention.

Roughly, a speaker means that P by his remark if he openly intends his audience to believe that P , and on the basis of their recognition of that intention. (This is elaborated in Grice, 1989 ; essays 5–6.)

A controversial consequence of this approach is that the meanings of sentences are functions of the intentions which speakers would generally have in uttering them.

Grice often stresses that utterances typically “implicate” (for example, intimate, suggest) something other than what they strictly say. His theory of conversation ( Grice, 1989 , essays 2–3) is designed to explain this. Conversation standardly proceeds on the assumption that the speakers are obeying various “maxims” (for example, “Be relevant,” “Speak the truth.” An important issue is whether these “maxims” are, as Grice seems to hold, cultural universals.).

And the rest is Ancient Griceian Philosophy.