Griceiana

Speranza

Herbert Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 15 March 1913 and died in Richmond, California on 28 August 1988.

After a classical education at Clifton, he began his formal philosophical studies with W. F. R. Hardie at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later at Merton.

Later he held various positions at Oxford, notably as Fellow of St. John's, and served in the Royal Navy during World War II.

In 1967 he moved to California, taking a position at the University of California, Berkeley.

He retired from Berkeley in 1979, but continued to teach afterwards until 1986.

Grice is best known for his work on meaning, in particular for his work on the pragmatic dimensions of meaning.

He gave an analysis of what it is for a person to mean something by his or her words and gestures, where that might depart from what the words literally or standardly mean (this he did in an informal talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society, "Meaning" (1948)), and offered a theory of the phenomenon of conversational implicature (This he first did in "Causal Theory of Perception", for the Aristotelian Soceity, 1961).

He wrote on reasons and reasoning, perception, value, justice and happiness, -- but also on pirots and immanuels, sometimes engaging with classical philosophers, such as hisself.

Grice can be characterized as a systematic philosopher.

He appealed to the notion of a speaker's intentions in communication to explain meaning, and further explored the role of intentions in reasoning.

His interest in the pragmatic elements of meaning seems to have been sparked by his reactions to some applications of ordinary language philosophy, a movement in which he participated early in his career ("Put the blame on Austin," he'd say).

Those works that have had the greatest impact include his early article ‘Meaning’ published in 1957 (drafted in 1948), and his William James lecture series, ‘Logic and Conversation’ given at Harvard University in 1967.

The second of the set of seven lectures was published under the same title in 1975, edited by his friends Harman and Davidson.

Other lecturers were published as ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’ in "Foundations of Language", edited by his friend J. F. Staal, in 1968, and ‘Utterer's Meaning and Intentions’ in 1969, for the "Philosophical Review" which had published (due to Strawson submitting the 1948 draft, as typed by Ann Martin Strawson) the original "Meaning".

In 1989 many of Grice's works, including a revised version of the original William James lecture series, and a seminal paper on perception, were published as WoW, or Studies in the Ways of Words.

The Conception of Value appeared in 19991, and Aspects of Reason in 2001.

The vast collection of his genialities rest with the UC/Berkeley, Bancroft. They include tape recordings, too. NOT TO BE MISSED.