H. P. Grice

H. P. Grice was born in Harborne, England, earned two Firsts at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and, after a year as Assistant Master at Rossall in Lancashire, began a period as Lecturer, Tutor, Fellow, and finally University Lecturer at St. John's, Oxford.

His Oxford career, during which his reputation as a philosopher's philosopher spread throughout the world was interrupted by his service in the Royal Navy, at first in the Atlantic theatre and later in Admiralty intelligence.

After the war, Grice was a visiting lecturer at Harvard, Brandeis, Stanford, and Cornell, and was elected to the British Academy.

He joined the Berkeley faculty, where he taught well past his retirement, serving briefly as department chairman.

He was one of very few philosophers invited to give both the William James Lectures at Harvard and the John Locke Lectures at Oxford.

He was philosophically very active, leading discussion groups in his home, giving papers at professional meetings, and completing the manuscript for his first essay, Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard University Press.

A second essay, The Conception of Value, based on his Carus Lectures, was published by The Oxford University Press.

Among his former students are many of the most distinguished philosophers of the present day.

His contribution to philosophy at Berkeley was unique.

Grice taught only graduate courses, although advanced undergraduates were encouraged to attend, and he was regarded by many as a sort of spiritual head of a new movement in philosophy at Berkeley.

Grice's seminars were well attended by his colleagues, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, always with a scattering of visitors from other campuses. 

The presentation was, for most of the audience, more than a little difficult to follow, as Grice laid out his newest ideas slowly, in great detail, with much hesitation and occasional backtracking, shading each thesis with the qualifications he rightly considered necessary to shield it from the objections its very clarity invited. 

The spirited and often heated discussions that ensued led to clarifications, consolidations, and yet further refinements. 

Particularly memorable are Grice's carefully crafted and often very elaborate extemporaneous refutations of views counter to his own, deployed stepwise, like so many chess moves, until the piece was captured, the whole process accompanied by contained but unconcealed, rising, and somewhat mischievous glee. 

Philosophy in Grice's hands was a co-operative enterprise, a conversation in search of truth, despite its outward appearance of combat. 

And it was an enterprise Grice loved deeply.

Grice did important work on philosophical subjects as diverse as Aristotle's metaphysics, the foundations of psychology, and ethics.

Grice's strongest influence lies in the philosophy of language, where his thought continues to shape the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists think about meaning, communication, and the relationship between language and mind.

He stressed the philosophical importance of separating what a sentence means from, on the one hand, what a speaker said in uttering it and, on the other, what the speaker meant by uttering it.

Grice provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is by providing a series of ever more refined analyses of the utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and what is said.

He produced an account of how it is possible for what a speaker says and what that speaker means to diverge.

By characterizing a philosophically important distinction between the “genuinely semantic” and “merely pragmatic” implications of a statement, Grice clarified the relationship between classical logic and the semantics of natural language.

Grice provided some much needed philosophical ventilation by deploying his notion of “implicature” to devastating effect against certain over-zealous strains of “ordinary language philosophy,” without himself abandoning the view that philosophy must pay attention to the nuances of ordinary talk.

And he undercut some of the most influential arguments for a philosophically significant notion of “presupposition.”

Grice's conviviality is legendary among philosophers.

The flavour of his wit survives in his writing, as does a suggestion of the way he could draw his listeners into his perspectives on a topic and treat philosophical discussion as a very high form of entertainment.

Some preserve his love of laughter and the expressiveness of his eyes.

A bench has been placed in front of Moses to commemorate H. P. Grice, providing a place to continue indefinitely the philosophical conversation he encouraged, enjoyed, and for which, to a great extent, lived.