Grice Obituary -- by B. A. O. Williams

OBITUARY BY B. A. O. WILLIAMS.
UC/Berkeley records

H. Paul Grice was born March 1913 in England, earned two firsts at Corpus Christi (1935 and 1936) and, after a year as Assistant Master at RossalSchool 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 through the English speaking portion of the world, was interrupted by nearly five years' service in the Royal Navy, at first in the Atlantic theatre and later in Admiralty intelligence. After the war, he was a visiting lectureer at Harvard, Brandeis, Stanford, and Cornell, and was eleted to the British Academy in 1966. He jointed the Berkeley faculty in 1967, where he taught
until 1986, well past his 1979 retirement, serving briefly as speartment chairman in 1971. He was one of very few philosophers invited to give both the William James Lectures at Harvard (1967, on Logic and Conversation), and the John Locke Lectures at Oxford (on Aspects of Reason and Reasoning). Although health problems greatly diminished his physical vigour in later years, he remained philosophically very active, leading discussion groups in his hime, giving papers at professional meetings, and competing the manuscript for his first book, _Studies in the Way of Words (Harvad University Press), very near his death. A second book, _The Conception of Value_ based on his Paul Carus Memorial Lectures was published in 1991 edited by J. Baker, by Oxford University Press, as well as _Aspects of Reason_, the John Locke Lectures, edited by R. Warner, in 2001). His contribution to the department of philosophy at Berkeley was unique. Grice taught only graduate courses, although advance 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. His seminars were well attended by his colleagues, graduates students, and advanced undergraduates, always with a scattering of visitors from other campuses. The presentation wsa, 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 occasionla backtracking, shading each thesis with qualifications he rightly considered necessary to shield it from the objections it very clearly invivted. The spirited and often heated discussions that ensued ledt to clarifications, consolidations, and yet further refinementss. Particularly memorable were Grice's carefully craffted and very often 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 cooperative enterprise in search of truth, despite its outward spparance of combat. And it was an enterprise he loved deeply. Grice did imortant work on philosophical subjects as diverse as Aristotle's metaphysics, the foundations of psychology, and ethics. His strongest influence lies in the philosophy of language, where his thought continues
to shape the way philsoophers, linguistis and cognitive scientists think about meaning, communication, and the relationship between language and the mind. He stressed the importance of separating what a _sentence_ means from, onthe one hand, what a speaker _said_ in uttering it, and on the other hand, what the speaker _meant_ by uttering it. He 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 spaker says and what a speaker means to diverge.

By characterising a philosophically important distinction between the "genuinely senmantic" and "merely pragmatic" implications of a statement, Grice clarified the relationship between classical logic and the semantics of natural language. He provided some much needed philosophical ventilation by deploying his notion of "implicature" to devastating effects 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 the undercut some of the most influential arguments for a philosophical significant notion of "presupposition". Grice's conviviality is legendary among philosophers. The flavour of his wit survives in his writings, 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. It is a great pity that we cant in the same way preserve his love of laughter and the expressiveness of his ice-blue eyes. A bench has been placed in front of Moses Hall to commemorate Paul Grice, providing a place to continue indefinitely the philosophical conversation
he encouraged, enjoyed, and, to a great extent, lived for."