Paul Grice

Herbert Paul Grice ( born March 13, 1913 in Birmingham, England; † August 28, 1988 in Berkeley ) was an English philosopher. He is known especially for his work in the philosophy of language, in particular for his analysis of speaker meaning and the development of the concepts of conversational implicature and the cooperative principle.

Life

His teaching career began Grice at Oxford University ( Clifton College and Corpus Christi College ). He moved in 1967 to the University of California, Berkeley, and held there, even though 1979 has retired, and 1986 lectures.

Work

Analysis of speaker meaning

Grice's approach consists in an intention- based theory of the meaning of language. He explains linguistic meaning - contrary to a widely held view among linguists - without recourse to a code or convention.

As a result, among other things, these ideas moved in the 1970s and 1980s, the focus of philosophical debate on the nature of the meaning of a linguistic representation to a mental representation.

Implicature

For linguistics, especially for linguistic pragmatics, Grice was groundbreaking. His distinction between implicature and literal meaning was taken by the pragmatics. Grice's work and in particular the concept of speaker meaning became the basis for a separation of semantics and pragmatics.

His contributions to the theory of meaning were published after his death collected in Studies in the Way of Words (1989 ), while previously separately published essays also were partially included in the collection.