Grice, Herbert Paul (1913–88)

Grice was a leading member of the post-war Oxford group of analytic philosophers. His small body of published work, together with an oral tradition, has been deeply influential among both philosophers and theoretical linguists. His outline of general rules of conversation began a new era in pragmatics. Grice’s analysis of speaker’s meaning explicates semantic notions in terms of the psychological concepts of intention and belief. His theory of conversation is based on the nature of language as a rational, cooperative activity. His account of conversational rules gave him a tool that he applied to a wide class of philosophical problems. Although Grice is most famous for his work on language and meaning, his interests cover a full range of philosophical topics, including ethics, moral psychology and philosophical psychology.