Page 540 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
(2') think that (3$'): U intends x to be such that
expressions (e.g., the temporal connotation of and as and then) could be accommodated as conversational implicatures. This suggests one way in which a divi- sion between semantics and pragmatics might be drawn (the former based on austere truth-conditions, the latter drawing on broader principles of rational communication), although Grice's proposal has by no means met universal approval.
It is perhaps a mark of the influence and stature of Grice that the phenomena he characterized are as often as not identified, in theoretical writings, by the use of his name: e.g., 'Gricean intention,' 'Gricean implicature.' Above all, his work is distinctive not just as a body of ideas but as a style of philosophizing.
See also: Conversational Maxims; Cooperative Prin- ciple; Meaning: Philosophical Theories.
Bibliography
Grice H P 1957 Meaning. Philosophical Review 66: 377-88 Grice H P 1968 Utterer's meaning and intentions. Philo-
sophical Review 78: 147-77
Grice H P 1969 Utterer's meaning, sentence-meaning and
word-meaning. Foundations of Language 4: 1-18
Grice H P 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Cole P, Morgan J L (eds.) Syntax and Semantics Vol.3: Speech Acts. Aca-
demic Press, New York
Grice H P 1978 Further notes on logic and conversation. In:
Cole P (ed.) Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9. Academic Press,
New York
Grice H P 1981 Presupposition and conversational implica-
ture. In: Cole P (ed.) Radical Pragmatics. Academic Press,
New York
Grice H P 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, MA
Lewis D 1969 Convention. Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge, MA
Searle J R 1965 What is a Speech Act? In: Black M (ed.)
Philosophy in America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
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Schiffer S 1972 Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford Schiffer S 1987 The Remnantsof Meaning. MIT Press, Cam-
bridge, MA
Strawson P F 1964 Intention and convention in speech acts.
Philosophical Review 73: 439-460
Travis C 1991 Annals of analysis. Mind 100: 237-264
anyone who has <f>' will come to ^ out relying on E.
+
thatp with-
(Gricel989: 114)
Some philosophers have thought that the intro- duction of refinements of this complexity amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of the Gricean approach to meaning. For different reasons, an early prominent supporter of Grice has been led to abandon the pro- gram (Schiffer 1987).
Grice's second major contribution to philosophy of language is his theory of'conversational implicature,' developed in his William James lectures at Harvard University in 1967 but not prepared for publication until several years later. Grice's starting point was a distinction between (i) what is said, determined by the semantic properties of the words uttered; (ii) what is conventionally implicated, including conventional but not strictly semantic implications; and (iii) what is conversationally implicated. Grice's account of this lat- ter species of'implicature,' which arises not from sem- antic or other conventions but from general features of discourse, has had enormous influence in pragmatics, speech act theory, and discourse analysis. The basic idea, in summary, is that conversations are governed by a general 'cooperative principle,' subsuming more specific 'conversational maxims,' which, in subtle
ways (involving judgments about whether the maxims are being observed or flouted), enable hearers to draw inferences about what speakers intend (beyond what they literally said). A full account of the mechanisms of inference is given in the articles on Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims.
One important philosophical application of the theory of implicature concerns the meanings of and, or, if ... then, not particularly in relation to the semantics of the logical particles (&, v , =>, ~). Grice argued that the apparent divergence between ordinary usage and the truth-functional definitions in classical logic does not amount to a difference in meaning; the conventional or semantic meaning is the same in each case and the connotations of the ordinary language
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) made influential con- tributions to a wide variety of fields. He was respon- sible, along with Gottlob Frege, for the rejection of
psychologism in logic and the philosophy of language; his investigation of semantic and syntactic categories influenced the development of categorial grammar; he
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Husserl, Edmund D. Bell