Thinkers

H. P. Grice

Analytic · Europe · 1913 to 1988

English philosopher who held that what a speaker means goes beyond the words, and is worked out by assuming speakers cooperate.

What it is

H. P. Grice (1913 to 1988), usually called Paul Grice, was a philosopher of language. He was born in Birmingham, England, and spent his career first at Oxford and then, from 1967, at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for a theory of how people manage to mean more than their words say.

He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, taught for a time at a school, served in the Royal Navy during the war and went back to Oxford. In 1967 he delivered the William James lectures at Harvard, which set out much of his thinking on logic and conversation and were later collected in the book Studies in the Way of Words.

The main ideas

• What is said and what is implied. The words of a sentence have one meaning, and a speaker who uses them in a setting may suggest something further. Grice drew a line between the two and called the second kind of thing an implicature.
• The cooperative principle. He held that people in a conversation normally try to make their contribution what the purpose of the talk calls for. Listeners lean on this assumption to work out what was meant.
• Maxims. He sorted this cooperation into four groups of guidelines. One group is about quantity, giving as much information as is needed. Another is about quality, trying to say what is true and not what you lack evidence for.
• Cancelling. Because an implication is not part of the sentence's meaning, a speaker can take it back by adding a few words.
• Speaker meaning. In his article Meaning (1957) he proposed that to mean something by an utterance is, roughly, to intend a hearer to form a belief by recognising that very intention.
• Two kinds of meaning. He set natural meaning, as when spots mean measles, apart from the meaning that people give by speaking.
• Sentence meaning from speakers. He tried to explain what sentences and words mean by starting from what speakers intend.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone asks a friend whether a new colleague is good at the job, and the friend answers only that the colleague is always on time. The friend has said nothing false and has not said the colleague is poor. Yet the listener takes a hint, because the friend seems to be offering less than was asked for. Grice's account explains why the hint is heard and why the friend could take it back. This is an illustration of his approach, not an example from his writing.

Books and moments

• Meaning (1957) is the article that began his theory of speaker meaning.
• The William James lectures (Harvard, 1967) set out his work on logic and conversation.
• Studies in the Way of Words (1989) gathered his essays and lectures, and it appeared after his death.
• He also worked with Peter Strawson, who had been his pupil at Oxford.

Questions and criticism

• Counterexamples. His first definition of speaker meaning was controversial and produced counterexamples, and later thinkers, including Grice himself, revised it.
• Where meaning ends. It is fair to ask how firmly the line between what a sentence means and what a speaker implies can be drawn in everyday talk.
• Cooperation as a rule. It is also fair to ask how far people really cooperate in conversation, since the theory leans on that assumption.

Close neighbours

The page on Peter Strawson sits closest, since he was Grice's pupil and collaborator. The page on Ludwig Wittgenstein is a neighbour for anyone interested in how words come to mean what they do.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

• J. L. Austin · He worked beside Austin in the Oxford circle of philosophers of ordinary language. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Analytic thinkers

• Gottlob Frege · 1848 to 1925
• Bertrand Russell · 1872 to 1970
• G. E. Moore · 1873 to 1958
• Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1889 to 1951
• Gilbert Ryle · 1900 to 1976
• Karl Popper · 1902 to 1994
• H. L. A. Hart · 1907 to 1992
• W. V. O. Quine · 1908 to 2000
• J. L. Austin · 1911 to 1960
• Wilfrid Sellars · 1912 to 1989

Sources we used

• Paul Grice · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
• Paul Grice · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026