Grice on Meaning, Implicature, and Conversational Logic

Paul Grice (1913–1988), an Oxford philosopher who later moved to the University of California, Berkeley, made two foundational contributions to the philosophy of language that together shaped the subsequent development of linguistic pragmatics as a distinct field of study alongside semantics. The first, presented in his 1957 article "Meaning," published in The Philosophical Review, was an analysis of speaker meaning (or "non-natural meaning," Grice's technical term "meaningNN") in terms of communicative intention, distinguishing it sharply from natural meaning, the sense in which "those spots mean measles" or "smoke means fire" — a natural, evidential relation quite unlike what a speaker means by uttering a sentence. On Grice's analysis, a speaker S meansNN something by an utterance U if S intends U to produce some effect in an audience A, and intends this effect to be produced, at least in part, through A's recognition of S's very intention to produce it — a reflexive, layered structure of intentions later refined by Grice himself and by Stephen Schiffer (in Meaning, 1972) to handle cases of "audience-directed" deception and complications involving iterated or mutual recognition of intent.