Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988)

Grice was born on 15th March 1913 in Birmingham. His father Herbertowned an initially successful business manufacturing small metalcomponents. When this began to fail after the First World War, heretired from business and devoted himself to playing the cello.Grice's mother, Mabel (née Felton) took in paying pupils and educatedthem, along with her own two sons, in the family home.

From the late 1930's until 1967 he held positions at OxfordUniversity. During the war years he served in the Royal Navy. In 1967he moved to the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1979but continued to teach until 1986.
Grice is best known for his work in the philosophy of language, inparticular, his analysis of speaker's meaning, his conception ofconversational implicature, and his project of intention-basedsemantics.

Largely as a result of these ideas, the focus of the philosophicaldebate over the nature of meaning shifted during the 1970s and 1980sfrom linguistic representation to mental representation.

Grice's most important ideas may be found in his William Jameslectures presented at Harvard in 1967. Several lectures from thatseries were published in the form of journal articles, and for manyyears the lectures circulated in their entirety in mimeograph. Theywere finally published (in revised form) in 1989 in Grice's collectionof essays, Studies in the Way of Words. (This was published under thename 'Paul Grice'. Prior to that, Grice had been known to the world atlarge as 'H. P. Grice'.)

Publications
Grice, H. P., 1957, "Meaning" The Philosophical Review 64: 377-388.
Grice, H. P., 1968, "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning andWord-Meaning," Foundations of Language 4: 225-42.
Grice, H. P., (1969), "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions,"Philosophical Review 78: 147-77.
Grice, H. P., (1969), "Vacuous Names", in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka,eds., Words and Objections, D. Reidel, pp. 118-145. [bookstore]
Grice, H. P., (1975), "Logic and Conversation", in P. Cole and J.Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Academic Press, pp. 41-58
Grice, H.P., (1982), "Meaning Revisited", in N. V. Smith, ed., MutualKnowledge, Academic Press, pp. 223-243. [bookstore]
Grice, Paul, (1989), Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard UniversityPress. [bookstore]